13 Then He went out again by the sea; and all the multitude came to Him, and He taught them. 14 As He passed by, He saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax office. And He said to him, “Follow Me.” So he arose and followed Him. 15 Now it happened, as He was dining in Levi’s house, that many tax collectors and sinners also sat together with Jesus and His disciples; for there were many, and they followed Him. 16 And when the scribes and[b] Pharisees saw Him eating with the tax collectors and sinners, they said to His disciples, “How is it that He eats and drinks with tax collectors and sinners?” 17 When Jesus heard it, He said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” (CEB)
“Seeking God Anew: Faith, Doubt, and
Other Lines I’ve Crossed,” Week Four
As
the dad—and writer—put it, his family was a pretty standard-issue All-American
family straight out of central casting: wife, teenaged son, teenaged daughter,
lovely home, affluent lifestyle, the works.
Until they got it into their heads that they should travel to Africa on
mission as part of their conscious decision to live more simply and give away
the proceeds. He writes:
(O)ur family had arrived here in Abisu
#1, which we were thrilled to find on our very detailed, two-sided map of
Ghana. Amazingly, in a country no bigger
than the state of Oregon, we have spent two days visiting village after village
too insignificant to be mapped. That
said, Abisu #1 doesn’t even get its own name, instead sharing it with nearby
Abisu #2…
As we emerged from our vehicles in Abisu
#1, Hannah, her brother Joseph, Joan, and I might as well have been wearing
neon arrows screaming “LOOK HERE!” Like
it or not, we are the center of attention.
We are the outsiders—not just people from somewhere else, but the most
foreign people for miles, miles uncrossed by villagers who don’t have
transportation. Small children point. They call us “obruni” (white person) as they
see what they’ve never seen before, people with pale skin. They want to touch us, shake our hands, feel
our arms, understand whether we’re different.
For our teenagers, it’s a new world of
being the “other.” For all of Hannah’s
and Joseph’s lives, they have been the majority: white kids in a mostly white
world, English-speakers in an English-language society, affluent in an affluent
community. Now we are the different
ones, the ones with the name that the majority calls us.
It’s
one thing to say you are a stranger in a strange land…but think of all that
entails when it involves a land so remote it literally isn’t found on the
map. It isn’t just that you have a toe,
or a foot, outside your comfort zone, you are eons away from your comfort zone;
it is zooming away in your rearview mirror.
And to be honest, for most of us, that is the only way we will ever be
outcasts. And, at least in that way, it
is the only way we can relate to this part of Jesus’ ministry.
This
is a new(ish) sermon series revolving around a new book, by a fairly new(ish)
pastor, with a very un-new name: Jay Bakker, the son of the (in?)famous
televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, first pinged my radar when he came to
speak at my seminary’s annual Earl Lectures series in 2010. I have followed bits and pieces of his work
ever since, and after beginning the Revolution church movement in Phoenix, he
has gone on to plant Revolution churches in Atlanta and New York City, and he
is now planting a church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the meanwhile, he has also taken to
writing, and his latest book, entitled, “Faith, Doubt, and Other Lines I’ve
Crossed” spoke strongly enough for me make a sermon series! The chapter I am borrowing from this week is
called “Becoming the Outcast.” Jay
writes in it (in part):
Jesus was constantly with the wrong
people. Why was he talking to
women? To Samaritans? To tax collectors?
Jesus never seemed to have a moral
standard for the people who came around Him.
On occasion, the Gospels tell us He encouraged them to “sin no more,”
but He never kept them out because of their sin. On a regular basis, His disciples or the
religious leaders were scandalized and offended by those Jesus welcomed into
His presence. Women. Prostitutes.
Tax collectors. Romans. Lepers.
Beggars. Samaritans. In fact, Jesus got the most angry at those
most focused on sin: the religious leaders who would classify other people as “sinners.”
Jesus ate with the wrong people. He hung out with the wrong people. He demonstrated through His life that there
aren’t wrong and right people. There are
just people.
The type of inclusion Jesus practiced
gets you in trouble. This type of
inclusion you just don’t do. This type
of inclusion gets you labeled as an outcast.
This type of inclusion gets you killed…
Jesus saw Matthew (Levi) and said to
this traitorous outcast, this untouchable dirtbag, “Let’s try to change the
world.”
Here’s
the thing about being an outcast: sometimes, it can make you a persona non
grata: someone invisible to other people, like a ghost in a community of flesh
and blood. But other times, it can make
you the center of attention, of rumor, of intrigue, as though you came branded
with your own scarlet letter upon your body.
In both instances, what the community around you is communicating is
that you are different, and in both instances, it can be awkward at best and
outright hurtful and destructive at worst.
Levi,
also known as Matthew, would fall into the latter category. As a tax collector, he would have not only
been a very visible member of his community, he also would have been a very
visible reminder of the Roman occupation of Israel. As you can imagine—because of how we are as
Americans—the Israelites were (and Israelis are) a fiercely patriotic people,
and being reminded that they were the vassals of a pagan empire would have
galled them at every turn. But to make
matters even worse, Levi—if you hadn’t guessed by his name—was himself an
Israelite. So, in essence, he is a
collaborator, a traitor to his own people.
He would have fit in incredibly well as a cartoon villain in any number of comic book universes. He and Benedict Arnold would
have gotten along spectacularly. You get the idea.
But
there’s still yet another layer on this giant cake of awfulness that makes Levi
such an outcast. Many of you have heard
me say this, but tax collection did not work back then as it does today. Much as you might like to complain about the
IRS, they are downright pleasant compared to the tax collectors of Biblical
Israel who were, for wont of a better term, state-sanctioned thugs. They would win the right to tax certain areas
at auction, and in order to make a profit, would demand more in taxes than what
the auction rights cost them. So they
lined their own pockets by basically stealing from their neighbors, and the
Roman Empire turned a blind eye to this because they didn’t care how their
legions got funded so long as they got funded.
And
Jay goes into this at great length in his book as well, about exactly how hated
the tax collectors were, the sheer magnitude of the loathing with which the
populace held them in. Even today, it
truly is difficult to understate or overestimate.
And
because of this, because of how they earned their living, tax collectors most
definitely fell into the category of really bad sinners. And it probably would have galled not just the
Pharisees but you and me to see Jesus not just dining with Levi, but
sumptuously dining with him: the Greek says they were reclining at the table,
not just sitting, which says that this was a luxurious setting, where they lay
on couches to eat rather than around a simple table. Jesus is enjoying a feast that is bought and
paid for with dirty money.
But
here’s the thing, and why today’s lesson really matters: the Pharisees are
perhaps the worst possible messengers to say this, because they, too, are Roman
collaborators: they serve the temple high priest, who was a political appointee—he
was appointed by whomever the Roman prefect was at the time! So the Pharisees are criticizing Jesus for
hanging out with, if you can imagine it, people just like them!
And
so when Jesus says, “I came not for the righteous, but for the sinners,” we
should in fact read this as an invitation to the Pharisees, that Jesus is
inviting them because they are in the exact same boat as Levi the tax
collector! But the Pharisees, of course,
will not do so.
Now,
we can say that people like Levi are outcasts because of the choices they made,
except that there is one other wrinkle in this hypothesis: sons were often
expected to apprentice in the vocations of their fathers. Joseph was a carpenter, and so Jesus was a
carpenter too. Zebedee was a fisherman,
so his sons James and John, the Apostles, were likewise fishermen. And so, it is likely that Levi was the son of
a tax collector.
Can
you imagine having THAT hanging around your neck as a kid?
So,
really, this passage is about more than just socializing with people who have
made themselves outcasts by the choices they made, but also by socializing with
people who had little to no say to begin with on being made outcasts. Because that, in a nutshell, is what
privilege means: you had no say in what you were born into. Levi had no say in perhaps being born to a
tax collector. Sure, maybe he could have
gone and done his own thing, but at what cost?
Disassociating himself from his family?
Either way, he would have to become an outcast, either with society or with his own family. What an unenviable choice to potentially have to make.
Becoming
an outcast, then, requires us to in turn cast aside identities that we were
born with, identities that we may have had no say in making, in order to
understand the identities of others. And
I have to believe that doing so is a fundamentally Christian exercise, because
it is what Jesus Himself does. As Paul
says in Philippians, though being made of divinity, Jesus emptied Himself of it
and took the form of a mortal, of a slave.
Jesus was willing cast aside the greatest status of all in order to
come, not for the righteous, but for the sinners. Not for the healthy, but for the sick. And not for those who were like Him, because
there could not possibly be anyone else like Him. No, He came for those who weren’t like
Him. As must we.
Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
September
29, 2013
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