“Breach the Wall! Tear down the Fence! Jesus is for Losers!

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-25

June 8, 2008

Rev. David A. Kaden

During my senior year of college, I spent January term in Philadelphia at Messiah College's campus near Temple University. I took a three-week class called "Crossing Cultures in America". It was a cross cultural immersion class where each student was required to live with a Philadelphia family of a different ethnicity and then reflect on and write about the experience. Depending on a students' ethnic background, they could be assigned to Asian, Indian, Latino, Euro-American families; there was even a Brazilian family whose primary language was Portuguese.

Another student and I were assigned to an African-American family who lived in North Philly. We moved in and lived there for three weeks. That January was the first time in my life I ever felt ... different, like an outsider. I looked different, dressed differently than the people around me in the house and neighborhood. The food was new to me, as were the three-hour Sunday morning church services. And I never did get used to the steady stream of city buses racing by at all hours of the night. I also never got used to the suspicious looks from the Philly police, who would slow down in their squad cars as my friend and I walked down the street. One time we were even stopped mid-stride on the sidewalk by two cops who pulled alongside us wanting to know who we were, and why we were in this neighborhood. It wasn't until we'd walked a few more blocks that it hit us-we'd just been profiled. We were white people in a black neighborhood. And law enforcement was letting us know that a boundary had been crossed, and a racial wall breached.

One thing I learned that January-something that has shaped who I am-is that the labels we use to categorize and define people are really artificial and nonsense. People are people regardless of ethnicity, language, culture, skin color, sexual orientation. I sat with that family in their home in North Philly and did the same ordinary things I did at my home. We watched the State of the Union address together, and the football playoffs.

We ate together as a family, laughed at the same jokes, played board games, and a whole host of other things typical families do. After three weeks, the mother gave me a big hug and called me her son. At that moment, there were no categories or labels of white and black; there was only a family.

We've finally arrived at the end of an arduous Presidential primary season where labels and categories were the objects of unending chatter by political pundits, sustained and perpetuated by the media industrial complex. People were broken down into voting blocks, scrutinized, dissected, and parsed, as: well-educated elites, white middle-class women, Latino immigrants, Southern and urban African-Americans, blue collar white males ... the list goes on. (I actually heard the phrase 'downscale Democrats' yesterday ... )

Human beings crave labels and categories. When we're able to name something and place it into a box, it feels organized and systematic. We gain power over it.

People in first century Jewish society were also accustomed to labels. Labels like:  Religious Elites-Chief Priests and Sadducees; Peasants and Prostitutes; Samaritans and Gentiles; (Jesus was a peasant rabbi from Nazareth.) Even our text for this morning in Matthew can't avoid using four labels for people in the story: Pharisees, the righteous, tax collectors, and sinners.

According to the text, Jesus very directly approaches a tax collector named Matthew. (Mark and Luke call this tax collector by a different name ... Levi. Whether he's the same Matthew who wrote this gospel is impossible to know. Most likely he's not.).

Jesus approaches this man and says only two words, 'follow me!' With merely four Greek words, the author of this story describes Matthew's response, translated before us as 'and he got up and followed him.' I picture Matthew sitting at his tax booth, perhaps with Roman guards nearby (tax collectors worked for Rome after all) counting a stack of coins-forty three, forty four, forty fi ... -and getting interrupted by a young man he'd never seen before, who asked him to leave everything and start a new life.

What has bugged me this week as I studied this short one-verse narrative, was why Matthew actually got up and followed this enigmatic Rabbi? In fact, when reading about the things Jesus said and did in the preceding chapters in Matthew, I wonder why anyone would follow him? When looking at the ministry of Jesus, one gets the impression that he goes out of his way to explain the reasons why not to become his disciple!

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus throws down the gauntlet and lays out his moral agenda. He said: the poor in spirit-the down and out instead of the up and coming-­would inherit God's kingdom; the meek and humble--not the powerful and well connected-would triumph on the earth; those who hunger and thirst for justice in the world would see their vision fulfilled; the peacemakers, not the warlike, would get God's blessing, as would all who faced inequality and a cold shoulder from others. Jesus went on to criticize the very Hebrew Bible his fellow Jews read each week in the Synagogue by challenging the OT principle of an eye for an eye, basically saying that an eye for an eye would leave everyone blind. And then he instructed his followers to resist the urge for violence by turning the cheek to take another blow, never fighting with evildoers, loving and praying for enemies, and making sure to always give to people who beg on the street: because poverty, injustice, and violence are all related.

Jesus also taught that we can't serve God and money-we have to choose; that we shouldn't worry or be anxious; that we should never judge other people for how they act, or be hypocritical; and that his way is like a narrow, overgrown path filled with potholes and thorns that few will be able to navigate. Jesus even told one prospective disciple not to bother following him unless he was prepared to be homeless. (And by the way, all of this happened in just four chapters in Matthew's gospel: 5,6, 7, and 8!) Not just the tax collector Matthew, why would anyone follow this Jesus? Scholar Gary Wills puts it mildly when he writes that Jesus is at the very least, a 'divine mystery walking among' us.

In his book, The Irresistible Revolution, Shane Claiborne, founder of The Simple Way in Philadelphia tells this story about what it means for us to follow Jesus:

A few years back, I was talking with a homeless guy in an alley downtown, and he started sharing with me about God. He was familiar with the Bible but kept talking about "the Christians" in the third person.

A little confused, I finally asked him, "Are you not a Christian?" "Oh, no, " he said, "I am far too messed up [to be a Christian)." I asked him what he thought a Christian is, and he said, "Someone who's got their stuff together and has things figured out. "

I confessed that I must not be a Christian either and that I wasn't sure I had ever met one. " ... We read together the passage where Jesus tells the Pharisees, "It's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners. "

The gospel, writes Claiborne, is good news for [the disturbed] and is disturbing for those who think they've got it all together. Some of us have been told our whole lives that we are wretched, but the gospel reminds us that we are beautiful.

Others of us have been told our whole lives that we are beautiful, but the gospel reminds us that we are also wretched. [Jesus lets us be honest with ourselves, so we can] stand up and say we are wretched, [so he can remind us] we are also beautiful.

Matthew was a wretched tax collector. Tax collectors weren't well-liked in the first century. (And now that I think of it, tax collectors aren't well-liked in any century!) But in the first century, a tax collector was labeled a collaborator with the hated Roman Empire, categorized and dismissed as a dog, a brute, inhuman, rejected by God. The Greek Philosopher, Xeno, referred to all tax collectors as 'robbers'. One Jewish writer of the day, named Philo, called tax collectors 'pitiless men full of all kinds of inhumanity ... covetous ... and bad tempered.'

Viewed as less than human, tax collectors were social outcasts because they maintained ongoing relations with non-Jews. Pharisees and other religious leaders labeled tax collectors as ritually unclean, and actually prohibited them from worshipping God in the Temple. So, picture Matthew: rejected by others, shut out from worshiping God, suspicious of everyone, always glancing over his shoulder, spit on and cursed as he walked the streets; picture him hunched over counting his tax money, cold and loveless inside-he's a loser!-until suddenly, out of nowhere, a young rabbi goes out of his way to talk to him, looking into his eyes and not past them, treating him like a human being instead of a category or a label, saying, 'follow me', and then going to Matthew's house to eat dinner with other tax collectors and outcasts, defending his behavior with these words, "I've come not to invite the righteous-those who think they've got it altogether-but the sinners, those who are free to admit they don't."

Jesus reminded this wretched tax collector that he was also beautiful and beloved of God. Author Brian McLaren writes, Jesus welcomes and 'eats meals with people-all the wrong sorts of people-to demonstrate that the kingdom of God transforms by grace and acceptance .. .'

But it's hard for us to be grace-full and truly accepting. We look at people. They're objects: to lust over, to hate, to dismiss as evildoers. They're "illegal". They're poor. They're gay or straight. They're white or black or uneducated or blue collar or downscale. We look at people.

But Jesus looked into people. For Jesus, people were not labels or categories, they were just people. He didn't distinguish between insiders and outsiders, loving the one and hating the other. Rather, he welcomed outsiders and insiders, others and them, bringing everyone into a new "us", a new "we," a new humanity that celebrates diversity in the context of love and justice and mutual respect for all. I wonder what our society ... our politics ... our schools ... our ghettos ... our world would look like if we stopped the artificial labels, and just looked into everyone, as Christ did, seeing fellow human beings as siblings in the family of God.

One theologian has written, 'Humans like to tack on qualifiers [in order to join a club or a church]: one must be good, one must keep the rules, one must be in good standing in [society). .. one must be of the right clan or tribe or nation, one must be the right color or the right sexual orientation ... [Jesus] resists all such qualifications. '

The Jesus we follow is a Jesus who sees straight into our souls with piercing eyes, as we sit hunched over at the tax booth of life wallowing in a world of possessions and violence, and labels and qualifications, trying to pretend that everything is pulled together on the surface but wrestling with the one desire we all have-to be accepted, no strings attached.

Today, as we prepare to celebrate communion, know that we make no qualifications about who can come and partake of the bread and cup. Jesus made no distinctions ... we make no distinctions. He didn't see labels or place people into categories ... neither do we. If you're here, come on up, you're invited! Because: We are all beloved of God. We are all beautiful. We are all human beings whom Jesus accepts and invites. AMEN