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April 06, 2003
The Very Imperfect Disciple of Jesus
The Very Imperfect Disciple of Jesus
Psalm 15 / Isaiah 41: 8-13
Luke 5: 27-32
April 6th, 2003
It would surprise me if at least some of you did not share my experience as a young fellow when the neighborhood kids got together to play touch football, or softball, or basketball. The two best players would be captains. They chose who would be on their teams. The best players would be chosen first--quickly, then you’d see the selection process slow down. The gears of grace moved very slowly as reluctantly, clumsy little Todd got chosen, and then Richie, who couldn’t catch. Maybe you were one of the kids chosen first, maybe you weren’t. If you couldn’t catch a ball well and run fast, maybe you got used to being chosen, reluctantly, last. Maybe you heard the captains say, “We’ve got full teams. You get to watch or you can chase foul balls.” If you weren’t very good, you felt very lucky to be on the team.
A lot of us kids went to Sunday School where we learned about grace, unmerited favor, but here it was entirely a merit system. You earned your rights in neighborhood sports. The merit system doesn’t stop with childhood sports.
It’s the custom to choose the best students for the university, the best employees for our company, the best singers for the choir, and so forth. The colleges that can report how small a percentage of their applicants get admitted add to their prestige. The choir for which you must audition has highest reputation. Human society loves the idea of grace, but it operates by merit. How can it be else? We live in a highly competitive market place.
People who can’t compete, who need too much grace, gradually sink farther and farther down. Some people end up walking the streets, standing in lines to get a free meal at a rescue mission. Those who queue up for a free meal feel cast off from God and people. It’s remarkable how many people feel God has cast them off. Some of you feel this way, maybe more than I realize.
You worked hard for your education, but there was no job waiting for you in your field. Disappointment of this kind affects more than your income. You wonder if God has cast you off.
Some of you have health problems that leave you in pain much of the time. Persistent pain is tiring and demoralizing. You wonder if God has cast you off.
Time is going by and your financial situation has dipped to a precarious plateau. You thought your investments were going to carry you through your old age. But your security is shrinking with the stock market. A lot of people are losing their jobs now as their employers buckle under the strain of our weak economy. Maybe you’re afraid that the economic whirlpool in our country is going to suck you under. What embarrassment. What dread. It feels like a sin to have financial problems in wealthy America. Has God cast you off?
Some people who once stood happily before me, joyfully making their marriage vows, have had their marriages turn sour. They are on the threshold of divorce. Some have suffered divorce. Embarrassment. Failure. You didn’t dream of this when you were a child. You never thought you’d be in this situation. God has cast you off, you think.
The prophet Isaiah spoke for God to Israel in a period of their history when they felt like they’d been cast off by God. They were in exile, a captive people, prisoners of war. They knew they deserved it. It was because their ancestors had succumbed to low-life living. There is a special kind of ignominy that comes with falling from a position of privilege. How painful it is to realize you deserve what you got.
But Isaiah told them, the Lord says, “You, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen … I have chosen you and not cast you off.” I wonder what people in exile thought when they heard the prophet tell them this, “God has chosen us? He has not cast us off?” Yes, they once had been God’s chosen people, but that was long ago. It’s hard not to feel cast off by God when you’re in exile, and your Temple is in ruins. And you deserved what you got. What was God up to that the great prophet should say still, “I have chosen you. I have not cast you off”?
This morning we just read how Jesus chose His fourth disciple. Levi was a living, breathing type of ancient Israel. Ironically, his name was the name of the most sacred tribe in Israel, the one from which priests were chosen. He was a Levite. The other name by which we know this man, Matthew, was an honored name in recent Jewish history. It was the name of the one who led the revolt against the cruel tyrant, Antiochus Epiphanes, in the second century BC. Mattathias was the father of Judas Maccabeas, who led the Jews to a one hundred year kingdom of their own.
But this Levi, or Matthew, was a detestable tax farmer. He made his extravagantly good living by leaching on his own people, charging them more than they had to pay the Roman government in taxes and pocketing the difference. And it was legal, even though immoral. He may have been rich, but he had an unenviable reputation. He was a devalued Levite, a preacher fallen from grace.
Customarily, when walking by the tax booth, a decent person would look the other way. Whom we despise we ignore. Shunning is the reward we give to those we condemn. But Jesus passed by this shunned man and not only looked him in the eye but said, “Follow me.”
Remember, this is the Son of God talking, the Second Person of the Godhead, the holy Creator of heaven and earth become flesh. This is perfect Man, who had never sinned, talking with a big-time sinner. This is the Big League Super Star choosing fourth a guy who couldn’t catch. The fourth person Jesus chose to follow Him, to bear the Gospel of salvation to the rest of the world, was a sinner by birth, by habit, and by trade who brought shame to the name Levi.
We are accustomed to thinking that grace is undeserved favor. We remind ourselves that we are saved “by grace, not by works, lest anyone should boast.” We love to sing “Amazing Grace.” But wasn’t Jesus over-doing it a bit in choosing a wretch like this from the priestly class? And Jesus wasn’t just saying to this man, “God forgives you. Go and sin no more.” Jesus was choosing one of the Twelve Apostles, who would be the very foundation for the next wave of God’s work in redeeming a fallen world. Amazing grace? Or poor judgment?
Levi, may I suggest, “felt very lucky to be chosen for Jesus’ team.” He was so thrilled that he dropped everything to follow Jesus. But first, he invited Jesus to dinner. In effect, he said to Jesus, “Follow me first!” And Jesus followed Levi into his house. Levi invited all his friends, other tax collectors. He also invited others from town whose rejection by ordinary good people gathered them into a society of their own miserable kind. They had a great banquet.
Often we will have a banquet to celebrate a success. Purdue’s basketball teams will soon have banquets to celebrate the exciting seasons they just finished. But at this banquet that Jesus shared with Levi, they celebrated the end of Levi’s career as a tax collector. He was burning his bridges at that feast.
How suggestive it is that here we see Jesus early in His ministry breaking bread with tax collectors and sinners. Here Jesus was demonstrating the nature of the Church against which the gates of hell could not prevail. It seemed that Jesus had opened the gates of hell to invite the people who deserved hell as His chosen friends.
It was the kind of company in which a rabbi should not have fit at all. And Jesus’ antagonists among the good people in town noticed. They asked Jesus’ disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” I wonder if it was obvious when Jesus went to Levi’s home with all these moral rejects that He was not preaching at them there. That was one of the problems the Pharisees had with Jesus. Not only did He eat and drink with sinners, He enjoyed their company, and they enjoyed Him. He should have made them squirm by preaching to them. How else do we correct the erring than by lecturing them?
Jesus drank with them and ate with them and spoke with them about things that endeared Him to them. Jesus was gracious! It seemed improper to be gracious. The psalmist may have written of God that “His mercy endureth for ever,” but mercy must have its limits, we believe, on the practical plain of life. What right did Levi and his tax-collector friends have to receive mercy?
As Jesus spoke with these tax collectors and sinners the level of their conversation must have raised. They found unseemly the crude things they have spoken before. Now they found themselves talking of their children, of their grandchildren, of their love of country. They no doubt felt at liberty to ask Jesus questions. As they realized that Jesus was not there to condemn them, the conversation turned to the kinds of things that make the grace of God believable. Jesus liked them. They could feel it. And love lifted them up!
Was it in a setting like this that Jesus told the story of the prodigal son, after someone asked Him, “How can you be eating with us?” The love of God became believable when Jesus loved them. I wonder how many people went away from that meal with the seed of God planted in their souls, and they were changed.
Now we feel harshly towards these Pharisees that chided Jesus. We read the Gospel lesson and we’re supposed to hiss when they come on stage. We read that Jesus came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. We understand that “righteous” here is a code word for people who think they are righteous—the Pharisees. The “righteous” is the kind of person who prays so everyone can hear, “I thank you I’m not like this other guy, an adulterer and unclean.”
We can understand that Jesus came to call sinners to repentance, but where do we fit into the picture? We have been called to righteous living. Every Sunday you hear me close the service with the benediction, “The God of peace . . . make you perfect in every good work to do His will.” Isn’t there something odd about putting the tax collectors up on a pedestal, and demeaning people who try to do better than that? Didn’t even Levi and perhaps some of his sinner friends become righteous after encountering the grace, the kindness of Jesus? Did Jesus have it in for people who try to be good?
I have other questions that arise from what Jesus said. In a day of so much religious controversy, when many voices claim to be right, does not becoming a champion for truth put us in the place of the Pharisees whom Jesus found wanting? The Pharisees set out to be right, to guard God’s law. They did not set out to become hypocrites---and all of them were not hypocrites by any means. But there is a natural tendency for moral earnestness to change into feelings of moral superiority. Moral rectitude slips into pride, and pride demolishes the very state of heart that God looks for. The righteous think God is lucky to have them on His team.
It is a humble and contrite heart that God looks for. As a little boy who doesn’t catch very well feels immense gratitude when he’s chosen for the neighborhood ball team, and as a tax collector feels immense gratitude when He’s invited by the Son of God to follow Him, so you and I are living in a state of grace and need to remember it is God’s kindness to us that has given us a place on his team.
The moment you start congratulating yourself that you are right, you’re losing touch with Jesus. The moment you self-confidently ask for a signing bonus, you’re losing touch with Jesus. We never, ever reach the point that God is lucky to have us on His team.
When you sit at the Lord’s Table this morning, remember it was your sin that made Jesus’ death necessary. I will remember this too. Jesus does not ask us to remember this in order to push us down and make us feel miserable, but to keep a sense of proportion. And if you understand how much you needed Jesus’ death for your sake, perhaps you will be goaded to ask how you can live out your gratitude to Jesus. Live out your gratitude.
I wish we knew how Levi’s life turned out. Maybe it was just as well we don’t get to follow the lives of Jesus’ Twelve Apostles because then we’d maybe get our priorities skewed. We’d venerate them too highly, or perhaps be disappointed in how they turned out. We know that Judas didn’t do too well. Maybe others of the disciples didn’t do too well.
But these matters are beside the point. Jesus loves sinners. Jesus loves the worst of sinners. Jesus doesn’t ask us to think ill of ourselves, just realistically, so that we can be grateful for grace. Levi was forgiven an awful lot, and he must have been very glad. The rest of his life he spent as an Apostle, someone sent out for Jesus. Jesus has forgiven you and me an awful lot. Live out your gratitude to Jesus.
I wonder what your life would be like if you felt very fortunate Jesus chose you to be on His team. I wonder what Faith Church will be like when we take in how lucky we are to be on Jesus’ team.
O Lord God, thank you for the kindness of Jesus. Help us to live out our gratitude to Him. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at April 6, 2003 09:30 AM