The Third Sunday after Pentecost

"Follow me," said Jesus. And Matthew got up and followed. He left his tax-collecting business and followed Jesus to the house, the Scriptures say. Some think they went to Matthew’s house, but the evangelist does not say that. He just says they went to "the house." I think it was to Jesus’ own house, where Jesus had invited "many bad characters, tax collectors and sinners" to have dinner with him that evening.

And while they were eating, some of the best and most important people in town began grumbling among themselves about why Jesus eats with people as disreputable as Matthew, and with other kinds of sinners as well.

Matthew was a most undesirable person. He was so despised that if he offered some of his money for charity, people threw it back in his face with disgust, and with their spittle. His testimony was not acceptable in Jewish courts. He was despised, not just because he collected taxes, but because he collected taxes for a foreign emperor, and because of the way he did it. Matthew helped Caesar keep his heel on the necks of Matthew’s own people. And in order to line his own pockets, he collected more than even Rome expected. That’s the way the system worked. Disgusting it was. Despicable. A good Jew had zero tolerance for Matthew, a traitor who helped the foreign conqueror bleed his own people.

If that were the situation today, here in this land, in Colorado, if you were being fleeced by a fellow American who was working for a foreign country who had conquered the United States, would you invite this man to dinner?

Jesus’ dinner party was a perplexing affair to the good pharisees who stood just outside the door. They stood out in the street, not because Jesus hadn’t invited them too, but because they wouldn’t even think of eating with Matthew and all those others Jesus had allowed inside. Jesus’ hospitality was unbelievable to them, because Jesus not only welcomed Matthew, but went out of his way to find him in the first place, so that he could share the intimacy of his home with him.

Consider the hospitality of Jesus, not only on that particular evening, but throughout his life. Near the top of the list of those whom Jesus welcomed into his fellowship, right up there with Matthew, are the sick. Sheesh! Who wants to spend the evening with the sick, who are constantly coughing and sneezing and wheezing? They’re often complaining, too, always wanting to tell you about all their aches and pains. And what if they’re contagious? But "it’s not the healthy who need a doctor," says Jesus, "it’s the sick." And it was often among the sick that we find Jesus.

And what about the lonely and the depressed? Would we invite them? They’re not much fun at a dinner party either. But it’s not the popular and well-liked who need companionship, it’s the lonely who need it. So we find Jesus with them a lot of the time as well.

What about those with weird ideas, those whose values we don’t share? Who wants to spend dinner time with a bunch like that? But it’s not those with sound thinking who need a teacher, it’s those who haven’t thought matters through. So that’s another place where we often find Jesus, among those who don’t know or keep the law of God.

What about the radicals? What about those who question our institutions, those who flaunt our way of life and who are unacceptable in respectable circles of society or among the politically correct? But it’s not the acceptable who need acceptance, Jesus reminds us time and again, it’s the unacceptable.

And it’s just this kind of group that Jesus invites to dinner -- "many bad characters, tax collectors and sinners."

Is this news good?

Let’s continue to imagine the party. There had to be some righteous folks there as well, the pharisees, the separatists, the zero tolerance folks. They were there too, at least off to one side or just outside the door. Otherwise, the wouldn’t have asked their question. These were folks who knew sin when they saw it. They knew God’s law, and they were punctilious in its observance, so they wouldn’t associate with the people around Jesus’ table that night. Righteousness forbade them to do so.

But Jesus reminds them, as he reminds those inside, that the righteousness God desires exceeds that of the separatist, that of the pharisee. Jesus reminds them that the righteousness that God desires exceeds that of those who keep God’s law. Go and learn what this text means, Jesus says, the text where the prophet says that God requires mercy and loving kindness, not sacrifice. Or, as The Jewish Bible (Tanakh) translates it, "that God requires goodness, not sacrifice."

Where did we go wrong? When did we begin to think that church is for those who have all their stuff together? When did we begin to think that fellowship with Jesus is for the righteous, when it’s Jesus himself who reminds us that it’s not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick, when it’s Jesus himself who says that he did not come to call the virtuous, but sinners? Or, as Goodspeed translates him, that he "did not come to invite the pious, but the irreligious."

How did we ever get the idea that fellowship with Jesus is for church folks? Surely not from today’s text. Not from today’s Gospel, not from today’s good news.

How ever did we Christians get the idea that God desires our prayers and other sacrifices, rather than the simple goodness that Jesus himself offers to Matthew and his friends? How did we ever get the idea that God is impressed with "Lord, Lord," rather than with mercy and compassion? Where did we ever get the idea that God has no kindness for the sinner? Certainly not from Jesus.

Philip Yancey tells about teaching a class at his church in Chicago, a class that for many weeks examined the life of Jesus scene by scene. After a couple of months, he said, the class began to notice "a striking pattern in Jesus’ personal interactions: the more unsavory the character, the more comfortable he or she seemed to feel around Jesus.

"These are the people who found Jesus appealing: A Samaritan social outcast whose resume included five failed marriages, an officer of the decadent tyrant Herod, a quisling tax collector employed by conquering Romans to exploit his own people, and Mary Magdalene, recent host to seven demons. [Throughout the Gospels], their ardent responses to Jesus stand in great contrast to the reception he got from more respectable types: A rich young ruler walked away shaking his head, pious pharisees thought him uncouth and worldly....

"I asked my class if that same principle held for those of us in the modern evangelical church," says Yancey. "Do sinners like being around us? Do they seek us out? I recounted a story told me by a friend who works with the down-and-out in Chicago. A prostitute came to him in desperation -- homeless, her health failing, unable to buy food for her two-year-old son. As the woman described her plight, my friend asked if she had ever thought of going to church for help. A look of shock and unfeigned incredulity crossed her face. ‘Church!’ she cried. ‘Why would I ever go there? They’d make me feel even worse than I already do!’

"What was Jesus’ secret?" Yancey asks. "How did he, the only perfect person in history, manage to attract the notoriously imperfect? And why don’t we follow in his steps? These are the questions my class discussed that Sunday morning." (Christianity Today, January 11, 1993)

"Jesus seems to have had a strong appeal for a group of people who are conspicuously absent from our churches today -- the irreligious," said Halford Luccock in a sermon based on Jesus’ invitation today: "I did not come to invite the pious, but the irreligious" "[Jesus’] fellowship with the irreligious was one of the major scandals of his life.... He did not have a pigeonhole mind or a synagogue mind, which classified men by types. He never thought, what we so often think of a person, ‘He’s not our type.’ All men were his type," Luccock says, "because they were God’s children."

Yancey later tells about attending a play based on stories from a support group comprised of people with AIDS. "The theater director decided to stage the play after hearing a local minister state that he celebrated each time he read an obituary a young, single man, believing each such death to be yet another sign of God’s disapproval. How, Yancey asks, did the church come to be viewed as the enemy of sinners? How indeed, when it’s Jesus himself who embraced them?

"I did not come to invite the pious, but the irreligious. I did not come to invite the virtuous, but sinners." "[But] ever since Constantine," Yancey adds, "the church has faced the temptation of becoming the ‘morals police’ of society. The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, Calvin’s Geneva, Cromwell’s England, Winthrop’s New England -- each of these has attempted to legislate a form of Christian morality, and each has in its own way found it hard to communicate grace.

"I realize, as I reflect on the life of Jesus, how far we have come from the divine balance he set out for us. ...The man from Nazareth was a sinless friend of sinners, a pattern that should convict us on both counts." (Christianity Today, February 6, 1995)

So, is Jesus’ invitation today good news? Not necessarily. Not if we fail to recognize who’s who. Not if we fail to recognize that we are the ones who have been invited to the meal. It’s not good news if we fail to see, as the pharisee failed to see, that it is we -- you and I -- who are the sick in need of a doctor, who are the lonely in need of companionship, the unrighteous in need of forgiveness and love.

It is good news when we remember that it’s not because of our righteousness that we are here.. It’s good news when we remember who’s who in church this morning, that we are the sick, the lonely, the spiritually hungry, the unrighteous, the sinners who have been invited by Jesus to his meal today.

In the little book, Children’s Letters to God, the little girl asks: "Dear God, Who draws the lines around the countries?" Ah, yes. It’s not God who does it, is it? One searches the Gospels in vain to find Jesus ever drawing lines around people, separating the virtuous from the sinner, the pious from the irreligious. When did we start to draw lines that Jesus never drew?

"Your loyalty is to me is like the morning mist, like the dew that vanishes early. I desire loyalty and mercy, goodness toward your neighbor, but you give me only sacrifice and obedience to the law." Go and learn what this text means, Jesus tells us. God looks at those who think they are healthy and at those who know they are sick alike. He looks at the keeper of the law and the sinner alike, at insider and outside alike, and he tells us that what he sees is a common need, a common need for us to do acts of simply goodness and kindness for one another, because that is our love of God.

We are united, whether we see it or not. Our unity is in our need of him, and in our need of each other. How in the world did we ever get the idea that it was more complicated than that?

Years ago, back when going to church was fashionable, I used to listen to the radio on the way to church. Part of the commercial for a particular Sunday morning program was a public service message that urged people to "attend the church of your choice."

But if we’re to attend the church of Jesus, what choice do we have? If we’re looking for the church of Jesus, what church is there but the church at Jesus’ house? If we’re looking for the church of Jesus, we have no choice about which church to attend, only the choice of whether to attend. Because there is only one table in Jesus’ house.

If it’s Jesus we hope to find, it will do us no good to shop for him wherever we choose. The only way we’ll find him is to follow him to the place where he is, at home sitting around his table with "many bad characters, tax collectors and sinners." The only choice we have is not where to find him, or among whom to find him, but whether, considering the character of his guests, we will accept his invitation to join them.

We dare not accept it assuming our own worthiness. We dare not accept it assuming that we have been invited to an exclusive dinner party, or assuming that because of who we are, we have a right to be there.

We originally cut our theological coat "for the figure of total depravity," W. R. Maltby once said. We cut our theological coat to fit us as sinners. "But when it was tried on, it was found not to fit any kind of human nature. [So] we let out a seam in the back, and the margin thus gained, with the stitches still showing, we called prevenient grace. Still the coat does not fit, for it is not by any afterthought that we can do justice to that boundless patience and holiness of God which loves goodness everywhere, labors for it, and delights in it everywhere." Wherever it is.

Dinner jackets, altered by grace, to fit our spiritual girth. God has a jacket tailor-made for each one of us, regardless of religious or spiritual girth. And Jesus invites us all, even many we might think spiritually anemic.

Jesus came, St. Paul reminds us, to break down the dividing wall of hostility between insider and outsider. He recognizes none of the lines our churches have drawn, none of the walls we have erected to separate the pharisee from the sinner. He sees no walls or lines that should keep him from fellowship with either of them. He applies no test of religious doctrine, no test of political conviction, no test of social standing. He is no friend of zero tolerance. Jesus sees only our common need, our common need to be touched, to be loved, healed, and forgiven. He responds to a need in us that unites us all, the need to be made whole.

None of us is whole; that’s the news for today. None of us is whole, perhaps least of all those who cannot see their own brokenness. The pharisee could not see his own illness, his own sin. He could not see that his drawing of lines, his building of walls between himself and the sinner for who he had only scorn and contempt, was but the creation of a barrier that only kept himself outside the presence of the very One who could heal him.

Jesus’ invitation today is good news for those who can see. Jesus argued with the pharisees a lot, but he didn’t have much success with them. Most of them failed to see what Jesus was about. Perhaps Jesus will have more success with us, united as we are. United as we are with all people in our need of him, united as we are in our need of his touch, his grace, his love, his forgiveness.

And united, as we are, in our prayers. We come this morning to your home, Lord. We come with Matthew the tax collector, and with the broken woman from Samaria, and with Mary Magdalene and the prostitute from Chicago, and with all your other unclean and broken children. We come because you are the host, and because you have invited us. "We do not presume to come to your table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercies. We know that we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table, but that you are the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy."

Therefore, we ask your forgiveness, Lord. We ask your forgiveness for all the lines we have drawn in your name. And we ask for your healing, that we may forgive those who sin against us with the same measure that we have been forgiven.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.