Just outside Amarillo, Texas, Cowboy Jack stops in the truck stop and strikes up a conversation with the nun sipping coffee at the counter. "Sister Angelica, where you headed to?"
"Well, I'm on my way to west Texas to do medical missionary work among the Indians and Mexicans."
"Don't you realize how dangerous that part of Texas is?"
"Yes I do, but it's what God has called me to do."
Jack takes a long sip of his coffee and says, "Ohhhhhh, Sister, do you ever have faith. And just how are you getting yourself out to west Texas?"
Sister Angelica finishes her coffee and says to Cowboy Jack, "Come on out to the parking lot and I'll show you."
They walk out and the driving nun shows Jack her car, a 1971 Plymouth Fury with more rust than metal. Its tailpipe is dragging the ground, its taillights are busted and its tires that are balder than Yul Brynner. Cowboy Jack looks at the car, looks at Sister Angelica and says, "Ohhhhhh, Sister: do you ever have faith."
Jack and the sister bid one another adieu. Sister Angelica has driven about a hundred miles when the Plymouth starts wheezing and chugging. She pulls over to the side of the road. The gas gauge says "Full," but then the nun realizes that the person who loaned her this car said that the gauge always said full. She's scarcely walked 10 feet when a kindly old gentleman pulls over and offers her a ride.
"What's a matter, sister?"
"I think I'm out of gas."
"Well sister, there ain't a gas station for another 50 miles. But if you come to my place I can let you have enough to get you to the gas station. Do you have a gas can in this car?"
Sister says she doesn't know. So she looks in the trunk. All she can find is a super-duper high-capacity bedpan. She brings it around and says, 'I guess this will have to do."
The old man says, "Sister, I don't think you can get more than two gallons of gasoline in that bedpan. Do you think you can get 25 miles to the gallon in a gas hog like this Plymouth?"
Sister says, "God can get me to the gas station."
The old man shakes his head and says, "Ohhhhhh, Sister, do you ever have faith."
So Sister Angelica rides to the old man's house, fills the bedpan with gasoline, and the old man drops her off.
Meanwhile, Cowboy Jack finds himself driving back on the highway. He looks up ahead and sees Sister Angelica's car beside the road. He pulls up to see the nun leaning over the Plymouth, pouring the contents of the bedpan into the gas tank. He slows down, rolls down his window and says, "Ohhhhhh, Sister: do you ever have faith."
Sometimes what you see isn't necessarily what you get. You see people that look one way on the outside, but are completely different on the inside.
In this morning's text, we see an example of someone who looks different on the outside than what he is on the inside.
On the outside, Matthew looked like a tax collector. He dressed like a tax collector, talked like a tax collector, felt a tax collector, and smelled like a tax collector. As a matter of fact, until Jesus comes along and says, "Follow Me," Matthew was indeed a tax collector, the first century equivalent of an IRS agent.
Now, how did people feel about tax collectors in those days? I think it can pretty much be explained by a cartoon I saw one time. The first pane shows a possum walking in the middle of the road and skid marks from a single car that had avoided it. The second frame shows a rattlesnake crawling down the middle of the road and skid marks from a single car that had avoided it. The third frame shows an IRS agent in the middle of the road who has been flattened like a pancake and it shows the skid marks of a dozen cars that had driven straight towards him.
That's how people felt about the tax collectors in the days of Jesus. The Roman government had this ambitious program of roads, aqueducts, amphitheaters, and world domination. These projects were funded no differently than any other government: they levied taxes on whatever they could find.
There are some big differences between then and now. In the first place, the Romans were no different than Uncle Sam or our friends who run that place with the big dome down in Saint Paul. They put levies and tariffs on certain items. But the big difference was in the income tax rate itself, The citizens of the Roman Empire had to pay this exorbitant income tax rate: one percent. And, by the way, people griped about the high rate of 1%.
The biggest difference between governments now and the government then was in the way that the taxes were collected. The Romans didn't have a massive bureau or forms or a code that was a mile thick. The Romans collected taxes the same way that some municipalities collect garbage: they contracted the collection out to private individuals, strictly on a commission basis.
The tax collector had the power and authority to stop you at least once a year. He lived in your neighborhood. He knew what kind of work you did. You could not pull the wool over his eyes. And once a year he could say, "Ralph, it looks to me like you made 30,000 bucks this year. And, as you know, the Roman government needs 10% of that. So fork it over."
Now, earlier I said that the taxation rate was really 1% but here we have the IRS agent telling Ralph that he owed 10%. This is because the Roman government didn't really publish the rates. There were no IRS publications. They didn't have a toll-free number where you could ask the same question to ten different people and get ten different answers. So Ralph was pretty much at the mercy of the tax collector's word.
Since the tax collector didn't get a salary from Caesar, his compensation was the difference between the one percent he had to turn over to Rome and the whatever percent he could squeeze out of Ralph.
As you could imagine, tax collectors were rich. Loaded. And in the same way that a lot of people are jealous towards those who do well for themselves these days, Matthew was hated doubly hated. He was hated for the fact that he was rich; he was hated because of the way that he got rich.
One day Matthew is sitting at his booth, spying on citizens, and feels something happening deep within himself. He looks up and sees Jesus. Jesus doesn't give Matthew the long form. He simply says, "Follow Me." Matthew gets up, leaves his calculator and his forms and, yes, his entire old way of living, and follows Jesus.
So here is Matthew: a changed man. A man who followed others to extort their hard earned money from them now follows Jesus so that he can give away the things Jesus gives him. Matthew is a changed vessel. On the outside he still looks and dresses and talks and sounds and smells like a tax collector. But his insides are different. What fueled him before:‹greed and power and wealth‹has been replaced by forgiveness and mercy and love. So Dr. Jesus isn't so much a dermatologist when it comes to Matthew. Jesus doesn't change Matthew's outward structure. Dr. Jesus is more like an internist: He changes Matthew from the inside-out.
And Matthew is all bubbling up on the inside and throws a party; he invites all his fellow tax collectors. He wants to celebrate the change in his life and to introduce Jesus to his friends. When Jesus comes into our lives, we will want to introduce Him to our friends.
So here they are at Matthew's palace. There's food and wine everywhere, and Matthew is going around from table to table, telling others about this change in his life. There's this effervescence in the air, things are bubbling, and then THEY walk in.
You know THEM don't you? Every time someone has a bit of good news. Every time someone receives a blessing. Every time someone undergoes a radical change for the good, THEY walk into the room. THEM, the party-poopers.
The THEY we are talking about are the Pharisees and the Scribes. The keepers of tradition. And they believe they speak for the rest of us when they start whispering, "Look at this. Isn't this pitiful? Doesn't Jesus know what kind of snakes these people are? If He was as smart as He thinks He is, He wouldn't be hanging around THESE type of people."
The Pharisees and Scribes were what we call Separatists. They believed that associating with non-Jews corrupting you. One of their favorite verses was the one which to said to separate from among the unholy and the unclean things. So they were very careful to not speak to or to be seen with thieves and robbers and drunks and prostitutes and tax collectors.
And here they see Jesus actually rubbing elbows with the tax collectors. Here is Jesus actually seated at table and engaging them in conversation. And oh, how scandalous.
But Jesus says, "Look at these people. Look at how they make their money. Everyone knows the corruption that eats away at their insides. But how do you change that? Do you change a person by sitting outside the circle and lobbing grenades in at them? Do you think that they are going to give up their ways of cheating and extortion by criticizing them? Most people don't get hounded into the Kingdom. But a lot of people, most people, get loved into the Kingdom."
While Jesus is getting hammered by the Pharisees for going to this party, He begins taking it on the chin not only for going to the party, but why doesn't He fast like the followers of John the Baptist?
"Here You are, Jesus, going to this party and drinking wine, when You should be out praying and fasting."
Jesus looks around. He sees people eating. He sees people drinking. He sees people engaged in stimulating conversation, the subject of that conversation being Him, and says, "Imagine yourself at a wedding, a glorious occasion. A time to celebrate the joining of these two lives together. Are you going to be all mournful at a wedding?"
Well, there is a certain sadness at a wedding, isn't there? Two of the absolute saddest days of my life were the days that I gave away my little girls in their wedding ceremonies. They were two of the saddest days of my life; they were two of the happiest days of my life.
There is a little poignant melancholy at a wedding, especially when the parents of the bride get the bill for the wedding, but for the most part it's a time to celebrate. The bride is here. The groom is here. In a few hours they will go away and we will have to pick up the empty 7-up cans and we will have to take down the wedding canopy. But before they drive off to honeymoon in Fargo, let's celebrate.
Matthew. Old life: a tax collector, a man who made his living by fraud and extortion and who got rich at the expense of others. He's changed. He looks the same on the outside but he's changed on the inside. Let's celebrate that.
The bride and groom. Old life: single guy, single girl. their lives incomplete. But now, through their marriage, they begin a life of being yin to her yang, Hepburn to his Tracy, a life of togetherness. They look the same on the outside, but they are changed on the inside. Let's celebrate that.
But how? How did Matthew change? What happened to the inside?
Jesus goes on to tell us: "No one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins."
What is it that truly changes a person? Jesus says that the insides have to change first. It's like having a heart transplant. It's like having a blood transfusion. The old stuff that is within you is replaced by new stuff. Your whole way of looking, your whole way of thinking, your whole way of living is changed because of what Jesus calls new wine.
I don't know a lot about wine. I don't know a Beaujolais from a Robert Goulet. I only know that there's red wine and there's white wine, some goes well with red sauce while others go well with white sauce.
But I do know something about new wine. You see, even though Mom grew up a teetotaling fundamentalist, she gave in one day when Dad announced he was going to make homemade wine. We had glass milk jugs back then in the Stone Age and dad put grape juice - maybe some other stuff too - in the jug. Then he put a balloon on the mouth of the jug. And every day we'd peep into the laundry room and see that balloon getting bigger and bigger until it popped.
Then that which had been called Welch's was now something new. That which was cheap grape juice was now delicious wine.
In the days of Jesus, they didn't have glass jugs or jars. All they had were the skins of animals fashioned into bottles. And any new batch of wine had to be put into fresh skins. The new skins were pliable. They let the wine do its stuff. The wine would contract and expand and the new wineskins would conform to this wonderful fluid within.
But my Scottish ancestors must have settled in Israel because Jesus says that sometimes in the interest of economy, people would try to reuse the wineskins. But the trouble with the old wineskins is that as they got older, they had a hard time going with the flow. The old wineskins were set in their ways. On the outside they looked the same, but they could not accommodate the new things happening on their insides, and sometimes they burst.
And that, says Jesus, is what it's like to be a Christian. You see, wine is a symbol of God's Holy Spirit.
When you, like Matthew the Tax Collector, realize all the hurt you have caused others and all the damage you have done to yourself, the Holy Spirit begins to heal - like wine - those wounds. One of the most important steps in Alcoholics Anonymous is making a list of everyone his drinking and behavior has hurt. The alcoholic then makes a rigorous to seek forgiveness from those she has hurt. So when the Holy Spirit comes into your life there is healing. There is forgiveness.
When you, like Matthew the Tax Collector, cease to follow after money and begin to follow that which money cannot buy, the Holy Spirit begins to change that which is within you. When the Holy Spirit is truly within you, there is motion. There is movement. There is power.
When you, like Matthew the Tax Collector, cease to seek after a prosperity that is here today and gone tomorrow and begin to seek the prosperity of God's kingdom, the Holy Spirit begins to prosper your soul. There is growth. There is largeness.
When you, like Matthew the Tax Collector, cease to seek after happiness, knowing that happiness depends completely on circumstances, and that when circumstances stink your happiness rots, and instead you seek after joy, then the Holy Spirit begins to give you joy. Joy knowing that even though things look like they are falling apart, even though this outer vessel is wasting away, inside there is joy.
Sometimes what you see isn't necessarily what you get. I'll never forget this episode of the television show ER a few seasons ago. Jeanie Boulet is a Physicians' Assistant. She has HIV. She's black. She's has to face the prejudice that comes from without and the fear that comes from the infection that is within. And then one day a man is brought into the E.R. He's a rough looking white guy. He has the kind of look that when you see him for the first time you don't want your daughter to date him. And, on top of this, he has a bone-chilling tattoo on his chest that identifies him as a member of the Aryan Nation, a white supremist hate group.
Jeanie walks into the room to treat him for his injuries and, much to her surprise, the man is very kind and gentle. And then he begins talking to her about Jesus. She doesn't say anything, but he sees her eyes glance at the tattoo. And then he goes on to tell her how that part of his life, which was so wrong, is behind him now.
You see, it is not always the people who act and dress and talk and walk and sound and smell like the rest of us that need a doctor. Jesus came to change the insides of people. People like the Aryan Nation members. People like the Physicians Assistant with HIV. People like tax collectors.
And it doesn't matter what the vessel looks like on the outside: a wineskin, a gas can, a bedpan. It's what is bubbling and changing and healing and giving joy in the inside.
May others look at these homely vessels, trying to get somewhere in the kingdom and say "Ohhhhh brother, ohhhh, sister, do you ever have faith."
© Rev. Duane Brown, 2003
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