The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
June 8, 2008

Proper 5-A
Hosea 5:15--6:6
Romans 4:13-18
Matthew 9:9-13

“Follow me,” said Jesus. And Matthew 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 simply says that 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 day.

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

Matthew was a most undesirable person. He was despised, not because he collected taxes, but because he collected taxes for a foreign emperor, and because of the way he did it. Matthew earned his living by paying Caesar the taxes for his district up front, and then using Roman authority to collect for himself whatever he could in excess of that amount. That’s the way the system worked. Disgusting Matthew was. Despicable. Matthew helped Caesar keep his heel on the necks of Matthew’s own people. A good Jew had zero tolerance for a traitor like Matthew, who was so despised that his testimony was not accepted in Jewish courts. And if he offered some of his money for charity, people threw it back in his face with disgust, and with their spittle.

If, today, you were being fleeced by a fellow American who was working for a foreign country who had occupied the United States, would you invite that man to dinner?

Jesus’ dinner party was a perplexing affair to the good pharisees who stood just outside the door. They stood outside, not because Jesus wouldn’t welcome them too, but because they wouldn’t even think of eating with Matthew and all those others Jesus had received 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 call him as a disciple.

Consider the fellowship Jesus enjoyed, not only on that particular day, but throughout his life. Near the top of the list of those whom Jesus welcomed into his circle, right up there with Matthew, were the sick. Sheesh! Who wants to spend the day with the sick, who are always telling you about their aches and pains. And what if they’re contagious? But “it’s not the healthy who need a doctor,” Jesus explained, “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 dinner 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 the radicals, those who don’t share our view of things? Who wants to spend 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 foreigners? What about those who question our institutions and disregard our way of life and who are unwelcome in respectable circles? 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.”

And just outside the door stood the pharisees, the separatists, the zero tolerance folks with their grumpy question: “Why does your teacher eat with tax-collectors and sinners?” These were folks who knew sin when they saw it. They knew God’s law, and they were exact in its observance, so they wouldn’t associate with the people around Jesus’ table that day. Righteousness forbade them to do so. And they question why he’s doing it.

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 the righteousness of those who keep God’s law. Go and learn what this text means, Jesus tells them and us today – the text where the prophet says that God requires mercy and loving kindness, not religion. Or, as the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible, 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 Gospel event.

How did we Christians ever get the idea that God favors religion over 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 examined the life of Jesus scene by scene, and he said that after several sessions 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,” the class discovered: “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 [Jesus] 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. Do sinners like being around us?” Yancey asked. “Do they seek us out [the way they sought Jesus out]?” Yancey told a story about a friend who worked with the down-and-out in Chicago. A prostitute came to his friend in desperation. She was homeless, her health was failing, and she was unable to buy food for her two-year-old son. “My friend asked if she had ever thought of going to church for help,” says Yancey, and “a look of...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 [righteous] person in history, manage to attract the notoriously [unrighteous]? And why don’t we follow in his steps?” (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 [to Matthew and us] 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 insists, “because they were God’s children.”

Jesus came not to invite the pious, but the irreligious, not 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 [then] 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 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 for us to follow him today good news? Well, it all depends. It depends upon whether we recognize who’s who. 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, and the unrighteous in need of forgiveness and love.

It is good news if we remember that it’s not because of our righteousness that we are here at Jesus’ table this morning. It’s good news if 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 to dine with Jesus 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 foreigner from citizen, black from white, the virtuous from the sinner, the pious from the irreligious. When did we start to draw lines that Jesus never drew?

Go and learn what this text means, Jesus tells us: “Your loyalty is to me is like the morning mist, like the dew that vanishes early. I desire goodness and mercy toward your neighbor, but you give me only religion, only sacrifice and obedience to the law.” Remember, Jesus tells us. Remember that “not everyone who says to me, ’Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom, but only those who do the will of my heavenly Father,” which is a warning strikingly similar to the words found over the door to the holocaust museum in Jerusalem today: “Forgetfulness is exile,” they read; “remembrance is the secret of redemption.”

Remember, Jesus encourages us today. Remember that God looks at the keeper of the law and at the sinner with the same eye. He looks at insider and at outsider, 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 acts are genuine love of God.

We are united – those of us in church and those outside, those in this church or in that – whether we see it or not, whether we believe it or not. Our unity is in our common 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?

Years ago, back when going to church was fashionable – it seems centuries ago now – I used to listen to the radio on the way to church in Wisconsin. 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 at table with “many bad characters, tax collectors and sinners.” The only choice we have is not where to find Jesus, or among whom to find him, but whether, considering the character of his guests, we will accept his invitation to join them. And 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.

W. R. Maltby once noted that we human beings cut our theological coat to fit us as we imagine ourselves to be. But then, when we tried it on, we found that it did not fit any kind of actual 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.” But still the coat does not fit, because even prevenient grace does not alter it sufficiently to cover us as we actually are, ”for it is not by any afterthought that we can do justice to that boundless patience and holiness of God which loves goodness , 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 size. Jesus lovingly invites us all, even those we might think spiritually anemic.

Jesus came, St. Paul reminds us – remember, remember that forgetfulness is exile, but remembrance is the secret of redemption – Jesus came 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 pharisee from 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 why Jesus calls you and me along with Matthew 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 away from Jesus’ table, exiled from the presence of the very One who can heal him.

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. But Jesus’ invitation is good news for those who can see. Perhaps Jesus will have more success with us, 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 prayer:

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 with which we have been forgiven.

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