Out & About: Unlikely Disciple

Matthew 9:9-13,18-26

“Unlikely Disciple”

Jesus asks Matt the Tax Collector to be his disciple. The hemorrhaging woman touches Jesus’ cloak and is healed. Jesus raises the young daughter from the dead. Whew! There is a lot going on in this passage. Again and again, we see Jesus in the world seeking, teaching, and healing those burdened and cast aside without qualification.

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Trinity.

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June 7th, 2026. Our main reading today is Matthew chapter 9, verses 9 through 26. Years ago, I was riding my bike and saw a friend on the other side of the street. As we passed each other, I waved to her, waved to her across the traffic, and while I was waving, my front tire lodged in a crack in the cement. My bike stopped moving, but I did not. I flew over my handlebars. I hit the ground hard enough to knock all the wind out of me. The force of me flying over the handlebars dislodged the front tire from the crack. And so while I was lying there, breathless, my bike ran over me. Laying there on the sidewalk, bleeding, unable to speak, I waited for my friend. Finally, I was able to turn my head, and she was just further down the street than before. My friend had never seen any of it. She never saw me waving at her, flying over my handlebars, or getting run over by my own bike. So often, nobody knows when we are flying over our own handlebars. So often nobody sees when we get the wind knocked out of us. For some of us, like the hemorrhaging woman, there are moments you know help is not coming. So you get up and you go find it yourself. And then there are people who get help when their child needs help. Like the leader in our gospel reading. They will exhaust every possibility, even after death, to do right by that child. They will seek out the extraordinary. There are some people who don't go looking for help at all. They're all set. They're often good people with nice houses and mini friends whose lives enable evil, who have jobs that do terrible, multi-generational damage to the world. Like the tax collector Matthew. These folks are not flying over their handlebars. They are not even riding a bike. The car service picked them up and they're on their way to the airport and they'll meet you at the reunion. Our scripture today has a lot going on. We have three people who decide to engage Jesus. One even becomes a disciple. Over the next five weeks, we'll be exploring themes of discipleship in our sermon series, Out and About. Each week, our scripture story invites us to think about the call of Jesus and our response, our active response to grace. We are also considering how each of our gospel writers tells the good news in their own way. All of this is unfolding in the Christian season of ordinary time. Now we are in the first week of ordinary time. The liturgical color is green. The theme is slow in steady growth. Ordinary time is a time of counting. Think ordinal numbers. One, two, three. Ordinal, ordinary, counting. From the Latin word order which means order. Ordo is also related to the word ordinance in both senses. A town ordinance is a law that orders the life of the town. And a military ordinance originally referred to anything that was a part of a provision or ordered arrangement of weapons and supplies provided to soldiers. Ordo. Order. Ordinary time is life unfolding in order. In the season of ordinary time, we are counting the long stretch of weeks until Advent, the season before Christmas. Different churches count the weeks of ordinary time differently. Each week of ordinary time is called a proper. And these proper weeks pop up even before the full season of ordinary time begins. So some churches, like the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, start counting at the beginning of the year. Mainline liturgical churches, you know, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, others, peg proper week number one, or proper one, to the second week of May. The second week of May is the earliest possible time we could enter into the full season of ordinary time if Easter comes super early that year. The way we count our propers here in the Methodist Church is a shortcut. This simplified calendar also frees us from the complexity of feast day calculations around the ancient and special celebrations Protestants don't typically mark. We might say that feast days are, in air quotes, out of the ordinary. Literally, they break the orderly unfurling of ordinary time in the Christian calendar. For example, last week was a celebration of the body of Christ, communion, in many Roman Catholic and Anglican churches. It's a special annual celebration tied to the timing of Easter, the Ascension, Pentecost, and Trinity Sunday. Today, we here in the Methodist Church are celebrating our regular communion. At this church, it happens the first Sunday of the month, any regular old Sunday. We are not celebrating the body of Christ as a special day. All of this is to say we are part of a vast and deep faith tradition. Every generation is entitled and required to reshape the faith so it remains vibrant and relevant. For some, that is a turn back into tradition. For others, that's a turn towards new forms and formats. For Methodists, each generation is invited back to fill our plates at the potluck buffet of the Christian faith. All the Christian practices and understandings, ancient to contemporary, are out on the table. So, as always, I encourage you to fill your plate with what brings you closer to Christ. And yet, despite that diversity, here we all are, all the Western churches, in ordinary time. Whether or not we mention it or celebrate it, we are all sitting here on the far side of the same Easter Sunday, moving towards the same December 25th Christmas Day. Well, ordinary time is counted differently across Christian traditions. For liturgical churches using the Revised Common Lectionary, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Anglicans, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, United Church of Christ, Reformed Church, and even the occasional Baptist or Evangelical Church, our lectionary scripture readings are almost always the same. Again, in ordinary time, each week is called a proper. And each proper comes with a list of scripture readings and a theme. So for those of us who start counting off propers in the second week of May, and for those who don't, welcome to the first Sunday of Ordinary Time. Welcome back to the color green. And welcome to Matthew chapter 9. The Gospel of Matthew was written 40 to 60 years after Jesus died. It was probably written down by someone familiar with the Gospel of Mark. For Matthew, Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. First, Matthew makes sure we understand how Jesus is like Moses. In Deuteronomy 18, 15, Moses promises that God will raise up, quote, a prophet like me, unquote. Matthew wants us to know Jesus is that prophet. How is Jesus like Moses? He leads people to their freedom. He interprets God's law for human ears. He organizes his followers. He sets rules around behavior and community. He leaves earthly life before the promised land is reached, before all have realized the kingdom of heaven. We might think of Christ as that kingdom. Second, Matt wants you to notice that the story of Jesus is the story of God and the Jewish people. So Jesus' major teachings are presented in five blocks with themes that mirror the five books of Moses and Moses himself. Matthew affirms the reality of the resurrection not only with his story of Jesus, but with the structure of that story. Jesus' main teachings move from mountain to town to water to town and back up to mountain, matching the movements of a Jewish Messiah with God in heaven, on earth, in death, on earth, and back with God. So when we are reading Matthew, we are reading about Jesus, the Messiah who fulfills Jewish scripture by being like Moses, with teachings that align with the books of Moses, and with a story arc that reflects the story of the fully divine and fully human resurrected Messiah. Today we are reading from Matthew 9. Notice in today's gospel reading that Jesus is out in the world and he is calling students to him, healing those who have faith in his power, and restoring people to life. Our reading from Matthew is packed. And there's this quibble going on too about Jesus eating with sinners. What I would like you to notice here is Jesus' presence, even before anyone decides to touch his cloak or to seek him out to resurrect a dead child or to follow him. Jesus is a loving agent in the world, ready to interact when he is sought out. This is our reminder that Jesus seeks the willing, not the quote-unquote worthy. This is a distinctive detail. The willingness is obvious in the hemorrhaging woman and the leader whose child has died. The woman realized help was not coming and she was willing to go and find it. She didn't need to be religious or knowledgeable. She just needed to be willing to go find Jesus, saying, if I only touch his cloak, I will be made well. The leader was the kind of family person who would exhaust all possible options to heal his child. He was willing to try everything, even Jesus. He didn't need to be religious or knowledgeable. He just needed to ask Jesus for his help. My daughter has died, but come and lay your hand on her and she will live. Matthew is also willing. Now Matthew is a tax collector. Tax collectors at that time got a cut of the taxes they collected, and they often extorted and defrauded people legally. That was a perk of the job. Tax collectors lined their pockets by making the world a worse place. Matt is someone maligned, but wealthy. He has made a deal with empire. He will make his life a little bit easier by making life harder for others. I mean, somebody's going to be doing the job. Why not him? Jesus invited even Matthew to join him in his ministry. Matthew's willingness is different than the woman and the leader. He isn't charged with desperation like the other two. Matt's all set and quite comfy. But Matthew is still willing. And just like the leader and the woman, Matthew didn't need to be a religious person. He didn't need to know his Bible. He didn't need to have his beliefs all worked out. Though clearly he did get it worked out at some point. We have a gospel attributed to him, one likely written by a second or third generation follower who combined the oral accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Peter. But Matthew did not need to have it all worked out. He just needed to be willing to answer the call of provenient grace. He just needed to get up and follow Jesus when the invitation came. Jesus responds to willingness. He does not demand we be worthy. For Jesus, there is no concept of worthy. One is worthy of Jesus merely by being alive. In our reading today, from Proper 5, each of these three people, the woman and the leader and Matthew, were already in the presence of God's love. Jesus was out on the street doing his thing. And before they turned towards Jesus, each was already worthy of that love. This is prevenient grace. Provenient grace is God's love for us before we even know there is a God. Jesus seeks everyone. If we turn toward him, he turns back towards us. And he keeps on loving us even if we turn away. God's love is unconditional. Provenient grace means we are always beloved and always worthy of God's love. A love beyond measure and without regret. Prevenient grace means we cannot make ourselves unworthy of the unconditional love of God. And if we could, that love would not be unconditional. And that's not possible. The hemorrhaging woman and the leader turning to Jesus make sense. They are both desperate. Matthew does not make sense. He is an unlikely disciple. He is not desperate. And Jesus seeks him out. Jesus extends God's love even to an agent of Caesar. Because everybody is loved by God. Everybody. And if everybody is loved by God no matter what, executives who make big bucks creatively exploiting legal loopholes to sell weapons and surveillance technologies to foreign dictators, work that oppresses billions of people are loved by God. And the hedge fund middle managers playing shell games, burying rural hospitals in debt that forces them closed, work that literally kills people are loved by God. And the managers who structure layoffs to, finger quotes, earn a fatter annual bonus. Work that strips people of livelihood are loved by God. And the trading house executives making themselves a mint by changing the IPO rules so the indexed retirement accounts of the middle class will lose money to make Twitter investors whole. I don't know if you've been watching the news. These trading house executives, whose work moves financial pain from those who can't absorb a loss to those who cannot are loved by God. And lawyers who defend terrible and abusive corporate managers by threatening sexually harassed employees with countersuits to force them to settle out of court, work that enables abuse and abusers are loved by God. If all of these people, many of whom I have known personally, many of whom I have loved, who are not malicious people, they are people pursuing secure jobs, wealth, and status that our society tells them will keep their families safe in a society without a floor, if all these people who are not bad people, yet lose no sleep over the fact their well-paid work effectively kills, oppresses, and impoverishes millions, if all these people, like Matthew the tax collector, are loved by God and invited, despite it all, into a relationship, surely I am too. And so are you. God loves that person too. That is how radical an invitation God is extending with provenient grace. The fact that Jesus invites Matthew, who has harmed an entire community, to follow him tells me Jesus' call is far more radical than we can imagine. Jesus is interested in our willingness, not our worthiness. Amen. A little word for the road this week. People get wrapped around the axle about worthiness and sin, particularly in churches. This week I invite you to consider how Jesus dining with the unclean and with sex workers and outcasts. In other words, this week I invite you to consider how Jesus dining with people on the business end of legal injustice, whose greatest harm is often harm to themselves, is actually way less gracious than the grand expanse of grace God offered Matthew, whose life's work directly harm an entire community. And God's grace is still grander than that. Greater than we can imagine. And this week I invite you to think of all the ways you think you are unworthy of love, unworthy of Christ. The ways you have fallen short. And then I invite you to think of Matthew again. And remember, you are worthy and beloved just by being alive. And if you get into an embarrassing, non-serious accident, please do call me. I want to hear all about it.

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