RVCC Pastor's Sermon

Sermon - June 8, 2008

“Doctor, Doctor, Give Me the News”

By Rev. Nancy Foran
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

When our daughter, Heather, was young, she had a yellow cotton nightgown with a large, quite ferocious looking wild animal on the front of it. Framing the beast were the words, “I’m a bear in the morning.” And that was true! Before her breakfast, Heather was more like the main character in “The Taming of the Shrew” than the adorable and compliant baby I had given birth to three years previously.

One Saturday morning, Heather was a bit crankier than usual – even after she had gobbled down her eggs, two pieces of toast with crunchy peanut butter, orange juice, and a large glass of milk. As she was finishing up, she mentioned in passing that she had a “little sore throat.”

Not giving it too much thought, I told her that she probably was getting a cold and had been breathing through her mouth all night, causing it to be dry. However, because I was a cautious new Mom, I took her temperature anyway – and discovered that she had a low grade fever as well.

Being first time parents, Joe and I felt that those vague symptoms merited a call to the physician on-duty that weekend (it is never your own pediatrician, but you know that!), which resulted in a trip later that morning to the doctor’s office. The doctor took one look down Heather’s throat and then gave me one of those piercing stares that made me feel like a very inept and totally useless Mom.

“Well, I don’t even have to do a culture,” the doctor announced. “This is one of the worst cases of strep throat I have ever seen. I am astounded that this child has been able to eat anything at all.”

And I thought of the orange juice, the hot scrambled eggs, and the crisp toast complete with crunchy peanut butter. A “little sour throat”?

Sometimes you do not know when you are sick. Sometimes you do not know when you need to see a physician. Sometimes you do not know just how much you hurt, how much your heart needs healing, how much your soul needs shalom/wholeness.

That is part of the truth that the Gospel writer, Matthew, proclaimed when he strung together three little seemingly disconnected stories about Jesus and the rabbi’s relationship with the displaced, disliked, and down trodden strata of Jewish society that he always seemed to hang around the dinner table with.

The first vignette is the story of Jesus’ calling Matthew (another Matthew, not the Gospel writer) to be one of his disciples. Now this Matthew was different from Peter and Andrew, James and John, the ones that Jesus picked up at the docks as they were about to set their fishing boats a-sail. Matthew was not a man of the sea. He was a tax collector.

Inconsequential in his own right, he was a little man who had a job where he could really push people around. As Luke Bouman writes, “With a Roman soldier on either side he had the right to enforce the taxes and the means to skim a bit off the top for himself. But to his own people he would have been a traitor, a disgrace to his family,…and he certainly would not have been welcome in a synagogue or yeshiva school. In fact, the rules of collaboration were strict. Those who attended to the taxes of the infidel occupation army were considered as dead. This “shunning” would have rendered Matthew a non person in first century Israel.”

The second little story is about a woman who had been bleeding for twelve long years, non-stop. Now, to be set apart and shunned because you are ritually unclean for a few days every month – OK, maybe that was acceptable, maybe that was part and parcel of being a woman in ancient Israel. But twelve years? Talk about being pushed to the very distant fringes of society. For her there was no room even in the women’s area of the temple; she was always on the outside. With no possibility of a husband either and no children to love and care for, this nameless woman was relegated to begging as a way of life and was probably even worse off than the most impoverished widow. She did not stand a chance. Like Matthew the tax collector, she was someone else who simply did not matter.

And the final tale is about a religious leader, someone you would have thought would be far removed from the displaced and down-and-out, but he wasn’t. He was as dislocated spiritually and emotionally as Matthew the tax collector and the nameless bleeding woman because he had a terminally ill child whose fragile hold on life was going, going, and now gone. She was dead. As only a father could, he searched for help. Like any of us, he was desperate enough that he would practically sell his soul to bring that little girl back to life again.

There you have it. Three little tragic tales of hopelessness. Matthew the Despised. The Down-and-Out Bleeding Woman. The Despairing Dad. Each one of them, in his or her own way, was grasping at straws and willing to do just about anything to find dignity, acceptance, and even life itself. And Matthew the Gospel writer tells us that for all three, there came to be a way out.

There was Matthew – finally realizing that he could actually push aside his Roman body guards and leave behind his tax collector booth without once looking back. He fairly leapt at the opportunity to follow this itinerant preacher, Jesus - someone he knew next to nothing about, but something about the rabbi made his heart beat faster and his whole being fill with – could it be? Hope? Hope that there was something more to life than trampling the dreams of those around you?

There was the nameless bleeding woman – after 12 long years finally understanding that she did not even need to talk to Jesus, no, if she could just get close enough to touch his robe, to make that tenuous connection, she would be healed.

In the very act of standing on her faith, she is falling on her knees, reaching, reaching, almost there, just a little bit further, until her unclean fingers close around the dusty muslin of his cloak, and tears - first of hope and then of joy and relief - fall from her eyes.

And finally there was the desperate father, having waited too long and wasted too many years, willing to do anything now, anything to bring his daughter back. Willing even to storm down the narrow streets and byways in broad daylight – where is he? I must find him. Seeking out his one last thread of hope, he pursues the renegade rabbi, who was already fast ending up on the bad side of both the Jewish religious leadership and the Roman authorities. Come, come, I do not care who you are. Come and follow me home and make my precious little one open her eyes and smile and live again.

Sometimes you do not know that you need a doctor – until it seems to be too late. Sometimes you just wake up one morning and realize that your whole world is about to fall apart – that carefully constructed house of cards is destined to come tumbling down. And so you reach out in the darkness – because there is nothing else left to do.

"Faith," says the theologian, Frederick Buechner, "is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp." But it is a hand that longs to touch all that is broken and failed, to gather up lives -- even successful lives -- which on some days seem like worthless trash (Barbara Lundblad).

Oh, it may not have happened to you yet. Your life may be right on track. You have a great job – hey, you have a job. Your children and grandchildren are fine. Hey, you have children and grandchildren. Your finances are just where you planned for them to be, and your pension fund is bursting at the seams. Hey, you can pay the bills and you have a pension fund.

But someday – someday even you may desperately need a physician. Your spouse may leave you for someone younger, smarter, and more glamorous. Your child may get sick and even linger close to death. Your money may not go far enough – and you will feel desperate – like Matthew who walked away from everything he knew, like the woman who grasped at a bit of dirty fabric, like the man who searched high and low for life itself.

And then what? Well, maybe that is when you remember the three disconnected characters that the Gospel writer Matthew weaves together for us. As Ann Weems wrote in a poem, “hurting, they came to him. Healed they followed him. Grateful, they gave to him what they had and what they were. Blessed, they became a blessing and went out to all the world in his name.”

In each one of these short stories, Matthew reminds us that Jesus sees for each of the three characters an alternative that simply does not occur to the folks around him. "Inviting WHO???" "Healing WHO???" "Life for WHO???" The despised, the desperate, the dead?

As Barbara Lundblad writes, “Jesus was always in the wrong house, eating with the wrong people. It seems that He spent His public ministry crawling across the floor of history to tuck one wrecked life after another under His arm.”

Likewise, Cathy Talbot reminds us that “Jesus’ message of God’s powerful restoring love sparks irrational hope in a tax collector…, a (father), and a woman with a chronic illness, (all of whom) are seeking help and healing.”

Now the truth of these stories for us is that God’s powerful and restoring love can transform us as well – all these centuries later – we who in our own ways are as despised, desperate, and dead as those that Matthew tells us about when he weaves together these three little disparate stories born of despair and desperation and even death itself.

God’s love restores. God’s love transforms. That is the Gospel message. And all we need to do is to reach out for it. And you know what? Grabbing just a tiny bit of the hem of his cloak is enough. That too is the Good News of God.

Surely even we can do that much – and so become living signs of the power and grace of God – like Matthew the tax collector, the nameless bleeding woman, and the Dad who weeps in the face of death.

You see, in the end, God’s promises are fulfilled in each one of us. As James Bracher reminds us, “To the least, the lost and the last, Jesus teaches us to extend hope, direction and reassurance. The powerful, proud and arrogant are challenged to become more human, humble, sensitive and gracious…. Holy Scripture is no longer simply someone else's message; it is our story.”

As strong and impervious to pain as we may try to be – like Heather with her “little sore throat” – we are in need of a physician – each one of us. We are in need of God’s restoring and transforming love, sacred love without boundaries, so we in turn can begin to heal the hurting world around us.

We do not know much about what happened to Matthew after he became a disciple, and we know nothing about his later years. We do not know what happened to the woman after she found relief from her bleeding, or to the Dad when his daughter lived again.

However, I like to think that Matthew became a more just and merciful man, that the woman became more compassionate in her own way, and that the man and his daughter had a long and wonderful relationship sparked by laughter and laced with love.

I like to think as well that someday in the not too distant future we, like the folks in the three little stories we heard, will finally recognize just how sick and broken our world is and just how much we need a doctor.

And when that time comes, I like to think that we too will reach out in faith for the hand just beyond our reach, that we will touch the hem of his cloak - and experience God’s compassion flooding our lives. And most of all I like to think that it will restore us and empower us to create communities characterized by that selfsame transforming love.

Sermon - June 8, 2008

“Doctor, Doctor, Give Me the News”

By Rev. Nancy Foran Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

By Rev. Nancy Foran
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26