St. John’s Lutheran Church
11 June 2023 + Lectionary 10a (2 Pentecost)
Matthew 9.9-13, 18-26
Rev. Josh Evans

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(Video unavailable this week.)

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There’s admittedly a lot going on in this Sunday’s gospel reading: a call story, a resuscitation story, and a healing story.

Where do we even start?

It can feel a little suffocating – perhaps as claustrophobic as Jesus must have felt  as the crowd is pressing in on him, quite literally so, that he is able to notice a woman who touches even the fringe of his cloak, as he is already on his way to the home of a man whose daughter just died.

The demands on Jesus’s time are many: Come, lay your hand on my daughter, so she might live … If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well…

Jesus responds to each of their requests in turn, but in the midst of the healing and the raising to life (or is it just waking up?), it’s easy to gloss over where all this began.

The acts of healing and raising to life arise out of demands placed on Jesus by others. But the call of Matthew – a tax collector – is different.

This is a call story rooted in compassion, in seeking out, in welcoming.

It’s worth noting that Matthew didn’t choose Jesus. Jesus chose Matthew.

Jesus chose a tax collector. Jesus chose someone despised by the general public who believed that they price gouged and took more than they were owed in order to line their own pockets.

It’s perhaps a bit too simplistic to cast a first-century tax collector into the framework of a 21st-century IRS agent – however much I might grumble and complain every time my quarterly estimated tax payments are due. (But I digress.)

It makes me wonder, though: Who do we put in Matthew’s place? Who is that we turn up our noses at, grumbling in disdain about how this Jesus “eats with tax collectors and sinners”? Who is that we eye cautiously across the sanctuary when they walk into “our church”?

Maybe it’s enough, for now, just to remember that it is to that person, to “those people” (whomever you might be thinking of) that Jesus extends the call of a disciple. As much to them as to you and me.

Maybe that’s the good – and challenging – news for today.

The good news is that Jesus chooses and calls us, no matter how worthy (or not) we feel, no matter how people might look at us and wonder: He’s eating with them?!

The challenging news is that Jesus chooses and calls the ones we utter that same question about – yes, sometimes even we “progressive” Christians – sneering off to the side: He’s eating with them?!

Yes. He is.

This is the call of the church. It’s rarely comfortable, but it is vitally important.

God welcomes all – strangers and friends.

God bids us to build a longer table, not a higher wall. To feed those who hunger, making room for all.

None can be excluded.

All must, and will, and do, find a home here.