September 27, 2020

Bishop John Bluck

St Matthew’s Day     Matthew 9:9-13

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

It’s a hard time to be church.

Nothing new about that.

But now it is harder than ever because everything is harder than ever in the midst of a global pandemic with no end in sight.

All our old habits of gathering, belonging, communing have been put on hold, our wider networks nationally and internationally seized up for who knows how long. And we don’t know when or whether they will ever return. We have all been distanced from each other quite literally. The old normal has gone forever.

And if all of that is not enough to feel sorry for ourselves, the two biggest church stories in the last month are Dilworth School and Mt Roskill Evangelical Fellowship.

So happy St Matthew’s Day to you all.

Even as we try to find out what it means to be church in the midst of a maelstrom is there anything there in this story of this man Matthew whose name we take to give us some clues of a way ahead?

What kind of church does he want us to be? Because it will be different from last year pre covid?

How can his story make us more effective and accessible and even more distinctive as a community?

Because being distinctive is something that St Matthew’s people pride themselves on being. I met a friend yesterday and told him I was preaching here today. Oh really, he said, that’s a pretty alternative kind of place, isn’t it? I’ll pass that on, I said.

We like to think we’re a cutting edge congregation, but are we cutting in the right places, are we really sharp enough?

We knew what we had to do when the rest of the church couldn’t cope with solo parents, so called as they were back then, so we invited them to come and dance between the pews and drink sherry with us.

When the rest of the church couldn’t cope with the gay community, we hosted a bible study group and then a regular service for gay people.

And it was the same with apartheid and racist rugby.

St Matthew’s knew what kind of a church it had to be.

As it did after the Christchurch mosque shootings, reaching out to the local Muslim community.

But what about right now in the midst of this pandemic that is killing and dividing us?

Matthew might have something to say to us on this patronal festival. After all it’s his birthday. What could we give him as a present?

He knew a thing or two about divided churches, like ours.

At end of first century the church was caught in tension between Jewish Christians who still tried to worship in the synagogues, where the Pharisees set the rules and fussed about them, on one side, and on the other, Gentile Christians who didn’t.

The Jesus Matthew portrays is still very focused on his own Jewish people, even telling his disciples to stay away from Gentiles, not bothering to explain Jewish customs because everyone should know them. So there’s a culture war as well as a religious fight going on.

As there is now across the church.

Let’s face it, we have to confess Jesus together with some strange bedfellows. Strange to us because we have so little in common not only in music and theology, but the way we see the world. Yet make no mistake. The Mt Roskill Evangelical Fellowship is as much a part of the body of Christ as St Matthew’s.

Matthew knew a thing or two about divided cultures. Jewish purity laws made the divisions very clear. Not over silly stuff like what shade of grey or white to paint your house. But who is ritually clean and unclean, how carefully you follow the dietary and social contact laws of Deuteronomy. Who is in or out. They make our quarantine laws look careless. The lines back then were crystal clear.

Especially if you were a tax collector. They were a bad lot in good Jewish eyes. Sub contractors to the agents who bought the customs franchises on goods and services from the Roman empire. The agents made forward payments to Rome then screwed down the subcontractors to collect the revenue, so corruption and coercion were rife. They were about as popular as finding your accountant was fiddling your GST payments and being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office.

So decent law abiding Jews had nothing to do with tax collectors except to hand over the cash when they had to and then treat them as social outcasts. Tax collectors had nowhere to stand in Jewish society, except to teeter on the edge, distrusted and despised. Matthew himself was one of them, he knew what it was like.

So what kind of a church is being called for in this story? What kind of a church would be faithful to what Jesus is demonstrating here when he says I’ve come for the sick not the healthy?

The sickness he’s talking about is social not medical; being left out of community. The sickness of exclusion and alienation and isolation. The sickness of those who have no place to stand with any hope or dignity.

And Jesus addresses that sickness by including people like tax collectors. Come with me he says. Come to dinner. Sit down and eat with me.

And the Pharisees who make the rules and enforce them are furious.

They ask the disciples, what does your boss think he’s doing? He’s breaking all the rules.

In this covid defined time of global crisis, when we’re all masked up and socially distanced from each other and our borders are locked down to the rest of the world, what does it mean to be the kind of church that Matthew describes and Jesus models?

And at a time when we are quick to judge and condemn those who break the rules of quarantine and masking and handwashing and distancing, slow to forgive and quick to anger, who are the Pharisees in our midst? Are we in their number?

We are living in times of incredibly hard moral choices, where the ground beneath our feet is tilted by social media driven conspiracies about dark forces at work. We have to condemn these lies yet we also have to find ways of engaging with the liars, meeting them in the midst of their fear and confusion. Because the more isolated they are the more extreme their rhetoric becomes. Have you noticed that the most alienated and angry of our politicians and church leaders are the ones promoting the most paranoid theories about covid vaccines and plots to control us?

I think the kind of church that Jesus models in our troubled time is as radically inclusive as he demonstrated around that dinner table on the night that Matthew joined him, as radically inclusive as that dinner table on the night before he died when there was even room for the man who would betray him.

It will be the kind of church that works hard at trying to understand the extreme and alienated voices. Engaging with them rather than amplifying them, calling them back into community that can cope with disagreement. No one else is doing that right now. We’ve got plenty of Pharisees quick to condemn, but very few who say let’s sit down with a cup of tea and talk.

I don’t have the courage to do alone where I live but I might if I had a community like St Matthews around me willing to try.

Imagine if we invited the elders of the Mt Roskill Evangelical Fellowship to come along to St Matthews and share a coffee and tell us what on earth they thought they were doing.

Let’s work to keep ensuring St Matthew’s is known in Auckland as a place where isolated groups of all sorts find a voice and a welcome, where all sorts of groups who struggle to find a place to stand and somewhere to belong, find a home here, or at least a waystation on their journey.

But there is another constituency who are just as alienated from the church of the old normal – those who find their inspiration and advice, even their pastoral care, online; who live and breathe in a virtual digital world, who wouldn’t come near us on a Sunday morning, with or without the covid crisis.

I’ve never had to preach the same sermon differently on a Sunday but I had to today, now and for the online version that comes later in the morning.

That digital version might become our new normal, as the covid crisis forces us finally to make ourselves accessible to an IT savvy generation and an online culture.

St Matthews is already seeking to do that. Few of our churches will have the imagination or the resources to even try.

And Matthew would approve, because it would be continuing a long held tradition of hospitality that this church has offered.

Matthew would like that. It would be the best kind of birthday present.