Claimed, gathered and sent

This is the sermon I preached Sunday at St. Timothy Lutheran Church . The text was Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26.   Isn’t Jesus always getting into trouble? He hangs out with the wrong people, the inappropriate people, the people he was told to stay away from, the great unwashed. Why can’t he just learn to fly under the radar? Life is so much more comfortable that way. He could still do good, heal a few people, but the right kind of people—the good religious people who don’t stir up trouble.  In today’s gospel, we find an array of characters: good religious ones, on the inside of society and those on the outside of society by virtue of their birth or their diseases.  We have three distinct movements in this passage, which is why three different people read this passage:  The call of Matthew (v. 9). The account of Jesus’ table fellowship with tax collectors and sinners (vv. 10-13). Sandwiched stories of restoration of synagogue leader’s daughter (vv. 18-19, 23-26) and woman w...

This is the sermon I preached at St. Timothy and St. Mark Lutheran Churches on Sunday, Oct. 23. The text was Luke 18:9-14. At first glance, this is one of the shortest, most straightforward and easy to understand parables of Jesus. It's about two men and prayer. One man is the good guy and the other anything but. The gist of this parable is about how to pray, isn't it?-----or is it?   We don't understand this parable as those of the first century did. Because we know how the parable ends, we assume that the Pharisee must represent the one who put his trust in himself, that he was righteous and the one who despised others. The first century listeners would have had opposite impressions of these two men. Pharisees often prayed, went to the temple and did all the right religious things--so it would seem they must be trusting God, not themselves.    Tax collectors were traitors to their fellow Jews--so it stands to reason that they must be ...