Showcase For Saints Or Hospital For Sinners?

But you can’t live a real life in a display case. People today who see the church like this try to recruit only those who look really good, who won’t make waves to be in their church. And when they get together, everybody is polished up and on their best behavior. And the first day you walk in it looks pretty good. But it isn’t long before you start wondering if a real person like you can be accepted here. You may have a day when there is a burning issue in your life but you know it is something that just doesn’t fit the showcase image, so you bite your tongue and keep it to yourself. And as you realize you can’t talk about this, and you’d better not talk about that, it starts to feel like it’s all an empty sham. And it is.

And the scariest thing of all is what Jesus said in our text. There is nothing he can do for these folks. He said that he didn’t come for the righteous, but for sinners. If you are sure you’re good enough already, then there’s nothing he can do for you.

Jesus saw the church, not as a showcase for saints, but as a place to get well, a hospital for sinners. He welcomed them. He hung out with them. He spotted Levi as someone worth taking the risk of investing in. And he did it, even when it really bothered the Pharisees.

And what happened when he did? Jesus’ love, his hope for this man, Levi, moved him to stop being a selfish money grubber. He walked away from his degrading job, and he started a new life.

Levi was so touched by Jesus that he held a big banquet and invited all his friends. And all sorts of people who really needed Jesus got to sit down with him and meet him for themselves. The Jesus movement had a flood of visitors who came to see how a guy like Levi got turned around. I can imagine people saying, “Have you noticed how much Levi has changed? If this Jesus could turn him around, maybe there’s hope for me. I want to learn more.”

And we don’t know for sure, but there is a strong tradition in the early church that this despised tax collector was called Levi by his Hebrew friends, but went by a different name, Matthew, with his Greek speaking friends, and that this is the man who went on to write down all of what Jesus taught and did and gave us the first gospel in the New Testament, the gospel according to Matthew.

The church is not a showcase for saints. It is a hospital for sinners. If we see the church as a showcase for saints, then it will be really exciting when one of the top families in town visits worship and we’ll be all excited that they might join our club and give us even more prestige in town. That would make us a more impressive showcase for how good we are.

But if the church is a hospital for sinners then we’ll be more excited when a broken person comes to church. Our greatest excitement will be over the hope of what Christ is going to do in repairing their life. And we won’t care a bit what anybody thinks about our prestige in town.

This has a huge effect on what we do when we come together. If we see the church as a showcase for saints, then, of course we’ll put our best side forward. We’ll dress nice, put on our Sunday morning church smile, keep the unpleasantries of our lives well out of sight. I fear that on many Sundays there may be more than one person whose hearts are breaking with some struggle and they so much want to get it out and talk about it with someone, but they just don’t feel like it’s allowed to do that at church. No smudgy, human fingerprints allowed on the showcase.