sermon-June 8

Sermon-Year A-4 Pentecost-Proper 5 –June 8, 2008
The Cloud of Unknowing,
"O God, our great companion, lead us ever more deeply into the mystery of your life and ours, that we may be faithful interpreters of that Life to each other, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen."
Every year close to Christmas, we invite the Trinity staff over on a Sunday afternoon. We talk, we eat, I give out gifts, and then I ask “the question”. (You have to understand Jenifer has been coming to these parties for over 20 years so she gets a little tired of “the question”.) The question changes every year, and I usually give it a fair amount of thought. Your favorite Christmas, what was your favorite gift, who do you miss the most. It varies. But I have found something out over the years, we don’t get asked “the question” very often in our lives-not legitimately, not because someone really wants to know. Lots of times people will ask, “the question” because they want to give us, “the answer”. This is really a favorite of clergy. Because I am going on sabbatical, and one of my goals is to listen to other people more, I have been using situations to ask people, “if you were given three months and a fair amount of money-what would you do.” At first, people can’t stop giving funny answers. But eventually, if I persist and let people know that I am serious, they will think about it. And this is my goal-to have people imagine, think, wonder. My hope is to push people into thinking about important things-to think about their lives, to think about themselves. When I was 19 and trying to party my way through college, someone actually began asking me “the question”. When someone finally asked me to think about something, that’s when my life began to change. Someone looked at me and said, “you’re better than this, who are you going to be?” That’s when my life changed. Someone took me seriously, someone asked me “the question”, someone wanted me to imagine a different kind of life.
Jesus is wandering through Israel. Walking along. He sees a man called Matthew, a tax collector. And he says to him, “Follow me.” And Matthew did. And it would cost Matthew his life. Jesus say and ate with Matthew, and I’ll bet you anything, he asked Matthew, “the question”. And Matthew followed him. What a moment that had to be, giving up his “so called” life because someone had finally taken him seriously. What we try to do in church, and fail way too often, is to say to people, “we take you seriously; who are you called to be?” And then wait-and see what answer is discovered. Usually when we say the words, “follow me” the next phrase someone will say, is “and I will make you fishers of people”. But here’s the question, who are you called to be. Jesus is always being praised for loving sinners. What do the Pharisees say today, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus never says, “leave them alone, they’re just doing their job.” He sits with them, eats with them, takes them seriously. He accepts them-but he loves them too much to leave them as they are. What question do you think he asked them?
The rest of the gospel doesn’t seem connected to the first part, except there’s one word. A leader of the synagogue comes to Jesus and tells Jesus that his daughter has died. And what does Jesus do? 19And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. To follow Jesus is to walk into situations that are difficult, hard, challenging. First Jesus meets a woman who has been bleeding for 12 years. Then he has to touch a little girl who is dead. Both experiences would have kept Jesus out of the temple for a long time-both times Jesus touched someone who was unclean-but he did not leave them as he found them. He healed the bleeding woman, he raised the little girl from the dead, and he called Matthew the sinner. All three times, Jesus walked into situations where people were unclean, ritually tainted, supposed to be ignored or abandoned by the community-and all three times he changed them. He did not run away, but he never left people the same.
God takes us more seriously than we take ourselves, imagine living a different kind of life, “you’re better than you think you are, who are you going to be, who are you going to follow?”