A sermon on Matthew 9:9-13,18-26 & Romans 4:13-25 by the Rev Aksel Lund
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
Eleven years ago, I moved from the island where I grew up, to the city of Stavanger—where I now live—to study theology. At the time, I didn’t have any plans to enter ministry, but a Lutheran born and raised, I knew I really loved theology, the Bible, and my faith. It was only natural for me to study theology.
The same year I started my studies, there were unusually many new theology students at our faculty. Traditionally, most students would belong to the Church of Norway—the Lutheran former state church and still the majority church in Norway—and would be training for ordained ministry in that tradition. Many of the new students this year, however, belonged to a new church in the region, influenced by particularly conservative variants of New Calvinism and American evangelicalism.
These young men—of course, they were all men—were eager and knowledgeable students. They would debate nuances of dogma and interpretation of the Bible. They were the kind of students who would pester the professors with questions both during and after lectures, not out of genuine curiosity, but in order to test their fidelity and orthodoxy, and even to debate them.
Our differences notwithstanding, I became friends with many of them. After all, disagreement and varying opinions on theology, Scripture, and what have you, are natural parts both of education and of the body of Christ as such. At least, that’s what I thought to myself. Until one day, when we were sat in the canteen having lunch. “Well, Aksel, you’re going to hell”.
My stomach dropped as those words were uttered by someone whom I had thought to be my friend. It still hurts to think about to this day. Apparently, as a liberal, progressive—or whatever label you want to put on it—Christian, I did not belong to the fold. My theology, my faith, wasn’t of the right kind to pass the pearly gates, come judgment day. Therefore, my fellow students saw it as their job to pass judgment on me. Perhaps they had hoped that condemning me to hell might make me see the error of my ways.
My experience with this particular group is hardly unique. There’s lots of similar groups of Christians all over the world, who happen to believe that they’re the ones who’ve truly got it, they’re the ones whose faith is of the right kind, and it is their job to save the world. There’s a joke that goes like this: a man enters heaven, and is greeted at the pearly gates by St. Peter, who shows him around. “Here’s the Catholics,” says St. Peter, “there’s the Lutherans, the Baptists, the Orthodox,” and so on and so forth, until they arrive at a room where St. Peter tells the man to be quiet. “Why is that?”, he inquires, to which St. Peter replies, “That’s where the [Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Plymouth Brethren, or Southern Baptists, or whichever exclusivist group you prefer] live, and they think they’re the only ones up here”.
In this way of thinking, faith is conflated with knowledge, with certainty, with facts and reason. Faith becomes a thing of the mind, a mental exercise almost, something that requires you to subscribe to proper dogma, to believe the proper things in the proper way, in order to be saved and be right with God.
In today’s Gospel reading, from Matthew, we heard three interwoven stories that all, in one way or another, address the issue of faith. We hear that Jesus is walking along, encountering first a tax collector—Matthew—sitting at his tax booth. Jesus tells him, “Follow me,” and Matthew does precisely this. Now, this is met with considerable critique from the religious elites, when they see what kind of people Jesus like to hang out with—tax collectors and sinners. Tax collectors are often mentioned in the same breath as other sinners in the gospels, and for good reason—they were Jews employed by the occupying Roman empire, they were often dishonest, charging excess taxes and pocketing the surplus. But Jesus quips, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick”.
As this unfolds, a synagogue leader enters, falling on his knees, begging Jesus to help him—his daughter had just died, but he had faith that Jesus could heal her. On their way over to the synagogue leader’s house, a woman who had suffered for bleedings for twelve years, approaches Jesus from behind, thinking to herself that if she could just manage to touch his cloak, she might be healed. When Jesus notices this, he turns, and tells her: “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well”.
When they finally arrive at the synagogue leader’s house, there is a great commotion—a crowd and flute players, a typical mourning practice at the time. Jesus attempts to disperse the crowd, saying “the girl is not dead but sleeping”. And in spite of the disbelief and ridicule that ensued from his ludicrous claim, Jesus goes into the house, takes the girl by the hand, and she gets up as if nothing had happened to her at all.
Taken at face value, from a rational point of view, none of these encounters make much sense. To simply abandon everything one knows to follow a strange preacher and miracle-worker simply because he calls your name, to think that touching the fringe of his clothes may cure you of a decade long disease, or to believe something so absurd as that he can raise the dead—these events cannot be explained or understood through pure reason alone.
And notice how Jesus responds to those that seek him out. He does not question their dogma or orthodoxy, or their religious and spiritual practices. He does not care about their age, ethnicity, social status, gender, or sexual orientation. No, what he sees is their faith—their reaching and grasping for that which is always beyond our understanding, their trust in the promises of a God who is always faithful, always loving, their hope in a better future.
My former friends and co-students who condemned me to everlasting torment, eventually quit their theology studies. Regrettably, I’ve lost touch with most of them. And their relatively small church ended up splitting into two churches, quarrelling over some miniscule aspect of dogma. And, I guess, that makes perfect sense when you view faith like they did: as a checklist of things you need to subscribe to, certain dogma you must accept, in order to pass the litmus-test handed out by St. Peter at the pearly gates. Faith, in this way of thinking, is a thing of the mind.
But I don’t believe that is an accurate account of what faith is, or how faith works. No, I believe that faith is not first and foremost a thing of the mind. Even as someone who’s devoted their entire adult life to the study of theology, I refuse to believe that is how faith works. I believe that faith is rather in our ears and our feet, as was the case with Matthew the tax collector, who heard Jesus’ voice calling to him, and promptly stood up and followed him. I believe that faith is in our hands, like the woman suffering from bleedings, who reached out, grasping, hoping to touch but the fringe of Jesus’ cloak. I believe that faith is in our eyes, and in our tears, like the synagogue leader, who knelt before Christ, tears flowing down his cheeks, begging for him to save his dearest, his daughter.
Faith is in our struggles, in our reaching out, in our grasping towards God. Or, as St. Paul describes it in the letter to the Romans, it is “hoping against hope”. It is acting as if a better world is possible, even when all evidence suggests otherwise.
When beggars reach out towards strangers on the street, when queer folks raise the rainbow flag ever higher, when a recovering addict shows up at a meeting, when young climate activists skip school to protest climate inaction in our governments, when a parent sits at the bedside of their child in the hospital, when the peoples of Palestine and Ukraine and South-Sudan and all other oppressed peoples stand up against their oppressors, whenever and wherever we dare to believe that a better world for all of God’s children, regardless of race or creed, might be possible—that is faith.
When I first started presiding over the Eucharist, in the first years of my ministry in the Church of Norway, one thing I began to notice, was the hands of all the people who knelt at the altar in my local church. Some large, some small. Some dirty, some clean. Some young, some old. Some dark-skinned, some light-skinned. Some bore witness to a life of struggle, others to a life of privilege. After Martin Luther died, those who visited him found his final words written: “We are beggars. This is true”. And that was also my revelation as I looked upon all these different hands, all reaching out, begging for grace: before God, we are all beggars. No matter who we are, what we’ve been through, our social standing, the colour of our skin, our gender and sexuality—we are beggars in the presence of Love Unending.
Much as we cannot work ourselves towards grace, through good deeds and proper religious living, neither can we think ourselves saved, through simply believing the right things in the right way. For grace is always a gift, never earned, never deserved.
Friends, when we share the Eucharist—as we shall do also today, later in the service—remember this: Before God, we are all beggars, we are all reaching out, grasping, and struggling for grace. That is what faith is: to trust that somehow, come what may, God will prevail. Grace will prevail. Love will prevail, love that conquers all, even death itself.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, ✠
as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. Amen.
Three wonderful examples of faith in one short reading.