A Fourth Church Sermon by John Buchanan

June 9, 2002 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

How Far Are We Supposed to Follow?

John Buchanan
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Genesis 12:1–9
Matthew 9:9-13, 18–26

“Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

Matthew 9:11 (NRSV)

There is something about us that doesn’t like change. My favorite story about change, and our dislike of it, was told to me by my father years ago. He was a railroader and liked to tell me a story about one of his fellow workers, a fireman, who every day at lunchtime opened his lunch pail, extracted the contents, and complained, “Same old bologna sandwiches! I’m so tired of bologna sandwiches! I hate bologna! I’d give anything for a different sandwich some day!” “Well, why don’t you ask your wife to make you different sandwiches?” my father asked. His friend answered, “My wife doesn’t make those sandwiches. I do.”

There is something about us that doesn’t like change. Change is difficult. Moving from one place to another can be a traumatic experience. Leaving old securities and certainties behind, established routines and traditions, and launching into an unknown future can be positively terrifying. I can honestly say that I have never made a move of any consequence without having second thoughts and regrets and remorse not long after making the decision. “Why did I think traveling across the country in an unair-conditioned station wagon full of little children, pulling a pop-up tent trailer from camp site to camp site was a good idea instead of staying home and enjoying air-conditioned comfort and the community swimming pool?” A new job, a new city, new school, a new business venture, a new relationship—moving stirs up nostalgia for the old and secure, and fear for the new and unknown. There is something about us that doesn’t like change, doesn’t want to change, doesn’t want anything to do with change.

Change is difficult. Change management is big and important. Bookstore shelves are full of titles on the subject. I referred last week to a currently popular little book, Who Moved My Cheese? In the line to say hello at the end of the service were several people who loved the book and several who wanted me to know about other titles, which were their favorites on change, and one woman who had written her own book on change and was a little miffed that I didn’t use hers. Who Moved My Cheese? is about two mice and two little people who live in a maze and love their cheese, depend on cheese, organize their lives around the cheese being where it’s supposed to be every day. And then one day somebody moves the cheese. The mice set out to look for new cheese, but the little people behave as people often do and sit around complaining and whining about the absence of cheese, trying to finding someone to blame for the missing cheese. Finally, of course, they decide to move, to change their routines, their old certainties and securities, and find new cheese. It’s hardly profound, but a lot of people are reading it precisely because we live in a time of enormous change and change is always difficult.

I started out determined not to say this, but I’m going to anyway. God moved Abraham’s cheese—and Sarah’s too, for that matter. Centuries later, Jesus moved Matthew’s cheese.

The first word God says to Abraham and Sarah is “Go.” And then in case Abraham doesn’t understand the radical nature of the move, God spells out what exactly they are leaving behind: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house.” That is to say, “Leave behind your nation, your family, the very home in which you have lived all your life and planned to die; pick up and move to a new place. And when you have moved, I will bless you.” That’s the primal Bible story, the foundation of everything that follows: an elderly couple, settled, secure in their routines, ordered by God to get up and move to a new place and then blessed by God. It’s difficult, risky business, but here at the very beginning, faith is defined, and blessing is promised, when people hear God’s voice speaking to them in the middle of their settled lives, telling them to get up and move, and they do just that.

Centuries later, Jesus of Nazareth was walking along a street in the town of Capernaum, where he lived, where he had a house. And “he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth: and he said to him, ‘Follow me,’ and he got up and followed him.” Just like that. Unlike Abraham, Matthew wasn’t much of a candidate for Jesus’ attention. He was sitting at the local tax booth because he was the tax collector. Throughout the Roman Empire, the function of collecting imperial taxes was sold to brokers who were people of wealth and power. In turn, these regional brokers sold the function to local operators. Matthew was one of those. The system worked by allowing the local collector to set the rates. After all, in absence of newspapers, television, and computers, how would you know the difference between the official amount of tax Rome had levied from what the tax collector said you owed? The local tax collector set the rates high enough to pay the broker the actual tax, the broker’s fee, and then kept whatever was left as his profit. Tax collectors were not very popular. There was something slightly unsavory about working for Rome in the first place, not to mention the fact that whatever wealth the tax collectors accumulated came out of their neighbors’ pockets. The system depended on self-interest. And that is why tax collectors are characterized as prototype sinners in the New Testament. The phrase “tax collectors and sinners” is used commonly in the text; they go together. So that is who Jesus recruits and who gets up from his counting table, walks away from his security and income, his very identity, to follow Jesus to a new place.

We’ve read and heard this story hundreds of times, but this time around I was struck not only by Matthew’s willingness to follow Jesus, but where Jesus led him and where Matthew found himself. Matthew’s move is not just geographical. In fact, he doesn’t move very far from home. Matthew’s move is first of all social, relational, and then theological—and that is sometimes a lot harder than moving to a new place.

Almost immediately, apparently, he found himself a different table. Jesus took Matthew home for dinner. Matthew moved from the predictability of his tax table to a most unlikely dinner table, with a very different party of guests.

“And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him.” This is a very peculiar gathering. “Other tax collectors and sinners”—the people who simply ignored or disobeyed the law of Moses, the very organizing principle of life with all its requirements and restrictions and prohibitions; the amoral and the immoral; the ruffians and the scoundrels; the marginal and outcasts; the very ones a good, upright person would never associate with or eat with. In fact, the law prohibited it. And here was Jesus, inviting them into his own home, sharing his own food, extending the hospitality of his own table. No wonder the Pharisees sniffed, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Matthew himself, a tax collector, was probably wondering the same thing. “What are they doing here? For that matter, what am I doing here?”

That table—which, by the way, is a kind of picture of the kingdom of God—is a new place for those who observe it and can’t understand it and are made very uncomfortable by it. It is a new place for Matthew, who, when he made the decision to follow Jesus, didn’t know where he was going but surely never thought it would be a dinner party for sinners.

And then the unlikely journey continues. A local religious leader appears and pleads with Jesus to come with him because his daughter has just died. It’s a poignant story. He, the synagogue leader but also a desperate parent, crosses a huge barrier by reaching out to Jesus, who is still sitting at the table with his unsavory but colorful friends. Jesus gets up; his disciples follow, Matthew, still brand new at the following business, tagging along. On the way there is an interruption—another new experience—a woman who has been hemorrhaging for 12 years touches his cloak. Matthew has never even been close to someone like her. This woman is taboo. Ironically, because of her physical condition she isn’t even allowed inside the synagogue of the leader whose dead daughter Jesus is on his way to see. If you touch the woman you are impure, unclean. She touches Jesus. He calls her daughter and heals her, and now Matthew has a new family member.

The journey resumes. The entourage with Matthew tagging along arrives at the synagogue leader’s house. The girl is already dead. She is taboo, unclean according to the law. Jesus touches her. Her life is restored. He has now had physical contact with two taboo persons, eaten with sinners—so he is ritually unclean. The Gospel writer says, “The report of this spread throughout the region.” The report of the miraculous healing and restoration? Probably. But also something equally miraculous—this new thing, this man who leaves all the old certainties and securities and organizing principles behind and does something radically new: touches, embraces, and welcomes the rejected, the outcasts, the morally and physically impure and unclean.

The world had never seen anything quite like it and still hasn’t. The world is still surprised and uncertain and unsettled when his followers actually follow him. Often his followers refuse to follow, can’t quite bring themselves to follow, can’t or won’t leave old certainties behind to follow him to that kingdom where there are no barriers and boundaries and exclusions and prejudices, to that table where all are welcome, that table where he is the host and where he welcomes precisely those the righteous reject.

Distinguished scholar, teacher, and author Reynolds Price wrote, “Jesus of Nazareth was a man above all else, merciful and welcoming, but who made no crushing demand of any other creature.” Out of his own experience of the church, Price criticizes the tendency of organized religion to reverse whole aspects of Jesus’ teaching by rejecting the ones Jesus seemed intent on sweeping into the kingdom (God’s coming reign). “Jesus the Jew,” he wrote, “dined by free conviction and desire with the furthest outcasts of his time and place, . . . the sheep despised by all other shepherds: and he did not apparently exhort them to shame but pledged them first entry rights into God’s kingdom.” (Three Gospels, pp. 32–33).

Our Presbyterian church is engaged in a great debate about what kind of institution it ought to be in the future. In recent years the church has declared who it wants to be in terms of who it will not allow to be leaders. Some of us think that is a terrible mistake. Some of us wish our church were known for what is for, rather than what it is against; known for who it includes rather than who it excludes. As the General Assembly meets this week in Columbus, Ohio, in addition to this new exclusion, there will be numerous attempts to define what the Presbyterian church believes about Jesus Christ, it’s Christology, in very narrow terms that will seek to exclude many who feel compelled to be more open and who are not so certain that everybody has to conform theologically.

The struggle for the soul of our church is important because the good news of the gospel, the only good news we have, is about God’s grace and mercy and undeserved and unconditional love. When the Pharisees were complaining about his association with the sinners, his invitation and welcome to his own table of those who were not welcome anywhere else, he said, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’” That’s God he is quoting, by the way, the God who wants compassion and acceptance and affirmation for people, not judgment, shame, condemnation, and exclusion; who wants the church, I believe, to leave old certainties, old habits, old opinions and prejudices behind and open its as widely as he did.

In the middle of working on this sermon, I received a phone call from one of our fine young adults, who cares a lot about his faith and his church and what the church will be for his children. Like a lot of young adults, he’s not sure why the Presbyterians spend so much time arguing about sex and so little time working on things like education and justice and poverty and helping our neighbors. “You know,” he said, “it’s not about who you reject; it’s about who you embrace.”

Jesus could not have said it any better that that.

God’s call came to old Abraham and Sarah, settled, waiting for retirement, putting in time.

The call of Jesus Christ came to Matthew sitting at his desk hard at work.

So God’s call, Christ’s summons, comes to the church to follow him to new places, to new obedience, to new mission activity of compassion and healing and reconciling and rebuilding in the world; to take risks on the side of what it does and how it loves and who it includes rather than on the side of protecting its own purity and who it excludes. And God’s call comes to you and me

> to move from where we are to a new place
> to let go of old securities and certainties and hold tightly to him
> to summon the courage to be open to his openness, to be as inclusive as he was;
> to come out from behind our barriers and boundaries and live in the glorious freedom of his love

My caller was right: it’s not about whom you reject but whom you embrace.

Amen.