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It's still early in Jesus' ministry. He's been baptized. He's faced temptation out in the wilderness. He's read scripture and taught in his hometown of Nazareth. He's been to Capernaum. He's traveled from town to town in Galilee preaching the good news of the Kingdom of God.
Simon and Andrew and James and John are with him. This passage tells of the calling of Levi, otherwise known as Matthew. The other seven disciples won't be named in the Gospel of Luke until the sixth chapter. It's likely that they are in the crowd that is following Jesus here in the fifth chapter, but they haven't yet been singled out and named.
It's early in Jesus' ministry, but already it's clear who is most receptive to Jesus and who tends to meet him with resistance and skepticism, who comes to Jesus hungry for his message of good news and who comes to Jesus with ears that somehow can't quite hear what's so good about the news.
Word about Jesus was spreading quickly. In Capernaum, people came to him in waves, and he laid hands on them. He healed them from all kinds of sickness and delivered them from demons. Word was still spreading and people were still coming to look for him when he left Capernaum to travel to other towns in Galilee. Wherever Jesus went, those who were in need flocked to him.
A man with leprosy gathered up the courage to approach him and plead for his attention, and Jesus healed him.
Another man, paralyzed and unable to approach Jesus on his own, was carried to Jesus by four friends. When the thickness of the crowd prevented them from approaching Jesus directly, they went around the crowd. They carried their friend up to the roof of the house where Jesus was. They dismantled the tiles and dug through the roof. With astounding determination and boldness they lowered their friend down through the roof, bringing him to the front of the crowd and claiming Jesus' attention. Jesus healed him. Not satisfied merely to give the man new legs, Jesus also washed him clean and gave him a new heart.
The gospels are full of stories of people who went to remarkable lengths to get Jesus' attention in a crowd and to bring to him their need or the need of a loved one. Not once does Jesus rebuke these people for their impoliteness. Instead he honors their boldness and commends their faith. It's like the hungrier people are when they come to Jesus--the more desperate they are to bring before him their emptiness or their brokenness or their shame or their hurt--the more powerfully Jesus can act in them to fill their emptiness or mend their brokenness or wipe away their shame or heal their hurt.
It wasn't only the physically and spiritually wounded who flocked to Jesus. At a word from Jesus, four fisherman dropped their nets and left everything and followed him. Hearing the simple invitation, "follow me," a tax collector got up from his tax booth, left everything and followed him.
These men were not empty or broken or shame-filled or hurt, at least in any obvious way. But they recognized in Jesus something they did not have and could not achieve on their own. They may not have been able to put their finger on that something and name it, not yet, but they recognized it nonetheless. Jesus offered them transformation, and even when they did not know what that transformation would look like, they were open and they responded. They were hungry for Jesus and for his message of good news.
The sick were hungry for his message of healing. The demon-possessed were hungry for his message of deliverance. The empty were hungry for his message of hope and purpose.
The broken were hungry for his message of wholeness. The shame-filled and the sin-stained were hungry for his message of forgiveness and reconciliation. The lost and uncertain were hungry for his direction along the way. The unfinished and incomplete were hungry for him to take them by the hand and lead them on.
Not everyone was hungry for Jesus and his message of good news though. There were those who couldn't quite hear what was so good about the news. There were those who tried to shut Jesus down and send him away. There were those who gathered in the crowds only to question and obstruct and critique Jesus' choice of food and drink and company.
In Jesus' hometown of Nazareth, the people who knew him the best rejected him and even threatened to throw him off a cliff. They couldn't hear what was good about his message. Instead they heard him call in to question what they had assumed was their own preferred place in God's favor.
In the other towns in Galilee, it was the Pharisees, primarily, who couldn't quite hear what was so good about the good news. Who were the Pharisees? They were a group of highly religious folk who studied the Torah in depth and who made every possible effort to live in accordance with God's law. They were generally more educated in scripture and in the history of the faith than the average person. They were teachers in the synagogues. They were models of proper religious observance.
Some of us who have been around church a long time have picked up the idea that the word Pharisee is practically synonymous with legalistic and self-righteous. No doubt some of them were, but I suggest that characterization is over-simplistic and unhelpful. Some of you who have heard me preach for a while know that I suggest that it is more helpful and more honest to think of the Pharisees as the good church folk of the time-the pillars of the church, the pastors and Sunday school teachers and paragons of virtue that everybody else in the church looks up to and looks to for guidance. Some of them were legalistic and self-righteous, but not all. Some of them even followed Jesus.
When Jesus healed the paralyzed man who had been carried to Jesus by his friends, there were Pharisees in the group who responded sort of like the folks in Jesus' hometown. They were so worried about whether Jesus' words went beyond the bounds of proper religious speech that they hardly noticed that a man who once could not walk was not running home with his mat in his arms.
When Levi abandoned his tax booth to follow Jesus, he was so excited he threw a party for Jesus and invited all his friends. Not surprisingly, his friends were tax collectors and other types of shady characters. After all, nobody who was well-thought-of in society socialized with tax collectors. They may have been rich, but they were resented as collaborators with the Romans and regarded as outcasts from Jewish society. As usual, Jesus was more than happy to eat and drink and talk with the friends of Levi. They were hungry, and Jesus was always happy to be with those who were hungry. Maybe some of them responded to Jesus and changed their ways, like Levi. Maybe some of them left the party unchanged. The text doesn't say. The text does say that Jesus did not hesitate to spend time with them.
The Pharisees, on the other hand, were appalled that Jesus would attend such a party. How could Jesus teach in the synagogues one day as a respected rabbi and then party the next day with people who wouldn't dare darken the door of a synagogue? These good church folk were too caught up in maintaining the boundaries between who is respectable and who isn't, that they couldn't quite hear what was good about Jesus' news.
When the good church folk complained, Jesus answered them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."
At the risk of oversimplification, I suggest that the key difference between those who came to Jesus hungry for his message of good news and those who came to Jesus with ears that couldn't quite hear what was so good about the news is this: Those who heard knew they were incomplete and hoped that Jesus would change them; those who could not hear thought they pretty much had a handle on things and hoped that Jesus would pat them on the back.
There are three take-home messages to this sermon.
The first is for anyone here who is so aware of their own incompleteness that they are truly surprised whenever they walk into a sanctuary and the roof does not cave in.
The roof will not fall in. You are exactly where you need to be.
My mom-who is one of those gray-haired, pillar of the church, Sunday school teacher types-sent me a book called "Messy Spirituality" (Michael Yaconelli, Zondervan, 2002). There are a few quotes included in this book that I want to share with you today.
First is a story reprinted in this book that Anne LaMott tells in book "Traveling Mercies." Yaconelli summarizes: "Things were not going well in her life: addicted to cocaine and alcohol, involved in an affair that produced a child whom she aborted, helplessly watching her best friend die of cancer. During this time, Anne visited a small church periodically. She would sit in the back to listen to the singing and then leave before the sermon. During the week of her abortion, she spiraled downward. Disgusted with herself, she drowned her sorrows in alcohol and drugs. She had been bleeding for many hours from the abortion and finally fell into bed, shaky and sad, smoked a cigarette, and turned off the light."
LaMott writes: "After a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner, and I just assumed it was my father, whose presence I had felt over the years when I was frightened and alone. The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there-of course, there wasn't. But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus. I felt him as surely as I feel my dog nearby as I write this.
"And I was appalled…I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen. I turned to the wall and said out loud, 'I would rather die.'
"I felt him just sitting there on his haunches in the corner of my sleeping loft, watching me with patience and love, and I squinched my eyes shut, but that didn't help because that's not what I was seeing him with.
"Finally I fell asleep, and in the morning, he was gone.
"This experience spooked me badly, but I thought it was just an apparition, born of fear and self-loathing and booze and loss of blood. But then everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in. But I knew what would happen: you let a cat in one time, give it a little milk, and then it stays forever…
"And one week later, when I went back to church, I was so hungover that I couldn't stand up for the songs, and this time I stayed for the sermon, which I just thought was so ridiculous, like someone trying to convince me of the existence of extraterrestrials, but the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling-and it washed over me.
"I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels, and I walked down the dock past dozens of potted flowers, under a sky as blue as one of God's own dreams, and I opened the door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, … 'I quit.' I took a long deep breath and said out loud, 'All right. You can come in.'
"So this was my beautiful moment of conversion."
If you are so aware of your own incompleteness, brokenness, emptiness, shame, or sin-stains that you are truly surprised when the roof doesn't fall in when you enter a sanctuary, know this: The roof won't fall in. You are exactly where you need to be.
The second is for anyone here who has begun to think now and then that they've got this religion thing more or less figured out. You finally know what words to say when and what things to do when. You're hoping Jesus is ready to pat you on the back and, truth be told, you really don't want him to do anything to disrupt your life right now, just when things are finally going smoothly.
Quoted from Henri Nouwen, "The Genesee Diary": "He who thinks that he is finished is finished. How true. Those who think they have arrived, have lost their way. Those who think they have reached their goal, have missed it. Those who think they are saints, are demons."
Stay hungry. Stay hungry.
The third is for all of us-no matter how long we've been walking with Jesus, no matter how long we've been participating in church, no matter how much we've got figured out, no matter how much we still need to learn-for all of us, no matter what.
Quoted from Keith Miller quote: "Our churches are filled with people who outwardly look contented and at peace but inwardly are crying out for someone to love them…just as they are-confused, frustrated, often frightened, guilty, and often unable to communicate even within their own families. But the other people in the church look so happy and contented that one seldom has the courage to admit his own deep needs before such a self-sufficient group as the average church meeting appears to be."
There's something about the call, even as we come to Jesus hungry, somehow to be vulnerable enough to let other people know we're hungry-not only so that they might be able to come alongside and help us, but also so that others might find the courage to tell the truth about their own hunger.
All of us who are here-no matter where we are in our walk with Jesus-are called by him to throw our hearts open wide and welcome with hospitality whomever he sends our way. All of us who are here-first timers and veterans alike-are called by him to receive one another with openness…because there isn't a one of us here who is not incomplete, unfinished, hungry, broken, empty, or uncertain. All of us who are here-first timers and veterans alike-are called by him to go from this place with our hearts thrown open wide…for the world out there is full of people who are incomplete, unfinished, hungry, broken, empty, and uncertain.
Some may respond to the love and compassion that Jesus shows through us. Some may not. We have no control over that.
We are invited to keep pulling the wax from our own ears, so that we might hear the good news and receive it as those who are hungry.
We are invited to share the good news as openly and broadly as possible, so that others who are hungry might hear it.
Quoted from Brent Curtis and John Eldredge, "Sacred Romance": "From one religious camp we're told that what God wants is obedience, or sacrifice, or adherence to the right doctrines, or morality. Those are the answers offered by conservative churches. The more therapeutic churches suggest that no, God is after our contentment, or happiness, or self-actualization, or something else along those lines. He is concerned about all these things, of course, but they are not his primary concern. What he is after is us-our laughter, our dreams, our fears, our heart of hearts."
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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