daily java

Daily Java: 

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at his tax collector’s booth. “Follow me and be my disciple,” Jesus said to him. So Matthew got up and followed him. Later, Matthew invited Jesus and his disciples to his home as dinner guests, along with many tax collectors and other disreputable sinners. But when the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with such scum?” When Jesus heard this, he said, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor—sick people do.” Then he added, “Now go and learn the meaning of this Scripture: ‘I want you to show mercy, not offer sacrifices.’ For I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners.” (Matthew 9:9-13)

A friend of mine was new to an area and had taken a church to pastor. Everything was going well and the church was enjoying moderate growth when the unthinkable happened. He invited the wrong people to church.

This was a racist area and he invited a black family to church and a large contingent went ballistic. It eventually caused him to leave and the church to close.

That’s the problem with church growth. It doesn’t always go the way you want it to go. You want young couples to come so your church can be more dynamic, but they bring their children with them and they are noisy. You want to do more community outreach but when you do, the people you reach out to begin to come to church. They are poor and street people and it jars with what you think your church should be. An area changes its cultural makeup. Hispanic people begin to come and that, again, jars with your picture of church.

Many a huge church in Houston, my home town where the Churches of Christ were massive, died when they refused to accept people from their own neighborhoods. Many of the members had themselves moved to the suburbs, yet they wanted to keep their church as an upper class church. The people in the neighborhood ruined that picture.

The apostles were happy with the makeup of Jesus’ followers. They were all of a type. Working men, or at least studious men, men like themselves, men they could understand and who they enjoyed (or at least tolerated) being around.

Matthew the tax collector changed that dynamic. The vast majority of the Jews considered tax collectors to be the worst of all creation. First of all, they worked for the Romans, an occupying force which ruled with an iron hand. Second, they worked on a commission basis. They had to raise a certain amount of money, anything over that they kept for themselves. So the potential for corruption was great.

Third, since they worked for the Romans, they tended to adopt Roman, or Gentile, customs in  dress and eating. They were not as careful to keep the dietary restrictions of the Jews, nor did they do a lot of the small things the Jewish religious leaders demanded of the Jews.

When Jesus called Matthew, it baffled the rest of the apostles. How could he do this? How could he ruin a perfectly good bunch of people by bringing in the wrong people. Matthew does not fit in with us. He is too different. Philosophically, culturally, in every way he was too different. They considered him sinful and therefore so should Jesus. The Jesus they followed was supposed to think like they did, like who they did, hold the same political views they did.

The only problem was that he didn’t. He followed his own course, he was more in tune with God’s agenda.

In other words, they were racist, sexist, culturally biased, full of their own inflated self-importance - just like everybody else. And Jesus was there to do the will of the Father who sent him.

As he told those who complained: the ones who are sick need a doctor. The ones who are well do not. And then he adds an oblique comment. I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners. The Great Physician will do no good to anyone who will not acknowledge him as Lord. Only after we have realized that we are sick can Jesus truly touch our hearts.

The apostles were wrong and some of them had trouble with that the rest of their lives. Some of them stayed with the Jews. Some left. But the ones who left did so only after a lot of teaching by the Holy Spirit and a lot of pain.

The churches who refuse to learn die long protracted deaths. Yet they sadly remain convinced of their cultural superiority. Until the day the doors close, they are convinced that if they could just get the right people to come back they could return to their former glory.

But they never do. After they die, someone from the neighborhood starts a church in their facilities and it grows.

How much easier would it have been to have had that attitude from the beginning, the attitude of service and bringing the gospel to those in their neighborhoods.