“Sinners? He Eats with Sinners?”

Matthew 9:9-13

Hosea 6:6 (The Message): I’m after love that lasts, not more religion. I want you to know God, not go to more prayer meetings.

A message from a bumper sticker: God don’t make no junk.

[prayer]

Several years ago, while having lunch with Sandy’s brother Bob and his adult children, the conversation turned to the hunting and fishing Bob did while he was growing up in rural West Virginia. He mentioned shooting squirrels, dressing them, and cooking them for dinner. His son Doug was shocked. “Rodents! You ate Rodents!” Doug obviously wasn’t connected to his father’s rural roots. He equated eating squirrel meat with eating a rat.

I thought of Doug’s reaction as I studied today’s text. I have this picture in my mind of the Pharisees gazing on Jesus’ dinner guests with disbelief, and saying, “Sinners! He eats with sinners! How disgraceful. He should know better that to consort with such lowlifes. What about his public image? What about his ritual cleanliness? Why does he hang out with such scum?”

I really like Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of Jesus’ response: “Who needs a doctor: the healthy or the sick? Go figure out what [God’s Word from Hosea] means: ‘[I, the Lord], am after mercy, not religion’. I am here to invite outsiders, not coddle insiders.”

To rearrange an old line about the preacher’s primary task, Jesus came to comfort the afflicted, and when appropriate within the prophetic tradition of Israel, afflict the comfortable. He had no patience with self-righteousness or by-the-numbers religiosity. In order to remain faithful to the real intentions of God’s Law he wasn’t above disregarding humanly derived legalisms.

There was a rule forbidding healing on the Sabbath. Jesus healed anyway – what better way to celebrate the Sabbath? There were rules about not talking to women, not associating with Samaritans, not touching lepers, and not consorting with those whose backgrounds and behaviors landed them on the Pharisees’ do-not-invite list. Jesus broke them all. Why?

He had come into our world as God incarnate to be the flesh and blood revelation of God’s Word and will. His compassion was God’s compassion. His steadfast love was God’s steadfast love. When he came to dwell among us, to pitch his tent in our camp, he came to dwell with all of us, not just a select few. He did not pitch his tent exclusively in the high rent district or among the religious elites. He came to seek and save the lost: those who knew they were lost and those, who like the Pharisees, had no clue.

One couldn’t be much more lost than Matthew. His own people hated him. The Romans were willing to use him even as they considered him less than human. He was a traitor to his fellow citizens of Judea. He cheated and extorted money from them. He was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg and as slimy as pond scum. While he probably wasn’t so brutal as to run over his own mother on his way to collect more taxes, odds are that he cheated her just like he cheated everybody else. He was a crook, plain and simple. As David von Schlichten wrote about such tax collectors in a recent sermon, “They would steal the lollipop right from your toddler’s mouth and then present it to her as a gift.”

And Jesus ate with one of them! Furthermore, before eating with him he called him to be one of his disciples, a member of his inner circle – one of the twelve. Why did Jesus choose such a low-down piece of common trash to be his disciple? Because Jesus did not consider Matthew to be a low-down piece of trash. Where others saw a worthless piece of human trash, Jesus saw a child of God. Where others saw a hopeless reclamation project Jesus saw a person of value and worth, someone whose sins could be forgiven and whose life could be turned around. Jesus was willing to look beyond Matthew’s sinner persona and see a potential saint.

So he called him. He said, “Follow me,” and Matthew did just that. This tax collector became a disciple, one of those otherwise unlikely and unremarkable people who followed Jesus in the way of the cross and later served their risen Lord as an ambassador for Christ. While the Pharisees criticized and condemned people like Matthew, Jesus helped them, offered them sympathy and forgiveness, and extended to them personal care and concern. While others turned their backs Jesus gave them a hand. While others hated them Jesus loved them with the steadfast love of God love that would not let them go.

Who are the Matthews in our lives, communities, and culture? Who are the hated and despised, the riff-raff and untouchables? Which of the people around us are we taught not to speak to or fellowship with? Who around and maybe among us are modern equivalents of that woman caught in adultery or that Samaritan woman cohabitating with a man without benefit of marriage, or the 21^st century folks whose lives parallel those of the lepers of Jesus’ day?

Who are they; where are they? Why aren’t they here seeking welcome, healing, and redemption? More importantly, why aren’t we going where they are as witnesses of God’s love made real in Jesus Christ? Are we so offended by them and uneasy around them that we cannot share the Good News of God’s grace and mercy with them? Are we afraid of what the modern Pharisees might say about us?

If so, we are not imitating Christ or walking in the way of the cross. While it is true that we are not to be of the world, we are still called to live, work, and witness in the world. How do we do this in ways that lift up Christ while remaining firm in our commitments to biblically moral and ethical lives? Let me share an example from a quarter of a century ago.

Do you remember the television series M*A*S*H*? Do you remember Father Mulcahy, a Roman Catholic priest who served as the unit’s chaplain? How did this priest relate to and with his Army colleagues serving in a mobile surgical hospital during the Korean War? Did he set himself totally apart from them, self-righteously looking down on them from the chaplain’s tent? No, he worked and prayed alongside them. He helped carry litters. He was known to lend a hand during surgery, holding a clamp on a bleeding artery so that the doctor’s could see to operate.

He also fellowshipped with his comrades in arms; playing poker, smoking an occasional cigar, and taking an occasional drink. He was very careful not to get caught up in the moral excesses going on all around him: the adultery and other forms of sexual misconduct, drunkenness, thievery, lying, stealing, whatever.

He was in the world that was a M*A*S*H* unit during a time of war, and in it completely: the blood, the mud, the stench of human decay, and the screams of the wounded. He had pitched his tent with them and lived among them seeking within his sinful human limits to incarnate the love of God.

We can – and must - serve Christ beyond the walls of this or any other church. We can – and must - be loving, caring friends to people who are not Christians. We can – and must – talk with and listen to non-believers, eat with them, fellowship with them, laugh and cry with them. We can – and should – be ambassadors of Christ in unlikely, and occasionally unseemly, places.

I once had a Dairy Queen ministry. Sitting there with my Bible, books, and prayer journal, I was transparent about my faith and vocation. People who hadn’t walked through doors of a church in years, who would never have made an appointment to come talk with me at the church, opened up to me, giving me opportunities to witness.

There was a Presbyterian Church in Mobile, Alabama that actually had a “Happy Hour” ministry among the city’s young single professionals. Amidst all the networking, flirting, and whatnot those young single Presbyterian professionals found appropriate ways to share their faith and invite people to church.

The pastor of that church actually engaged in conversation with the prostitutes who loitered near the church’s downtown location. He didn’t approve of their profession. He most definitely never sampled their wares. But neither did he look down his nose at them or act as if they didn’t exist. Although he definitely wasn’t of their world, and he made that very clear, he was consciously aware and made it clear that he lived in that same little corner of the world as did those ladies of the evening.

It is incumbent on each of us to discover the Dairy Queens, Happy Hours, and street corners of our lives. That’s where the sinners are, the broken, hurting, lost, and lonely people who do not know Christ. It is our task as disciples of Jesus to look beyond whatever sinful persona they might project and see the child of God for whom our Lord Jesus died on a cross, always remembering that God don’t make no junk. Amen.