Sermon:  “Party at Matthew's House”

Prayer:   “May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts and minds here together be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.”

Imagine our shock at this image Matthew gives us today: Jesus as a party animal, feasting with “tax collectors and sinners.” It reminds me of the first impression I got of Brookfield through my early conversations with the Search Committee, who from time to time would kind of sheepishly mention their secret meetings at “Widder Brown’s.”  The way they talked, I thought it must have been a cigar-smoky saloon filled with dancing girls and card players – hardly what I was expecting from a stuffy 250-year-old New England Congregational Church!

But the truth is, our Congregationalist ancestors may have had a reputation for being stern and strict, but they were quite literally revolutionary.  Those fiery Christians who used a church meeting to plan the Boston Tea Party were not afraid of getting engaged with the real issues of this world.  So our ancestors in faith, much like our modern United Church of Christ, were always about that risky business of putting “new wine in new wineskins.”  With our worship focus on scripture and preaching, we have always considered it our duty to really wrestle with old texts and dusty doctrines – to apply them in ways that make sense for us in our world today.  Our clear glass windows still remind us to look outward and engage ourselves with real-world issues.

This means we sometimes differ with one another about how we interpret scripture and how we try to apply it to our lives.  But what continues to unite us is the classically Protestant confession of our church covenant, that we are all sinners who are “made whole solely by the grace of God in Christ.”  We are saved through the power of God’s grace alone and not through our own righteousness.  Gay and straight people are sinners.  Republicans and Democrats are sinners.  White people and black people, young people and old people are sinners.  Our sin, and our love for Jesus, is what unites us – and calls us into covenant with Matthew and with all those people at the party there at his house.  It’s all pretty shocking, nonetheless.

When I was young, and working for The Raleigh Times, the afternoon paper in Raleigh, NC – we used to go out after work with the Capitol press corps – some in the Governor’s office and others at the Times.  And I used to joke with my Southern Baptist grandmother at the time about how I was “dining with the tax collectors and sinners,” because it was more than a little shocking for me.  I was such a good little church girl, and at age 22 and 23, I still looked about 15 years old – so to go out to a pool hall with people drinking beer at 3 in the afternoon was a big deal.  So I’d have my Diet Coke and do my best to hold my own with this crowd of real men – I mean, some of these guys had helped to plant that flag at Iwo Jima!  I did everything in my power to learn to swear and to stay in the closet as a Christian.  I had to protect my reputation!

You know what I mean?  Even those of us IN most Christian congregations I think are prejudiced about what boring people go to church – as opposed to all those fun and joyful people we know who frequent bars and nightclubs on the outside.  Always drove me crazy in my youth.  North Carolina newspaper people I knew were especially skeptical, obsessed with facts, reacting to narrow-minded Bible Belt fundamentalists.  “I don’t believe in the God you don’t believe in,” I’d say.  “You know?  That God of yours is not a God I believe in at all.”  I tried to defend the Jesus I knew, who didn’t act like Christians who were getting press coverage at the time – those preaching the politics of hate, marching for segregation and against women’s rights.

Matthew the tax collector knew God’s grace through this compassionate Jesus I had come to know – one who offered the joy of forgiveness.  And tax collectors back then but were seen as the worse sinners of all.  They enriched themselves at their neighbors’ expense, by taking a huge “cut” of the taxes for themselves.  That was how they legally got paid.  So a tax collector was far from a respectable IRS agent; he was much more like a gangster on the take from the biggest Italian mob boss of all, Caesar.  The high toll they took might mean that after a Jewish family had paid off the Romans they had no more money left to pay their tithe.  And in their religious system, that meant they were “sinners” – excluded by law from the Temple, kept out of the one place where the Holy One of Israel was supposed to live. They were cast out of the covenant.

My point is, Jesus was doing the unthinkable in these stories.  He was not just being kind – he was forgiving everything.  He was going a little overboard, according to most regular church-goers like us – the faithful religious people of the times.  He was loving those who had wandered away from God’s ways, to “the places where demons dwell,” whether or not it was their own fault.  And the gratitude – the enormous upswell of gratitude of these people brought back into relationship with their God and with one another – meant that the worship at Matthew’s house really WAS a party.  It was a joyful feast of the people of God.

Jesus does not criticize the guests at Matthew’s party. He does not demand their repentance. He simply eats and drinks with them, and he calls them his friends.  And that is the very foundation of the church.  It’s like the old TV series “Cheers,” the bar “where everybody knows your name.”  Here in Christ’s church, as at Matthew’s party, we live “forgiveness of sins,” so that everyone learns to get along.  Through God’s grace, we come to love one another – all the Dianes and Sams, the Norms and Cliffs, the Woodys and Carlas. We are privileged to be a part of such a church – a joyful church full of God’s grace, just like the party at Matthew’s house.

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.

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Matthew 9:9-17

⁹As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him. ¹⁰And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. ¹¹When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” ¹²But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. ¹³Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

¹⁴Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but your disciples do not fast?” ¹⁵And Jesus said to them, “The wedding guests cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast. ¹⁶No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak, and a worse tear is made. ¹⁷Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.”