Sermon Tone Analysis

Celebrity watch

Celebrity gossip!

It’s one of those things that I suspect if I ask most of you, you would probably you don’t care much for it.

Funnily enough, much of society also say they don’t care much for it, but yet the gossip mags seem to still do alright.

Now one of our favou

I suspect for most of us here, while we probably don’t care too much whether Brad Pitt has got a new girlfriend, or whether one of the Kardashian had pancakes for breakfast - we are however intrigued when the scandals start to hit.

So as someone who fits into that category of not really knowing much about celebrities but taking note when the big scandals hit, what I’ve noticed is how quickly people can go from being in favour, to out of favour.

Now sometimes there is really good reason that some people fall out of favour with the gerenal public.

You could take for example a prominent Aussie, known for his wobble board who has been convicted of child sex abuse.

But there are also other celebrities that fall out of favour with society for far less.

One case that springs to mind is Margaret Court, one of Australia’s greatest women’s tennis players.

She fell out of favour, not because of any wrong doing, but because her opinion varied from the general public.

You see, she became very outspoken about the issue of same-sex marriage

What becomes clear is that with our celebrities we want to hold them to account, and so we set a bar for them.

The interesting thing however is that the bar is not very static.

As was the case with Margaret Court, the very things that put her out of favour where very similar things that the mainstream politicians (for want of a better word) had been saying just a few years prior without anyone getting upset.

But our inconsistent standards are also evident with say football stars.

People probably don’t like admitting it, but depending on the ability of a particular player, we may be more or less likely to overlook certain indiscretions.

The point I want to make however, is actually to show how we set these bars.

Once people cross these boundaries, our whole perception changes.

Now the reason I’ve pointed this out for celebrities is because I think we can see it a bit clearer, however a similar thing happens in everyday life.

We have lots of people in our lives, be they work colleagues, acquaintances or friends.

Things go along well until they do something offensive.

Suddenly a big wedge comes between the two of you.

Now, here’s the thing: this is just a part of the way relationships work, that it seems obvious that God would work on a similar principle.

That is, God can accept a bit of wrong doing, but there’s a limit.

Once we become so offensive to him, he won’t want a bar of us.

And, just like that bar is actually very flexible in our relationships, in a similar, sometimes we might have that bar set at such a level that we think - as long as we don’t fit into the category of murderer, rapist or pedophile, then we are ok.

Other times, the built-up guilt of consistently being rude, angry and greedy is enough for God to have had enough.

God is love

Well, as we’ve being doing for the last few weeks, we’re in the middle of a series called: Who is the God I know.

And today’s theme is: God is love.

As we’ve seen in each of the different themes, we’ve seen that we have all of these attributes which are really central to what we believe about God, but there are these worldly narratives which white ant the fundamental beliefs.

As I’ve explored in my introduction this morning, the false narrative pulling us away from the understanding that God is love, is the narrative that God can’t love us when we are bad.

Essentially this narrative teaches us that God’s love is conditional.

The problem is, if this is true this changes everything.

If God’s love is conditional, there can be no assurance of salvation.

If God’s love is conditional, the whole basis of our relationship with Him is now gone.

Now, the idea of unconditional love, certainly raises some interesting questions, like: what about the worst of the worst offenders?

And doesn’t unconditional love just give us a free ticket to do what we want?

Well, I will get to these, but first, I want to explore the narrative that Jesus teaches about unconditional love.

Matthew the Tax Collector

So to do this, I’m going to turn to the passage we read earlier which showed Jesus calling Matthew the tax collector.

Now we might not like paying tax, but I suspect for most of us, there is at least an acceptance that the taxation system is on some level necessary.

We could argue whether it should be more or less, but there is some need for a centralised system of governance, and this requires tax.

But the taxation system in the first century was actually a bit different.

You could argue that they still had a need for some sort of governance and this would require taxes, but there system for collecting this left a lot to be desired.

You see, the system relied on tax collectors whose job it was to go around obtaining the tax.

The problem however was that there were very little checks and balances to ensure the money was handled properly.

Extortion was easy.

And so getting a tidy little profit was a piece of cake.

Tax collectors therefore got a reputation for lying and cheating.

As a result, they ended up on or very near the bottom of the social ladder.

The Pharisees would hold them up as the model sinner.

The type of lifestyle that they warned people against.

A shocking story

Well, it is with this context that we come to the passage starting in .

And like a lot of stories, we lose the absolute shock!

horror!

because it has become so familiar.

You see, the story tells us that Jesus goes up to him and says “Follow me”, to which Matthew got up and followed.

Now because the worldly narratives are so prominent in our minds - in this case, the narrative that says that there is a limit at which God can no longer love us - we then tend to modify this story in our own minds, even if just subconsciously.

You see, it is very easy to start to minimise the wrong doing of Matthew.

Sure he made a few wrong choices, but it wasn’t that bad - temptation just got away from him.

Maybe there is some truth to that, but the reality is, the Pharisees were right in one regard - the life style of the tax collector went completely against God’s way.

This really is meant to be a shocking story about the unconditional love of God.

To help us consider how shocking this is, consider this:

Rabbi - disciples

For Jewish rabbi’s, it was a very important task to select your disciples well.

You see, the whole model of the rabbi was to train people up who would essentially represent you and your ways.

If you choose poorly, then your legacy is doomed.

You can think about this from a modern perspective.

As an employer takes on a new employee, they want to be very careful that the employee is committed to the ethos of the company.

It’s not a perfect parallel, but you can see how choosing the wrong person can have massive detrimental effect.

But here is Jesus.

He almost seems to be going out of his way to choose the dirtiest, most vile person he can find.

Someone watching this happen in the first century could only conclude that Jesus was setting himself up for failure.

No questions

But then it gets even more shocking.

You see, surely if you are going to invite someone with such a nasty reputation, surely you would ask a lot of questions.

You know, to check to see he has it in him to change.

Now I do recognise that what’s recorded for us is just a small snippet of what happened.

There was no doubt other dialogue that wasn’t recorded for us.

But generally, the biblical authors are very deliberate about what they include, and I think that what we’re meant to get from this, is that Jesus is taking the initiative in showing love.

In fact this becomes a theme in the Bible, most notably in which says: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us...”

You see, back in this passage in - what is completely absent is any kind of message of: well, if you can clean up your act, then you can follow me; or, if you can promise me things will change, and if we can put a plan in place for you to keep these promise, then you can follow me.

Rather, the simplicity of what Jesus says is striking: “Follow me”

It gets worse...

But then it gets worse.

You know when you make a bad call and the moment things turn bad, you get a chorus of people saying - I knew that would happen.

I tend to make a lot of bad calls so that’s not an unusual thing for me.

Well, this shocking call of Jesus is about to bite him.

You see, Jesus goes off to have dinner with Matthew - that’s just terrible in itself.

But it gets worse when this meal ends up as a den of sinners.

Even the author of the gospel (who, incidentally, is generally thought to be the tax collector in this story), doesn’t sugar coat it.

He clearly calls these people who come to eat with him as sinners.

And so we get the Pharisees, who well knew Jesus just made a horrible mistake.

Now being early in the ministry of Jesus, there’s a bit more constraints shown.

Their horror is expressed in the form of a question, but I don’t think it was a mere polite question.

I think it was rather a very pointed question, in such a way that they express how foolish Jesus has just been.