EAT WITH SINNERS | LUKE 5:27-32 | Pastor John Anderson | 10.11.26

Hello, this is Pastor Ryan Gerlock and Pastor John Anderson.

Welcome to the Resurrection Church Podcast.

Each week we bring you Sunday's message from Resurrection Church right here in Racine, Wisconsin.

So whether you're listening on a walk, driving to work, or just holding some laundry, or avoiding folding laundry, we hope this encourages your faith, challenges your perspective, and reminds you that resurrection isn't just something that happened.

It's something God is still doing.

Enjoy this week's message.

Snuck up on me.

I'm getting too old.

Happy birthday.

I have a reading today from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 5, verses 27 to 32.

Luke 5:27–32

After this, he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the tax collection station, and he said to him, Follow me.

And he got up, left everything, and followed him.

Then Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house, and there was a large crowd of tax collectors and others reclining at the table with them.

The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, saying, Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?

Jesus answered them, Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick, I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

Anyone remember that one?

I uh they're they're uh 13, 13, and 11.

They're doing math at home.

Uh they're bringing their math homework home, and it's the absolute worst.

And um, you know, I feel pretty competent and confident as a parent until they bring me their math homework.

Um, but one thing I did I was reminded of is that if you are numerically, if you're north of 45, you're closer to 50.

And if you're below 45, you're closer to 40.

So I'm just yeah.

And I'm so then you know what I'm saying?

Got it.

All right, good, good, good, good, good.

But that's the last one.

We're very excited that he's still alive and with us and celebrating another birthday.

Um, friends, we are uh we're in a sermon series, The Way.

Uh and if you have your Bibles with you, we're in Luke 5, uh, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Uh Luke, we think wrote the Gospel of Luke and then also uh the book of Acts, and so gives us a whole story of Christ and the early church.

And today we meet Jesus and he meets a man named Levi, and then we see a table.

And I it got me thinking a lot about a table.

I love the communion table.

If you're a visitor here, you'll learn that quickly.

I also love breaking bread with the people I love and inviting a stranger or a new guest uh to the table.

There's something powerful about the table.

I wonder for a moment if you can use your imagination.

What's a table that you used to love that's maybe no longer available or not the same?

Maybe it was in your grandparents' house.

I remember my grandma used to make what I thought was the best spaghetti ever until I had real spaghetti.

But I remember that table and the red bowl of jello and the laughter.

What's that table for you?

I bet you remember more than more than food.

I bet you remember who was there, how it made you feel.

There's something powerful about a morning around a table, about a late night breaking bread around a counter in a kitchen with those whom you love, working out heavy things or celebrating great things.

The other side of that, though, is walking into a room and not knowing where to sit.

Have you ever had that experience?

When I was in junior high school, Lincoln Junior High School in Kenosha, Wisconsin, it's no longer there anymore, uh, which is how old I am.

Uh, Pastor Ryan and I both went there.

He was older than me.

And Pastor Ryan and I were friendly and band.

Thank God for band, by the way.

Band is the one of the safest places, love band.

But in junior high school, I did not have friends.

And at our seventh grade lunch hour, I sat alone.

Um, I'll try that again to elicit an awe.

I sat alone.

Oh, yeah.

Thank you.

My goodness gracious.

I'm guessing you wouldn't have sat with me either.

I we but I sat alone and I didn't know any better.

I really didn't know any better.

I um I remember just being jealous of the kids who could afford hot lunch.

And I sat through my lunch, and and then and that was it.

Um, eighth grade year came around, same thing, same pattern.

Uh, and I went into the lunchroom and there was this guy, Danny, Dan Ambrosini.

And and Dan was a unique guy.

I'd met Dan the year before, right at the end of uh uh the school year, we had been invited on a class outing, and we went to the Fox River, which was a I don't know, I was like we were so excited for that at the time.

And we could picnic and hang out.

You could also bring some simple fishing gear and go fishing if you if you were allowed to.

And and Dan, I remember I didn't know him very well.

I'd seen him around school.

He was in band, he played the baritone, but he was always getting in trouble.

Um, I remember he wore like sweatpants and t-shirts like every day, which interestingly enough is what kids now wear every single day to school.

Um, but back then that kind of uh that puts you in a certain category.

Um, I know sometimes Dan was loud and would say words I'd never heard before.

Uh and he was just different and not somebody I hung with.

Well, I remember eighth grade year starts the same first week, lunchroom.

Dan walks up to my table, my lunch is unpacked, and he does this over my food.

And I said, Stop that, please.

Don't do that.

And he said, Uh, what's wrong?

I said, That's gross.

And I pushed my food aside and he said, Oh, you're not gonna eat that?

I said, No.

And he said, Could I have it?

I said, Yeah.

And so we ate it.

And we sat there awkwardly while he ate it and said thanks and got up and left.

The next day he came around again and I was sitting alone.

I said, Hey man, please don't do the thing.

I learned later that he didn't actually sprinkle anything, he just did this because he was hungry.

And every now and then, when he wasn't told to bug her off, people gave him some food.

And so he sat down with me and I shared a little bit of what I had and we talked.

And then we began to do this regularly.

I had someone to sit with at lunch.

That was so exciting.

You fast forward now almost four decades, three decades for sure.

And uh he's one of my closest friends.

Um he was the best, uh he was the godfather of my child, and and vice versa.

Uh, we have so much life together.

Um we share a tattoo that I'll show you someday.

Uh, we became the best of friends, but I remembered, I remember that it took that moment, someone seeing me, and me seeing past the labels I had placed on somebody else.

It was a profound moment for me.

And our theme this week is eating with sinners.

And I wouldn't have had this language back then, but I think I've I might have thought back then, Dan's one of those sinners I'm gonna eat with.

And before anybody starts making a guest list of all the sinners they know, uh, just remember that you're definitely on somebody's list, okay?

And we carry that, we carry that reality into this scripture today.

And as we do so, let us pray.

God, you are good.

God, I thank you for Danny.

I thank you for people who've shown up in my life in moments when I needed to be reminded that I wasn't alone.

I thank you for grace.

I thank you for forgiveness, for all the ways that we've labeled or judged others and come to you in confession about it, God.

We know that just as quickly as we made a judgment, it is quickly dismissed by you.

Help us, as we learn from Scripture today, to be reminded of the true life found only in you.

But also to be reminded that the world is constantly trying to distract us and divide us.

Let us be different in the world, O God.

I pray that the meditations of my heart and the words that pass through my lips are yours.

It's in Christ's name we pray.

Amen.

If you're in Luke, we're in Luke 5, and Jesus' ministry is uh it's on its way.

And Jesus does something very surprising.

He he goes up to a tax collector named Levi, who we would also know as Matthew.

He wrote a gospel in our Bible.

Uh, he is someone who would help shape the early Christian church, especially through the lens of the Jewish community.

And he and he approaches Levi, Jesus does, and he says, This follow me.

That's it.

And Levi does.

He leaves everything and follows him, and that's a remarkable beginning.

How many of you have responded to that type of a call?

Drop what you're doing, come with me right now.

Wouldn't you have questions?

Jesus had some sort of a reputation at this point.

Levi could have been worried about what was gonna happen, but he follows.

And tax collectors, by the way, they they were associated, at least in the minds of first century Jewish people, with bad things.

Remember, the Jewish community, the Jerusalem, Israel, that whole community, they are controlled by Rome.

In fact, uh, 30 or 40 years after Christ's death and resurrection, there would be a major revolt against Rome by the Jewish people that they would lose.

There was enmity, there wasn't trust.

And to be a tax collector and a Jew meant that you had betrayed your people.

You were you were no different in their eyes than a Samaritan, someone who was about exploitation, about greed, a system of extraction to serve those who were in power.

They looked at Levi and others who had wandered over into that Roman community and signed up with disdain and disgust.

They were the vilest of sinners, according to the leader of the church at that time.

Yet Jesus sees Levi.

He doesn't see a tax collector, he doesn't see someone who took advantage of somebody else, he just sees Levi, he just sees a person, someone whose life can perhaps become different.

And that's actually the response to the gospel.

I know as Pastor Ryan jokes, I could probably stop right there.

And that is the sermon that we are called to see each other as God sees us.

But sin gets in the way of that.

Sin is our own way, sin is sin is missing the mark.

Jesus comes and he says, follow me.

He said, I have a whole new direction, a whole new way, a whole new path.

You just you follow me.

And I and I wonder how often we forget that possibility when we look at another person.

I just see it all the time.

In fact, there are days where it overwhelms me.

And I get angry.

We're so clicked to see a reputation or family history or political position or something they did years ago, or the crowd that they're hanging out with, or something they're wearing, or a word they said, and we immediately go, that's who they are.

Who have you reduced to a label?

They're just they're part of that.

It's not how God sees creation.

Who have we stopped expecting anything good from?

Who have we decided because we have so much power that that person can never change?

And church, I preach to you as somebody who struggles with it myself.

And what does Levi do?

He invites Jesus over to have a meal.

And it could be a beautiful story, except there are some church leaders who say, What's he doing eating with sinners?

And that's a word we should unpack.

It's a word that I think the church actually fumbles quite a bit.

They either go one direction where they don't talk about it at all, or they go an entirely different direction where they use language that is built entirely around guilt and shame without unpacking what first century believers in Jesus would have understood sin to be.

And we can begin with the word that Pastor Ryan used in the meal, harmatia.

That's the word we see in scripture for sin.

And the imagery it elicits, the meaning is to miss the mark, to literally shoot an arrow and miss the mark, the measurement by with by which you miss the center of the mark.

And how many of us miss the mark?

But we can focus maybe too much on that distance or what was happening when we shot that proverbial arrow.

But I think what we miss as a church in teaching is educating what the mark is.

What is the mark?

And I wonder what you hear when the word sin is brought up.

Maybe you're a visitor and you're thinking, here we go again, another fire and brimstone sermon.

Those, I don't give those.

Those are all Pastor Ryan.

Uh I think well-intentioned pastors might use heavy language because they're so worried that you might be lost to the world.

But I want us to think about it.

For some people, sin that word just brings up guilt.

For others, it's shame.

For many of us, it's a list of things I've conquered, and then the other long list I haven't yet figured out.

Things you can do, things you cannot do.

Maybe it's somebody keeping score in your head.

Or maybe it's that private shame conversation you have every day if they only knew.

If they only knew.

And for some of you, it brings back memories of how the church made you feel that way.

And I apologize on behalf of the church for that.

Now the Greek word here harmatia means so much more, and Luke uses it in a specific way.

He could have left this part out, but he leaves it in to point out some of the hypocrisy of the religious leaders, but also to show us the way that Jesus lived.

Jesus gives us a much larger picture of why we are here, which is the mark.

And here's what you can't miss.

If harmatia means to miss the mark, what is the mark?

It's given to us in the beginning.

Genesis says we are, we, all of you.

Look at the person next to you.

Take a minute.

Go ahead, look at him.

Yeah, keep looking.

Feel free to smell.

I don't know.

Keep looking.

The very image of God sits next to you.

The very image of God stares back at you in the mirror.

If you believe the truth of Scripture, the Imago Dei, the image of God.

And then God calls us to take care of creation.

This is right away in Genesis 1.

Represent me as caretakers for this world and for each other.

That's the mark.

It's right there.

Careful what God has made.

Honor the dignity of the people that God has placed alongside us.

The target, the goal in Christ is genuine humanness.

And you say, Well, what is that?

We say, Well, God came to us in the human form of Christ and showed us what that looks like.

A life living fully into the life God created us to live in.

And we see that in Jesus.

So don't miss this language around sin.

Sin is a failure to live into our calling as God's image barriers.

And it does include breaking God's commands.

But the cross was not just some place where Christ was put to death in our place.

It was so much more.

We trivialize it.

We minimize it.

The cross is God saying, I am not in the sin management business.

That's not what I am about anymore.

No, I am in the new life business.

The rebirth business, the everlasting life business.

That's what I'm about.

The kingdom building business that I believe you can create.

And let me be clear about something.

When we fail to live into that calling, we don't lose Christ's love.

When we screw up because we're human, it's our humanness that allows us back into the great Holy of Holies with our God.

God's image is not a prize that we can earn through good behavior.

No, our dignity remains, and it has to because of how the story plays out.

And what does Levi do?

What does Levi do when Jesus accepts the invitation to his home?

He tells all of his sinner friends about him.

He invites them all.

I don't know what I would have done if Dan back in seventh, eighth grade, Lincoln would have invited all of his friends that I'd never met before, but I would have protected my food.

He invites every single one of them.

Are you racing out of here to invite everybody to see what Jesus has done?

Who Jesus invites in?

Often right in front of us.

And I'm gonna, you're gonna see it.

You might, it might be right next to you in your pew, but you will encounter it at some point today.

It's an opportunity to love where someone just needs to be loved.

But sometimes it seems like an inconvenience to us.

Don't let it.

You're gonna be confronted today or tomorrow with an opportunity to be honest, to be present, to honor God or care for our family in a way that honors God.

But something else in this world will offer itself to you as a substitute.

Don't be tricked by it.

I come to you as a sinner.

Don't be tricked by it.

Martin Luther, simileusis et peccator, which means simultaneously saint and sinner.

That was his great call of the Reformation, a great reminder that we stumble and fall, yet by the grace of God we are able to stand up tall in the mercies of Christ.

Amen.

I think about how often we're distracted.

My kids wanting my attention, but whatever I am looking at on my phone is so much more important than whatever they have to share.

Simple little things like that, where we give value and dignity to things that don't really matter, arguments that divide us and divide families.

Not that the words said or the passions inside are important, but that they would let us for any moment remove the dignity or humanity in the person that we are arguing with is not of God.

Sometimes we struggle to get out of the way.

Someone I love needed my attention, but I'm gonna give it somewhere else.

Our relationship needs an honest conversation, but instead, I'm I'm just gonna lie a little bit so I don't gotta deal with all the junk I got going on inside, and we'll just kind of pretend like it never happened, even though Christ never modeled that.

We'll just kind of move forward.

And the cross refuses to accept that because the cross knows that that will damage relationships and we'll take the dignity and the humanity that God has given to us away from that person in that relationship.

I could speak kind words of affirmation or encouragement.

I could deal with a heavy conversation between myself and an enemy, or I could just gossip, or I could just decide that they're wrong and they're evil, the things they think are wrong.

My job is not to love them, it's to convince them they're wrong.

Jesus offers us something different.

Jesus calls us into a way of living that is radical and should make some of the religious authorities go, why are they doing that?

Why did he let that person in?

Meghan Marshman, the great preacher and teacher, says a forgiven people are a forgiving people.

If we claim forgiveness in Christ, how could we withhold it from each other?

If we say this prayer and we mean it, then how much are you forgiven in your trespasses as you forgive those who have trespassed against you?

Following Christ is both beautiful and simple and awesome and hard.

And the way was never promised to be easy, but the way was meant to be fulfilling and life-giving.

I think about moments in my life when I have just stumbled and fallen, when I have gone my own way and I've hurt those in front of me, those around me.

And thank God for brothers in my life and sisters who hold me accountable.

So often we want to just kind of fit in, not rock the boat.

I remember again in eighth grade at Lincoln Junior High, a very formative experience for me.

I was in choir and I didn't know a lot of people in choir, and I was quiet and shy until I sang.

And there was this kid, we'll call him Joey.

I shared this story as an intern for those that remember it.

And Joey was always an awkward kid, didn't have a lot of friends, was always late, always tired, never had any of his materials for class.

And one day he came in and everybody was giving him a hard time because Joey was crying.

And I remember laughing right along with all of them.

Joey ended up running out of the room.

It turns out that Joey was in a foster home.

Uh Joey's home had burned down the night before.

There was no family for Joey to go stay with the next day, so they just sent him to school.

In 2012, I was on Facebook.

Uh, Facebook, if you're younger than 40, is a social media tool uh that we use to post pictures of people we love.

Um I was on Facebook in 2012 and I was sharing a post from our youth ministry program, and I got a private message from Joey who said, How the bleepity bleep are you leading youth to Christ?

Joey was so hurt by something that happened in the 90s.

I I humbly apologized over Messenger, asked Joey if I could have his number and call him.

I think he thought the whole thing was weird.

He gave me his number, I called him, I talked about the transformational love of Jesus Christ that rocked me in.

College.

I asked for forgiveness, not expecting it.

He gave it.

I prayed with him.

He made it very clear he wasn't sure where he stood with God.

But I like to believe that my response to that surprised him at the very least.

How many of us just need to own some mistakes?

NT Wright says, sin is the power that seeks to destroy and distort God's good creation.

And when we abandon our calling, what's our calling?

What is the aim?

What is the mark?

It is to reflect God's love.

Then we invite destruction into the room immediately.

And he goes further to say it's at that point, and this sounds like dramatic language, but it's at that point that we collude with the forces of chaos and darkness.

When we begin to see ourselves over other.

And that doesn't mean we invite in toxic relationships or live in a relationship that's not healthy.

No, that's not what Christ calls us to.

In fact, we see Christ, right?

Christ throughout his ministry would go and heal people and set them free, but he would also encourage them to live in a new way.

Removing themselves.

The instructions in the Gospel of Luke to the disciples, if they don't welcome you, move on.

No, but but but do we live in a way where we can vanquish the real chaos in this world, the real darkness in this world that wants to distract us?

The dishonesty that undermines trust, that's very evident in scripture, the greed that exploits people, the contempt that makes people really irrelevant in your eyes, the indifference that I see too often that just leaves suffering people unattended.

What are we doing in response to the gospel?

What is your mark?

And not just because I'm excited, but because I've experienced that I want you to lean into the truth of the story today.

Levi calls his friends, come and eat with me.

And these teachers say you are eating with sinners, and Jesus says, I've come to heal the sick.

Church, the hospital for sinners is what we are supposed to be.

Not a country club for Christ, not some place where we feel good when we walk out of here.

I hope there's some positive energy when you leave.

But no, we're supposed to come as we do in confession, recognizing we're all broken, and there's a decent chance before you leave today you might screw up again.

But thank God for the cross and the grace of Jesus Christ.

But you can't thank God with one hand and then dismiss that grace towards another with his hand.

Sin is real because it takes away the dignity and the beauty and the humanity of God's creation.

And we're called to something different.

I'm gonna invite the band up at this time.

We're gonna sing a song called I'll Come to the Altar.

And I want you to think about the great promise of the cross, the great promise of the table, that nothing separates you from God's love.

That might be easy to receive.

But what about nothing separates God's love from the person that you can't stand?

That's harder to believe and it's definitely harder to practice.

But God calls us into something new by showing us Levi.

Levi, a sinner, who says, Come and see Jesus quicker than many of us would.

Church, we have infinite dignity and value because of God.

And so does your neighbor.

And so do people all over the world.

Christianity started in a land far away from here a long time ago.

Believers all over the world come together today, believing in the life-changing truth of Jesus Christ, because in his death and resurrection, he has bridged that gap, he has vanquished that separation that we think exists between us and God, and God says, I am the way.

I am the way.

So, friends, I want you to go this week, and I want you to find that person that needs a seat at your table, and I want you to break bread with them.

I want you to be reminded of our shared humanity, and I want you to trust that Jesus is the way.

And that the mark is pretty evident, I think.

Look into the eyes of the ones that you love and you'll see God.

Then go look into the eyes of a stranger and look for God.