"a Call To Healing"

“A Call to Healing”

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

In a 2016 interview in The New York Times, award-winning actor Ben Affleck reflected on the pressure to hide our broken areas.

When he watches other movies that strain to make their heroes entirely likable and valiant, Affleck said, “I find that boring.

Instead, I think it’s interesting how we manage to be the best versions of ourselves, despite our flaws, weaknesses, and tendencies to do the wrong thing.”

The article noted, “Affleck also realized that for all his Hollywood success, some part of him will always feel like a relentless striver who must prove, through his work, that he has a right to be there.”

In our Gospel Lesson for this morning, Jesus is interacting with and healing a number of people who may not feel as if they have “a right to be there,” so to speak.

They are people on the margins who may feel as if society thinks they don’t matter much or aren’t good enough.

Have you ever felt this way?

Have you ever wondered if you matter or if you deserve to be here?

A lot of us feel that way at times.

The world is so complex and large that many of us struggle for meaning.

Many of us exist from day to day and wonder whether anyone out there thinks of us as important or even meaningful, anyone outside our own loved ones, anyway.

And this hasn’t changed much since the days that Jesus walked the earth.

He, too, came in contact with many people who not only felt as if they didn’t matter, but the world and religious establishment had labeled them as unimportant.

(pause)

The first person Jesus comes across in our Gospel Lesson for this morning is a guy named Matthew.

He was important in some ways as a tax collector with a Roman soldier on either side of him; he had the right to enforce the taxes and to skim a bit off the top for himself.

But to his own people, he was a traitor, a disgrace to his family—who were forced to disown him—and he certainly would not have been welcome in a synagogue or any other place where the people he grew up with congregated.

In fact, the rules were that those, like Matthew, who did the bidding of the Roman occupation by collecting taxes from his own people were considered as dead.

Can you imagine being considered as “dead” by your own people?

I’ve heard stories of people who come out of religious cults or even highly fundamentalist churches who are treated like this today by the groups they leave.

This shunning rendered Matthew as a non-person in first-century Israel.

Have you ever felt like a “non-person”?

Although we don’t do it a lot, I love going to downtown Chattanooga on a weekend evening with my family.

There are so many good restaurants and so many things to do and see.

But one thing that upsets me to the core is the number of homeless people.

This past April, we splurged and went to an expensive restaurant to celebrate Clair’s birthday.

Afterward, we walked around looking in the many shops.

And on nearly every corner were people sitting against buildings, dirty and dressed in rags.

We passed one person, a woman who was weeping.

I asked her if she needed help.

She looked at me and said, “I’m just hungry, and I don’t like to beg.”

I gave her $20.00, not that $20.00 will get you much these days.

We live in a world filled with people on the margins, who may seem or feel like they don’t matter or at least, don’t matter as much as other people who have the money to pay for an expensive meal and a roof over their heads.

I’d imagine that woman I met on Clair’s birthday felt pretty close to being a non-person.

The next people Jesus engages with in our lesson for today are other tax collectors and people whom the religious elite labeled as “sinners.”

They were the people that Jesus went and had dinner with after calling Matthew to follow Him.

The “sinners” were all those whose lives rendered them unrighteous in light of the Jewish Law as the religious leaders interpreted it.

An old phrase says: “We will be known by the company we keep.”

And Jesus, became known and judged by the leaders of His day as a guy Who hung out with tax collectors and sinners—by the company He kept.

Those who were righteous according to Jewish Law did not break bread with those who were considered outside the Law.

And this is what Jesus was doing.

And therefore, this caused the elite to judge Jesus as “outside the law” as well.

Have you ever felt as if you were judged as being “outside the law” of the church or of religious people?