June 11th,  Second Sunday after Pentecost, Sermon by The Reverend Loree Reed

Genesis 12: 1–9
Romans 4: 13–25
Matthew 9: 9–13, 18–26
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

Last week, I got a couple of calls from our younger daughter Catherine, who had just received her DNA results from the test she’d sent to Ancestry.com.  She wasn’t surprised by all the English antecedents she saw there, and she’d always known something about her Baltic forebearers, from my dad’s side of the family.  But where, she wondered, did all the Swedish ancestry come from?  And why hadn’t her Scottish ancestors figured more prominently?
I guess we all want to know where we’ve come from and whose traits we share.  For none of us is in this enterprise — called life — all by ourselves.  We’re connected, one to another.  John Donne said it, memorably, back in the sixteenth century:
No man is an island, intire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse [for it] . .  .  [So,] any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde.
We are all involved in Mankinde. And it wasn’t just John Donne – back in the 16th century — who saw that.  The Lord God Almighty set things up that way — in the beginning — when he created Adam and Eve in His image.  He made them, you see, to resemble Him – in mercy and compassion and kindness —for He wanted them to be His agents in this brand–new world.  In fact, God the Father wanted to bless His whole Creation through Adam and Eve.  But you know what happened; Adam and Eve disobeyed God and wound up being evicted from the Garden of Eden and cursed instead of blessed.
But even that wasn’t the end of it, for disobedience continued in that family line from one generation to the next.  Until, finally, God the Father decided to wipe the slate clean and start over again with the one righteous man he could find — Noah and his family, gathered safely together in the Ark.  But even then, after the flood, the family of man wasn’t behaving in the righteous kindly ways God the Father had hoped for.
That brings us to our readings for this morning, where in Chapter 12 of the Book of Genesis, the Lord God begins to pin his hopes for yet another fresh start on Abraham.  For God the Father hasn’t given up on his beloved family.  Only it isn’t easy to see what distinguishes 75–year–old Abraham from anybody else around him – except that like Adam before him and Moses after him, this man walks and talks with God.  Better yet, he listens when God speaks.  And that, evidently, is all God requires.  So, at God’s direction, Abraham and Sarah set off for parts unknown, simply trusting that God is guiding their steps.  And because they trusted him, from those two, God was finally able to raise up a faithful community, a whole nation, in fact, called the Children of Israel.
Given this long history, I think it’s safe to say that God is always re–creating us, always trying to give us fresh new starts.  He’s always trying to guide us in the direction he wanted us to go in the first place — towards mercy and kindness and compassion towards one another.  These are the traits he wanted to pass on to us.  But some of us are slow to catch on when he corrects us.  For we think we already know what God wants.
That, in fact, is where the Pharisees were when Jesus came on the scene.  They knew what God’s Law said.  Most of them, in fact, had memorized it.  But they tended to apply that Law so strictly that no one could measure up to what they insisted were God’s requirements.  What they had left out, you see, was the mercy and compassion that was the essence of God’s own character, his intention towards the whole world.
So as Jesus comes on the scene in Matthew’s Gospel this morning, he’s going to try to capture the Pharisees’ attention in a new way.  He’s not going to tell them what they have missed, because he knows they aren’t likely to listen.  Instead, he’s going to act out God’s compassion and mercy right in front of them – in a way he hopes they can’t miss.
First, he sees Matthew sitting in the tax collector’s booth.  And he looks at him gently, mercifully.  In those days no one in Israel looked gently and compassionately at a tax collector.  They were the bottom feeders in that society, taking money from the poor and giving it to the occupying Roman forces.  So, no one liked them or respected them.  Everyone despised them.  No wonder Jesus’ gentle look at Matthew was all that man needed.  As soon as he heard Jesus say to him, “Follow me,” he was ready to get up and follow this kind rabbi to the ends of the earth.
Then, later that evening, when Jesus is having dinner at Matthew’s house, more tax collectors and disreputable types join them.  And once again, the Pharisees are outraged.  “What is your teacher doing,” they ask Jesus’ disciples, “consorting with this crowd?  What kind of example is he setting?”  Well, he is setting God’s own merciful example – but it would take his critics a while to see that.
But that evening Jesus hasn’t finished showing the Pharisees how differently God sees things.  For just then a leader of the synagogue approaches him and says, “My daughter has just died.  But if you will come and lay your hand on her, she will live.”  Matthew doesn’t explain how this father knew that, but Jesus isn’t asking for explanations.  He simply gets up and begins to follow the man to his house.
Before they can get there, though, there is yet another disruption.  A woman with an issue of blood, an affliction she has had for years, comes up behind Jesus and touches the fringe of his cloak.  Somehow, she too suspects if she can only touch his clothing, she will be healed.
Now, to us, neither of these appeals sounds extraordinary.  For we’ve grown used to the idea of Jesus as compassionate healer.  But to those Pharisees, both these appeals were outrageous.  For one thing, in that society a woman’s status was lower than low.  And a woman with an issue of blood – which rendered her ritually unclean according to the Law – should not even have appeared in a crowd – much less reached out to Jesus.  For even touching his clothes rendered him unclean too.  And finally, in the last example, the child too was female – so she hardly counted.  And if she had already died no one was to touch her – once again, for fear of contamination.
The counts against them all, according to the Law, multiply.  If they had ever done anything wrong, if they’d been born female, if they were sick, or God forbid, if they had died – according to the Pharisees, they were out of luck.  God was against them.
But Jesus, that evening, is redefining the Law, giving everyone a fresh new start.  He says he has come to heal the sick.  And he has – the physically sick, the morally sick . . . and the spiritually sick – the ones who are lacking in mercy and compassion.  And somehow, I think, that includes us all.
And the good news this morning is that he is here – right here among us.  We too can reach out and touch him — in praise, in prayer, in Communion.  We too can be healed.  For his healing power rests not in his clothes, but in his mercy.
Amen.
 
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