On this warm June Sunday morning in New York City, we hear a story from two thousand years ago about events taking place in a culture vastly different from ours, and we wonder if the story has relevance for us. The story is about Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish carpenter who became a rabbi or teacher and formed a community of women and men that evolved into the Christian Church. We, the people of Rutgers Presbyterian Church, are part of the Christian Church, and so I believe stories about Jesus are relevant to our understanding of ourselves and our mission.
Christianity has its roots in Judaism. Abraham and Sarah are our spiritual ancestors, and Jesus was decidedly Jewish. I believe Jesus knew that many human beings, possibly most or all human beings, have a built-in yearning for a spiritual connection, that is, a connection with something or someone beyond themselves—God, a Higher Power, Allah, or the Great Spirit. Jesus was in the succession of gifted people who had fought against the human tendency to reduce spiritual responsiveness to obeying rules and regulations. That tendency is alive and well today.
Jesus is in line with the prophets of ancient Israel in this morning's story. He was in the process of calling disciples or forming his family—not the family he had been born into, but the family he was creating—often the more meaningful community of belonging. The Gospel writer Matthew describes Jesus as just walking along—maybe sauntering would be a good word for it, when he saw a man sitting at a toll booth collecting the duty imposed on commercial traffic. Toll collectors were despised by most people because they made themselves rich in the process of over-charging the people who paid tolls. Also, by virtue of their work they were collaborators with the hated Roman invaders.
Knowing all that, Jesus approached the toll collector, and to the amazement of everyone, invited him into the family he was creating. "Follow me," Jesus said to Matthew, the toll collector. The Gospel story tells us Matthew got up and followed Jesus. As the hymn-writer puts it:
In simple trust like those who heard beside the Syrian sea
The gracious calling of the Lord,
Let us like them, without a word
Rise up and follow Thee.
Matthew got up from his seat in the toll booth and literally followed Jesus. Eventually they had dinner together. Other Gospel writers say it was the transformed toll collector who gave a dinner for Jesus. Our story implies it was Jesus who gave the dinner. It doesn't really matter. What matters is that Jesus was at dinner in the company of many toll collectors and sinners, a term used to describe people who didn't observe the Jewish law, which had become incredibly complex by the time of our story. And Jesus' presence at the dinner table with such people was duly noted.
The Pharisees, the people who tried to obey all the fine points of religious laws, expressed their dismay in their question to Jesus' followers. "Why does your teacher eat with toll collectors and sinners?" The Pharisees believed in guilt by association. They would never sit down to lunch with anyone not wearing an American flag in his lapel or on her blouse. They believed in keeping themselves pure and clean. They were scandalized that Jesus not only tolerated the irreligious; he sought them out.
Overhearing the question of his critics, Jesus made one of the more difficult and more important statements of his ministry. Clearly the early Church remembered it and valued it because it is in all three synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. "I have come to call not the righteous but sinners."
What about those two words righteous and sinners? For me they're central in my understanding of the Christian faith: righteous and sinners. During his brief but powerful ministry, Jesus redefined and reframed the prevailing concept of righteousness. Clearly the religious professionals believed that righteousness consisted in obeying the Mosaic law as it had been handed down and interpreted by the scribes over centuries. They went to church, prayed often, tithed their income, followed the dietary code, and limited their social connections to people like themselves.(I wonder if they ever experienced joy?)
Jesus demonstrated impatience with them—even anger at times. He called the religious professionals whitewashed tombs—clean on the outside but rotten on the inside. He redefined righteousness in terms of love, love for God, other people and oneself. He went farther. He lived out a righteousness expressed in connecting with people the Pharisees called sinners. The Greek word used most frequently in the New Testament for sin is a term from archery. It means missing the mark.
What was different about Jesus was that he didn't just tolerate sinners, the men and women who missed the mark of respectability, who lived outside the realm of conventional goodness. He sought out such people. He recruited at least one such person to be in his inner circle of followers, and he spent a lot of time eating and drinking with them.
It's important to note that Jesus spent significant time with sinners, not so much because they were more interesting and more fun to be with than conventionally religious people. (That may or may not be the case.) Clearly he enjoyed such people but he also challenged them to live with a new kind of self-awareness. One of the three synoptic Gospels, Luke, expands the sentence I have come to call not the righteous but sinners. The expanded version is I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.
If we understand that the word repentance means changing direction, we hear Jesus inviting people outside the pale, people who missed the mark, to live at a deeper level than they had yet found. For me the whole sweep of the Christian gospel is the good news that there is more to life than self-interest, more to fulfillment than fun, more to satisfaction than personal worth measured in millions or billions—God help us!
I believe Jesus was inviting the people he thought had the most potential for spiritual discernment to do the hard work of changing the pattern of their lives, revising their priorities. I believe Jesus knew that the people with the greatest capacity to hear and live out his truth were the people called sinners, the people pushed to the margins of society. I can tell you that when I have gone into the rooms of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous), I have found more people proportionately with deep spiritual sensitivity than I have found in most churches.
Jesus spent time with people who weren't welcome in the synagogue as far as we know. He met them where they were, on their own level. And he invited them to change. That is still the primary mission of the Christian Church as I understand it—to meet people where they are and invite them to change, change the way they see themselves, see themselves as loved by God and worthy of a full life, change the way they order their priorities so that they value people more than money and see themselves as part of a global network instead of as isolated individuals.
This past week has seen some dramatic events in the realm of American politics, and for me, in the realm of the Christian Church, both having to do with change. Politically, the emergence of Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee for president is especially hopeful because he seems to see the need for systemic change in the way our national government operates. He is phenomenally gifted in articulating the need for change and his vision for implementing it. He seems to understand the desperate need for a major shift in our national priorities, lifting up the urgency of communal effort rather than individual prosperity, although those two things need not be mutually exclusive. He seems to be willing to ask us to make the sacrifices necessary for providing good health care for everyone, for transforming our national infrastructure, and for restoring a balance to a capitalism that has become intoxicated with selfishness. I have hope that in November we Americans will be able to redefine our understanding of righteousness and sin.
As for the Church, the church that has disappointed so many of us who have waited for full inclusion, I am encouraged whenever I experience breakthroughs in unexpected places. Last weekend one of my younger sisters called to say that her husband had just died after a long and valiant struggle with cancer. His death was expected, and in many ways it was a blessing. My sister asked if I would be willing to have a part in her husband's memorial service, which would be in the Roman Catholic Church they had attended. I said of course I would. She acknowledged there could be a problem, depending on the priest who would be saying the funeral mass.
To make a long and good story short, the night before the mass, I met the priest, who came to my sister's house. I found him to be a very open, caring man. The next morning before the mass began, he asked me if I would help distribute the "host," the wafers given to people as they came up to the altar. I had wondered if I would even be permitted to take communion, never dreaming I would be invited to distribute communion. My sister and I were both crying when I handed her the symbol of Christ's body, something we never expected to happen. The body of Christ, our hope in life and in death.
Maybe God isn't finished with the Church after all—Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, or Methodist. Maybe the changes we long for and pray for will come in our lifetime. It seems that Jesus is still calling people to follow him, to walk the way of welcome and inclusiveness, to make love the definition of righteousness. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that calls anyone and everyone to life in all its fullness. Welcome to the banquet of life. Welcome to this table where the Christ of love awaits us and calls us by name.