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Called by name
SERMON - 10.15am, Emmanuel Church, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
Sunday 5th June 2005
Revd. Matthew Vernon
Matt 9.9-13, 18-26.
When were you given your name?
Perhaps your name was chosen well in advance.
• but not all parents have a name ready at the birth.
There's the wonderful story of the boy who could remember being called "him".
He could remember the day his older sister asked their parents
• "Isn't it time we give him a name?"
As children of God, we are named long before our birth.
Psalm 139 says O Lord, "you knit me together in my mother's womb. … Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed."
God names us before we are born.
God calls us into existence.
Our date of birth is an important part of our identity.
At least, it's important to whoever collects immigration papers.
What does happen to all those immigration forms we fill in on airplanes?
Are they really kept my some immigration official in some immigration warehouse?
As children of God, more important than our date of birth is our date of conception.
So where did it all begin for you?
We don't often think about it.
I heard about some research recently
• research into where people were conceived.
Some answers where ordinary: at home; on holiday
• some more exotic: at a bus stop.
One was "whilst watching President Nixon on the television"!
God says, "Your beginnings are important because I created you."
Jesus' conception is one of the most famous.
We believe it was miraculous.
On 31st May, just passed this week, the church remembers Mary's visit to her cousin Elizabeth.
• it's described in Luke's Gospel.
We think of the events surrounding Jesus' conception and birth as being controlled by God.
The events surrounding our own coming to this world were too.
The time had to be ripe,
• the place just right,
• the circumstances ready
• before you could be born.
God chose Mary and Joseph to be Jesus' parents
• he gave them the gifts and personality they needed for his birth and childhood.
God too chose your parents.
They had to be the kind of people they were
• for you to become what God means you to be.
God calls us into existence and God calls us by name.
This morning's Gospel, you'll understand, is a personal favourite of mine:
"As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, "Follow me." And he got up and followed him."
I never wanted to be a tax collector.
When I was young I did want to be an accountant…
But it's not just my own name in the story.
A particular person is named.
Like the calling of the other disciples
• like Peter, Andrew James and John fishing.
In the Gospels, particular individuals are called by Jesus.
And he calls each of us by name too.
As an aside, notice we don't need to be spooky about Matthew's calling.
The way the Gospel puts it, we might think Matthew had never seen Jesus before.
It's much more likely that they knew each other.
It was a small place where they lived.
Tax collectors would have been well known to people.
Jesus would already have been famous locally.
The story of Matthew's calling appeals for other reasons too.
Tax collectors we caught up in materialism.
They were despised because they were officials of the Roman authorities.
They collected tax from the Jewish people on behalf of Rome
• Rome which was occupying Israel.
It's thought that the tax collectors profited from their position
• manipulating the figures,
• adding a little extra.
Materialism and worship of wealth that we're all too familiar with.
That deceives us into believing our value comes from that rather than from God.
And yet Jesus calls a tax collector.
"Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick."
We know we all need a physician.
We all need God's healing touch.
It's so easy to be like the Pharisees:
• judgmental and critical
• to exclude people from God's grace.
Tax collectors are as unpopular now as ever!
But when we're honest, we know that we are amongst the tax collectors and sinners in Matthew's house.
We need a doctor.
Thank God, Jesus welcomes sinners like us.
Straight after Matthew's calling, we have a healing story.
Jesus heals the haemorrhaging woman.
The woman's haemorrhaging is linked to conception and birth,
• because it's presumably some kind of menstrual bleeding
• and it was incurable by medical means of her day.
The significance of this shouldn't be underestimated.
She would have been in a permanent state ritual defilement;
• excluded from public worship
• and a virtual outcast
Not only was she unclean from her bleeding,
• but other people would be unclean if she touched them.
All women were unclean for at least a week each month.
The taboo of menstruation was believed to come from God's curse on Eve in Genesis.
A taboo that continued in the 'Churching of Women' until very recently.
This woman whom God called by name before she was born.
This woman whom God had knit together in her mother's womb,
• had been permanently unclean for 12 years.
• A tragic stigma.
And yet Jesus heals her.
Just as he reached out to Matthew and the tax collectors
• other people who were social and spiritual outcasts.
Here is someone who is sick and needs a doctor.
Jesus shows a revolutionary attitude.
It would have been unusual, if not shocking, for a rabbi to mix freely with women.
And impossible for a rabbi to mix with a bleeding woman.
It's why she approaches Jesus from behind,
• secretly.
But she discovers she didn't need to be so ashamed.
Jesus responds with love and intimacy,
• "Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well."
In New Testament Greek, the word for "heal" and "save" is the same.
So Jesus could have said "your faith has brought you salvation."
Mark's Gospel adds, "Go in peace; be cured from all your sickness."
Healing and salvation are very closely linked.
We might not have experienced such a dramatic physical healing as the woman.
But healed we are all the same, as Matthew and the tax collectors were.
• Emotionally, psychologically, spiritually.
Christ has called each of us by name
We have touched the hem of his garment.
And he has said to us, "your faith has brought you salvation. Go in peace"
To learn of the depths of God's love for us.
To realise that God named us before we were born.
That heals our internal haemorrhaging.
We who so easily think of ourselves as outcast
• are included in God's kingdom.
For God names us before we are born.
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