God calls Matthew, Abraham and even you! Proper 5 A 2025

Bible passages Gen 12:1-9; Romans 4:13-25; Matt 9:9-13

NOTE THIS TEXT IS A LONGER VERSION THAN THE VERSION PREACHED.

Imagine you're an office worker in a medium sized family business. You like your job and the boss. You get on with the other staff. You do your job well and are respected and liked, by both your fellow workers and the owner of the company but you’re a little discontent.

              You see you have a dream about being the manager about being in charge. -You would do it right. You’d make the firm more competitive, efficient, but also just plain better at what it does. Just as importantly it would come with a much bigger salary. That would give you security and help you pay off the mortgage. It would also probably come with a new company car and other perks.

              One day the owner announces he wants to retire and offers you the job you've dreamed of, General Manager or CEO of the business.

              As a special bonus he also offers that high end company car plus a bonus if as CEO you can cut staff by 10% and increase productivity.

              The staff as your fellow workers trusted you, so you have a good idea who is less efficient. So with that inside knowledge you you make the slackers redundant. You also push the remaining staff and workers to fill the gaps and do even more. You get the bonus and the car. You’re able to make higher payments on your mortgage and you get to go on regular holidays, even overseas.

              Excited by your success go to management seminars and bring back the latest idea every six months. You make extra sure to use and bring in new ideas thaqt increase efficiency and lower costs.

              In the end you have everything you wanted - car, house, trips, you've fulfilled the dream you had. You’ve made it. You’ve won the prize.

              But you've also lost. You’ve lost the respect of workers and staff who see you as mean with money and mean in personality. You’ve lost the friendship of some of your former colleagues.  Those other staff in management who are ambitious like you resent your success and you worry that they covet your job. So you’ve lost a lot of free time because you’re always working to make things more efficent and productive. As a result your relationship with your wife or husband, children and extended family suffers. Your marriage is under strain.

              One day a call comes it’s from one of the few friends you still have. He founded the small charity where you first stared your management career. He’s inviting you to come back as a project manager for them. It will be a good wage but nowhere near as good as where you are. But you would be working with a few with old mates. There you know you will be respected and valued and you will be helping people in the community.

              But what would it cost. You will no longer be the boss. You will lose position. There’s no car with the role. You won’t be able to buy that bigger house you’ve been thinking about. You will have less power, and no longer ne the master of your own destiny. When you get that call what do you do.

              This is the sort of thing that faced Matthew the tax collector. Our reading today tells us Matthew is in his tax collectors’ booth. We don’t know who Matthew was collecting taxes for. Perhaps he was collecting the tax directly for the Romans, or more likely collecting it for King Herod Antipas the Son of Herod the Great who passed on tax to Rome. The kind of Tax that Matthew collected was customs tax. Goods which travelled into Herod’s area had to pay a tax between 5 to 12.5%. He may also have charged a tax on the fishermen’s catches as well. The way Matthew made his money was to keep a percentage, probably about 5% of what he collected, but tax collectors often collected more and there were not hard and fast rules.

Most of the custom collectors were Jewish. They were hated by their fellow Jews because they worked with the hated Romans and/or the hated Roman loving, half Jewish Herod. They were not welcome in the Synagogues or the temple. A devout Jew would only ever pay correct change to a tax collector so they didn’t have to touch the unclean money which had been touched by unclean tax collector hands. A devout Jew would never go into a tax collector’s house.

              The best contemporary example I can think of are the Isis brides. These women are Australian citizens, our fellow Australians, many of them born in Australia, but many of us do not want them in our nation, our community or in our homes and we would certainly never go into their home and accept their hospitality.  They collaborated with terrorists who beheaded, otherwise murdered and enslaved fellow Muslims of other denominations, Christians, Jews and secular people. These women like the tax collectors are collaborators. They made their bed and can lie in it.

              This is how the tax collectors were regarded by their fellow Jews. It is not surprising that the Pharisees, whose great desire was to see the Jewish people obey the Law and keep themselves pure ask Jesus’ disciples “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” To them it is impossible to understand and a great scandal that Jesus is the guest of, and eats with tax collectors. Imagine if Mr Albanese or Mr Taylor or Senator Canavan not only welcomed home the Islamic State brides but even went to their houses to join in a welcome home party, how would we regard them. And imagine how social media, tv and the newspapers would respond if when asked why they had joined in this welcome home party, Mr Albanese, Mr Taylor or Mr Cannavan had responded as Jesus did ...“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”” (Matthew 9:12–13, NIV)

              It is very challenging to us but this is exactly the sort of thing that Jesus does when he not only calls a tax collector to be one of his followers but also joins Matthew in a meal, a party where all the other guests are tax collectors. (They are of course his only guests apart from Jesus, because no-one else wants anything to do with them.)

              Last week I spoke about the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. The undeserved love of God given to the whole world in the gift of Jesus. There is no way a first century Jewish tax collector could be worthy of being one of the key followers of Jesus numbered among the apostles, the leaders of the early church. It would be like giving an Isis Bride an Australia Day honour, or making her Australian of the year. It is simply scandalous. Jesus’ call to Matthew is undeserved love - pure grace.

              A less extreme example of this is the call to Abraham. God chooses and calls Abraham for no reason we can see. It is true that after God calls, Abraham leaves his home and most of his extended family and goes where God calls, but God’s choice and the promise are offered to Abraham for no reason that we can see. As the story of Abraham unfolds we learn that he is a far from perfect person, and he does not always trust God as he did when he first followed the call. He is no tax collector or Isis Bride but he like you and me is very far from perfect.

              As a free gift Abraham and Matthew are called to be blessed and included in God’s mission, and they will become a blessing not just to the Jewish community but through them the whole world will be blessed. There is nothing they can do and nothing they did do to receive this call. It is undeserved. The undeserved love of God.

              But there is a cost. Matthew was giving up wealth. Today’s gospel story is short but in those few short verses we learn that Matthew has a house and is wealthy enough to put on a meal for Jesus, his followers and a large number of tax collectors.  He also loses power. He loses power over people who he can stop, search, demand payment from. He loses connection to the king or the Roman officials for whom he worked and could receive favours. Perhaps most profoundly he loses power over his own destiny. He places his life into the hands of hands of God.

              That same call comes to us. Jesus calls sinners like Matthew  and the Isis brides and sinners like Abraham and Sarah, you and me. We are called and chosen not because we are special or good but because God loves us all. We are chosen and called because Jesus loves us all and lived and died and healed and taught for everyone and ate with Pharisees and tax collectors and was raised to new life and shares that life with us, shares his relationship with the Father and the Spirit with us simply because of love.

And this costs us nothing. For absolutely nothing we are forgiven and reconciled to God, we are included in God’s mission. The same is true of Matthew and Abraham and it could be true of Isis Brides and of you and me if we are able to receive the gift of Jesus, and recognise that our lives are in his hands whether we like it or not.

              From God Abraham and Sarah receive a child and after a series of ups and downs in their lifetime they have become a large wealthy community. A large nomadic moving village. The also have a promise that their family will grow and be blessed and will be a blessing for the nations. Matthew receives Jesus who drawn him into a relationship with a new community as we reflected on Trinity Sunday with God the Father and the holy Spirit, but on the ground Matthew is drawn into a new community of Jesus followers, women and men who are part of a new transforming community which Jesus called the Kingdom of God. This was n inclusive community of Pharisees like Nicodemus, rich people like Joseph of Arimathea or the women mentioned in Luke’s Gospel who followed Jesus and provided for him and the disciples, publicly notorious sinners like tax collectors, fishermen, the poor and the poor in Spirit. This was a community where the hungry are fed, the sick healed, the naked clothed, the dead raised, the tormented restored, and the outcasts are honoured provided for and included. This community would fulfill the promise to Abraham because trough them all the peoples of the world have been blessed.  And so in front of me today sits a little slice of the Kingdom of God the fruit or the outcome or a fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham. Like Abraham and Matthew and Sarah and Mary of Bethany, the church is fare from perfect, still part of the Kingdom of the broken and beautiful Kingdom of the world, which has not yet been fully transformed into the New Heaven and the New Earth. It is absolutely the free gift of God but it also costs us.

              What does it cost us? It all depends, but like Matthew it could cost us wealth, power, and position. Like Abraham and Matthew, Sarah and Mary it will cost us control of our own destiny and self security. It will mean trusting ourselves to God and not wealth, or self help or our own personal resources.

              We are called to follow - like Abraham and Sarah, Matthew and Mary, Peter and his Mother in Law, Paul and Priscilla.

As for them the promise and call if God given to us in through and by Jesus is absolutely free and unearned.

              As for them it also costs everything because it means trusting ourselves to God and God’s Son Jesus of Nazareth, and not trusting in ourselves or the personal resources we have.

              Jesus calls us to follow. (Silence) Amen.