Family Values Part Two: Belonging

The New Revised Standard Version The Call of Matthew

9 As 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.

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

Introduction

My People

I spent the first part of my ministry career, and in fact so very much enjoy today, leading youth ministry.

Teenagers are some of the most misunderstood people of our age.

A lot of people think they’re weird and unruly and unfinished because…well, they are!

My I’ve had a simple two word response when anyone notices this odd generation:

Anyone who would stay up all night just to play hide and seek? My people.

Anyone who creates lego replicas of popular movies and takes pictures of it for instagram? My people.

Anyone who cannot wait to explain the latest video game that I don’t have the foggiest idea what they’re talking about? My people.

Anyone who can eat their bodyweight in pizza and still have room for jello? My people.

And in all my years of ministry I noticed something.

The more that I’ve claimed these oddball, goofy teenagers as my people, the more they claim me as theirs.

It’s almost like when these teenagers are told they belong, they pay it forward and start to believe it themselves.

And here’s the kicker for today’s sermon: It’s not just teenagers.

Our values

We are continuing today a series on the Values that we have established here at LPC.

Last week we explored our first value:

We belong to the family of Christ. We believe and trust in the saving love of Jesus Christ, which unites us all as brothers and sisters in Christ. So we will strive in all we do to support and encourage our families to live in to that calling.

We looked at what it means to be a part of a family, how we as a church family can support over-busy and over-tired families in this generation, and we looked at how we can become a tribe or a church family together.

Today, I want to take a look at our second value:

Everyone belongs here. We hold fast to the truth that the Kingdom of God is free and available to all, regardless of whatever dividing walls our world may seek to establish. We will do all we can to tear down these dividing walls, to befriend the stranger, and to provide a safe and casual space for all to experience the healing love of Jesus Christ.

And we’re going to do that through a rather small story about a tax collector named Matthew

The Story of Matthew the Tax Collector

Why were tax collectors hated?

If you read Jesus at all, you start to notice that no one in his day held tax collectors in high regard.

They’re compared with criminals, prostitutes, murderers, and all kinds of other unsavory characters.

The reason is both obvious and complicated.

When Rome conquered a people, it was a set up a little bit like the mob.

If you give us enough cash, we’ll protect you.

If you don’t give us enough cash, well that’s a nice temple you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.

And so to collect this cash, Rome would use a people’s own citizens to collect.

Maybe they thought they’d be a more sympathetic voice or something?

But so Rome would come to a Jewish tax collector, and say “Go collect 10% from everyone. Here’s a centurion in case anyone doesn’t want to pay up. Enjoy!”

But then the tax collector, a Jew themselves, would show up on your front door and say “Hey, Rome says you owe 20%, and Franz here is gonna make sure you paid up.”

These tax collectors were hated because

They were thieves.

They were in bed with the enemy.

They were betraying their own people.

Hold that thought, because there’s something else worth exploring here.

The path of the disciple

Schooling looked a whole lot different in Jesus’ day than it does in ours.

Bet-safair

Essentially our elementary school.

You memorized the first five books of the Bible, called the Torah, backwards and forwards.

99% of the kids that graduated from this level of schooling went on to pick up the family trade, like fishing or farming or carpentry or something like that.

But the best of the best went to the next level.

Bet-Talmud

At this level, kids memorized the entire Old Testament.

Genesis -Malachi, all memorized.

And even here, at the end 99% of that top 1% are told that’s really great, but go learn the family trade.

But the best of the best of the best went and found a Rabbi to a apprentice under. We call those disciples

Disciple- Follow me

To become a disciple, you had to sit down for a super intense interview with the Rabbi.

And the Rabbi can grill you on anything he sees fit.

He can check that memorization you’ve been working on.

He can ask you for your interpretation of those scriptures.

He can ask you your opinion on every day cultural things.

At the end of the interview, there were two possible responses.

If the kid was no good as a disciple, the Rabbi would bless him and say return to your family to work the family trade.

But if the Rabbi thought that this kid was good enough to be just like the Rabbi, to follow in the Rabbi’s footsteps, the Rabbi would say two words.

“Follow me.”

Why is everyone mad? Matthew just jumped the line

So Jesus ticks everyone off on kind of three levels:

1) Without any of that education, while at some point along the way someone looked right at Matthew and told him he wasn’t good enough, Jesus says “Follow Me.” He invites him to be a disciple.

2) Not only does Jesus let Matthew jump the line, but he lets a TAX COLLECTOR jump the line.

It’s not hard for me to imagine someone in that crowd who thought “Hey, what the heck? I’m a decent person who has never stepped out of line, and I’m not good enough, but this tax collector? He’s ok?”

And 3) Jesus invites Matthew over for dinner.

Dinner ain’t what it used to be.

Dinner in the biblical world was a little bit different than it is today.

To be invited to someone’s house for dinner was essentially to say that you are in their family, and they are in yours.

There were no casual dinner parties. It was all about status and symbol.

So Jesus has dinner with Matthew, the tax collector.

Not only has Jesus said that Matthew is good enough to be a disciple.

Not only has Jesus looked past all the bad things that Matthew has done to the people of Isreal at the hands of the enemy Rome, and has made a good bit of spending cash as a result.

But Jesus has now essentially said that he and Matthew are equals.

Can you feel the scandal coming off this story now?

Healthy people don’t need to be here.

You can always count on the Pharisees to get it wrong in the gospels.

They ask a question of Jesus...

Well, actually they’re too scared to do that, they ask the disciples...

“Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

And now, as heartless as this question kind of sounds when it’s in the mouth of the bad guy Pharisees, but let’s be honest it’s the question we’re all asking all the time.

“Who belongs here?”

That person refuses to get vaccinated. How can we let them be here?

That person voted for that candidate? I can’t spend time with them!

They prefer Coke over Pepsi? Get behind me satan!

Like the value we read earlier said, we as humanity are amazing at building dividing walls between ourselves.

And the funniest/saddest part of all of that is that all of the walls we divide are artifical.

What’s the punch line in the question the Pharisees ask?

Why does your teacher eat with sinners?

If we believe that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, then it was sinners wondering why Jesus eats with sinners.

None of us are any more or less worthy than another.

And Jesus straight up calls this out.

Look, I don’t need to be here for the healthy people.

If you people actually had your act together, there’d be no need for a savior.

But the very fact that Jesus is here, that Jesus showed up, shows the need.

If Jesus says the healthy don’t need the great physician, then either

A) There is something wrong with the healthy people, or more likely

B) None of us, not one, is healthy.

Salvation as rescue vs. Salvation as healing

A few weekends ago I was playing music at a conference, and the speaker challenged us on something:

Most Christians have a “rescue” view of salvation.

Salvation looks like us and our poor souls being rescued from this world or rescued from hell and sent to heaven.

But while that’s certainly a part of it, Jesus seems to have a much bigger understanding of salvation as healing.

Jesus doesn’t talk much about heaven or hell, but he spends a great deal talking about healing people.

He spends a lot of time healing people.

He sends his disciples out specifically with the ability to provide healing.

And when the Pharisees ask who belongs, Jesus says “anyone who wants to be healed.”

Our NA friends put it this way in their meetings: the only requirement for membership is the desire to be healed.

So if that’s true, how are we going to live in to it?

How are we going to live in to the value of belonging

The Culture’s Choo Choo Trains

There has been a subtle shift in the way the culture has understood this concept of belonging.

And to help me explain it, I brought along some visual aids.

In the age of modernity, which many of us grew up in in this room, the choo choo train looked like this:

Believe-Behave-Belong

To underscore this, how many of you remember going to a confirmation class to learn what your church believed?

If you grew up Catholic, you might still have the knuckle scars from Sister Mary’s ruler...

But the point was super clear, you have to believe what we believe, then you have to behave like us, dress like us, etc.

And if, and only if, you do these things, then you can belong to who we are as an organization.

But in the post-modern age, which really got its start in the late 60s, the choo choo train shifted a bit.

Belong-Behave-Believe

If you don’t believe me, pay attention to the commercials during today’s Steeler’s game.

Pepsi isn’t going to tell you that it tastes really delicious, it’s going to invite you to belong to the Pepsi generation.

Olive Garden isn’t going to brag about their breadsticks, they’re going to tell you that when you’re here, you’re family.

The Steelers themselves aren’t going to talk about how well or how poorly they’re playing, they’re just going to say you belong to the Steelers Nation.

The implications of this for us as a church are huge.

If we are interested in folks coming to know Jesus Christ...

If we are interested in leading them to a place of healing and redemption...

If we are interested in making an impact in our community...

Then we have to make sure that everyone belongs here.

Which sounds nice!

But there’s a question that we have to challenge ourselves with this morning if we’re going to take this seriously...

Who doesn’t belong here?

I will bet that some of the Pharisees, who had at least been watching the Jesus movement where everyone belongs, believed that they were on board with that message.

Until the tax collector showed up.

A gut level question for us has to be who is it that doesn’t belong here.

When I was in college I went to a very traditional church in town which had a very untraditional college ministry.

One day one of the members of our praise band, covered in tattoos and wearing ripped jeans, made his way to the traditional service.

Not 5 minutes in to his being there, he was asked by an elderly woman in the congregation to leave.

He never came back.

And as it turns out, tattoos and ripped jeans are the least of our worries these days.

Those are actually pretty easy to welcome.

Our culture has spent an inordinate amount of time telling us that there are walls up between us and “them,” whoever “them” is for you.

Democrats

Republicans

Gay

Straight

Black

White

Hispanic

Middle Eastern

Asian

Penguins

Flyers

Steelers

Ravens

Tax Collectors

Prostitutes

Addicts

Drunks

I have a difficult pair of questions this morning, but we each have to wrestle with them in our own walk with Christ in a spirit of honesty and humility:

Who is it that if they sat next to you in this pew, you would be uncomfortable with?

And what do you have to do in yourself (note: not changing the other person) to become comfortable with them being here?

Because the absolute worst thing we could do as a church is to claim as one of our values that everyone belongs here, and then suggest that someone doesn’t.

It’s not the Jesus way.

It’s not enough to be passive

A little while ago on one of my trips to Vietnam we were flying for about 10 hours, and we were absolutely blessed by God to be given the exit row.

Leg room for days my friends!

And as they do, the stewardess came around and asked if we were ok to help out in an emergency.

Two things:

1) I am NOT giving up my leg room, so sure!

2) That’s never going to happen, right? So I’ll agree to it, because I don’t think I’m going to have to worry about it.

It’s a passive acceptance of what’s being asked of me.

We are not called to a passive belonging.

It’s not enough to say that if someone we found objectionable were to join us, we’d somehow find a way to be ok with it.

Jesus was walking along not because he was aimless, he was walking along looking for people to join his movement.

We are called to seek out new folks to belong.

We are called to find people who need healing to be a part of what we’re up to here.

We are called to find people who feel like they have no family to be part of ours.

We are called to be welcoming, and we do our best welcoming by seeking.

We are called to actively tear down any and all dividing walls that our culture incorrectly tells us we need between “us” and “them”.

And we are above all called to bring anyone in need of healing to meet with the great physician, and to give folks the space to do that right here in our midst.

May Jesus bless us in the work of belonging.