Pentecost 3 A
Matthew 9:9-13
Our God: The Patron of Lost Causes
06/09/02
Speaking of Lost Causes, take a listen to these stories. In New Orleans, a man broke into a home and stole, some jewelry and took the home owner’s season tickets to the New Orleans Saints. The police arrested him the following Sunday at the Superdome. He was not only sitting in the homeowner’s seat, but was wearing his jewelry.
Here’s another. R.C. Gaitlin, 21, walked up to two patrol officers who were showing their squad car computer equipment to children in a Detroit neighborhood. When he asked how the system worked, the officers asked to use his I.D. for an example. Gaitlin promptly gave them his driver’s license. They entered it into the computer, and moments later they Gaitlin was arrested. Information on the screen showed that Gaitlin was wanted for a two-year-old armed robbery in St. Louis, Missouri.
Finally, here’s two more who vied for lost cause of the year. Two men in Pennsylvania were recently sentenced to 24 years in prison for robbing a bank. That was dumb. But what really took the cake was the fact that they were easily identified by the bank’s security cameras because the two had somehow come to the ludicrous conclusion that rubbing citric acid on their faces would somehow blur their images on the monitoring screens.
There’s just no respect for the criminal these days, especially when they show as little forethought as these here.
It’s fairly clear there wasn’t any respect for them in Jesus’ day either. In particular there was no respect for Matthew’s brand of thievery. He was a tax collector, probably a lot sharper than these we’ve mentioned here today; but still likely the butt of many jokes and likely the shame of his parents. He had sold out to the Roman stench that had invaded the homeland. Here was this man of the priestly tribe of Levi, serving the interest of the pagan invaders and stealing from his countrymen on top of it. That’s how tax collectors made their lucrative living. They would over bill taxpayers or use their positions to extort money that wasn’t due them. And for that they were especially hated. Note, they’re in a class of losers all to themselves, specifically noted even in distinction from other sinners. Lost causes, all of them, even as some have been labeled today.
Oh, not so much tax collects. While some have been guilty of excesses, the IRS is pretty much an accepted institution. Not a popular one, but an accepted one.
Nevertheless we still have those we’re all the more ready to label as losers. And this is true, not just of our society at large. It also comes from within the very walls of our churches. As a people of God we sometimes want to pick and choose. We look down upon some people, even some of our fellow members, and conclude that they’re a lost cause; that they’re not worth the trouble we’re going to, to include them; that they’re not worth the effort we’re making to restore them when they’ve strayed; that there are still others that are more worthy of our labors than these.
I was reading the other day the report of a brother in Christ who had been invited to speak to a college class. He spent the last hour answering the rather sobering questions of students in their mid twenties, many of single women with children who had no church affiliation because they had been made to feel as if they were not good enough to go to church. The whole experience was difficult and raised a number of questions in his mind, questions that I believe we too must ask. “What is there about us that people, who make mistakes, who yearn to leave that life and be restored and who yearn to grow as part of a Christian Community nevertheless feel left out in the cold? What does this say about us? Have we gotten too proper and respectable that we’ve distanced ourselves from those who truly need to experience God’s redeeming love, that we’ve separated ourselves from the very people our Lord Jesus would reach out to in order to save?”
Hear those words of Jesus today again. “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick…I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
It was a challenge the rest of the disciples that day too. There’s no question, that they looked at Jesus’ choice of Matthew with the same level of disdain as the Pharisees. Matthew had stolen from them too. But now here’s what Jesus was trying to get across. There’s really no distinction between men in the eyes of God.
Was Matthew a sinner? You bet. And Jesus doesn’t ever say that he was not. Yet so were those who would condemn him. They were sinners by their very exclusion and lack of mercy in the face of one who quite obviously had now left his former life and was desiring something new. They were losers too in the very fact that they could not extend a forgiving and restoring hand. That’s the lesson He would have them learn when he quotes from and reminds them that God desires mercy, not sacrifice; mercy that they were now denying this bleeding heart in their midst and that we have at times denied to others who have come among us. Lost causes, all of us.
That’s hard to see and hear about ourselves, isn’t it? It’s hard because we must admit that our trophy works don’t change our condition before God. It’s hard because we the very reliance upon these works is just more evidence of our own sinfulness and the truth of our being lost.
But that’s where we need to be. That’s where we’ll want to be. That’s part of why Jesus came. Jesus came calling out to the masses, “Repent! Recognize yourselves as sinners and turn to God and His grace being revealed in me. Turn and be saved.” Even more we heard several weeks ago how Jesus promised to send His Spirit who would do the same. He would send His Holy Spirit who would come and “convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment.” Through the spreading and teaching of His Word he would point out how all of us are lost causes and to think anything else is to reject and miss out on what Jesus came to do. To receive and then cling to Christ in faith – this is life; life because Jesus is our patron, the patron of all lost causes.
That word “patron” has a number of meanings. Here we understand it to indicate “one who frees and then continues to support and protect another.” It’s someone who releases an individual from an impossible situation and then continues to shelter and shield, defend and keep from further harm. A patron takes a lost cause and gives it new life against all odds. In the case of us sinners, he grasps us out of the death and hell we deserve and sets us in the land of life and salvation.
Impossible? Paul was dealing with those who questioned that too? The key was that Jesus, God’s Son and His chosen Savior, had not only died sin’s death; but had risen victorious over sin’s death on Easter morn. If that had not been true there would be reason to wonder, to question, to doubt. As it is God had given life again in the midst of a hopeless situation. He had shown himself to be master over the greatest lost cause to face humanity – death.
Still this was nothing new. He had done it before. He had called his people Israel out of exile, a nation as good as dead, He restored to the map again. He did it, just as He had once given life out of man and woman as good as dead themselves, too old to procreate; and yet from them an heir through whom God would continue to carry the promise of a future blessing to all nations in the person of His Son; a Son through whom He’s done even more.
What we see today in the story of Matthew, He repeated in a far greater way on a cross on a hill outside of Jerusalem when he opened wide his heart and arms to the whole world and bore away their sins, your sins and mine. As he healed Matthew of the burden of his sin; as he took this lost cause, this worthless piece of humanity, and made Him into His child; so He would meet us today as well. He would forgive our exclusive attitudes, our mislead trust in our works. He would heal us of all that is wrong and make us His child again. Even more he would restore.
As a member of the priestly tribe of Levi, Matthew would’ve, should’ve grown up in service to God at the temple; the very embodiment of God’s presence in the midst of His people. Now He would serve God in an even grander way. Restored by God’s grace, He would serve God in the flesh, sharing in His mission, proclaiming the very Word that had healed Him, holding out the love of God in this Christ who had freed Him of His former life and given Him something new for which to live.
It’s not surprising then that he would do it again. In 1 Corinthians 1:26 we’re reminded of who we are. “Not many are wise by human standards; not many are influential.” Nonetheless in 1 Peter we’re given to know that in Christ Jesus we have not only been made His child and heir; but also “a royal priesthood, a holy nation a people belonging to God, that we may declare the praises of him who called us out of darkness into his wonderful light.” Healed and restored. Forgiven and renewed. Called home by God’s grace and sent out with the purpose of sharing that grace with the world. We’re grafted as a branch into the vine that we might bring forth renewed fruits of mercy, of peace, of goodness and love.
As one butcher’s sign reads, “He makes the best of the wurst.” Rather than avoid some in the name of respectability or decency; Christ chose to go beyond the boundaries by offering God’s mercy to everyone who was sick, to all who needed a doctor of grace. He chose to go to those who were lost. He chose to come near even to you and me at great cost, at His own personal loss on the cross; but for our and all people’s great gain, that for these others we might do the same. Amen.
