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“Follow me,” said Jesus. And Matthew got up and followed. He left his tax-collecting business and followed Jesus to the house where Jesus had dinner with “many bad characters, tax collectors and sinners,” the Scriptures say. 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, righteous 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 because he collected taxes, but because he collected taxes for an occupying power. Matthew helped keep Caesar’s heel on the necks of his 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. In 1989 Stephen Shields related an experience he had which I think is helpful in understanding how contemptuous the pharisee was of people like Matthew. Shields was a soldier who helped liberate the Nazi concentration camp at Nordhausen. By the time the Jews at Nordhausen were liberated, only a few hundred of them remained alive, and they were walking skeletons. They did not have the strength even to speak. When the doors of the camp were opened, they simply started walking. “Hundreds of the former prisoners were walking toward the town in a great mass, through the fields and on either side of the road,” says Shields. “They were almost totally silent. Their only sound was the rustling of their long, ragged coats against the grass of the fields. They looked like an army of scarecrows, a phalanx of living cadavers.” But for Shields, the worst was yet to come. Shields was sitting in his jeep by the side of the road when two German teenagers, dressed in the brown uniform of the Hitler Youth, walked by and saw the approaching survivors of the death camp. “They appeared to be about 15 years old.” says Shields. “They were blond, pink-cheeked, and healthy looking. And when they saw the vanguard of starving Jews coming up behind us, the two boys stopped in their tracks. Then, incredibly, they began to laugh. They nudged each other, pointed at the [men and women who were but one step from death], made [contemptuous] comments, and continued to laugh. “It was,” says Shields, “as if the devil himself were hurling a final insult at those tormented people. We were dumbfounded and enraged, [and] in desperation I turned to the lieutenant. ‘Sir,’ I asked, ‘what shall we do? Shoot them?’” (in American Heritage, December, 1989, pp. 83-93) I share this story, not because the Jews of Nordhausen were sinners like Matthew, but because of the vicious scorn expressed by those who were used to power and who had been taught to think of themselves as superior. Theirs, I think, was the kind of scorn the righteous pharisee had for Matthew as they stood just outside the door of the house that night. To their eyes Matthew was but a skeleton of a man, an outcast whose greatest sin was that he presumed to breath the air of God’s land. Jesus’ fellowship with Matthew was simply unbelievable to the pharisee. But let’s consider the hospitality that Jesus practiced in the Gospels, not only on that particular occasion, 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, the lonely and the depressed. Even the leper! And at every turn the pharisee is astonished. But “it’s not the healthy who need a doctor,” says Jesus, “it’s the sick.” It is often among the sick that we find Jesus. And we find him among those with weird ideas, among those whose habits of life we don’t share? Who don’t often like to spend dinner time with a bunch like that. But Jesus reminds us that 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 are unacceptable among the socially or politically correct, those who challenge our institutions and way of life? 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 joins for dinner – “many bad characters, tax collectors and sinners.” But there had to be some righteous folks there that evening 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 the table that night. Righteousness, as they understood it, forbade them to do so. But Jesus reminds them that the righteousness God desires exceeds that of the pharisee; the righteousness that God desires exceeds that of those who stand aside, the separatists. Jesus reminds them that the righteousness that God desires exceeds that of those who keep God’s law, and keep to themselves. Go and learn what this text means, Jesus says, the text where the prophet insists 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, that church is for the pure and the self-assured, for the proud and the powerful? 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. How did we Christians ever 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 or for the weak and powerless? Certainly not from Jesus. Philip Yancey tells about 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 with people – 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.” How did we ever get the idea that the Jesus of the Gospels would find a welcome in the halls of power and wealth? In the Gospels, the rich and powerful are usually threatened by Jesus. The rich young ruler walks away shaking his head, the pious pharisees thinks Jesus uncouth and ungodly, and the high priests deliver him to Herod and Pilate to be executed. “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) 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 he heard a local minister say that each time he read an obituary a young, single man, he had a celebration, because he believed that 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 or the weak or the powerless? How indeed, when it’s Jesus himself who embraced them? “I did not come to invite the pious, but the irreligious,” said Jesus. “I did not come to invite the virtuous, but sinners.” “[But] ever since Constantine,” Yancey adds – ever since the Church climbed into bed with those in power – “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,” Yancey concludes, “how far we have come from the divine balance [Jesus] 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) “Jesus seems to have had a strong appeal for a group of people who are conspicuously absent from our churches today – the irreligious,” adds Halford Luccock in a sermon that asks Yancey’s question before Yancey. “’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....” Luccock reminds us, as Yancey reminds us, that Jesus was simply at home with any and every human being because the world was his Father’s house and because everyone belonged to his Father’s family. So “without either compromise or patronage, with ease and naturalness, Jesus created the climate of home wherever he went. It was no trick of manner. It was nothing put on. All folks were ‘home folks’ to Jesus, brothers and sisters. That truth was the very air in which he moved.... That was Jesus’ secret. That may be the priceless faculty of anyone who really shares the tremendous faith of Jesus. It was an inevitable result of his conception of God and man.” 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, the lonely in need of companionship, the unrighteous in need of forgiveness, the spiritually skeletal in need of nourishment 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 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, the strong and powerful from the weak and despised. 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,” says God. “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 with the same eye at those who think they are healthy and at those who know they are sick. 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 simple goodness and kindness for one another, because such goodness and mercy is our love of God. So we find that in God’s eye we are united, whether we see it or not, whether we like it or not. Our unity is in our need of God, and in our need of each other. How in the world did we ever get the idea that it was more complicated than that? 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, the rich from the poor, the strong from the weak, the healthy from the sick. He sees no walls or lines that should keep him from fellowship with any 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, and he is certainly no friend of contempt for any child of God. Jesus sees only our common need, our common need to be loved, healed, and forgiven, our common need to be touched by God. Jesus responds to a need in us that unites us all, the need to be whole. And 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 and need. The pharisee could not see his own sin, his own illness, his own hunger. He could not see that his drawing of lines, his building of walls between himself and the outcast for who he had only scorn and contempt, was but the creation of a barrier that served only to keep himself outside the presence of the very One who could heal him. “Follow me,” Jesus says. “Follow me to Matthew’s house.” 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 in our need of his fellowship and love, of his forgiveness, of his grace and his touch. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |