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.
In most American churches today there is a pretty clear idea of what an ideal new member looks like; clean cut, socially graceful, money, nice clothing, married with kids. But, have you noticed, there are a whole lot of people out there who don’t fit that description? Maybe no one ever taught them nice manners. Is the church for them, too? Is the church for them, too?
In Jesus’ day people had their own ideas of who could go to church and who couldn’t. And everybody agreed that one type of people who did not belong in church was tax collectors.
In Jesus’ day, Israel was under military occupation by the Roman army. Where did the money they collected go? It supported the soldiers who made their life miserable!
We were in Boston about a month ago and walked the Freedom Trail to relive the events of our colonial period. One of the things that the British did that really irritated the Boston people was to fill the city with British troops. And there was friction between that occupying army and the citizens of Boston every day. That was one of the irritations that moved us to declare our independence from England.
And the Romans had a really nasty way of collecting taxes. They would sell the office of tax collector to someone, who basically paid the entire district’s taxes to the Romans up front. And then the tax collector was free to get back his investment by squeezing what he thought was a reasonable return from his neighbors. And what do you think the tax collectors decided was a fair return? Everything they could get. And the Romans soldiers were his enforcers.
In our Bible text this morning we meet a tax collector, named Levi. He was an employee of one of those big shots. The word used to describe him is somebody who sits beside the road on a trade route as it crosses a border from one jurisdiction to another. He collected customs tax. And he goes through everybody’s bags and decides how much they should pay. If you think it’s frustrating to go through our security checks at the airport these days, multiply that irritation by 20. They were notorious for taking bribes, letting their friends get off easy and really sticking it to people who they didn’t like. They were collaborators with the enemy. They were bullies. They were greedy cheats. They were crooks. Everybody hated them.
And Jesus invited Levi the tax collector to church. He even invited him to be one of his disciples, in training to become a leader in the church. And Levi took him up on it. He jumped at the chance. Maybe Levi was realizing that making all that money wasn’t worth it. Maybe it had been a long time since anyone had really spoken to him as a person. Maybe he just hadn’t been able to find hope for a new life anywhere else. Maybe he had been listening to Jesus in the back of the crowds for some time.
And the Pharisees thought it was terrible.
So in our text we see two views of the church. The Pharisees saw it as a showcase for saints. They would work very hard to be better than anyone else. They would stay far away from anyone who might leave smudgy fingerprints on the glass in their display case. And that impressed some people. They seemed impressed with themselves.
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.
But if we see the church as a hospital for sinners, if we can all agree that we are not here because we are perfect, that we need help to find strength for the challenges coming tomorrow and guidance to know which challenges to take on and cut out the things that waste our lives, then we have the freedom to open up and talk about the things that really do matter to us. We can work on them together. We can treat each other’s vulnerabilities with respect and gentleness. We can support one another and pray for one another. And lives will be changed, and people will want to come and see what Jesus can do for them.
Maybe you’ve been wondering, what is all that hospital stuff doing up in the chancel of the church? The walker and the cane are there to say that we all need to lean on something sometimes. And it is very appropriate to come to church to lean on God, to lean on one another. That’s what we are here for. This is the place to be open about your burdens and find support from brothers and sisters in Christ.
And the stethoscope and the blood pressure cuff are here to say that if you feel something is wrong in your life but you can’t figure it all out yourself, this is a place for learning, for asking, for finding help in understanding what is happening in your life. The blood pressure cuff and the stethoscope are tools that our doctors use to figure out what’s going on when we don’t feel well. But if we don’t tell the doctor what’s wrong, if we always just say, “Everything’s great, doc,” then they will be wasted on us. And God has given us much help and many tools to get everyone made whole in their spirits.
It is when we humble ourselves, when we admit to God where we have failed, when we admit that we just aren’t going to make it on our own, that we find God’s strength and healing.
Jesus said, `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.'" AMEN
