St. Paul Lutheran Church, Albuquerque

Third Sunday after Pentecost, June 5, 2005

Pastor Harold Nilsson

Romans 4:13-25; Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

Kite Runner, the best selling novel, is set in Afghanistan and the Bay Area of California in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.  Kite Runner is a compelling and poignant story and, in case you’ve not read it, I’m not going to give away the plot.  But there is one scene where Amir and his wife Soraya, refugees from Afghanistan, are contemplating adopting a child.  They’ve been married for several years and have gone through all the fertility tests but still are unable to have a child.  So they begin to broach the subject of adoption.  When they mention it to Soraya’s parents, however, they meet resistance, especially from her father.  In pre-Taliban Afghanistan the father had been a government minister.  He was a proper, well-connected man, who still wore a shiny, threadbare gray suit and tie every day, even when he was selling items at the Hayward flea market.  The father comments, adoption is all right for Americans, but not for us Afghans.  We would not know the child’s people—his or her family and clan, the child’s origin.  We would not be connected through our heritage and traditions.  He is anxious that the child’s unknown identity (this was obviously not an open adoption) would reflect poorly on their family’s status in the Afghan refugee community.  Father was a proud man whose sense of his own worth rested heavily upon how he was regarded in his own family and wider community.  So Amir and Soraya do not pursue the adoption possibility further. 

Because we place much more emphasis on the individual in our American way of life, it may be hard for us to imagine our value, our worth and status deriving so heavily from our family and community connections.  But we have ample substitutes.  We have all kinds of ways of measuring our standing, some overt, some subtle.  Our education level, the schools we attended, the amount we earn, the size and location of our home, the cars we drive, the groups we belong to, the volunteering we do, the money we give, the honors we’ve received, the rank we’ve achieved, the physical shape we’re in, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the achievements of our children and grandchildren as well as our own—all contribute to our sense of identity and worth and well-being.  Kids are introduced early via grades and SAT scores to the notion that we are what we achieve. 

In the newest Atlantic Monthly, a young mother reviews three books about motherhood in today’s world.  She weaves into her review her anxieties about getting her own daughter admitted to the right kindergarten in LA.  After bypassing a couple of really prestigious and expensive private schools, she settles, as she puts it, “on the middlebrow Lutherans and their middlebrow [school], considered not top-tier but certainly decent.”  But the daughter doesn’t pass the kindergarten readiness evaluation, and is not admitted.”  Later, a friend of the reviewer is outraged when she hears of the rejection.  “Lutherans,” she rails.  “Since when are they exclusive?  How dare they?  Don’t they know who you are?  You’re a celebrity mom!”  (Now you know where we stand on the status scale.)  At the end of this status and achievement scale is the misplaced hope that afflicts some religious people: God will bless me because I am good or at least because I try hard. 

Then we bump up against the readings for today.   And the bump can be hard.  Because the assertions in Romans and Matthew, if we take them seriously are, as Gerhard Forde puts it, explosive.  They blow open values we take for granted.  They challenge our way of life.  And they put us in touch with power that we never imagined we had. 

Abraham enjoys a position of prominence in three faiths—Judaism, Islam and Christianity.  These are the Abrahamic faiths.  But that prominence, says St. Paul, isn’t something that Abraham received as a payoff for doing good or trying hard.  Abraham’s standing, his worth, his value, is all gift.  I really can’t improve on Eugene Peterson’s translation in The Message of Paul’s careful reasoning in Romans:

That famous promise God gave Abraham—that he and his children would possess the earth—was not given because of something Abraham did or would not do.  It was based on God’s decision to put everything together for him, which Abraham then entered when he believed.  If those who get what God gives them only get it by doing everything they are told to do and filling out all the right forms properly signed, that eliminates personal trust completely and turns the promise into an ironclad contract.  That’s not a holy promise; that’s a business deal.  A contract drawn up by a hard-nosed lawyer and with plenty of fine print only makes sure that you will never be able to collect.  But if there is no contract in the first place, simply a promise—and God’s promise at that—you can’t break it.

Abraham’s worth—and ours—is a gift from the God who can bring dead things to life.  It’s all grace.  Peterson goes on:  

We call Abraham “father” not because he got God’s attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody.  … When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said God would do.”

For several decades the ELCA and its predecessors have had a weekly radio program, Lutheran Vespers.  (It airs here in Albuquerque at 12:00 noon on Sundays, about the time those at the 10:30 service are enjoying a cup of coffee.)  This spring Lutheran Vespers underwent a name change.  It’s now called Grace Matters”  I think it’s an accurate name, a good name.  Because that is indeed what we’re about—saying and demonstrating that grace matters, not just for our eternal salvation but for the way we understand ourselves and live our faith. 

For the past year and a half John Haaland and I have been serving on the board of The Storehouse, the ecumenical ministry that provides food and clothing to those who need it, the ministry that has historic connections with this church.  The New Mexico Conference of Churches took back the ministry late in 2003 after being out of the picture for some years.  At the first board meeting of the new era, we made a decision to omit means tests for our customers.  We affirmed that grace matters: If people come and say they need food, we’ll give it to them.  No background checks, no long questionnaires.  Since then we’ve modified that only slightly to satisfy some federal regs about some of the food we distribute.  It’s a radical way to operate, taking people at their word, putting no conditions on them, trusting that there will be enough for everyone who comes.  By the way, we are receiving more gifts than ever, and are able to help more people than ever.  Grace does not disappoint.

Grace is at the center of the gospel reading as well.  Jesus welcomes people who have little standing, who in many ways are as good as dead.  He invites Matthew, the tax collector, to come along with him.  Matthew was the kind of person that many already had written off.  Tax or toll collectors contracted with the Roman government to collect direct taxes on land and crops, as well as tolls and tariffs of various kinds on the trade routes that passed through Galilee.  Some tax collectors, but not all, became rich.  Matthew would have been a disgrace to his family, and looked upon as a traitor, especially by business people who had to pay the levies.  Jesus calls Matthew, and in so doing transforms him from a non person into somebody who does count. 

Then Jesus sits down to dinner with a whole number of tax collectors, and sinners.  The sinners may have been those who committed grievous offenses against others in the community, and thus against God.  Or they have been people who lived on the edge of respectability because they were unable to live a full Jewish religious life, like tax collectors, for example.  It has been suggested that the sinners might have been bankers who charged interest on their loans to the poor, contrary to the requirement set down in Exodus.  I wonder how it felt to these folks, accustomed to being scorned by mainstream society, to sit down and enjoy a meal with Jesus.  Surely it was a grace moment, to be accepted after experiencing countless rejections.  By breaking bread with them Jesus gave them worth, value, salvation, if you will.  If we’re going to eat with Jesus, we may have to eat with some people that we might not readily choose for our koinonia dinner groups. 

Next Jesus encounters a leader of the synagogue.  (Other gospels name him Jairus but Matthew glosses over details of the story.)  His daughter has died.  As only a father could, he searches for someone who might be able to help him.  But in the first century, one might ask, why?  Boys were sought after children.  Girls could be bartered as brides, especially if they were from upstanding families, but otherwise were considered a liability.  The status of women in ancient Semitic society was not enviable.  Death may have been kinder to many female children than the hard, short lives they would endure.  This girl, already dead, is of no consequence to anyone but her father (and presumably her unmentioned mother).  Jesus gives her life.  Grace happens.

And in the middle of this story the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years intrudes.  The bleeding no doubt was painful for the woman, physically and mentally.  But it also likely prevented her from marrying and having children.  Certainly it rendered her ritually unclean.  She was robbed of any kind of life but begging, if such a thing constituted life then.  The fact that she was able to get close to Jesus through his entourage of disciples shows that she was already overlooked, as of no consequence, by the people who knew her.  In that day and age, avoiding her would have been the only thing that mattered.  Jesus heals her.  She matters to Jesus. 

The thing that binds together Matthew the tax collector, the young girl who had died and the bleeding woman is that they were all “untouchable” by anyone in Jesus’ position.  They were people without place, dignity, and future—they were cut off from life.  Jesus restores them all.  Without their doing anything to gain it. 

These are stories of grace.  And it is by grace that God restores us.  And this is explosive, says Gerhard Forde, because it strikes at the very understanding of life that has become so ingrained in us, the understanding in terms of merit, of moral progress, of having to do something to receive mercy—some tiny something like repenting, or making a decision for Jesus, or having faith.  But this gospel of justification of faith (which is the more technical term for what we’ve been talking about this morning) is such a shocker because there are no conditions placed on it.  Because Jesus died and rose, you are forgiven and have status with God.  Period. 

Fredrick Buechner has a beautiful way of talking about what happens in the wake of being graced: “Faith is a word that describes the direction our feet start moving when we find that we are loved.”  We are a church of loved people.  Our feet are moving.  We have value and worth and purpose because we are loved.  We have in this fundamental truth the basis for our life together—for how we treat each other and everyone in the human family. 

One brief addendum.  The public arena has been filled in recent years with debate about moral values and public policy.   Jesus’ gracious treatment portrayed in these readings leads, I think, to our espousing a set of moral values to stand for in the public sector today.  When inadequate health care and unfair tax policies and community prejudices oppress people and destroy their hope, our faith in Jesus calls upon us to seek redress.  We testify to the love of Jesus when we work for a just society.  This is the living of our faith in the world, our giving witness that we believe passionately in the restoration that God is bringing about in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  Grace will empower us for this witness.  Trust it.