Oct 20 | “Matthew and Jesus,” (Sermon, September 21st, 2016)

One of my favourite websites to visit is Cracked.com. It’s mostly a comedy website, but within the last five years or so it has also been branching out into what it calls “personal experience” articles, which are just what they sound like: they solicit interviews from folks on an online forum – folks who have had strange jobs or uncommon experiences. Some of them are funny, some of them are very weird, some of them are heartbreaking, and some of them are inspiring.

One of them is called “5 Things I Learned as a Neo-Nazi,” composed by one of the Cracked staff writers and the subject, Frank Meeink. In it, Frank tells the story of his time as a racist skinhead, beginning with his recruitment when he was just a teen, and ending with his reformation after time in prison and a beautiful relationship with a Jewish man who hired him to do odd jobs.

One insight from Frank was really interesting. He describes a terrible upbringing, a feeling of constant fear and worthlessness, which the men who recruited him recognized and exploited by introducing him to random acts of violence, at first without any racial element. He describes the fear on the face of a man they attacked, and how big it made him feel. He describes how that was really how they hooked people, and the racism came later, at first couched in positive language of heritage and white pride. However, he soon discovered that although the recruitment began with an invitation to feel proud of who they were, once the kids were in, he said, “We never talked ourselves up, never tried to feel better about ourselves. It was all focused on other people. Probably because the only people we hated more than everyone else was us.”

Take a moment to ponder the tragedy of that statement. “The only people we hated more than everyone else was us.” Hate your neighbour as you hate yourself.

Frank continues, “The driving power behind these movements is fear: fear of inadequacy, fear of being forgotten, fear of not mattering. And as hard as we tried to scare people, no one was ever more scared than we were. Hate is just repackaged fear[.]”

This is what was on my mind when I read today’s passage. Here’s Matthew, the tax collector – reviled, condemned, abused. According to Wikipedia, “The right to collect taxes for a particular region would be auctioned every few years for a value that (in theory) approximated the tax available for collection in that region. The payment to Rome was treated as a loan and the publicani (the tax collectors) would receive interest on their payment at the end of the collection period. In addition, any excess (over their bid) tax collected would be pure profit for the publicani. The principal risk to the publicani was that the tax collected would be less than the sum bid.”

You can imagine that these fellows would be very interested in collecting as much as possible.

This is the job that Matthew finds himself in when he meets Jesus.

We aren’t given any circumstances for how he got himself into that line of work. He would have been a man of means from a family of means, since a tax collector needed to be literate and would have to have contacts and funds to apply for the bid.

In short, he was not a victim. He chose this. He chose to spend his time wrangling money out of people, many of whom couldn’t afford it. We don’t know why. We don’t know anything else about him. He’s a blank slate – like the skinhead you’d want to cross the street to avoid. There he is at his little booth, probably dodging rocks.

And what does Jesus say to him?

“Follow me.”

That’s it.

No finger-wagging, no yelling, no cold turn of the head as though he can’t even see something so profane.

Just, “Follow me.” And Matthew does it.

And then invites him over and throws a party with all of the disciples.

I imagine that the Pharisees were feeling a little like the prodigal son’s brother at this point. “Are you serious?” I imagine them saying. “You’re going to get into fights with us, the keepers of the law, but you’re going to eat and drink wine with these degenerates?”

Jesus is typically witty here. “I didn’t come for the healthy, I came for the sick.”

This isn’t just a throwaway line. There are two separate collections of three healings by Jesus before and after this story, along with other instances of disciples being called. Finally, in the chapter immediately following this, Jesus sends out the Twelve to do some healing of their own.

This is the beauty of the one we call beloved.

It’s one thing to cure someone of their physical illness. It’s something else entirely to heal someone’s heart.

Matthew went from squeezing people dry to feeding strangers in his home.

What could he teach us about how to live our faith? Who do we know in our world that are sick, sick with hate and fear and a sense of worthlessness?

“The only people we hated more than everyone else was us.”

If you don’t know anyone like that, you can still search for and confront that attitude. It exists everywhere – in the persistent narratives of revenge that fuel many of our systems, in the reliance on bootstrap policy over compassion, in the tiny passive-aggressive jabs that are so much easier but much more damaging in the long run than having difficult conversations between us and the people we like and dislike.

There’s a lovely saying, “You might be the only Jesus that people ever see.” I’ve seen every single one of you do it. It’s hard work, but it’s worth it. Matthew knew it. That was why he wanted to celebrate when he discovered this new way.

So celebrate with me, right now. You were called, some of you before you could even speak, before you could even walk. It takes all kinds.

What a gift.

Celebrate with me…then go out into the world and find a frightened other to invite back to our house.