FOUNDATIONS FOR PEACE

MARK 2:13-17
January 21-23, 2012
Second weekend after Epiphany
Pastor Tim Smith

Podcast: Download (Duration: 19:37 — 18.0MB)

January 22, 2012 – Sermon from Saint Pauls on Vimeo.

Summary: The two points to keep in mind here are the grace of Jesus’ call—to ask a tax collector to join him, which was beyond belief to the Pharisees and a selection that was unspeakable. To call Galilean fishermen was to them a poor choice and maybe comical, but a trusty of the Romans like a tax collector? Unspeakable. Worse than David dancing before the ark.
The second point is the response of Matthew himself, who gave up everything—everything—to follow Jesus. In the eyes of the Romans and of the other tax collectors, Matthew had thrown away his franchise and his income; he may even have committed a crime in the eyes of some by walking away from his booth.
Jesus reached out to us all, despite our sins, and called us into his fellowship. This didn’t lessen Jesus in any way (as the Pharisees thought it would). Rather, it raised all of us. What will our response be?

Children’s devotion: Many kinds of medicine for many sicknesses. Jesus is the only medicine for the sickness of our sins. Nothing else—no one else—could ever cure us. But because of Jesus, we have healing and eternal life in heaven.

13 Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to him, and he began to teach them. 14 As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him. 15 While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and “sinners” were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. 16 When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the “sinners” and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and ‘sinners’?” 17 On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (NIV)

This story has three points of view, like three different cameras recording the same scene. One perspective shows us Jesus, with the crowd all around, walking along and teaching, and coming deliberately up to Matthew’s tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus says.

Another perspective shows us Matthew himself—he’s called Levi in our text, but we’re more familiar with his name “Matthew” because he wrote the first Gospel and we call it by that name. There he was, doing his job which was distasteful and hateful to many of his countrymen, but he was just trying to make an honest living—okay, a living, anyway. Then the Savior himself approached him. Matthew didn’t hesitate a second when Jesus invited him. To Matthew, did it sound more as if Jesus had said “Follow me instead”?

But there’s another perspective here, one that we’re shown a lot of in this chapter. That’s the point of view of the Pharisees. They were astonished at Jesus’ choice. Imagine what the Pharisees thought about Jesus. They weren’t pastors, the Pharisees. They were laymen, although some of them were well-educated, and some of the Pharisees were scribes, some were Levites; some were priests. But most of them were not. But all them were into a kind of “in your face” separation from most people.

The Pharisees wanted to make themselves holy and to be sure of their sanctity for God’s service, and so they didn’t associate with anybody who didn’t live up to their standards. For the Pharisees, that meant that they didn’t associate with many people at all, at least not people who weren’t also Pharisees.

Before this, the Pharisees eyes opened wide when Jesus called three or four Galilean fishermen o be his special disciples. It wasn’t a choice any of them would have made. It was almost silly, like a world-class conductor announcing the new orchestra he’s going to form, and then watching him start with the local middle school band and a guy he finds on a street corner playing the harmonica.

But to call a Tax Collector! This isn’t silliness. This is something else. This is unspeakable. Disgusting. This was an enemy of the people, as the Pharisees saw it. How could Jesus call a man like Matthew?

Let’s look at what Matthew was, and what he left. In the winter of 1990, the restaurant where I worked was sold. It was a national chain restaurant—a franchise. A franchise is a large corporation and it sells the daily local operations of its business to many different people—all of whom pay the overall corporation a fee for whatever it is the corporation gives them—in our time, that’s usually the trademark of a well-known company like the one I used to work for. But franchises in Roman times bought other things, like legal rights to operate.

That’s what happened with tax collecting. Palestine had three main tax-collecting centers in Jesus’ day: Caesarea, Jericho, and Capernaum. Matthew worked a booth in Capernaum. The main tax-collector, who once was called of all things a “farmer general” would buy the rights to collect all taxes in his region. He couldn’t do all the work himself. He couldn’t even oversee all the cities and towns. So he would sell the rights to tax individual cities and towns or clusters of villages to district “chief publicans,” who would then hire lower ranking “publicans” or tax collectors to actually collect the taxes. The lower-ranking men—like Matthew, for example—had to pay large fees and meet a quota, and they faced increases all the time, and they probably suffered from all the symptoms of stress that we’re aware of today. Their bosses had to send money up the chain to their higher bosses, who had to send the taxes to Rome.

That means that when Matthew got up to follow Jesus, he left behind his business. Now, you might think “Sure—Peter, James, John and Andrew were all fishermen, and they left their businesses behind for Jesus, too.” But we see those men getting into a boat later on and doing a little fishing here or there. They could always start up again, as long as there was a boat to rent and people to buy fish. But Luke’s Gospel tells us that Matthew “left everything” (Lk 5:28). He couldn’t go back once he abandoned his franchise. His whole way of making a living was done forever. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Matthew made enemies of the Romans on this day.

Matthew’s sacrifice for Jesus was like the one made by the widow of Zarephath when the prophet Elijah asked her to give him something to eat. She had only enough for her own last meal and that of her son. Once she gave it to Elijah, there was nothing more she could ever get as far as she knew. Matthew gave Jesus everything by giving up everything he had to follow him.

We could all dig into our lives and think of things that are gifts of God that we would surely give up to keep hanging on to Jesus. What child wouldn’t think of a favorite toy? What sports fan wouldn’t cringe deep down to ask: Would I give up football for Christ? Many of us would gladly lay down our very lives if it meant staying faithful to our Savior.

But what about our sins? What about the things we know we shouldn’t think, we know we shouldn’t do. Those things that are private temptations that we’re terrified even to mention when we’re silently confessing our sins to God—we know he knows. We know he’s aware of them, but when we come to him in prayer, we’re terrified to mention our unmentionables even in the private silence of our thoughts, where even the devil can’t go, but God knows. God is there. Do yo keep confessing a certain sin, do keep asking forgiveness for that sin, but then you go back and keep on embracing that sin?

Would you give it up? Would you hand over even the private contents of your heart and make your conscience as truly clean and straightened up and as inviting as your would make your own living room for an important guest?

Jane Goodall is a research scientist from Great Britain, but she lives and works in the Africa nation of Tanzania. Why? The answer seems simple enough: Jane Goodall researches the habits and the lives of chimpanzees, and Tanzania is where the chimps are.

Jesus Christ did not come into the world to research the human race. He already knew all about us; he already knew our greatest need, and he brought the antidote for our otherwise incurable disease. Jesus came to earth, because we carry around sin in our hearts, and because we’re the ones who are so very sick.

Jesus is the medicine that helps us to see beyond our turned-up Pharisee noses and gets us to get the gospel out beyond our comfort zones and into hearts that are dying to hear it. Jesus is the medicine that had cured the death grip of our sinful hearts and minds and has ripped our tag-along temptations from our clinging fingertips and turned us with clean hands and hearts to our Savior God. Jesus is the Physician, the Cure, the Nurse, the Neurosurgeon and Jesus is the whole hospital itself for our sins. Apart from him we would have nothing, but with him, with the one who carried us into his recovery room and who has given us the permanent IV’s of the sacraments—with Jesus our great Physician, we have hope and peace and eternal life.

MATTHEW 2:9-11
Epiphany
January 7-9, 2012
Pastor Tim Smith

Podcast: Download (Duration: 20:51 — 19.1MB)

Jan 8, 2012 Sermon from Saint Pauls on Vimeo.

They went on their way, and the star they had seen in the eastern sky went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. 11 On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh. (NIV)
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9 Or seen when it rose.

(A) Who were they? The name “Magi” might make you think of “magic,” and the words are related, but really the “Magi” are better described a “Wise Men,” men of great learning and understanding, men who thought and pondered great mysteries of the universe. They watched and named the stars and the planets, and there was hardly a thing on earth that they didn’t think about and catalog and consider.

When the prophet Daniel was in exile in Babylon—which became Persia while Daniel was there—he was elevated to being the chief of the Magi, the head of this order. It’s no wonder that they were looking for the Messiah or that they understood who and what he would be when he came. Through Daniel, the Magi would have known about the prophecies about the Messiah in the books of Genesis, Isaiah, Micah, and the Psalms. Through Daniel’s faith, the wisdom of Magi became true, godly wisdom.

We don’t know, though, how well that wisdom was passed down from generation to generation for the five centuries or so after Daniel’s time. But nevertheless, a few of these wise men did come when the time was right, expecting to find the Messiah born somewhere in the distant West, in the land of Judea by the Sea—from Daniel’s own country. And so they came.

(B) From Jerusalem to Bethlehem. The first Gospel tells us that the wise men went first to Jerusalem, and our text picks up the story as they leave for Bethlehem. It’s worth noticing that nothing at all is said about them leaving gifts with King Herod. They treated Herod more like a passerby on the street, leaning out the car window: “Hey buddy, can you tell me where the King Messiah is born?” Herod shrugged, literally and proverbially, and his own wise men—not nearly as wise as these Gentiles from the East—pointed to Bethlehem.

Bethlehem was the birthplace of King David, but even after David’s time it never grew into a large or important city. It was a little town, a cluster of houses around a well, but the prophet Micah had foreseen that this was the village where the Savior would be born.

The wise men continued their journey, and whether on camel’s back, horseback, in wagons, or on foot—we’re not actually told how they traveled or how many of them came—they would have traveled the five miles south to Bethlehem in no time at all. That is, after all, just the distance from St. Paul’s out to MVL.

(C) Guided by the star. The star that led the wise men appeared, as they said themselves, “in the east.” Opinions about the Star of Bethlehem have abounded from the earliest days of Christianity, and such notable astronomers as Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler—both Lutherans, incidentally—concluded that the Star of Bethlehem was not a natural star, nor a conjunction of either stars or planets, nor was it a comet, a nova, a supernova, or a meteor. None of these explain the phenomenon described in simple language in the Gospel of Matthew. We are left to conclude—and this is the best conclusion we can make—that the Star of Bethlehem was a miraculous rather than a natural phenomenon, and that the Magi were alerted to its significance by some means unknown to us. Whatever the reason that they followed the star, it led them to the very house where the infant Jesus and his family were staying following his birth.

(D) And there, when they found him at last, they were overjoyed. These Gentile scholars and travelers bowed down and worshiped. They were men who had never read Paul, who didn’t know the Christmas story as we do, who were still thirty years ahead of John the Baptist. To them, was the Old Testament one of many good books? Did they mix their curiosity in the Savior with curiosity in things detestable to God? They were Gentiles, Gentiles like most of us, and although they never sat for a Sunday school lesson, never went to Lutheran Elementary School, never turned the pages or little doors of an Advent calendar, they did know that something special was here.

A little late for Christmas, missing the manger scene but finding the infant Jesus and his family living a little house in the little town of Bethlehem, they opened their gifts for the Lord.

The gifts we give are seldom as well thought-out as these gifts were. The gifts we give are seldom as precious or treasured as much as these gifts were. We can’t help but imagine the wise men bow down in this little house in Bethlehem, a chair and a bench scrape on the floor as the family makes room for the wise men crowding in the little kitchen—Mary and the baby probably by a little hearth, the firelight glinting on the latches of the treasures as they open them up to show Joseph and Mary what they want the baby to have—and what is it we bow down before the Lord with? Do we hesitantly open a wallet? Do we scramble on Sunday morning to find the envelopes for church? Do we grudgingly look at our calendars before we offer our time? Do we hesitate before we commit to or even consider a task for the church? Or do we sometimes hold back our service because we think, “Someone else has more time,” or “I’m not going to waste my time doing that because no one else will come.”

But what the Lord asks of us is that we serve, and that we give—not judge what we think he will or won’t accomplish with our time, with our service, with our offerings. And if our consciences are pricked a little thinking of strangers offering their wealth and their eagerness to Jesus when we keep holding back, then the Law of God is doing its holy work in our sometimes limping faith, our struggle with sanctification, and turning us back to him in forgiveness, peace, and love. This scene in a little house in the little town of Bethlehem is an invitation to all of us to bow down and offer our gifts of thanks and praise to God, to God incarnate, Immanuel—God With Us—who came in the body of a newborn baby, to be treasured as God’s greatest gift to us.

As we ponder the infant baby in his mother’s arms, our minds—my mind, at least—often ponders two sides of the miracle. First, that God would become human and set aside some of his power just to be able to be like us. And Second, that there in Mary’s arms was a tiny, seven-pound bundle of cuteness with the tiny fingers and toes and the little bouts of cuteness that babies so effortlessly perform—and yet here was God, vulnerable, able to be hurt, able to be ill, able to be heartbroken, able to be tired, able to be exhausted, able to be sad, able to weep, able to be harassed and helpless like all of creation, the Maker who became part of what he Made, like a great artist giving up his life and entering into the very canvass he had labored over so much, to save those whom he had painted there. But we are no paintings—yet the great Artist came to rescue us, to save us from our world, from our Enemy and even from ourselves.

What do we offer him in thanks?

(E) The three treasures we see from these Magi are written forever on the tablets of our hearts: Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh.

We might want to think of these gifts in terms of what they would mean to us, but when we do that, their meaning gets lost in the differences of our cultures.

GOLD was given to him, and throughout the Bible gold is most often associated with royalty—a gift of gold because Christ is King. It’s true that the tabernacle was filled with gold as well, but that was before Israel had a human king of any kind, and so the gold was reserved for God.

INCENSE, or FRANKINCENSE, was used almost exclusively in worship. We still sing today: “Let my prayers rise before you as incense.” In the Song of Solomon we also read about all three of these gifts being used in connection with weddings—the incense was part of the wedding procession through the streets of a city or town. But mostly we see incense being burned to depict prayer ascending to God in worship. So there was a gift of incense because Christ is to be worshiped as God.

MYRRH was a very strong perfume, and when mixed with wine and drunk, dulled pain like an anesthetic, and we see it used this way at Jesus’ own crucifixion (which Jesus refused to drink, by the way). And then it was used in burials, as small chunks of myrrh were placed between the strips of linen as a dead body was wrapped for burial—most cultures including the Jews did not as a rule embalm as we do or as the Egyptians did. So there was a gift of Myrrh because Christ’s sacrificial death was also prophesied in the Old Testament.

The Magi recognized the baby Jesus as a King, as truly God, and as the Messiah, the Christ, who would take away the sins of the world. That’s how they worshiped him, that’s how they treasured him.

(F) To the Magi and even through the Magi, Jesus was revealed as the Savior of the World. He came as a gift to us; the wise men brought their gifts to him, and how can we do less than offer up our whole lives as gifts to him, who came into the world to take away our sins? He gave us the peace of God…