Sermon, June 9, 2002
3 Pentecost; Proper 5, Year A
The Rev. Lowell E. Grisham
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Fayetteville, Arkansas
Sermon, June 9, 2002
3 Pentecost; Proper 5, Year A
The Rev. Lowell E. Grisham
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Fayetteville, Arkansas
Gospel – Matthew 9:9-13 The calling of the tax collector
Maybe some of you are familiar with Huston Smith. He was featured in one of Bill Moyers’ public television series as being the acknowledged living authority on comparative world religions. His chapter on Christianity in his classic textbook The World’s Religions is as helpful as anything I’ve read as a brief introduction to our faith.
Huston Smith says that the early Christians had two qualities that caught the attention of their contemporaries. There were two things that made them different. The first quality of the early church was that they had genuine mutual regard for each other. "See how they love one another," it was said of them. There was an amazing absence of social barriers like race, gender and status. Those things meant nothing. Paul described it this way: "there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28) That was the first thing that made early Christians stand out from their culture – an amazing egalitarianism; "a discipleship of equals." (Quoting Elizabeth Fiorenza)
The second quality, according to Huston Smith, was joy. They had a radiant inner peace that allowed them to experience hardship and even persecution with a sense of God’s glory so completely present in them, that their response was one of unspeakable joy. Smith says, "Life for them was no longer a matter of coping. It was glory discerned." (The World’s Religions, p. 332)
An absence of social barriers and a radiant joy. That’s what made the early Christians different. It also was part of what made Jesus different. We see that in today’s gospel. He goes by a Roman tax collector’s office and coaxes him to a party with a bunch of sinners and his disciples. And they had a joyful time together. But can you imagine how scandalous it was.
It was actually more scandalous than it appears to us. In the first century in the Middle East, the hospitality of the table was a profound thing. To have a meal with someone meant much more than it does to us. There was a common understanding that if you sit down and eat a meal with another person, you show your public acceptance of that person and that person’s life. It created a permanent public covenant of friendship and respect. So good people were careful not to sit down with bad or scandalous people because it conveyed the message that you accepted the bad people. Jesus assaulted that discrimination.
Jesus’ attack on social barriers eventually led to his execution and the splitting apart his religious tradition. His behavior of sitting down with tax collectors and sinners was an affront and a challenge to the customs and religion of his day. We read in today’s gospel, "When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?’" You need to realize, quoting from Huston Smith again, the Pharisees were the group "that Jesus stood closest to, for the difference between them was one of emphasis only. The Pharisees stressed [God’s] holiness, while Jesus stressed [God’s] compassion; but the Pharisees would have been the first to insist that [God] was also compassionate, and Jesus that [God] was holy. The difference appears at first to be small, but in actuality it proved to be too large for a single religion to accommodate." (Smith, p. 321-2)
The part of the holiness teaching that Jesus rejected was that it drew lines between people. There were acts that were clean and unclean. There were people who were "clean and unclean, pure and defiled, sacred and profane, Jew and Gentile, righteous and sinner." Listen again to Huston Smith. "Having concluded that [God’s] central attribute was compassion, Jesus saw social barriers as an affront to that compassion. So he parleyed with tax collectors, dined with outcasts and sinners, socialized with prostitutes, and healed on the sabbath when compassion prompted him to." (Ibid)
I often worry that we are not continuing in that tradition of Jesus and the early Church, promoting the absence of social barriers and living with radiant joy. We’ve made progress healing divisions between male and female; and we have some healthy relationships between Christian and non-Christian in our community. Many gay people feel welcome here. But the Episcopal Church has suffered from forms of elitism, especially economic and intellectual elitism. Not many poor or illiterate people are among us on Sunday mornings. And we are awfully white. But I was glad that we had enough of a reputation for compassion that when an exotic dancer was killed in a tragic accident last year, the owner of the club asked St. Paul’s to lead her funeral because he believed we would do so willingly.
How can we grow individually and corporately in our genuine mutual regard for others, living with so much joy that we become such people of compassion that social barriers dissolve before us? So that they can say of us as was said of the early Christians, "See how they love."
Love is the key. Huston Smith sums up the teaching of Jesus into the "two most important facts about life: God’s overwhelming love of humanity, and the need for people to accept that love and let it flow through them to others." The parables tell of the shepherd who risks ninety-nine to rescue the one sheep that has strayed – a picture of God’s absolute love for every human being. "[God] loves human beings absolutely, without pausing to calculate their worth or due. We are to give others our cloak as well as our coat if they need it. Why? Because God has given us what we need. We are to go with others the second mile. Why again? Because we know, deeply, overwhelmingly, that God has bourne with us for far longer stretches. Why should we love not only our friends but our enemies, and pray for those who persecute us? ‘So that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for [God] makes [the] sun rise on the evil and on the good.’ ...We say his ethic is perfectionistic – a polite word for unrealistic – because it asks that we love unreservedly. But the reason we consider that unrealistic, Jesus would have answered, is because we do not experience the constant unstinted love that flows from God to us. If we did experience it, problems would still arise. ...Jesus offered no rule book to obviate hard choices. What he argued was the stance from which they should be approached. All we can say in advance, as we face the demands of a tangled world, is that we should respond to our neighbors ...not in proportion to what we judge to be their due, but in proportion to their need. The cost to us personally should count for nothing" (Ibid, p. 326-7)
In that sense, Christianity is pretty simple. Not easy, but simple. Experience God’s absolute, unqualified, wonderful love so profoundly that you are free from fear, guilt and from your own ego. Let God love you into tranquility. Accept that love and let it flow through you toward others in a liberated compassion. And you will be joyful and free. Joyful and free enough to love your neighbor as yourself, even if your neighbor is the tax collector.