Year A
June 5, 2005
Houston, TX
Title: Choices
When I first read this passage from the Gospel of Matthew a few weeks
ago, I said to a couple of folks that I was looking forward to preaching on
it, because, first, it didn’t seem to be something I remember ever
preaching on over the past 8 years—and because of the 3 year nature
of the Lectionary Cycle with its set of prescribed set of Biblical passages
for each Sunday, over time, you eventually end up hitting most of the
passages over two or three cycles, which I have already been through in
my ministerial career. And yet, I had this haunting feeling that I was
missing something—I mean, to have missed preaching on this passage
twice already through two different lectionary cycles just seemed a little
odd—so I dug through my sermon files on my computer, found nothing,
and then I actually went to my sermon files where I keep paper copies of
my old sermons, and found, to my surprise that I had actually preached
on this text twice before! I really was surprised that this passage had felt
so fresh to me a few weeks ago, as if I had never really dug too deep
into it, or preached from it, and it seemed
And the interesting thing to me in looking at how I preached those two
sermons is that at both times I chose to stick with the first part of the
passage, the calling of Matthew, and the command to him from Jesus to
“follow me.” There is something about that moment that is striking, as it
is in all the call stories of the disciples in the Gospel stories—the
bluntness, the command to follow, the turning of the disciple/rabbi
relationship upside down, that has always struck me. Again and again,
the texts of all four Gospels have this moment when Christ chooses his
disciples, he picks them out of the crowd, from a table, from the shore of
a lake—all of these moments are moments of choice, but the odd thing is
that it is the Christ who chooses his disciples, not the other way around,
which, if you think about it, is more typical—the master is chosen by his
disciple, the teacher is sought out by his student. Think of all those
movies you’ve seen where the disciple goes out to find a master, to
teach him the ways of the Force, or Kung Fu, or whatever. The
interesting thing about the Gospel stories about the calling of the
disciples is that they are usually in the midst of doing the ordinary tasks
of life—they do not seem to be seeking to follow anyone or they are
already following someone else, like John the Baptist—at most they are
curious about this Jesus, but they go back to their work in this world,
collecting taxes, fishing for a living, whatever.
In fact, earlier, in chapter 8 of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus actually
rejects two disciples who actually seek our Jesus in order to follow him—
they offered to follow him, but he turns them down—one seems to think
that it will be easy to follow this Master, but Jesus says to this want-to-be
disciple that there is no easy place to rest for those who follow him;
another person wants to bury his dead father before he begins to follow
this Jesus. It just seems to me that these stories about Jesus choosing
his disciples, and not the other way around, are meant to say something
about the nature of call in the Christian tradition, and I don’t mean just
the special call of a certain group, like disciples, or even the call of some
to become ordained clergy—but it says something about ALL of our calls
to follow the way of this One from Nazareth. And it says this, I think: it is
the Christ who chooses us, not the other way around, and it is not our
choices that bring us together at the inclusive table God has set for all of
creation, the table we are forever seated at, but we so often fail to
recognize before us—no, this is not our table and it is not one we get to
invite our friends too, our favorites too, and its not the one for best and
the brightest—It is simply a table for ALL OF US, sinners and saints,
physicians and patients, healthy and sick. It is that table that Jesus sits
at in this story from Gospel we heard today, a table surrounded by the
likes of people such as Matthew, a Jewish tax collector who is seen as a
traitor because he collects taxes for the Romans, and who is here, eating
with this rabbi Jesus, not because he has made good and ethical choices
in his life, but because this rabbi has chosen him to be at this table. And
if it is true that the measure of a person is the type of people she or he
surrounds themselves with, something we believe as much as the
ancient Jews did 2000 years ago, then Jesus is making quite a statement
in this moment!
The choice to be included at the table in Matthew’s story here in this text,
and the table God has set for all of us, it is not our choice to make —
we come to the table because we have been invited to it, we have been
chosen to be guests at the table, not because we have been found
worthy or unworthy to be here—this is not an appreciation dinner for the
best or most hard working among us or those of us have made good
choices in their lives—it is simply the table for all of us, people who are
worthy and unworthy alike to be here. The Pharisees, in their outrage at
this sight, at Jesus sitting with these outcasts and sinners, these people
who have made such bad choices in their lives, they really do believe
that their good and moral choices give them the right to sit at the table,
the right to be chosen as the party guests, and they are, these
Pharisees, they too are chosen to come to the table, but, ironically, they’
ve chosen not to be at the party because they don’t like the guest list.
Now, that’s sad—to be invited to a party, but not show up because you
don’t like other guests—talk about insulting the host of the party—all of a
sudden the party becomes about you, and your opinion of the other
guests rather than the host, who is actually throwing the party! There is
some sarcasm, I think, in Jesus’ reply to these Pharisees, these party
guests in his words about physicians and the sick—I suspect this pointed
little jab is to remind them that we all need of healing, that we are all in
need of a physician, and maybe the worst thing is to diagnosis others
without recognizing our own sickness.
And that is where I ended both sermons on this passage, with each of
them having some major variations, because that is what fascinated me
about this passage, that in our culture so obsessed with being able to
make choices and having a right to choose, of having the freedom to
chose, which is something I value tremendously, it is interesting to me
that the disciples do not chose to be disciples so much as they are
chosen to be disciples. And I know that it disturbs some of us, this talk of
being chosen, but I don’t think these stories are about one person being
chosen INSTEAD of someone else—actually, these stories are really
stories about yet one more person being chosen IN ADDITION TO all the
people we EXPECT to be at the table, this table that God has spread out
before all the universe—and to which ALL are chosen by God to be
together, to party together, so to speak, and to enjoy the feast that is
God, with each other. The math used in these passages is about
addition, and not subtraction, the adding of yet one more person to the
work God is doing in this world, this desire by God for us to see who we
are sitting next to at the table of life, someone we may not recognize or
even like when we do recognize them, but who are as chosen by God as
we are, to be at the welcoming table.
And yet, it’s the second part of this text that caught my attention when I
looked at the passage this time around—the part of the stories about the
two women who are healed by Jesus. Again, Christ’s welcome and
choice to include us all, is almost immediately put to the test—will the
Christ be able to live it out in this moment? A women has been
hemorrhaging, has been bleeding for twelve years, and because this
physical disease includes human blood, includes that which Jewish law
says makes a woman unclean if it persists, she has become an
untouchable, an outsider to human touch—to touch her is to make
yourself ritually unclean, it is to dirty yourself spiritually, so it was
believed, and you would spend much time and effort having to go
through a ritual cleansing procedure in order to make yourself
acceptable to polite society. These rules around blood so often hurt
women the most, excluded women the most and she has borne the brunt
of this idea more than even most women because her bleeding never
stopped, never ceased. And so she has spent her past 12 years living
with a disease that not only hurts her physically, but excludes her
spiritually and emotionally from the world around her—can you imagine
living without any touch, any human touch for 12 years? And yet, she is
determined to be healed, and so she gambles on this charismatic rabbi
who is passing through town, and like a thief, she steals a touch herself,
a touch of Jesus’ garment, his prayer shawl. And the passage says that
she was healed and he turns and greets her, saying “take heart,
daughter; your faith has made you well.” Somehow, her belief that life
included her, that God had chosen her as well, as a woman and as
someone suffering from a disease that excludes her from the rest of life,
somehow her trust, her faith that the divine story about the table being
open to all, was a story that included her as well, it transformed her, and
it healed her. And Jesus chooses to celebrate this moment of hope by
welcoming her touch rather than being horrified by it—he ignores all the
rules that exclude, that limit our ability to be at the same table.
And so too with the daughter of synagogue leader that is mentioned in
our passage today, the one he is on the way to heal when this
hemorrhaging woman reaches out to touch him—on one level, it is yet
another story about Jesus healing someone, but its more than that—
again, a moment happens when a choice is laid before Jesus: will he
touch what is understood here to be a dead body, a touch that was
believed to make a person ritually unclean? Or will he chose to heal her,
will he lay his hands on her, knowing that in the eyes of many he
instantly becomes unclean for not only touching a woman, but also a
dead woman? We all know the story—he touches her in order to heal
her, and once again, puts himself on the outside of his culture, he makes
himself an outsider, siding with all the outsiders who have always had the
rules exclude them, one way or another.
This choice by the Christ to move beyond that earlier table he was at
with Matthew, the tax collector, and all those other outsiders, and his
continual decisions to keep putting himself on the outside again, to make
choices that he knew would further complicate the picture people had of
him or wanted to take of him—he did it, and in these moments when he
could have failed his own words, the words that he had spoken moments
earlier at that table with Matthew and all the others, when he could have
reeled from the touch of the hemorrhaging woman, or declined to touch
what was believed to be a dead body, he did not. The choice by God to
include us and to include us all…it really does mean EVERYONE, and
though sometimes we get frustrated with our fellow guests, the people
next to us at the table, as the Pharisees did thousands of years ago, we
probably need to remember that we’re not throwing the party, we’re not
the host of this table, and we haven’t chosen the guests. And anyway, it
was never about who else was coming to the dinner party—it was and is
about the One who decided to throw the party in the first place, and who
believed that the table being set at that moment wouldn’t have been the
same without us, and who believed this meal eaten together wouldn’t
have been as good without the persons sitting next to us. The people
that God chooses to put on the guest list, including me, they are always
a surprise, I think. But I’m sure Matthew was stunned to be chosen to sit
as a guest at that particular table, as we all are, if we’re really, really
honest with ourselves. I’m glad, I’m glad that God makes the guest list—I
suspect I would not be so generous a host and my list of chosen guests
would not be as long as the one God is using. Some choices are best
left to God, but the choice by God to keep including and including until
there is no one left to exclude, that is, I think, something to celebrate.
Amen and amen.
