[This sermon was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
Some of you have heard me tell the true story of what happened at the end of a Lutheran worship service in Cincinnati a few years ago. This was at a church not far from the one I previously served.
A family that had just moved into the area was checking out this congregation when the husband and father was approached by one of its members. “Did you have a good experience here today?” the member asked in a friendly tone. The visitor responded that he had. “I’m glad,” said the member. “But,” he continued, “you know, there are several other Lutheran churches in our area and we already have about as many members as we need. Why not look elsewhere?”
Whatever that church member’s motives, it seems that he would have fit right in with the Pharisees in today’s Gospel lesson from Matthew. They too, were less interested in letting people enjoy fellowship with Christ and His people than they were in keeping their little religious club afloat.
Our Gospel lesson says that after calling the tax collector Matthew to follow Him, Jesus settled down for dinner with other tax collectors and a number of notorious sinners. The Pharisees, those good religious folk, were horrified. But like many good religious folks, they decided not to speak directly with the person whose behavior offended them, Jesus. Instead, like centuries of religious gossips, they decided to talk behind Jesus’ back. They slithered up to some of Jesus’ disciples, apparently not wanting their words to be directly attributable to them. “Why,” they ask, “does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
But Jesus heard them, we’re told, confirming a truth I have learned through the years: No matter how confidential we think the gossip we pass on is, it always gets back to the person we gossip about.
Now, Jesus could have just ignored the Pharisees’ question. Instead, He decided to confront it. Quoting passages from the Old Testament books of Hosea and Malachi, Jesus tells the gossiping Pharisees: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I [the speaker is God] desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”
Jesus doesn’t deny that He’s focused on spending time with sinners, a category of people that includes tax collectors, prostitutes, swindlers, good Pharisees and even good Lutherans. It’s sinners, people who were born alienated from God Who need Jesus to bring them God’s mercy, forgiveness, hope, and new life. “That’s why I’m here,” Jesus is saying. “That’s why I mix with the riff-raff and do things in the Name of God that good religious folks think is outrageously wrong.” The incidents that follow in our lesson underscore Jesus’ words.
It was while speaking at this dinner that, we’re told, Jesus was interrupted by a synagogue leader. “My daughter is dead,” he says. “Touch her and she will live.” On the way to the dead girl, you’ll remember, Jesus encounters a woman, afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years. She says to herself, “If I only touch His garment, I have faith that He will make me well.” The woman touches Jesus and Jesus tells her that her faith has in fact, made her well.
Then, Jesus goes to the corpse of the dead girl, touches her, and brings her back to life. Three times in the space of the these verses in our Gospel lesson, Jesus violates the rules of good religious folks—dining with sinners, allowing himself to be touched by a hemorrhaging woman, and touching a corpse and not undergoing ritual cleansing—all to drive home the point that He desires mercy more than religion and wants everybody—everybody—to experience the love of God.
A pastor named E. Carver McGriff once identified three major lessons that Jesus gives us in these incidents. First: Jesus loves us just as we are. I used to think that to be a Christian, you had to be good enough to merit Christ’s love and attention. Sometimes, in my pride, maybe a bit like the Pharisees in today’s Gospel lesson, I alternately thought that I was good enough. But Jesus didn’t ask the tax collectors and sinners to repent before He had dinner with them. He spent time with them just as they were. He didn’t ask the synagogue ruler or the hemorrhaging woman to confess their sins. He saw their faith in Him and He moved to help them immediately.
I once got a telephone call from a psychologist at Lutheran Social Services. “Mark,” he said, “I’ve been counseling with a man for some weeks. But we’ve hit a clearly spiritual snag. I don’t know what to do. Would you see him?” I wasn’t sure if I was competent to help a therapist with the treatment of one of his clients. But I said that I’d be glad to talk with the man.
The man's “snag” was that he had committed what he considered an unpardonable sin years before. He refused to believe that through Jesus Christ, his sins could be forgiven by God. I tried to show him that the only sin that is unpardonable, according to Jesus, is “sin against the Holy Spirit,” by which Jesus meant any sin which we refuse to allow the Holy Spirit to either convict us for committing or convince us that God is willing to forgive us.
The sin against the Holy Spirit is willfully blocking God’s mercy from our lives. But, I told this man, if we were willing to be forgiven, God wanted to forgive. God loves us just as we are. I don’t know whether that man believed me or not. But his reluctance to believe in God’s mercy was an object lesson for me on how important it is for we who bear Jesus’ Name in the world to share His merciful love with everyone.
Second: We see from our Gospel lesson that Jesus’ love has a strange and wonderful effect on us. When Jesus called Matthew to follow, He didn’t give Matthew a fifteen-step program for acceptance into Jesus’ fellowship. Jesus just called Matthew. And here’s the strange result: Matthew followed!
You’ve heard me speak of my mentor in the faith, Martha Schneider. Martha was in her sixties, a mature believer in Jesus, who took me, this snot-nosed, often flippant and sometimes irresponsible, twenty-two year old, under her wing, to help me get rooted in my relationship with Jesus Christ. Years later, Martha told me how crazy I drove her when I first came to faith and got involved in the church.
Once, at a meeting for a committee she was chairing and I’d volunteered to be a part of, for example, I stood off to the side with another young member of the group, pitching pennies and yucking it up. During the meeting. I think that if I’d been in Martha’s place, I would have blown up. She would have been within her rights to do so.
But she showed patience with me. Over time, the love of Christ that Martha patiently showed to me, had its effect. God used her patience to work faith and genuine repentance in me.
Who, among our acquaintances and friends might be turned toward Christ if we allowed ourselves, like my mentor Martha, to be instruments of Christ’s love? Who knows what strange and wonderful effects would result?
Third: We see from our Gospel lesson that when people encounter the love and mercy of Jesus, something good happens. Matthew, the synagogue leader, and the hemorrhaging woman all found that once the love of Jesus and the possibilities of His power touched them, their perspective on life changed. They saw things differently.
- Matthew thought that it would be okay to invite the Savior of the world to his house, no matter what the neighbors might think.
- The synagogue leader dared to believe that his dead daughter might rise again.
- The hemorrhaging woman, who would have been an outcast in her society, dared to think that Jesus would let her touch Him and that He could heal her.
True story. This young doctor had been hurt when his wife suddenly left him. He’d become a cynic with no place for God or others in his life. One day, he assisted in surgery and the chief surgeon began to sing a complicated piece the young doctor once sang as a Music major. He joined in with his bass voice.
The chief surgeon introduced him to the choir director from his church. The choir director, seeing the young doctor's apprehension and bitterness toward God, the world, and other people, invited him to go out for a beer. Intrigued by a church choir director that met people for beer, the younger man went.
Over time, he got involved with the church choir and eventually, the church. In the warm Christian fellowship of this congregation, a Lutheran church in the Chicago suburbs, his cynicism melted away. Christ came to be the center of his life.
It gets better. On Sunday mornings, he couldn’t keep from eying a particular young woman who always sat in the same pew. Eventually, they met and they married. Jesus Christ, the Lord of fresh starts and second chances, enlivens those touched by His love to the new possibilities of life. And that’s true whatever our ages.
Today, we can be thankful that...
- Jesus’ love accepts us we are,
- that Jesus’ love has a strange and wonderful effect on us, and
- that when we encounter Christ’s mercy, we see life with new eyes.
May we be quick to follow!
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