Fifteenth Pentecost
St. Matthew Apostle and Evangelist
Matthew 9:9-13; Ephesians 2:4-10; Ezekiel 2:8-3:11
Chris and I were at a wedding reception. Sitting at a table with a number of people we had never met before. Everyone around the table was introducing themselves and briefly explaining their connection to the bride and groom. Briefly explaining why they were invited to the wedding and reception. As the reception and meal progressed people engaged in conversation with the people sitting closest to them. learning a little more about each other—where they lived. marital status and talk in some cases of children. As Pastors we find that inevitably people talk to us about their church life, and the guy next to Chris seemed very active in his church. We talked on as we ate and of course at some point the conversation turned to employment “What do you do for a living?” I believe Chris asked. To this question the man sitting next to her seemed at first a little evasively. He said he worked for the government.. “What branch?” I asked. “Legislative—executive or a regulatory agency—military?”. He gave a half smile and said, “Well, kind of all of those.”. “Really,” I said, growing interested.“Yes,” he continued, “I work for the IRS.” It was interesting how every head at our table suddenly turned to look at the IRS Agent. It felt kind of like some commercial where everyone in the room suddenly grows silent. “Have you been doing it long,” I asked. Trying to sustain the conversation. “About 15 years now,” he replied. “I really like it. I think I’m very good at it.” We all smiled—nodded. and felt relieved that none of us had yet experienced his quality work.
There is a stereotype and prejudice that has been attached to the tax collector for millennia. There is no questioning the importance of taxes to the well-being of any society. Taxes are the source of revenue that provides for the protection of the society. police, fire, military. tax revenue rebuilds and restores after the hurricane and terrorist attack. Taxes are the investment a community makes in the education of its young people and the safety of its drinking water. Without tax revenue there is no public transportation, no paved and coordinated road system and no air traffic controllers. The tax revenue list goes on to include hospitals, elder care, housing and emergency relief, not to mention social security and Medicare programs. Probably the only institution not directly funded in someway in this country is the church. but in many parts of the world taxes even pay the pastors salary. When you start making the list of programs and services made possible and enabled by our tax dollars we find that we all benefit in some way, and the role of the IRS agent in a complex modern society becomes clearly indispensable. Yet it is a rare person who celebrates paying taxes.
Probably for a variety of reasons. the simple fact is that few of us likes to be told that we have to give up a portion of what we consider to be our hard earned income to what would appear to be the benefit of others. We tend to assume that any return we receive from paying taxes is our due by right and privilege as American citizens. But we also tend to believe that it is others who are disproportionately gifted by our tax dollars at our expense. Stated simply—we just want our money in our pockets and the tax man takes it away. Politicians have long recognized this seemingly innate hostility we carry with us, and whole election campaigns have been waged on this emotion at the expense of all who might suffer from the removal of the tax supported programs that make us the civilized and caring society we are. It has been said that one measure of a society’s civility and commitment to corporate unity can be found by looking at the percentage of income the populous is willing to invest in their society through taxes. It is a clear certainty that there are few if any tax collectors in present day Iraq or the starving civil war torn nations of the world. The tax collector. It is amazing to me that I have only met one person who has ever admitted to me to being a tax collector. and that was at a wedding reception sitting down to eat. Maybe you know more such individuals. But I find myself wondering why I know so many lawyers and doctors and teachers and engineers and manufacturers and yet have such limited exposure to IRS employees. Of course I’m not seeking contact with them in their professional capacity. But I do wonder why they seem to be so socially invisible from my world.
I find it curious that the only name of a tax collector that I can produce is that of a Galilean tax collector working in the first century for the occupying Roman government. By reputation, tax collectors were despised by the Galilean populous because they were viewed as collaborators with a foreign government. Depending on your perspective. the Roman army either provided security and stability in the region or was the oppressive presence of an occupying army. But either way it had to be paid for which meant taxes had to be paid. Like tax payers toda, most Galilean residents ignored the fact that the Roman taxes benefited them. the taxes paid for things like road construction that did not all lead to Rome. Provided for the construction of aqueducts that brought fresh water to the area. Helped build many of the fine public buildings that were popular gathering spaces.And paid for the art mosaics and sculptures that turned the dreary peasants life a little brighter. Part of the problem, of course, was the popular belief that tax collectors, who were actually paid by the Roman authorities, made their real money by skimming funds from the taxes collected. by over charging or taking bribes to look the other way on certain deals. While this may have certainly been true in some or even many cases. there were also those tax collectors who did their job—did it well. and suffered the disgust of others who walked by them looking the other way. Of course money itself was part of the problem. to some in the first century religious community any transactions involving money were suspect. It was just too easy to make money into a false idol. The very coins were engraved with images of rulers just like the carved idols of heathen Roman temples. Wealth and money was suspect because it was doubtful that any one could honestly succeed without being corrupted by greed and deceit. The disrepute that has come to be attached to names like Enron and Anderson, whether rightly or wrongly, clung to anyone involved with revenue collection in the time of Jesus.
Our Gospel lesson for today is a simple one. a tax collector named Matthew is sitting at the tax booth and Jesus comes to him with an invitation to “Follow me”. Jesus is then seen next sitting at dinner (in other versions of this story the dinner is in Matthew’s home) where the text indicates there were other tax collectors and sinners. Observing all of this shame are the Pharisee, a religious group that was popular among the people for their religious commitment and dedication to the keeping of the Law of Moses. The Pharisees committed to living their lives as if they were serving God in the holy temple which meant they defined their lives by the sacrifices they could make to God. giving up certain foods—dressing a certain way, limiting their actions and involvement with others out of sacrifice to God. They lived to be holy, set apart from the things of the world that were not of God but sinful and evil. This, of course, was not easy. It meant carefully defining who and what was acceptable to God and who and what was not. Tax collectors—like murders and prostitutes—were not. There is a bit of the Pharisee in us all.
The process of defining our own identity and values in the world means that we make decisions about what we will accept and what we will exclude from our lives. Most such bracketing of the world in and out is part of the developmental phases that every person moves through and then hopefully moves beyond as they progress from childhood to adulthood.. The little boy that at some point decides girls have cooties and should not be touched or the little girl who determines that boys are dirty and disgusting creatures are normally but passing through a phase of sexual differentiation that usually passes too quickly to the dismay of most parents of teenagers. But some prejudices and stereotypes are not so easily transcended. Some categories of acceptable and excluded sneak into our unconscious daily dealings with the world causing us to be less responsive to the person we would prefer to not know or have dealings with. Sometimes such prejudice is based on the categories that we as a nation have identified as unacceptable categories of exclusion. race, creed, color or sexual preference. but these are the obvious challenges to our values and goodness. There are the far more subtle prejudices based on maybe a painful personal experience or maybe the lack of experience that become embedded in our being and haunt us all our lives. It so much easier to see the Pharisee in someone else. Their intolerance for someone who is not as gifted as they are, the rudeness to someone not corporately on the same leve,. the neglect of someone economically more needy. Jesus confronts the Pharisee in us with a simple invitation to one who was outside the community, one who was outside the safe zone of our faith categories.
Who is in and who is out. This was one of the first questions the early Christian community had to struggle with. As the mission to the Gentiles—the non-Jewish communities. began to find converts. The question was should these converts be required to observe fully the Mosaic Laws. (We need to remember that most of the disciples were trained at least for part of their religious lives in the Pharisaic synagogues that filled the country side. The Apostle Paul was a devout Pharisee before becoming a follower of Christ.) So the church struggled with the question of what to do with the Gentile who was formerly viewed as sinful and unclean when they desired to enter the faith community. Fortunately the decision, based on the witness of Jesus in our lesson for today, was to accept Gentiles without reservation. Notice Matthew was not accepted by Jesus because of anything he had done. He was not told to return any illegally acquired funds or even to stop collaborating with the Romans. The grace of Christ comes before any requirement even of repentance..
Thus this morning we baptize Jonathan as an infant, as further witness to the grace of God coming to us even before we can acknowledge that gift. A gift of grace—freely given—no strings attached. There were later disputes that arose in the faith community that struggled with this amazing grace coming without restrictive criteria. Struggles that echoed time and again the question centered on the forgiveness of major sins. There was the question of how the church should forgive the murderer, the adulterer or someone guilty of apostasy. Some argued that God could certainly forgive any sin but what about the faith community. How does the church restore to inclusion those guilty of grave sins against God and the community. Through the centuries this has not been an easy question. We no longer commonly practice the expulsion of a person from our community. But we do feel compelled to mark the sex offender—identify the felon. And the church struggles to appropriately witness God’s love in community with such individuals. Much of our struggle around the world today reflects the difficult task of dealing with societies that practice various types of exclusivity. It is easy for us to begin to reflect that same type of prejudice when we hear the term Iraqi or even Arab. And there are the others—the others we would leave sitting at their booths. who we would walk by like so many did in Jesus’ day without a word being spoken. We don't know why Matthew, the tax collector, got up so abruptly to follow Jesus that day long ago. And we're not sure if the dinner which followed was at Matthew's house, although that seems likely, for those who gathered around Jesus would have been Matthew's kind of people. "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" The religious leaders asked the disciples. The correct response would probably have been, “Why don’t you?”
Jesus was always in the wrong house, eating with the wrong people. "As Jesus was walking along He saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and Jesus said to him, 'Follow me.' And he got up and followed Him." Who can explain it? Matthew's decision was so sudden— clearly not thought out. Perhaps pastor/novelist Frederick Buechner was right when he said. "Faith is a word that describes the direction our feet start moving when we find that we are loved." Matthew got up and followed. He could have waited until he knew more about Jesus. Maybe he should have waited until he felt better about himself. But if he had he would probably still be sitting at his booth. "Faith," says Buechner, "is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp." A hand that reaches out to us before we realize we want or need it. The hand of God’s grace opened to us even when and while we are busy closing our hands to exclude others. There’s a tax collector in the crowd today—I know it. Someone who knows the pain of exclusion, who yearns to hear just once the words “Follow me”. There’s also a Pharisee or two in the crowd—struggling to find God on their own terms. And to the Pharisee as well as the tax collector there is a special invitation today. “Follow me”. Follow me to my table of grace. Follow me by faith alone, and know that you are named this day a child of God—my disciple for all time.
Amen.