Pentecost 2

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

Bishop Michael Pryse

Eastern Synod

Greetings friends! My name is Michael Pryse and I am the Bishop of the Eastern Synod. It’s a privilege to be with you today and I want to thank you for providing your pastor or deacon with some much-needed relief and time for rest and restoration. The ELCIC Summer Sermon Series is a wonderful opportunity for us to support our rostered leaders and to experience the amazing breadth of our wonderful church, from coast to coast to coast, and I’m delighted to be a part of this effort!

By all appearances it was a “chance encounter.” Jesus, it seems, had just finished delivering a message to a large crowd that had followed him to the lakeside and was walking somewhere. Perhaps he was trying to steal a few hours alone in quiet contemplation. Maybe he was on his way to the next preaching point. Or maybe he was, in fact, looking for someone; someone or some persons who would go with him and help him in the spreading of this new word of Good News, this new Gospel.

Nonetheless the Scriptures tell us that he “saw” this man identified as Matthew sitting at a tax booth. As a matter of fact, that’s just about all that the scriptures tell us, that Jesus “saw him!” There was no great parting of the heavens, no loud voices booming from the skies, indeed no indication that this man was anything other than what he appeared to be, a junior clerk in the Roman equivalent of Canada Customs, going about his daily business of collecting taxes from those who were transporting goods along the road that Jesus happened to be travelling.

But that was Jesus’ way, wasn’t it? Think of all the stories from the Gospels where Jesus saw what no one else saw. The widow who cast all she had into the alms box. The woman he met one day at the wellside. The little tax man Zaccheus. In all these instances and more, Jesus sees and he calls. It’s an action repeated again and again through the Gospels, an action that we see repeated again and again in the lives of any who have come to see themselves as followers of Christ from that time right until today.

It’s a great story. But it’s not just Matthew’s story, or any other disciple’s story for that matter. It’s also my story and your story. God has seen each of us and has called each of us. Not only the disciples or the bishops, pastors and deacons, but all of us. Even today, in this gathering, all are seen and all are called to a new way of living, a new way of seeing, a new way of being.

That was certainly the case for Matthew! I’m not sure Matthew quite knew what he was in for when he got up and put the closed sign in the window of his little tax booth that afternoon. Jesus calls him and says follow me. And then where does Jesus then go, but to Matthew’s own house! Furthermore, it seems he must have issued a few more invitations along the way, ‘cause the next thing we know there’s a whole crowd of “tax collectors and sinners” as the Bible calls them sitting in Matthew’s dining room having a big party. This is Jesus particular take on “Guess who’s coming to dinner!” 

In the space of two verses Matthew the tax man, Matthew the gatherer, the collector, becomes Matthew the giver, the distributor, the designated host. The Gospel writer is using a narrative device, a story-telling method, that provides a powerful description of the dynamics of conversion. Jesus sees. Jesus calls. Matthew answers in the affirmative and immediately significant changes begin to happen in his life. 

“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, Jesus said, but those who are sick.” More and more of us are recognizing our own sickness, our own need of conversion to a new way of life. More and more of us are feeling that we’re on treadmills that are running faster and faster but ultimately leading nowhere. Materially, we are, in global terms, the richest of the rich. Yet morally and spiritually we are feeling more and more impoverished. 

It was described very well in an article I read recently where an Indian teacher, lamenting the massive change being experienced in her country, said, “We are trading a simple life with high thought for a cluttered life with low thought. “It was an observation that I didn’t have a whole lot of trouble identifying with as a North American! The fact is, in spite of our riches (and maybe because of them!) we’re flirting with the disaster of society without community, of life without meaning. 

In another recent article, Tanis Helliwell, a management consultant with the Banff School of Management writes, “Everywhere I go I sense a chronic low-grade depression in people; a soul sickness. Many intelligent, hard-working, well-educated people are feeling as if they have sold their souls for paycheques.” Do you recognize what she’s talking about? Of course you do! And all of this carries profound significance for us when we reflect on the nature and mission of the church. 

I think there’s a lot of receptivity to hearing Jesus’ call to a new way of living, a new way of seeing and being. In recent years I find myself encountering more and more people are recognizing the high price we are paying for the kind of world we are living in. More and more people who are giving up on the god of upward mobility, people who are more and more open to experiencing the God of downward mobility that has been revealed to us in Jesus.  

But you know, it may well be that the church, we ourselves need to be converted before we can hope to effectively issue that same call to conversion to others. Maybe the problem isn’t so much a lack of receptivity in the community, but rather the church’s lack of faith in the power of the Gospel to convert, to effect change and bring that new life which we identify as being present in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. 

Some years ago, Harvard business professor Theodore Levitt wrote a classic article that focussed on the demise of the railroad industry in North America. The decline of the industry, Levitt says, didn’t come about because people and freight no longer needed transportation. The railroad declined, rather, because the railway managers came to believe that they were in the railroad business and not the transportation business. They confused the means (railroads) with the ends (transportation).

He contrasts this example with the genius of the Stanley Tool Company. Apparently, they train their salespeople not to sell electric drills but to sell holes. They know that one day lasers will replace mechanical drills and they want to be ready. Hence, they are in the hole business. The means (the mechanical drill) is only a way to get to the hole, it is not the end itself.

Can you see any analogies for the church? How many congregations believe that they are 
in the “we exist for ourselves” business as opposed to the “we are in mission to the community” business.” How many congregations and Christians are confusing the means with the ends?

I suspect that there are many people in our communities who are open to experiencing 
the kind of conversion that Matthew experienced, many people who are coming to know the emptiness and hollowness of the false gospels upon which much of our life today is founded. But they won’t look for that new life in a community, in a church that hasn’t itself already experienced a similar conversion. They won’t take seriously the witness of a church that doesn’t believably express the new life that we claim to be calling others to embrace. They won’t be drawn to the life of a church which appears to be more interested in the church business than in the God and people business.

Matthew was called to leave one way of life and embrace another. The question his story presents to us is a simple one. What am I as an individual being called to leave, and called to embrace? What is it that we as a church are being called to leave, and called to embrace?

May God give us the courage to ask those questions in sincerity and truth, along with ears that are open to hearing the answers that God would have us hear; and then gift us with the resolve to act decisively in response. AMEN