A sermon for St. Matthew's Day preached in Christ Chapel by the Rev. Anne Knight Hoey '88, of St. Michael's Episcopal Church, Austin, on September 22, 2004

What times we live in! What a world this is! Or, if you want to get fancy, O tempora, o mores. What times! What manners! What a world! And if we mortals hadn't already done enough to turn the planet on its ear with our vaunted dominion over creation, our pumped-up technological hubris, then nature, ever red and ready with tooth and claw, can blow us to our knees without raising a sweat.

Witness our friends Trish and John Wallace. John, as many of you know, is a recent graduate of this seminary, and has just been installed as rector of St. Mary's Church in Milton, Florida, just a few miles up the road from Pensacola. If you've followed the news of what's been going on in Pensacola, you can imagine what life is like in Milton in these latter days.

I talked to John the other night to see how he and Trish were doing. They appear to be among the lucky. Neither church nor rectory sustained any serious damage, although John's car had a run-in with a falling tree, and the tree came out on top. But John and Trish are safe and well, though powerless-and they don't have any electricity, either-like the rest of the world, which in its folly had come to believe it could depend on its own resources.

I'm mindful of Zora Neale Hurston's story of Janie and her husband Tea Cake as they try to ride out a hurricane in the Florida everglades:

"Sometime that night the winds came back," she writes. "Louder and higher and lower and wider the sound and motion spread, mounting, sinking, darking.

"It woke up old Okeechobee and the monster began to roll in his bed…The folks in the quarters and the people in the big houses…heard the big lake and wondered… Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands…

"They huddled closer and stared at the door…Through the screaming wind they heard things crashing and things hurtling and dashing…The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God."

Their eyes were watching God.

What do you suppose they saw?

It sounds like Mother Teresa's response to an interviewer's question about what she says to God in prayer. "I don't say anything," she told him. "I just listen." When the interviewer asked what she hears God say, she answered, "He doesn't say anything. He just listens."

We've been reading for the last few weeks a series of gospel accounts of God-watching, in the form of Jesus-watching.

The Pharisees have been watching Jesus.

And they're at it again this morning. Jesus has just recruited Matthew as a companion on the way, and the two of them are having dinner with a few of Matthew's friends and fellow tax collectors, that despised symbol of Jewish sycophancy to Rome. And from somewhere arises a chorus of Pharisees, bent once more on holding Jesus' feet to the orthodox fire. "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" they ask. It simply isn't done.

And so Jesus, who himself has his eye on God, makes one of those confounding replies that are his specialty:

"Go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.'"

Mercy, not sacrifice. Go and learn what this means.

Oh, that we could learn, that we could get it right! No matter how clearly we think we have God in our sights, no matter how hard we strain to hear that still, small voice, we end up pleading, along with the psalmist: "Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes,…Give me understanding, …incline my heart."

We crave an epiphany, a mountain to rise above the plain. We just flat need a little help from our friend.
If we were to read on past this morning's pericope, perhaps we'd get a clue. After the calling of Matthew and the exchange with the Pharisees, two things happen. A leader of the synagogue kneels before Jesus and pleads with him to restore his daughter who has just died. "Come and lay your hand on her," he begs, "and she will live." No sooner have Jesus and the disciples started out on this mission than he is approached by another petitioner, a woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years. "If only I can touch his cloak," she says, "I will be made well."

Here is Jesus doing pastoral care, doing his job, the nitty-gritty ministry of touching -- the tactile reality that fleshes out the sight and sound of God. Here is Jesus spurning the trappings of ritual purity, living out the mercy of God. "Your faith has made you well," he tells the woman. And for the grieving father, there is the joy of new life in the midst of death. Jesus incarnates the tender mercy of God, the dew from heaven, the coolness of rain on a summer day, the parent bending over the fevered child. The faithful, steadfast, abiding mercy and loving-kindness of God for God's people -- healing, forgiving, restoring to wholeness and life.

But that's Jesus, and this is Anne. Go and learn, he says. But sometimes the thought of one more worship committee, one more vestry, one more sermon, feels like forever. Sometimes I don't feel like trekking across town to the hospital. Sometimes I don't feel like taking up the cross. Sometimes the high calling to minister in the name of Jesus Christ just feels like a job. I get tired. I get bored and stale and all burned out. Someone asked me the other day if I were thinking about retiring, and I told her, "I think about it all the time!"

But no matter how my psyche kicks and screams at the thought of one more day in the traces, one more hour in the double bind of clerical collar and panty hose, I never fail to be surprised by God's mercy, by the grace and power of ministry with God's people. How often in praying with those who are drifting close to the portals of death, when I think they have slipped away into another realm, when I think I am saying alone the ancient words of our most familiar prayer, their lips will begin to move as they say with me, in a whisper only God can hear, the words they learned as a child. It is then that I hear afresh what it is we pray for: for the daily bread of strength and hope, for the grace to forgive as we have been forgiven, for the vision to perceive that God is listening.

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Matthew, the mysterious Levi whom the church calls both apostle and evangelist. Of the evangelist we know not; of the apostle we can only surmise. But we who hear the words our Lord speaks in his defense hear that same call to us: "Go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.'" And then comes the kicker. For Matthew. For me. For us all. "For I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners."

Thanks be to God.