"Who's Not Welcome?"

Sermon for June 21, 2020

Luke 5:27-39

Have you ever questioned someone’s motives for joining the church? Have you ever been surprised at someone’s salvation? Have you ever been suspicious that this person really didn’t fit in with the people of God? 

In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, we follow the life of a young girl named Scout growing up in Alabama in the 1930s. In one scene, she invites a boy named Walter to eat dinner with her because his family doesn’t have a lot of food. When they get to the table, Scout is appalled at Walter’s table manners, as he proceeds to pour molasses over all of his food. She comments on this, and is reprimanded by their family’s housekeeper, Calpurnia: “There’s some folks who don’t eat like us, but you ain’t called on to contradict ‘em at the table when they don’t. This boy’s your company, and if he wants to eat up the table cloth you let him, you hear?” It’s tempting to make and enforce unnecessary rules on people who are our guests, but that can sometimes get in the way of their being fed. In the church, we need to concern ourselves with making the gospel available for everyone, not making sure they “fit in.”

Between last week’s story about the call of the fisherman Simon Peter and this week’s story about the calling of a tax collector named Levi, Jesus restores two people to the community. A leper who was cast out of society and a paralytic who was unable to even walk to join his friends. Nobody doubts the worthiness of these two men to become productive members of the neighborhood, but Jesus goes a bit far when he begins to proclaim forgiveness to tax collectors. Perhaps Jesus should have stayed a healer, but now he’s getting too personal. You see, tax collectors were seen as leaches at best, collaborators and abusers at worst. Their job was to collect a set amount of money from their neighbors to send to the government, and they made their living off of whatever they could collect beyond their quota. Some of them, unsurprisingly, did very well for themselves, but their neighbors despised them. Their profession kept them out of community, just as surely as the leper’s uncleanness or the paralytic’s inability to tag along.

But Jesus tells Levi the tax collector “Follow me.” Not, “show yourself to the priest” and not “pick up your bed and go home.” Jesus tells the wicked tax collector, “Share in my life.” And Levi “leaves everything” and follows Jesus. The next thing Levi does is to throw a banquet, to introduce all his old friends to this man who has changed his life. In those days a banquet was a big affair, and it seems like Levi invited the whole community, tax collectors and “others.” The Pharisees also are there, apparently on the guest list, and they decide to show up, but it soon becomes apparent that they aren’t there to celebrate Levi’s repentance, but to judge the others in attendance. It’s a good thing we don’t know anybody like that.

The Pharisees start by going to the disciples: “Why do y’all eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Why would the Messiah go sit with those people?Jesus explains to them what he’s doing: “I’m like a doctor; those who are well don’t need me, but the sick do.” Jesus doesn’t go where he’s expected, you see: he goes where he’s needed. Then the Pharisees say, “Oh, so you’re concerned about sin? This seems more like a party than a solemn fast?” Effectively they are saying, “Doesn’t sin break your heart? How can you celebrate?” And Jesus’s response is that sure, sin is heartbreaking, but that’s what makes salvation so breathtaking!

Like the Pharisees, sometimes we get confused about what salvation looks like on a human, everyday level. The logic makes sense on one level: we are saved, and our lives look like this, therefore it must follow that saved people live like us. Never mind that we are a lot of other things besides saved: our loyalties to our groups and our traditions color our preferences and our picture of holiness. Like Peter we go out fishing for people, but rather than letting them fish for other people, we want to make them into an exhibit at our little aquarium here at 1737 Grit Road. We want take them out of the ocean of the world, and fit them into our own little boxes. Jesus’ parables at the end of this story show us three ways that self-righteousness gets in the way of our mission of sharing the gospel with everyone. In order to serve everyone the gospel, we have to let go of our desire to make them like us. The obstacles in our path are nostalgia, inflexibility, and traditionalism.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia gets in the way when we try to use the new things God is doing to serve the needs we used to have. Jesus says that sometimes we can be like someone who takes a new garment and tears it up to patch an old garment that is wearing out. He can’t take Levi out of the community of tax collectors, because Levi is there to transform that community into something new. Perhaps the Pharisees saw Levi as a promising new Sunday School teacher, but his desire to serve his old friends kept getting in the way. Jesus tries to show them the foolishness of this plan. Keith Myers loves his car, a Chevy HHR. You see him driving around in it all the time, working everywhere he goes. He sent me the odometer reading the other day. It reads almost 425,000 miles. That’s a lot of miles on a car. I found an HHR on Craigslist with 58,000 miles on it for $8000. Can you imagine if Keith bought that 58,000 mile car to use as parts for his old one? Instead, he should keep the old one to service the new one. If a church has a future, it is found by using the old to serve the new. But nostalgia often breeds inflexibility.

Inflexibility

Someone wrote a new beatitude, “blessed are the flexible, for they will never be bent out of shape.” Jesus says he couldn’t throw Levi in with the Pharisees, because that would be like putting new wine into old wineskins. In Jesus’ day, the last stage of fermenting wine involved putting the wine into leather skins. As wine ferments, it lets out gas, which either needs to be vented or else expands the container in which it is placed. If you used fresh skins, they had a lot of give, and the gas could stretch them out a bit. If you used old skins, they were hard and brittle, and they would crack and the wine would spill. Sometimes what gets in the way is our inflexibility, our inability to accept new people and their new ways. “Our fathers have been churchmen / for 2000 years or so/ and to every new suggestion / they’ve always answered ‘No!’” In the Spring of the year, as the leaves come back, it’s a good time to look and see what trees have died over the winter. You can spot them because they aren’t green with new life. When a storm blows in and the winds begin to howl, those dead trees have hardened, and so when the wind moves them, they break and fall to the ground. The living trees around them, bend, sometimes at frightening angles. But when the wind stops, they are still standing. It takes strength and life to be flexible. It takes a living faith to move beyond traditionalism.

Traditionalism

Traditions are assets. Traditionalism is an obstacle. Traditions serve us, traditionalism enslaves us. Jesus tells the Pharisees that they have gotten so used to the old wine of their traditions that they can’t appreciate the new wine that God is making out of Levi and his friends. Connasuers would be quick to point out that there’s nothing wrong with old wine. Indeed, as the country song says, “it’s one of those things that gets sweeter with time.” But that misses the point a bit. Everything that is old and refined and good, was once new. Today’s innovation is tomorrow’s tradition. It takes wisdom to hold on to what is good and leave behind what is unnecessary. 

There’s a story about a newly married bride who goes to make a ham for her husband. He is watching her cook her grandmother’s recipe, and she starts by cutting the ends off of the ham. He asks her why she’s doing this, and she says, “it’s how my mom taught me.” To him it seems like a waste of perfectly good ham. So she calls her mom, and she says, “it’s just how my mom taught me.” So the husband calls grandma, and asks why do you cut the ends off the ham?” And she says, “my oven is too small to fit most hams, so I have to cut them to a size I can work with.” What served grandma became a tradition, and it might seem harmless to follow it. But what winds up happening is that you waste perfectly good ham, and with that ham you could have fed more people.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is for everybody. The church is the vessel of that gospel, handing it down from generation to generation. God doesn’t change and the gospel doesn’t change. Jesus Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures. But precisely because this gospel doesn’t change, we need to be willing to change the ways we serve the world, the ways we move with the gospel. We need to ask ourselves, who isn’t here? Who would feel out of place in our church?

Down in Texas, somebody asked that question and realized that there were a lot of cowboys around, but very few of them felt comfortable in traditional churches. So they started some cowboy churches, where folks could come wearing their Western shirts and Stetson boots, and feel comfortable riding their horses and tying them up out front. Those guys would have stuck out like sore thumbs at First Baptist Church, where the deacons wore coats and ties, but they needed the gospel too. So they started the cowboy church, and somewhere down the line one of the guys invited his friend who wasn’t a cowboy but instead liked to drive his Harley Davidson motorcycle. When that guy got saved, he started a biker church, to bring the gospel to that group, with their leather and their tattoos.

So I ask you again, who isn’t here? Who wouldn’t feel comfortable with us? Why? Are the things that would keep them from feeling comfortable essential to our faith, or have we just become set in our ways? Where does our desire to make people be like us get in the way of our calling to help people be like Jesus?