Feast of St. Matthew 2024: Matthew 9:9-13

Emmy winning comedy writer Michael Jamin has written for several well-known shows over the past 30 years, beginning with Just Shoot Me and continuing with King of the Hill and Rules of Engagement. When production slowed during Covid, he built a strong social media following with his videos on Tik Tok and Instagram. Sometimes he shares screenwriting tips, sometimes he opens residual checks, the payment writers receive when shows they’ve worked on rerun, where he’ll tell his audience “I don’t know why this works out to 41 cents, I’m just opening the check”, and sometimes he’ll share insider “tricks of the trade”. One of his videos that I found really interesting was on laugh tracks. People claim to hate laugh tracks. If you survey people on their opinions on laugh tracks, they will almost unanimously claim to have an unfavorable view of laugh tracks. However, there’s a reason they continue to be put in shows: because we are wrong. When sitcoms are audience tested with and without laugh tracks - same show - the version with the laugh track tests funnier.

It turns out we don’t actually know what we like. Because we see the same thing with fundraising. When you open Wikipedia, you have to scroll down to get past the message asking you to donate $2.75. The school year started with plenty of PTO fundraising. And, hopefully you’ve noticed, we’re in the midst of our annual stewardship campaign at St. Matthew’s. People claim to not like pledge drives. We grumble about scrolling down. We proclaim NPR “unlistenable”. We wonder why the church talks so much about giving over the course of our stewardship campaign; why we are reminded to pledge and to give so many times. And the answer is, if we aren’t reminded over and over and over again, we don’t give, even though we repeatedly visit Wikipedia pages, we love to see our children benefit from PTO supported projects, and we find spiritual peace, comfort, and growth in our churches. I’m sure most organizations don’t like repeatedly reminding us to give any more than we like being reminded. But in the same way that we need laugh tracks, we need fundraisers.

Today is an interesting day in the life of this parish. While we are in the midst of our own stewardship campaign, today is also the feast of our patron, St. Matthew, the patron saint of accountants and bankers. But Matthew was a tax collector. And therein lies the oxymoron. Matthew would not have been a popular man. As a tax collector, he would have been a Jew who would also have been seen as a collaborator with the Roman state; an extortioner who took money from his own people to further the cause of Rome and to line his own pockets. Tax collectors were spurned as traitors and outcasts. They were so abhorred that pious pharisees refused to marry into a family if a member of that family was a tax collector. But Jesus saw Matthew sitting at his tax booth - not just walking down the street, but clearly defined as he sat at his place of business. And Jesus called him to walk away and radically change his life. Jesus did not wait for Matthew to come to him. Jesus didn’t set up shop and hope to be found. He went and found his people. He recruited.

And Matthew paralleled the action Jesus modeled by his own activities post-resurrection. At the end of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus instructs his disciples to “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” While ancient sources differ in their lists of countries to which Matthew traveled, almost all of them mention Ethiopia. Ethiopia, where there can today be found one of the oldest contiguous Christian communities, which is remarkable alongside the distinction that Ethiopia is the only country in Africa that was never colonized by any European power. The Christianity there is as influenced as every church is by worldwide Christianity in all its expressions but it is very definitively Ethiopian, imported from nowhere.

Matthew’s ministry to those nations received funding. Paul was frequently asking for money that was sent back to the church in Jerusalem. And Jesus was funded. It’s not like Jesus was a trust fund kid. A lot of the named women in the Gospels were financiers. Jesus’ ministry was never without financial cost. Funny thing is, we like to spiritualize costs, and there is no question that there have always been spiritual costs to following Jesus. But, we often focus on the spiritual cost of following Jesus in order to avoid talking about money. Jesus’ ministry never cost $0. It is true that when Jesus sent his disciples out to proclaim the good news in Matthew 10, he instructed them not to take payment. Yet, he told them to enter the house and stay. So at the basic minimum they received room and board, even if they came away with no money in their pockets.

And, not only is Jesus dining with an abhorrent tax collector Matthew and his cohorts, he chooses to dine with “sinners.” Why the distinction?

Oftentimes today, we rebrand the word translated as “sinner” as being just someone who misses the mark. Which is technically right but misses the deeper implications in its attempt to tame sin and assuage our feelings of guilt. But the word in today’s scripture means much more. It has the implication of someone who’s missing the mark so badly that it’s like they aren’t even trying. They’re so far off that they can’t possibly be making an honest effort. Here, the choice of the word sinners is used as a contrast, as the opposite of the “righteous”, those who follow the Torah. Instead of recognizing that Jesus is merely naming two ends of a spectrum and knowing that most people fall somewhere between following the Law and not even trying, we read it like Jesus is naming two completely separate buckets we all need to be sorted into with no overlap and therefore we need to make our bucket better. Since when we read this text we typically easily recognize that we are not the “righteous” to whom Jesus is referring, when we have that bucket mentality then we need the “sinners” category into which we fall to not be that bad.

But the blessing of the church is that no matter where we fall in the spectrum between the “righteous” and the “sinner” at any time, the grace of God falls on all of us equally. This isn’t the Lied Center, where we’re sorted into “good friends” and “best friends” based on our level of donation. The blessing of the church is that the chalice isn't just for “top tier Christians”, we all drink out of the silver cup and we all get the same bread because all are equally valuable under the cross of Christ. 

As churches were figuring out how to observe the sacraments during Covid, there were places where people brought their own bread to be blessed for the Eucharist which set off HUGE alarm bells for sacramental theologians. Bringing one’s own defeats one of the points of receiving communion together with common elements. We can’t bring our own salvation. 

Fundraising for the church can become problematic if what is being communicated is that we’re selling salvation or that we’re selling grace. Because we aren’t, it’s not ours to sell. It is a freely given gift of God. But just as it did in Jesus’, and Matthew’s, and Paul’s day, the mission of the church has a measurable cost, in our hours and in our dollars. Sometimes it costs money to live our values. And as much as we don’t like it, we exist in the capitalistic society into which we were born, where it costs the same type of money to keep the lights on in the space where we worship the Lord as it costs to feed the hungry. And all of that can be a bummer. There are plenty of times when we might wish we didn’t have to participate in society. But checking out doesn’t make anything better. It is our duty as Christians to hold on to our hope for the world that we see embodied in our risen Lord. We have heard the good news of the redemption of Creation through the cross, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ and in that good news we have been compelled to follow Him as our Lord and Savior, to proclaim by word and example that good news of God in Christ, to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves, and to strive for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being, the righteous and sinners alike.

Some of this is free. Some of it ain’t. Amen.