February 1, 2009
Matthew 9:9-17

“Shabby Dinner Parties”

Rev. David A. Davis 

I invite you to think with me this morning about these words of Jesus; “For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” “For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” This phrase from Jesus, it comes immediately after “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” Right after “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” That’s when Jesus says “For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” That which comes after in this short table lesson in Matthew’s house, it’s a bit more puzzling, a mixing of metaphors, images in search of explanation; fasting, bridegroom, a patch on the cloak, new wineskin.
 Jesus’ response to the disciples of John the Baptist who aren’t sure that the fresh set to be called disciples are quiet religious enough, the words of Jesus here require a bit of effort if the reader is going to wrap her head around it, if he is going to make any sense of it. “The wedding guests cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they?” “No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak.” “Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise the skins burst, and the wine is spilled….” And the reader heaves a sigh and takes a pause and makes one of those “thinking faces”. But before the wheels start turning, before the mind’s eye sees a wedding reception and a garment with a hole in it and a sack of wine, how about this? “For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”
            The headlines and the sound bites and the numbers and the earnings  and the loss and the percentages and the words being tossed around, being tossed at us from all directions, they aren’t letting up. To give a litany of the headlines from the week, to insert a couple of numbers or statistics here in the sermon, well, my hunch is that we don’t need that. A rehashing of the battering economic news, I mean. You can hear it, see it, worry about it, in your sleep, really. 
So I invite you to think with me about these words of Jesus. One sentence. Less than one verse. The size of a headline. A short, memorable quote, like a sound bite. You can rattle it off in your head, roll it off your tongue like a press released number from a quarterly report. This line from Jesus. Take it with you for today, tomorrow, the week, for a good long while. It’s so short even Presbyterians can memorize it, can quote it. We’ll skip the chapter and verse part, so you don’t get uncomfortable. It is well worth taking with you. No, it is essential, that you take it and find a way to plug in smack in the middle of everything else that’s coming at you moment by moment these days. “For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”
My topic for this morning comes from the teaching of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew.  Jesus said “I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”  As Jesus was walking along...that’s the Jesus who healed the paralytic carried on his bed by those nameless, faceless few. The Jesus who calmed the storm and said “let the dead bury their dead” and healed the leper and the centurion’s servant and Peter’s mother in law. Matthew’s Jesus was walking along. Well after the Sermon on the Mount and the calling of the disciples and his temptation in the wilderness, far from the beginning of his ministry, far enough away from the beginning that folks now know about healings and miracles and teaching. By now people are aware that this Jesus knows his stuff when it comes to the Law and the prophets. And the religious leaders (scribes, Pharisees) by now they are watching him like a hawk. By the time Jesus was “walking along” the tension of it all was already dialed up a notch or two.
So as Jesus is walking along, he sees Matthew sitting at the tax booth. “Follow me” Jesus says, while everyone was watching. The offense of it all is lost on us, that Jesus would call out to someone working in a corrupt system where shake downs and corruption and extortion and public office for sale and pay offs and pay to play and pyramid schemes were so common….are so common. He called out to him, to them. He bid him, “come”.
The dinner party at Matthew’s house only magnifies the unsavoriness of it all. Jesus reclining at dinner in the house filled with “many tax collectors and sinners.”  (Oooh!).  To be fair, the religiously minded professionals were rightly bothered by the scene. Jesus, sensing and apparently overhearing their discomfort with it all, points out that people who are well don’t need a doctor. And he quotes one of the prophets, something most in the crowd would have known, that part about “mercy, not sacrifice.” They could have finished the rest of the prophet’s words in their heads; “steadfast love, not empty ritual, knowledge of God, not burnt offerings.” 
Then Jesus offers what is a seriously self-evident caption to the tawdry picture of himself hanging in the house overflowing with tax collectors and sinners. “For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” Oh really, no kidding is the response of those taking it all in from somewhere outside the house. “For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” …..yeah, I guess so…..as the religious folks turn away and turn up their nose and head off to take a bath…all that sin in one place and Jesus smack in the middle of it all.
The phrase, the comment, the words from Jesus, the rather obvious observation of the moment. It’s not just a caption, it’s a promise. It isn’t just an explanatory footnote, it rests at the very heart of the gospel; “I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” I have come to call, to welcome, to embrace, to love, to forgive, to empower, to transform, to save sinners. And in the power of the gospel, and as gift of grace, and in the movement of the Holy Spirit,  that promise is Living Word, not just sacred text….and it is transcribed from the page of scripture right through to the narrative that tells of your encounter with God….it leaps from a snippet in the life of Jesus and rushes to the crucible moments in your life and mine….the stunningly obvious embrace of Jesus, it stretches from a household gathering of tax collectors and sinners and finds its way into those persistent displays of your humanity and mine….the promise, it tumbles from one shabby dinner party to another where the Lord finds himself surrounded by so great a cloud of sinners, like us. From one shabby dinner party to another…like this one.
John Calvin, early in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, points out that God is apt to speak to us like nurses commonly do with infants, that God is “wont in a measure to ‘lisp’ in speaking to us”. Or in other words, every now and then God must communicate in baby talk to us. God must try to be so simple. God must, in Calvin’s words “descend far beneath God’s loftiness.” That point comes, for Calvin, in the matter of language and how difficult it is to capture God in mere words. The same must be true when it comes to Jesus stating the obvious, Jesus hammering home the point, Jesus underscoring what we already know. Jesus descending far beneath his own loftiness to make sure we get it, we don’t miss it, this heart of the gospel. “For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”
I was listening a jazz piano player this week doing a solo concert of improvisation to a full house. You could hear a pin drop in the audience. You didn’t have to listen long to hear him groaning, or humming, or something like that. There was also an awful lot of movement in his playing; gyrations, poor posture. Many times he would actually stand up and lean in over the piano toward the hammers and the strings. It wasn’t clear to me how he could keep playing. He would look into the piano as if he were seeing if it still worked, or he had to be reminded that it was still there, or maybe he was leaning in to the sound, letting his whole body be absorbed by the sound. I’m still wondering whether the grunts and the motion, his humanity up there, whether it was a distraction or whether it was part of the experience of the music for those listening. 
You and I come to this dinner party with all the grunts and motion of our humanity. It’s quite a collection of sinners here, really. Who among us would question the shabbiness of the party, our sinfulness, that Jesus by his presence here is once again hanging with the wrong crowd? Sometimes, though, when you’re here, at the Table, when you find yourself at the party but your not sure about your place, whether or not you belong, when you question, not your own sinfulness, but that you have been forgiven, that Jesus comes to call, to welcome, to embrace, to love, to forgive, to empower, to transform, to save you…sometimes you have to lean in and let yourself be absorbed by the beauty of his promise, you have to lean all the way in to the heart of the gospel, to make sure it still works, you have to lean in and be reminded of Jesus’ love for you. You have to allow your humanity and God’s grace to meet once again in an experience of the gospel.  “For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

 

© 2009, Property of Nassau Presbyterian Church
Contact the church to obtain reprint permission