Jesus was a picker. He travelled the back roads of Israel looking for rusty gold. He saw amazing things buried in people's hearts. What most people saw as junk, he saw as disciples who could change the world. Each person had a history all his or her own. There was no such thing as a nobody to him. And he really wanted to show that.
You could say that many passages in the gospels are episodes in an amazing reality show, Jesus the picker, finding hidden gold. Our text for this morning is one of those episodes, Luke 5:27-32.
27 After this he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, "Follow me." 28 And he got up, left everything, and followed him.
29 Then Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house; and there was a large crowd of tax collectors and others sitting at the table with them. 30 The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, saying, "Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?" 31 Jesus answered, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; 32 I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance."
When you think about who is “Bethel’s kind of person,” what picture is in your mind? I see Bethel folks as the salt of the earth, mostly hard working, practical, clean living, simple lifestyle, respectable, down to earth, community minded, cooperative. Those are wonderful traits. We are blessed to be part of this church family.
But if we see ourselves as pickers, if we are thinking about who we might invite to church, and our image of who would fit here is limited to folks who are hard working, practical, clean living, simple lifestyle, respectable, down to earth, community minded, cooperative, we will overlook some people who have some rust on them, whose lifestyles need some cleaning up, who need to find a place where they can invest their lives in making a difference in the world. We may miss people who don’t have the respect of the community. We may miss some hidden gold.
If we had been disciples of Jesus along with him on the picking trip described in our text, we probably wouldn’t have given Mathew/Levi a second look. In our text he is identified by his Hebrew name, Levi, but in the other gospels he is known as Matthew. It wasn’t unusual for Jewish people to have a Hebrew name that their parents called them, and also to use a Greek name that they might use in their work. We are familiar with the disciple Peter, which was his Greek name, but his mother called him Simon, his Hebrew name.
Matthew/Levi would look like moral and spiritual junk to most Jews, hopeless. You know that the core of Jesus’ disciples, Peter and Andrew, James and John were fisherman. They worked hard with their hands and their backs. They probably didn’t have a lot of money. They were simple folk, without much education. Around town they would be “one of the boys,” who fit in easily.
That wasn’t Matthew. Matthew didn’t have any calluses on his hands. He was a tax collector. He did his work sitting at a desk. He probably made good money as a tax collector, so he probably dressed a lot nicer than the other disciples. Nobody saw him as “one of the boys” around town. He was a hated collaborator, a traitor to his people. The Romans had brutally conquered Israel. They set up a network of tax collectors to drain all the money they could get from the Jewish people. And Matthew/Levi had sided with them. And those tax collectors were notorious for exploiting their position, charging even more than they were supposed to and making themselves rich at the expense of all their neighbors. And you can guess what the village thought about that. Tax collectors were hated. If he dared to even come into the synagogue, people probably would have changed their seats to avoid sitting anywhere near him. You can guess that the Sunday dinner conversation at the café might have included something like, “Did you see who was at synagogue this morning? What was he doing there? I remember growing up with Levi. He’s smart. He had so much potential. And now he’s wasted it.”
Don’t name any names out loud, but think for a minute of some people in your life whom you have assumed were not Bethel’s kind of person, just wouldn’t fit in the church, just wouldn’t be interested in spiritual things. Their lives may be too chaotic. Maybe they are too materialistic. Maybe they are pretty ornery and they rub a lot of people the wrong way. Or maybe you’ve seen them around but they really keep to themselves and you have no idea what they are really like inside. But, probably unconsciously, a little dialogue has gone on in your mind that concluded, “Nope, they wouldn’t fit here,” or even “God couldn’t be working in them.” Stop and examine that thought for a moment. Is there anyone for whom we can be sure, “God couldn’t be working in that person.”?
But Jesus, the picker, picked Matthew. And when Jesus said, “Follow me,” that was a very loaded invitation. It was the phrase used by rabbis inviting someone to become their disciple, to be trained and molded for special use as a servant of God.
And that day Jesus saw gold. The gospels tell us other stories of Jesus calling people to follow him, people who seemed to have a lot more potential than Matthew but didn’t respond. Matthew responded and became a follower of Jesus.
How could Jesus see potential in someone like Matthew? The gospels don’t give us any background to their relationship, but I suspect they had spoken before. Jesus had built a personal relationship with Matthew. He told others not to set out following him until they had taken the time to count the cost of discipleship. So I suspect they had spoken before.
Our text doesn’t give us Mathew’s personal details. But I wonder if he might have come to really regret the decisions he had made in the past that had brought him to being a tax collector. Maybe he had been putting up a strong front against all the insults people had been giving him, but he was really bleeding inside and hungry for someone to see him as a person and care about him. Maybe he was really wishing for a way out, but just hadn’t found any hope that his life could change. Maybe he had been listening while Jesus had been teaching in the marketplace and nobody else noticed, but Jesus had looked into his eyes and seen that he was one who was really listening and thinking deeply. Maybe the Holy Spirit had been stirring his heart in ways that nobody else knew. Maybe he had been calling out to God, “Lord forgive me! Lord, get me out of this mess! Lord, give me another chance!”
And on that day Jesus saw Matthew. He really saw him, as a person. He stopped. He looked him in the eye. He gave him a direct , personal invitation to a new life.
We Methodists are shy about that. We figure that if we just keep being nice to people maybe they’ll come to church and we’re afraid to get to the point of a specific invitation to come to church and especially not an invitation to a whole new life in Christ. And when we give in to that we are failing our Lord, who really was a picker and really went to close the deal and get people out of the piles of garbage and into the shop where they belong.
And, wonder of wonders, Matthew said yes. I bet that made some jaws drop. Our text sounds like he just walked away from his office. I’ll assume he at least got the tax money put away properly and was responsible about it. Maybe there was someone else working in the office who could carry on. But when he heard a respected rabbi, the only rabbi he had ever heard who was really merciful and loving, and when hope grew in his heart that there could be new life for him, he jumped at the chance.
And he started out pretty rusty. The gospels tell us that the 12 disciples needed a lot of work. Jesus had to explain the scriptures to them. He had to teach them how to pray. He had to teach them what to do when people gave them grief. He had to teach them how to teach others. It was a pretty messy process because they messed up a lot. But Jesus can take people who look like junk to everyone else and clean them up until they shine like gold.
And Matthew really did shine like gold. Do you remember from our text what was the first thing he did after he started following Jesus? He invited all his friends to a great banquet, all his disreputable friends, other tax collectors and all sorts of people who had gotten the cold shoulder in the synagogue, other people who felt horrible inside, who knew their lives were not right, but didn’t have any hope of finding a new life. He called them all together to meet Jesus. Because Matthew had a deep, personal experience of God’s grace himself and his life had been dramatically changed, he could speak to people whose lives were a mess in ways that people who had always walked the straight and narrow never could.
Churches that give in to a narrow view of who God can use can’t grow. But churches that learn to be real pickers, who learn to see even broken people through God’s eyes, to see them for what they could be once they’ve been healed by the love of God, those are the churches that grow and experience real excitement. And it means a lot of work of cleaning off the dirt, teaching, training, patiently loving and forgiving. But that’s where we find the hidden gold. And often a chain reaction begins where one person’s life is dramatically changed and they tell their friends and they turn to God to do the same thing for them.
Did you know that that’s what we’re here for? We’re not a showcase for saints. We are a hospital for sinners. And being a hospital for sinners is hard, messy work. But that’s where God brings out some real gold.
Well, Matthew became one of the 12 disciples. Who knows how many lives were touched through him during his lifetime. That’s golden. But our lives have been touched through Matthew.
Tradition says that in the first years of the Christian church the disciples travelled all over telling people about Jesus. And they were so busy preaching and teaching and discipling that they didn’t take the time to write it all down for a while. But John Mark travelled with Peter and he heard Peter tell the stories of Jesus told over and over again and he wrote down what Jesus had done, probably asking Peter again and again to get the details right. And so we have the gospel of Mark, which tells us the core of what Jesus did, but not much about what he taught.
Time went by and there were way too many Christians for the original disciples to teach them all face to face and they realized that they needed to get Jesus’ teachings written down, too. And who did that for us? We don’t know for sure, but the tradition is that Matthew took Mark’s gospel, writing down again the stories of what Jesus did, adding some of his own remembrances as he saw they would be useful, and, especially he added the teachings of Jesus, like the Sermon on the Mount. Mark skipped over the Sermon on the Mount! And those skills that had once gotten Matthew the cushy job of a tax collector now produced the gold of the first book of the New Testament. And how blessed we are that he did.
Jesus was a picker. He travelled the back roads of Israel looking for rusty gold. He saw amazing things buried in people's hearts. What most people saw as junk, he saw as disciples who could change the world. Each person had a history all his or her own. There was no such thing as a nobody to him. And he really wanted to show that.
I never watched the American Pickers until Deb came up with the idea of doing some sermons based on popular reality TV shows. But I’ve been really challenged by them. If the American Pickers will drive across 3 states to find that hidden gold among inanimate objects, how far will I go to find that one flesh and blood child of God who is languishing in the junk heap? If the Pickers worked so hard to recognize the signs of what pieces have potential, can’t we work hard to watch and see the signs of who is open to God’s Spirit? The Pickers worked hard to develop the skills to make the sale, to get that chunk of metal out of the trash heap and to some place where it can be loved and appreciated. I want to learn some of the same skills for redeeming people. I hope that I and Bethel Church can become skilled and effective pickers. AMEN
