10th Sunday in Ordinary Time
June 8,2008

A few years ago, I traveled to the Kentucky-West Virginia border for an ecumenical conference on baptism. The fascinating part of this event was meeting pastors from denominations and Appalachian churches I'd never heard about. We learned various practices of baptism and baptismal anointing. We witnessed an elderly man's baptism in a rural creek-really 'full immersion'! One young pastor told the story of his first Sunday with his new congregation in a coal mining town. His evangelical Church had various forms of baptism. Whenever he did a sprinkling service for baptism, he used a pillow, a red velvet pillow, as part of the symbolism. The newly baptized person knelt on the pillow. This happened at the little holiness church up Cranks Creek Road called "The Pillar and Foundation of Truth." Appalachian folks say the words "pillow" and "pillar" the same way. So when the pastor set that pillow down on the floor, he'd say, "This is the 'pillar' and foundation of the truth!"

I don't think evangelical Christians in Appalachia have a corner on the market when it comes to amnesia and confusion about ritual practices and faith traditions-or meaning one thing but saying something else. Our readings from the prophet Hosea and the evangelist Matthew remind us that the church needs to be alert to misplaced emphasis. In fact, it's rare that the first and third readings in a Sunday liturgy mirror one another so directly; Matthew's gospel shows Jesus quoting from Hosea to point out the failure of human self-righteousness and hypocrisy.

Hosea voiced God's disappointment with Israel more than 700 years before the birth of Jesus. God's disappointment pointed to the Jewish tribes of Ephraim and Judah; God is perplexed, asking, "What can I do with you?" God complains about their piety. "Your piety is like a morning cloud, like the dew that early passes away." Look carefully at the metaphor. Israel's claim of faith is ephemeral (superficial), shallow. Even though people claim to repent and be reconciled with God, their repentance lasts only for a moment: Israel's piety evaporates as quickly as the dew under the heat of the rising sun. Despite going through the motions, Israel proved insincere, inauthentic. They may say what they know God wants to hear, but God knows when such gestures are inauthentic and dishonest.

Matthew's gospel echoes Hosea's reminder that God prefers the evidence of love over empty gestures of ritual conformity. God reads human hearts. God knows a hypocrite when God sees one. The contemporary American novelist, John Gardner, re-tells the classic Old English epic Beowulf from the vantage point of the primordial monster, entitling his novel Grendel. He reports the sea monster's surveillance from the vantage of a cave. Grendel says: "There is no conviction in the old priests' songs. They moan. Intone. Take off their hats. Put them on again. But no one harbors unreasonable expectations."

If ever there was an "unreasonable expectation," it was when Jesus called the tax collector, Matthew, to "Follow me." Few were as unlikely a recruit for the circle of the twelve apostles as Matthew. Yet there in Capernaum, on the northwest corner of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus chose to call a despised tax-collector. Capernaum sat at a strategic point on the international trade route between Damascus and Egypt. Everything sold in towns in the region passed through Capernaum. It was perfect for collecting taxes (or tolls) levied on all goods in transit. Matthew worked the Capernaum customhouse. He also brokered fishing rights on behalf of the government to anyone who fished on the Sea of Galilee.

You still don't meet many people who welcome tax collectors. The annual April 15 deadline for sending your tax return to the IRS creates a lot of anxiety. It's true that Jews doubly despised the fact that tax collectors at the time of Jesus worked from the Roman Empire, a foreign power that occupied Israel.

The Pharisees, the religious leaders, hurled a public challenge against Jesus' honor because he ate with tax collectors and sinners. Jesus, however, was master at these verbal games. It was a regular tug-of-war. He replies with the proverb from Hosea: "It is love that I desire, not sacrifice." The sacrifices he questioned were part of the Temple priesthood's exploitation of the poor; Jesus called the Temple priests a "cave of bandits" who had taken over his Father's house in Jerusalem.

Jesus added the proverb, "I have come to call not the self-righteous, but sinners." Translation: Jesus comes to heal the sick. Prior to our modern medicine, "sickness" was generally viewed as the loss of meaning in life. "Healing" occurred when "meaning" was restored, even if a physical cure of some disease didn't happen. Jesus points out the analogy between his association with tax collectors and sinners, and the way "healers" associated with sick people. So-called "healers" in Jesus' day failed to have much actual contact with the sick. If a sick person died, the "healer" might even be put to death-so "healers" preferred to talk and philosophize about sickness. Jesus, by contrast, touched the untouchables; Jesus associated with outcasts and restored their dignity.

Sickness in ancient Israel invariably involved separating the victim from the community. This was the meaning of "purity" and "wholeness." Notice how Jesus' "healings" include a restoration of the sick person to community life. He welcomed the sick person back into the community circle - no matter whether it was a person with repulsive, scaly skin (leprosy) or tax collectors who (like today) were a remarkably fair and honest group of people routinely stereotyped, condemned, and shunned by their peers.

Let me remind you of an echo of this incident later in Luke's gospel (18:9-14). It's the parable of two people who go up to the Temple to pray: one was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector. It helps us to see today's gospel from Matthew as a "second Epiphany"; there's a genuine "manifestation" of God, but we need to ask the question, "To whom is the manifestation given?" Only if we realize that the "outsiders" become "insiders" is this epiphany recognized. Do you remember how proper the Pharisee was? Luke tells us "he took up his position"-ostentatiously at the front of the Temple—and self-righteously thanked God that he wasn't morally "sick" like others-or, like the tax collector who stood far off in the back. The Pharisee boasted that he obeyed all the external and "highly visible" ritual prescriptions, and he fasted, he paid his tithes.

Meanwhile, the tax collector humbly kept his face down and beat his breast, praying, "O God, have mercy on me a sinner." When Jesus concludes that the tax collector went home justified, the world changed. In a sublime parable, Jesus heals the "sickness" of sin and welcomes back into community those who humbly acknowledge not what they accomplished and earned, but what God has done in their life through the wonders of grace.

So we cross the threshold today to our Eucharist. And we recognize that if we want really to show reverence for the Eucharist, we are asked to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to visit the imprisoned, to shelter the homeless, to visit the sick, and to bury the dead (Mt. 25:31-46). These works of mercy respond to the wisdom of Hosea and Jesus: By serving mercy to others, we live as the Body of Christ, given for the world. Here we touch the bedrock of the gospel and Christian faith.

This "good news" we believe. This "good news" (and no ephemeral, superficial, shallow gestures) we are called to practice. This "good news" we teach and cherish all the days of our life!