Jesus Worldview: Mercy, Not Sacrifice Matthew 9:9-13

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him. 10 And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Jesus and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12 But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 13 Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.”

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A Catholic, a Presbyterian, and a Methodist arrived in heaven at about the same time.

God’s secretary greeted the first man. “Religion?”

“Catholic.”

“Go to room 23 — but be very quiet when you pass room 8.”

“Religion?” he asked the second man.

“Presbyterian.”

“Room 10 — but be very quiet when you pass room 8.”

“Religion?” he asked the third man.

“Methodist.”

“Room 71 — but be very quiet when you pass room 8.”

“Why must I be quiet when I pass room 8?” the man asked.

The secretary replied: “Oh, the Baptists are in room 8. They think they’re the only ones here.”

I can poke fun at Baptists because I happen to be a recovering Baptist! It’s true, there are some Baptists that think they’re going to be the only ones in heaven. I have first-hand knowledge of this.

There are three truths in religion:
1. Jewish people do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah.

2. Protestants do not recognize the Pope as the leader of the Christian faith.

3. And Baptists don’t recognize each other in the liquor store.

This is true! One more:

You know why you shouldn’t take a Baptist fishing with you, right? He’ll drink all your beer. Take two Baptists fishing with you. They won’t drink any beer.

OK, I’ll quit picking on the Baptists.

The thing about growing up Baptist, I gained so much growing up in the Baptist church.  They gave me a deep appreciation for the Bible. They gave me community. They introduced me to Jesus. They gave me a place to start my journey—my life-long quest to find meaning in this life. They also gave me, however, a very finely calibrated understanding of who was “in” and who was “out.” Who was doing religion correctly. Who had earned their seat at the table — and who had not. Who God loved, and who God did not love. “Love the sinner, hate the sin” with the subtext (“but don’t love the sinner too much!”)

I was good at religion. Embarrassingly good. I learned all the right words. I practiced all the right behaviors, the right things to avoid and — crucially — to be seen avoiding. “Don’t drink, smoke or chew or run with boys who do.” If performative religion were an Olympic sport, I would have medaled.

And then I started reading the Gospels. The story of Jesus. And when I actually got into the Gospels, it turned my understanding of the faith upside down.

I discovered that Jesus was not terribly impressed by people who were good at religion. People like, er, me.

In fact — in our text this morning — Jesus seems to almost deliberately seek out the people who were worst at religion.

We are eight weeks into our summer series, Jesus Worldview — asking what it would look like to actually see the world the way Jesus saw it. Week after week we keep finding the same pattern: Jesus at the edges. Jesus with the wrong people. Jesus drawing the circle wider than anyone expected.

Week four, he sat down with a Samaritan woman at a well and handed her the clearest statement of his identity in the entire Gospel. Week seven, he washed his disciples’ feet on the worst night of his life.

This week, he walks past everyone who is doing religion correctly — and stops at the booth of a man who has made a career out of betraying his own people.

And then he goes to dinner with that man’s friends.

Matthew was a tax collector. In first-century Jewish society, this was not simply an unpopular profession. It was an act of cultural and religious treason. Tax collectors worked for Rome. They collected from their own people. And they were permitted to add their own surcharge on top of their collections for Rom — which most of them did, generously, in their own favor.

They were considered ritually unclean. Barred from the synagogue. Placed in the same religious category as prostitutes and Gentiles — people who were, by the standards of respectable religion, simply beyond the pale.

As Jesus was walking along one day, he saw Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth, and he said two words:

“Follow me.”

Matthew got up and followed.

No theological exam. No character references. No probationary period. No membership class.

Just: follow me.

As a recovering Baptist, I have to tell you — that is not how we did it. We had a process. There were steps. At the end of the worship service, during the invitation hymn after the preacher’s sermon, you had to walk down a long aisle to the front in front of God and everybody. You had to take the pastor’s hand in yours. You had to say the “sinner’s prayer” and ask Jesus “into your heart.” There might be a class to attend. And if you wanted to join the church, the congregation would have to vote you in.

Jesus apparently skipped all of that. Just “follow me,” and Matthew got up and followed.

Matthew celebrates by throwing a dinner party. And he invites his friends — a veritable who’s who of first-century religious rejects. Tax collectors. Sinners. The ritually unclean. People who had been told, in a hundred different ways, that they didn’t belong at a religious table.

And Jesus goes.

He doesn’t send his regrets. He doesn’t suggest a more respectable venue. He sits down with the wrong people in the wrong place — and he stays for the meal.

The Pharisees, watching from a careful distance, are appalled. They ask his disciples — notably, not Jesus himself — “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

It’s worth noting that they don’t confront Jesus directly. Which tells you something about their courage.

Jesus hears them anyway, and responds:

“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

That phrase — “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” — is a quote from the prophet Hosea. And to understand why it lands so sharply here, we need a brief detour into the Old Testament sacrificial system. I’ll make it as painless as possible.

Under the Torah, Israel’s relationship with God was maintained through an elaborate system of sacrifices — animal offerings, grain offerings, sin offerings, burnt offerings. There were 613 laws governing religious life, and the sacrificial system was how you restored your standing when you violated them. Got it wrong? Bring an offering. Need to restore ritual purity? There’s a sacrifice for that.

The system was detailed, demanding — and manageable, if you had the resources and religious education to navigate it.

Which meant that the people who were best at religion were, almost by definition, the people with the resources and knowledge to perform it correctly.

Which meant the poor, the uneducated, and the ritually compromised were — more or less structurally — excluded.

The Pharisees were expert navigators of this system. They were the performance champions of first-century Judaism. And they had, over time, come to believe that their performance was the point.

Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6 right back at them: I desire mercy, not sacrifice.

In other words: God has never primarily been interested in our religious performance. God is interested in our hearts — especially in how we treat the people religion excludes.

This is also, incidentally, why Anne Lamott’s line hits so hard. She writes: “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

The Pharisees had created a God who shared their guest list. Jesus was introducing them to a God who had an entirely different one.

Now. Two thousand years after Jesus stopped at Matthew’s booth, a tattooed Lutheran pastor in Denver had a similar moment.

Lutheran minister Nadia Bolz-Weber is six feet tall, covered in tattoos, and describes herself as cranky, sarcastic, and definitively not the warm, cozy pastor type. She spent years as an addict and a stand-up comic before something unexpected happened: a friend died by suicide, and she was asked to give the eulogy.

She stood up and looked out at the crowd — what she described as “academics and queers and comics and recovering alcoholics” — and something shifted in her. Bolz-Weber realized, in that moment: “These people don’t have a pastor. And maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do.”

She went to seminary. She founded a church in her living room with eight people — people who had been told, in one way or another, that they didn’t belong in the church. She named it the House for All Sinners and Saints.

The church grew. And it grew in a particular direction — toward people who had been excluded by religion, written off by respectability, left outside the carefully maintained boundaries of who was in and who was out. Convicted felons. Drag queens. Recovering addicts. People the church had walked past for years.

And here is where the story gets genuinely funny — and genuinely instructive.

After a while, what Bolz-Weber called “bankers in Dockers” started showing up at services. These “bankers in dockers” looked like your regular, respectable, mainstream churchgoing types. Bolz-Weber admitted it threw her into a crisis. “I felt like, ‘Wait — you could go to any mainline Protestant church in this city and see a room full of people who look just like you. Why are you coming and messing up our weird?’“

Do you catch the irony in that? The pastor of the most inclusive church in Denver had discovered her own prejudice — her own hidden guest list. She wanted the sinners. She was less sure about the saints. She had, without entirely meaning to, created a God who shared her preferences — and was tempted to exclude the people who made her uncomfortable. To her enormous credit, she recognized it. Named it. And widened the circle.

That’s what a Jesus Worldview requires of all of us, eventually.

Here is the uncomfortable question this text puts to those of us who grew up in religious traditions — or who have spent any significant time being good at religion:

Have we confused the performance with the point?

I spent years being excellent at the performance. I knew how to look right, sound right, associate with the right people, and keep a very polished distance from the wrong ones. And I called it faithfulness.

What I had actually built was a very respectable barrier between myself and the people Jesus kept walking toward.

“Go and learn what this means,” Jesus says to the Pharisees. Go and learn. He doesn’t say they’re beyond hope. He says they have homework to do. They need to unlearn something — the assumption that religious performance is what God is after — and learn something else instead.

Mercy.

Not the mercy you extend after people have cleaned themselves up. Not the mercy you offer from a safe, respectable distance. The kind of mercy that sits down at a table with the wrong people, in the wrong place, and stays for the whole meal.

A Jesus Worldview asks us to examine our own guest lists. Not just the obvious ones — the people we’ve written off entirely — but the subtle ones. The categories of people we’re slightly less enthusiastic about welcoming. The ones who make us quietly uncomfortable. The ones who, if we’re honest, we’d rather Jesus not invite to dinner.

Because as Bolz-Weber discovered: even the most inclusive among us have a hidden guest list. The question is whether we’re willing to see it — and widen the circle anyway.

Jesus said: I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners.

Which is, if you think about it, extraordinarily good news. Because the righteous — the ones who have it all together, the ones performing religion correctly — don’t think they need a doctor.

And the sinners — the ones who already know they’re a mess, who have no illusions about their standing, who would never in a million years assume they deserved a seat at the table — those are exactly the people Christ came for.

As Nadia Bolz-Weber puts it: “My job is to point to Christ and to preach the Gospel and to remind people that they’re absolutely loved — and all of their mess-ups are not more powerful than God’s mercy and God’s ability to bring good out of bad.”

That is the Jesus Worldview on mercy. It is wide. It is scandalously inclusive. It has no guest list except the one Jesus himself compiled — which (spoiler alert) included everyone.

Especially the ones religion walked past.

Here is the challenge I want to leave with you:

Sometime this week, have a meal — or a coffee, or a conversation — with someone who is not on your usual guest list. Someone your religious background might have told you to keep at arm’s length. Someone whose life looks different from yours, whose choices you don’t entirely understand, whose presence makes you slightly uncomfortable.

Don’t fix them. Don’t have an agenda. Just sit down. Stay a while. Listen.

That is what Jesus did at Matthew’s dinner party. That’s what Jesus modeled for us at Matthew’s dinner party. May we go and do likewise.

In this world, may we be like Jesus.

Amen