Sermon: Matthew's Story.

Psalm 33, 1-9

1 Sing joyfully to the Lord, you righteous;

    it is fitting for the upright to praise him.

2 Praise the Lord with the harp;

    make music to him on the ten-stringed lyre.

3 Sing to him a new song;

    play skilfully, and shout for joy.

4 For the word of the Lord is right and true;

    he is faithful in all he does.

5 The Lord loves righteousness and justice;

    the earth is full of his unfailing love.

6 By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,

    their starry host by the breath of his mouth.

7 He gathers the waters of the sea into jars;

    he puts the deep into storehouses.

8 Let all the earth fear the Lord;

    let all the people of the world revere him.

9 For he spoke, and it came to be;

    he commanded, and it stood firm.

Matthew 9, 9 - 13

9 As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.

10 While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Introduction to the Service.

We are having readings from Matthew's Gospel this year.

What do we know about Matthew?

A Tax collector – who became a disciple – who became an Apostle.

His testimony shows that salvation is about repentance & the grace of God, not about being religious or worthy.

Papias of Hierapolis, Irenaeus and St Clement of Alexandria ( the generation after the Apostles) all write of Matthew the disciple as the same man who wrote the gospel, & built up the church in Judea – Jewish focus to his evangelism and writing.

Matthew's Story.

The day Jesus called me to follow him I was in my booth collecting duties on goods traders brought to Jerusalem. A long line of merchants waited with their camels and donkeys, none pleased to stand in the dust and heat only for me to take a chunk out of of their profits and place it into my Tax Duty Chest.

Under the awning’s shade I knew that without the armed men I had hired, the taxes would go unpaid, and I would likely have been beaten by the crowd.

What it was to be so hated and despised!

Yet I had made my bargain: I had sold out my nation, my religion and my community for wealth and a little power.

They hated me, but they had to obey. I used to think, “Who’s the fool? I, sitting cool and collecting money, or those out in the heat waiting to give it to me?”

When you have sold your soul there is a tax to be paid. Looking into the eye of the brother you exploit, he hands over a coin and you hand back the pretence that you do not see his contempt.

It is a tax paid in deceit—a lie you almost come to believe: that what you do is justified and that only the one before you deserves contempt.

I knew I had gone over to the other side, collaborating with the occupying forces and making a great deal of money.

I had once been a nobody; the Romans had recruited me and made me somebody.

The system itself gave me incentive to squeeze as much as possible, since I kept the surplus. “I didn’t make the system,” I told myself. “It’s not my fault.”

I was taking from people the means to live and forfeiting honesty, integrity and honour, yet wealth was a great comfort. I could have gone on indefinitely deceiving myself at great cost to my soul and profit to my purse, had Jesus not looked me in the eye.

He did not look with contempt but with compassion. He looked as if he truly knew me—not merely Matthew the tax collector, but into the depths of my darkness, my shame and my fear. Through all my corruption he saw something still healthy, still alive, something he recognised as his own.

He held out mercy, not condemnation, and that mercy set me free.

Religious condemnation had never brought repentance. Every day people called me “traitor” and “sinner,” some to my face. At my command the guards enforced the respect I thought I was due.

Nobody associated with me unless there was profit in it. Excluded from the synagogue and condemned by polite society, I decided that if they called me a sinner I would enjoy the fruits of my sin to the utmost. I abandoned respectability and indulged every vice money could buy, growing more estranged from God and from my fellows.

My fellows, Israel, our holy nation,—the people who should hold no one as Lord but the Almighty—yet every tax coin declared that Caesar was Lord. Surely God had rejected Israel? And if so, why should I not reject those who rejected me?

How little I understood the ways of God, and how little I cared to learn.

When Jesus called me it was not the first time I had seen or heard him. Everyone was talking about this new prophet and miracle-worker. Scandalous things were said: he befriended beggars and prostitutes, argued with Scribes and Pharisees, and worked on the Sabbath.

He sounded more like a sinful tax collector than a prophet!

I was there at the Sermon on the Mount. I had come to be entertained and to mock, but he said beautiful, powerful things: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Rich as I was, I knew I was poor in spirit—yet how could I belong to that Kingdom?

He spoke with authority and compassion, fearlessly, even in the presence of the Pharisees: “…whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do…” They knew he meant them, their faces went pale, then crimson.

What struck me most was his call not to judge but to repent—to stop condemning others, to think again, and turn back to God. I had been condemning others to hide my own guilt. That thought would not leave me. Back at the booth I could no longer look with contempt on those who handed over their coins; the old trick no longer worked. Yet I still took the money and recorded it, as if enumerating my own sins.

Then he called me to follow him. I was amazed that he offered me a place in the Kingdom of Heaven. Knowing how poor in spirit I was, I longed for the riches of his grace.

To this day I do not know what happened at the toll booth after I walked away. People must have thought me insane, but I wanted to celebrate the gift of forgiveness and a new start. I invited him to my house to eat; he came gladly—and that caused a stink with the Pharisees: “Why does your teacher eat with tax-collectors and sinners?”

I think back to the meals we shared—the feeding of the five thousand, quiet journeys through the wilderness, dinner at a Pharisee’s house, and the Upper Room on the night he was betrayed.

Christians should eat together as a family remembering Christ, yet we should also sit and eat with those considered sinners—even with tax collectors.

I pray that we followers of Jesus will never become religious like those eager to judge, but that we will often be found in the company of sinners, the hungry, the dispossessed, and all counted unworthy in this world. After-all, we all fall short of the Glory of God.

May our religion always offer forgiveness, not condemnation; may it change this dark world by loving service, seeking not to hurt but to heal.

May all who hear the call of Jesus follow his way.

Amen.