Showcase For Saints Or Hospital For Sinners?

When I was a boy, my mother used to tell us to be careful about the friends we picked. If you pick a study partner at school who doesn’t want to do school work, you won’t get much done. If you start going out at night and roving the town with kids who like to make trouble, it won’t be long before you’ll be in trouble too. If you hang around with people who have a bad reputation, pretty soon their reputation will rub off on you. So, pick your friends carefully. Your mothers probably told you the same thing. It’s good advice for kids, who are easily influenced.

But picking your friends carefully can get taken too far. In fact, it can get downright destructive and mean in adults if we don’t watch it.

As we work our way through Luke’s Gospel, we met the Pharisees last week, who often took the lead among the people who opposed Jesus. Last week they objected to the authority that he took when he forgave sins. Today Luke gives us another reason why they opposed him, the kind of company that he kept.

Our text for today is Luke 5:27-32. It tells us about Jesus’ encounter with a very disreputable person, Levi, the tax collector.

“After this, he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, `Follow me.' And he got up, left everything and followed him. 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. The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, `Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and `sinners'?' Jesus answered, `Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.'"

Now the movement of the Pharisees had set out on a campaign to make every home a center for holy living before God. That was a good start, but they went crazy with it, becoming very strict about who they would eat meals with. In fact, sometimes it came to the point that they would only share a meal with other Pharisees, people who were just like themselves. They got carried away with being strict about their friends and it must have really hurt everybody else who didn’t measure up. And those Pharisees just couldn’t accept that Jesus would eat with disreputable people.

In the 1700’s when the Methodist movement began in England, there were huge masses of people who had moved into the cities to get jobs in the coal mines or the new factories, and the cities just didn’t have decent housing or schools or hospitals for all these people. So the cities were horribly overcrowded with desperately poor people. Those who had jobs often had to work in very dangerous conditions. They were hard times. Think of a Charles Dickens novel and you’ll have the picture.

And many of the churches of the day were repulsed at all these dirty, unsophisticated people who began swarming around them, and did everything they could to keep them out. The people outside liked toe-tapping music, like they sang in the pubs. So the churches had very high class, serious music. The people outside liked relaxed, conversational speech, so the churches had their sermons in polished, academic, high-falutin styles. The church people dressed in their very best to show that they were upper class. And that made everybody else feel lower class. They made it clear in all sorts of ways that those ‘lower classes’ weren’t welcome.

John Wesley’s friend, George Whitfield, started preaching to the coal miners in the fields on their way home from work. This was highly irregular. But Whitfield had to go to America for a while, so he asked Wesley to fill in for him. Wesley had very mixed feelings about it. He didn’t like preaching outside. He was nervous about those coal miners. But he went. He wrote in his journal that he ”submitted to be more vile.” And he preached the love and grace of God, right out in the coalfields.

And those rough coal miners, who had been excluded from hearing the gospel by all sorts of cultural barriers in the churches, stopped, even after working long, hard hours down in the mines and they listened, huge crowds of them. They listened much more intently than a lot of church regulars did, sitting in the pews on Sunday morning. The gospel of Jesus Christ was life and hope for them. They say that you could sometimes see little white lines washed through the coal dust as tears ran down their cheeks. There were tears of conviction over their sins and tears of joy at hearing the hope that Jesus Christ could accept them and give them new lives. And thousands of them joyfully came into the kingdom of God. John Wesley organized them into small groups and classes where they could learn. John’s brother Charles wrote new hymns for them, sometimes using the tunes from drinking songs. Church music became a joy. And they just grew in their faith and their lives were changed. The Methodist movement took off when the doors of the gospel were opened to the people who would appreciate the gospel the most.