Homily for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost - What We All Want

The Gospel -  Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

Homily by the Rev. Dr. David Smith

What We All Want

Despair, disease and death.  Not the most uplifting topics of conversation, but pretty common components of the human predicament and in the middle of all of them God shows up.

Matthew had had enough.  The money had lost its appeal.  He had plenty and was making more.  The cost of his wealth was higher than he could ever have imagined.  It was empty.  The worst thing that could have happened did - his people had ostracized him.  Though they couldn’t actually banish him from the town, they could dismiss him from their lives, and for a Jew, nothing is worse. 

Being part of the community, being blood Hebrew and embraced by all others with the same blood in their veins was the greatest joy of all, and now that was gone.  He couldn’t go to the synagogue.  The rabbis would not speak to him.  His own parents and siblings would have written him off.  He was dead to them. 

Matthew’s soul and body were not in the same place.  His body sat at the table in his tax office, but his soul, his real identity, was elsewhere.  He made a bad choice a long time ago and was paying for it.  He woke up every day feeling disconnected from himself.  It was a life of dissonance, as though a minor chord was playing in his head all the time. It made him wince.  It hurt, and he could not stop it.  He was sick and he was tired.

I had a friend a few years ago whose name was Richard.  He was a lawyer specializing in workman’s compensation claims.  He made a lot of money, lived in a wonderful home, drove a nice car, and was a member of the country club.  His children attended private schools and his wife was well coiffed and fit. 

Yet, just under the facade of contentment and privilege was melancholy.  I asked him why and the answer was simple.  “I hate being a lawyer.  I do not want to go to work.  I dislike being contentious and acrimonious all day.”  “What would you rather do?” I asked. 

“I want to teach high school history,” he said.  “I love history and teaching and being with young people.”  He was wistful.  “Why don’t you?” I asked.  “They [meaning his family] would never stand for it.  The train has left the station.  I can’t get off now.”   Richard was sick and he was tired.

The difference between Matthew and my friend Richard (who by the way had a son named Matthew) the difference between them was Matthew’s despair had reached a state of desperation.

Jesus said follow me, and Matthew did.  He had everything to gain and nothing to lose.

The woman with the medical problem was sick and tired too, literally.  She had been sick and tired so long she couldn’t remember not being sick and tired.  By this time, she suffered from severe chronic anemia.  She was weak with a rapid heart rate, rapid breathing, pale cold skin, jaundice, low blood pressure, heart murmur, enlargement of the spleen, fatigue, chest pain, abdominal pain, weight loss, weakness, dizziness and passing out, especially upon standing.

No matter what she or anyone else did, nothing worked.  She had tried to stay strong but energy was low and time was running out.  Despair had set in and she too was desperate. The life force was literally flowing out of her. 

And no matter the variety of test and trauma that may come our way, is there any greater than that of experiencing the death of one’s child?  We would do anything to prevent it.  We would gladly give our own lives; we would beg to die instead.  Can there be any darker veil fall on the human soul? And here was a man known to wield power, a ruler the story says, accustomed to getting his way and having life go his way, now powerless and pitiful; a portrait of ultimate despair and desperation. 

Despair, disease and death, and there is Jesus in the midst of them all.  However, the way he gets involved is interesting.  He walks by Matthew’s desk and says follow me and Matthew does, dropping everything in that moment and leaving it all.  Jesus was in the right place at the right time. 

Matthew was ready and it did not take any convincing on Jesus part.  Jesus did not have to cajole, entice, persuade or beg partly because his reputation had preceded him. Matthew may well have heard the Sermon on the Mount and knew of Jesus’ healing a leper and the centurion's servant and Peter's mother-in-law. Word of his casting out evil spirits, quieting an awful storm, and telling a man to get up and walk had not gone unnoticed. 

Matthew’s walking away was not on a whim.  It was considered; the despair was overwhelming, the reason was compelling and the time was right.  Jesus had something to offer.

It was a bit different for the sick woman and the grieving father.  Jesus did not come to them; they came to him.  Again, fully aware of what he had already done, their arrival was not whimsical, but considered and planned.  “If I can just touch his clothes” she thought, and then worked diligently to get herself close enough, to put herself in position.

And the grief numbed father too had to leave the comfortable confines of his home, get in the streets, mingle with the common crowd with no special privilege or fanfare, no one getting out of his way because he was important.

Was it purely the distress that drove them to act?  Were they so desperate that they would have done anything?   Were despair, disease and death the primary motivators?  I don’t think so. 

What prompted Matthew, the sick woman and the grieving father was not darkness, but rather hope.  Hope that something could be done. Hope that life would be better. Hope that dissonance, disease and death were not God’s fate for them and the rest of us.

There are no hopeless situations; there are only people who have grown hopeless about them.  Hope, means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. As long as life is going along swimmingly, hope is just flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength. When you say a situation or a person is hopeless, you are slamming the door in the face of God.

These three people are not illustrations of life gone badly, but rather hope.  Hope that if they answered God’s call or put their trust and confidence in God’s care that God would respond; and they were not disappointed.  Their hope was the door through which Jesus walked. It was the portal through which God intervened in their lives and brought meaning, healing and new life. 

If that is so for individuals, it is also true for all humankind, and the door of hope through which God arrives is the church.  If people with hope receive blessings, then the world receives the same blessings through communities of hope.  That’s what we are supposed to be. 

But, so much valuable time is spent in fighting, self-criticizing, finger pointing, arguing among ourselves, being angry and splitting apart that we don’t have energy to be hopeful.  

In Frederick Buechner’s novel “The Final Beast,” there is a scene in which a church member is begging the priest to declare forgiveness to a very disturbed woman in their church.  The priest says that the woman already knows that he has forgiven her, to which the other member replies, “But she does not know God forgives her. 

“Father, that is the only power you have.  To tell her not just that God forgives the adultery, but that God forgives her for being bored and not being delighted with a house full of great kids.  Tell her that whether she knows it or not what she wants more than anything else is true. She is forgiven; there is hope.

“Come on Father, what on earth do you think you were ordained to do?” 

That goes for all of us.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,

Amen.