Sermon 14th January 2018

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Simon Brindley, preaches. The reading is from Matthew 9: 9-13.

The calling of Matthew

So here we are, early on in the new year 2018, with pretty much all of it still ahead of us and with so much going on out there in the big wide world, isn’t there: politically, economically, environmentally, socially.

You know, I am an optimist by nature, at least that’s what people usually say about me, so I hope you will forgive me one small note of pessimism, please, if you will. You see, having turned 60, you do become a little more conscious of your own mortality. Put it this way: you realize that, if you are really fortunate, you are already two thirds of the way through your life, if you might, just about, get through to 90. In fact, once you turn 60 you might already be three quarters of the way through and that is if you even manage to get as far as 80, which itself would be pretty good! And then one thought that goes with that, that I have had in recent weeks - as I say apologies for the note of pessimism, and I was sharing this thought just this week with a friend and neighbour about my age on the street – one thought that occurs to you is that, frankly, the chances of the world sorting itself out politically, environmentally, socially, economically during your own lifetime are actually pretty slim. In fact, it dawns on you, it is almost certainly not going to happen during your lifetime. And that feels just a little pessimistic even if, like me, you think there is still a good case for optimism that sense will prevail in the end and we will, one day, learn to live together and look after each other and our world far, far better than we have learned to do so far.

So it may be just that I have turned 60 or it may be because things really are quite uncertain and difficult out there. But either way it is difficult, I am finding, not to feel, at least from time to time, that there is just a little bit of gloom and doom around, as we look forward at the start of this new year. You will have your own views on that no doubt and it may just be me….

Either way, whatever you are thinking about things right now, it seems to me that if we just think for a moment about how life might have been for Matthew the tax collector that fateful day, (or Levi, son of Alpheus, as Mark and Luke’s gospels call him), things at the start of that day were probably not exactly a bed of roses. There was probably quite a lot of gloom in his life.

You see Matthew was a tax collector.  Now if, by any chance, you have to fill in the dreaded UK tax return by the end of this month or face £100 a day in fines you might just be feeling that the tax collectors of today are not exactly your favourite people. But in those days it was far worse. Matthew was collecting taxes either for Herod, the Jewish leader or possibly for the occupying Romans and, either way, it is likely that the taxes were heavy enough and persistent enough to make the lives of ordinary people pretty miserable. It was probably a very big burden for them that they grew to hate. And the tax collectors almost certainly kept too much for themselves. That was probably a so-called perk of the job but, as a result, the collectors (especially if they were colluding with the occupying Romans) were almost certainly hated. Hated so much, in fact, that they could be lumped together with a load of other disreputable people by the Pharisees when they said to Jesus’ disciples, “What on earth is he doing? What on earth is he doing sitting down to eat with the scum, with the sinners, with the dregs of society, with the flippin’ tax collectors? For goodness sake!!  Is he blind?! Does he not realize that any respectable religious person should be running a mile from this lot?!”

So it would take someone with a particularly thick skin not to wish, I imagine, that they could have got a job that was not quite so deeply unpopular, one that probably made people turn away from them and ostracise them from much of normal community living. And if Matthew had any family, can you imagine what his kids might get called at school? And what the other women might have said to his wife when she went to get water at the well or do some washing in the river? Maybe, in fact, he had no family and kept himself to himself. Maybe even to think about a family would have been too much given the role he had chosen to take on.

No, I think it is a fair bet that life for Matthew the tax collector was not exactly a bundle of light-hearted laughter.

And I thought for a moment we would see if we might recreate just a little of the scene that day at the tax collector’s booth!

They had no notes in those days you see, so unless taxes got paid in kind, for example by giving of animals or crops, they must have been paid in coins. And it may well be that the tax collector’s booth was by a roadside and everyone who came by, perhaps everyone who entered the city by a certain gate, perhaps everyone on the road who was going from one province to another, had to pay the taxes in coins to get in, or to move through. And Matthew must have had something he could lock up to put the taxes in. So here is an old wooden box with a lock on it and its full of old coins. It's actually the bulk of my coin collection from when I was a child. I don't even remember where most of them came from but for today they are going to be taxes being paid 2000 years ago to a hated tax collector called Matthew and this box is going to be the tax collector’s chest and this spot here is going to be the tax collector’s booth.

And I need one person who would be happy to be Matthew, please? And I need six volunteer taxpayers. Come on, six people who want to show a tax collector what they really think of him!

So the idea is that this is the tax collector’s booth and this is his tax chest and these are the taxes (hand out some coins) and you are the taxpayers lining up on the road to pay your taxes and I want each of you to come up to the booth and look at Matthew like you might have looked that day, then I want you to pay your taxes into his tax chest in a way that shows just how much you hate having to pay them….let’s see how you get on!

Thankyou very much…

So there we have it, maybe we can sense just something of the look and something of the sound of contempt.

And into this scene walks Jesus of Nazareth and he says, “Follow me.” And Matthew got up, and followed him.

No one - and no situation - is beyond a calling from God…

And the first thing you might notice about this calling, apart from the person who is being called and the situation he was in, is that it happens quite late in the day. And when I say that I mean late on in the start of Jesus’ ministry. We don't get accounts of the calling of each and every one of the twelve apostles but the accounts there are for the others have already happened, for Peter and Andrew and James and John and there has been an awful lot of preaching and teaching and healing already, whichever of the three gospel accounts of this story about Matthew you read and then late on, Jesus sees this hated man in the situation we have been looking at and he calls him too.

It is never too late to be called by God and some indeed will be called, quite late in the day..

So Jesus calls Matthew, and the gospel says that Matthew got up and followed him and then, I don't know about you, but my brain thinks OK, let’s see where Jesus is going that Matthew has to follow him to! Will Matthew need good walking shoes? Are they heading for the Sea of Galilee? Are they going to go in a boat and face a storm? Will Matthew need warm clothing? Are they heading for the Temple to confront the authorities? Could it all get really tricky? Will Matthew be challenged by a bystander to say something in public about his decision or about Jesus? Might they be heading to where there are Roman troops? Might he even risk arrest?

Interesting, isn’t it, that none of this happens at all, at least not yet. A lot of that stuff may be off in the future, but what does Jesus do first? He doesn't take Matthew away. He first sits down to eat, presumably with Matthew and certainly with a whole crowd of similar people, the ones the society of the day held in contempt. And he sits down to eat just where they are. Actually they may have lain down, the original wording is that they “reclined” to eat but whatever exactly that means, to sit or to lie down, Jesus doesn't start by taking Matthew off to some tough situation of conflict or challenge. He starts by coming to where he is, quite possibly to where Matthew lives, certainly to where the so-called undesirables of that society gather in large numbers, and he has his food with them..

“Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking,” go those familiar words in the Book of Revelation, chapter 3, verse 20, “if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to eat with you and you with me.”

Jesus’ calling starts with who we are and where we are, wherever that is, and he comes to join us there and it is always deeply personal…

We see that with Matthew on this day. And you only have to read on through the rest of chapter 9 of Matthew’s gospel – if you have your Bible open, why not flick through the stories with me – to see this happening time and again.  It happens to the daughter of the leader of the synagogue, raised to life; it happens to the woman with a 12 year bleed, who touches the fringe of his cloak and is healed; it happens to the two blind men whose sight is restored and who can’t hold it in that this is what has happened to them, even when the Healer himself sternly commands them to say nothing; it happens to the man who cannot speak and whose speech is restored. And then Matthew goes on to say that when Jesus sees the crowds, he has compassion on them all, each one of them, because they appear harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Here we are again with that familiar idea perhaps that God’s call is to each one of us individually and it is, first and foremost, to a new, one to one, loving, compassionate, relationship with Him.

His call is to you….and his call is to be with Him.

And his call is then, finally and so obviously in this story, a call to a new way of doing things, to a new and radical set of values. If the religious philosophy of the day was to keep yourself away from what might contaminate you, Jesus says no, all are of high and equal value and in fact those who others in their narrow mindedness might think of as the worst are in fact my top priority! “I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners.”

The Pharisees of course can’t see it, or at least they are portrayed as not seeing it. There must surely have been some who understood the challenge. What he is doing sitting down with these awful people cannot be right, they say. We have rules and they must be kept and your Teacher is breaking them, sitting down to eat with these people. He will be contaminated!

And just listen again to Jesus’ response. I wonder if anything might sum up better what kind of life Matthew is now being called to. “Go away,” he says to his religious critics, “and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’”.

I think you could sum this up as follows. For sacrifice read religious formalities. Doing things according to religious formula, whatever that might mean for you. In those days part of the religious practice was to offer sacrifices in the Temple, of animals to God. But there had also developed a huge array of religious rules about what you could and could not do and what you could and could not wear and who you could and could not mix with and so on and so on. And for mercy read showing compassion to those who are suffering in any way and who need you to be the hands of God’s compassion, whether that is your friend or your neighbour or a Syrian refugee family you have not yet met, or whoever it might be. You will never be short of opportunities to show mercy; that much is certain.

We were away over Christmas and New Year in a couple of places in the North and managed to get to different churches twice. One in particular was impressive, warm and welcoming, a good intelligent talk from the priest, plenty of good people, honest, hardworking no doubt, friendly, open, respectable.

And we got invited out one evening, in that same town, to some new neighbours of a relative of ours, to the big house round the corner, to a home that down here would probably cost a number of millions in the right part of London and to people who up there were a self-made successful businessman and his wife and family who we had never met before.  I went with some slight trepidation. What would they be like? Might the talk turn to money and how well they were doing, like we would almost certainly have got from the previous inhabitants of that house? Would they go on about shopping and their expensive holidays and the cost of always needing to have the best? Well it turned out that there was none of that at all. I can’t recall a less formal gathering of its kind. Turns out the businessman had almost certainly put in 25 years ago the huge steel pipes that are the foundations for the building where I work on Canary Wharf but none of his success seemed to have gone to his head. But it was something his wife said that perhaps impressed me most. When the conversation turned to what she did, there no hint of café society and ladies who lunch. Instead she still did a three and a half hour round trip every day to work in a riverside project for drug addicts in the really left-behind part of the famous northern city nearby. “Working with people not as fortunate as you and me,” as she quietly put it.

I had no hint that they were church people but where do you think God is to be found, in the respectable church or in the riverside project with the drug-addicted families some do not even know exist? Well I suggest He is certainly at work in the latter. “I desire mercy’” not the formality of following respectable religious rules. But don't worry, the good news is that I am sure he is also at work in that church as well. There was too much evidence of that being likely. But Jesus’ message today I think is just that reminder always to be showing mercy in the new life to which we are called.

The calling is to show mercy and not to some form of superficial respectability…

So perhaps this story might speak to you especially if, like me, you are feeling something, anything, of that gloom in the air that I spoke about at the beginning.  You see no situation and absolutely no one is beyond the call of God. And it is never too late to be called; the time has never passed, even if many others have gone before and appear already to be way further down the road. And be prepared, again, to be surprised by the tender mercy shown to you by the God who looks on you with compassion and longs to join you and sit and eat with you. And then be inspired to be led to show mercy to others. That, it seems to me, is where you will still find him calling you today.

Amen