Monday, March 11, 2024

Sermon: Radical Hospitality

 Matthew 9:9-13
Radical Hospitality
James Sledge                                                                            March 10, 2024 

I was a very young boy when it happened, so I don’t remember it, but in 1960, not too far from my hometown of Charlotte, a group of Black college students began a sit-in at the whites only lunch counter in a Greensboro, NC Woolworths, a store that is now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum. The lunch counter is on display there, although a portion of the counter is in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and some of the seats are in the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Even though this was the segregated south, Blacks were free to shop at Woolworths, and so they frequented the store, but the lunch counter was for whites only. Apparently it was okay for Blacks and whites to be together in the checkout line, but sitting together while eating was problematic.

There is something more intimate about eating with someone as compared to simply being in the vicinity of each other. In fact it was quite permissible for there to be Black servers, but not Black diners. That encroached too much on the intimacy of eating.

By the time I was middle school aged, the schools had been desegregated, but the cafeteria still displayed a form a segregation. Blacks sat at some tables and whites at others, and only rarely did anyone cross over that boundary.

That boundary was even less permeable when it came to inviting people over to one another’s homes for dinner. Despite its loss of legal standing, segregation remained in force socially at my home and the homes of most people I knew, in large part because friendships continued to be segregated.

The legacy of those days is still very much with us. Our largely white congregation is a testament to the resilience of segregation, of the difficulty of crossing over long established social and cultural boundaries. There often is no intent to maintain such boundaries, and yet they persist.

Jesus’ day was not so different from ours when it came to social boundaries and barriers. Good Jews typically didn’t socialize with Gentiles or Samaritans. Religious boundaries were much more prevalent than they are in our day. Certain illnesses made a person “unclean” and so off limits, although in the verses on either side of reading this morning Jesus touches a leper to heal him, touches and heals a woman with a continuous menstrual flow, and touches a corpse, all of which would have rendered Jesus “unclean.”

In our scripture verses, Jesus does some boundary crosses of another sort. To start off, Jesus calls Matthew as a disciple, and Matthew is a tax collector. This story is not all that unlike the calling of Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John, except for Matthew’s profession.

I think I’ve mentioned before that tax collectors were generally regarded as traitors. They were Jewish but they collected tariffs and taxes for the Romans, sometimes using intimidation by Roman soldiers as an incentive. Tax collecting was a franchise operation. The Romans doled out the positions for a price, and the tax collectors had to bring in a certain amount of cash to the Romans in return, but they could keep any money they collected over that amount. It was a system designed to be corrupt, and tax collectors often got rich. They were despised by religious people and ordinary folks alike.

We’re told nothing about Matthew other than he is at work as a tax collector when Jesus calls him. Matthew immediately gets up and goes with Jesus, just as Simon Peter and his fellow fisherman had gotten up and left their nets and boats.

But here’s where the story gets really interesting. In the gospels of Mark and Luke, what seem to be different versions of this story are told, although the tax collector is there called Levi. Matthew’s gospel (the author is anonymous) uses Mark as his primary source material, but he makes an interesting change when he retells this story. Not only does he change Levi’s name to Matthew, but he seems to change the setting for the second part of our reading.

In Mark and Luke, we are told explicitly that Levi hosts a dinner where Jesus is in attendance, but Matthew completely leaves this detail out. Instead he says, And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. A lot of people simply assume that this is at Matthew’s house, perhaps borrowing from the similar stories in Mark and Luke, but if we don’t know those stories, Matthew’s telling and the grammar of the sentence both suggest that this is the house where Jesus stays in Capernaum.

I can’t help but think that the gospel writer decides to emphasize Jesus’ habit of socializing with tax collectors and sinners by having him invite them to his own house. This accentuates his conflict with the Pharisees. They are upset with him because he is actively cultivating relationships with people they think must be avoided, people they would never sit down to dinner with.

Many years ago, I visited a historic Presbyterian church, though I’ve forgotten its name and location. What I do recall was that they had a curio type cabinet that prominently displayed artifacts from the church’s history. There was an old pulpit Bible, old photos that showed the buildings at various times, old offering collection baskets, and a small number of what I later learned were communion tokens.

The idea of communion tokens goes all the way back to John Calvin who suggested them as a way of making sure nothing profaned the Lord’s table. During their use in American Presbyterian churches, communion was celebrated quite rarely, sometimes only a couple of times a year. Prior to such services, clergy and elders would visit the church members and question them on their understanding of church doctrine as well as determining if they were living good and upright lives. If they passed their examination, they were given tokens which had to be presented in order to receive communion.

I’ve never heard of a Presbyterian church that still uses such tokens, or that examines members in preparation for communion. In fact, our practices at the table have changed considerably during my lifetime. When I was growing up, only confirmed members could receive communion. When my children were young, that changed to say that baptized children who had received instruction in the meaning or communion were welcomed at the table. And in recent years the table has been opened to all.

The use of tokens and restrictions on who was allowed at the table were well intended. People wanted to make sure that the meaning of the Lord’s Supper didn’t get perverted or understood in a superstitious sort of way, but inevitably such restrictions made it seem like the table was open only to the worthy, which seems quite at odds with who Jesus invited to the table.

At the end of our scripture passage Jesus says, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” Jesus quotes the prophet Hosea. I don’t know that Hosea is speaking against sacrifice per se or any of the other rituals connected to worship or faith, but he and Jesus seem to think that mercy is the most important element.

The book we’re using for our Lenten study makes the point that “Jesus is the mercy of God in human form, never more so than when he eats with outcasts and welcomes all of us in our brokenness.”[1]

Worship is important, and how we worship matters. But what matters even more is that we radiate the mercy of God that in Jesus invites tax collectors and sinner to the table, that in Jesus practices a radical sort of hospitality that completely ignores the boundaries and barriers that we humans and our societies devise.

Whoever you are, however good or bad your story, Jesus calls you to follow, to go with him as a disciple. And he calls you, calls us as a church, to model his radical hospitality that continues to break down barriers and boundaries and to share God’s mercy with the world.



[1] Campbell, Cynthia M.; Coy Fohr, Christine. Meeting Jesus at the Table: A Lenten Study (p. 26). Presbyterian Publishing. Kindle Edition.

 

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