All the Wrong People
Texts: Genesis 12:1-9 and Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
Imagine you are a Pharisee.
Not a villain. Not a hypocrite. Just a deeply religious person who takes faith seriously, who observes the traditions, who has worked hard to understand what it means to live rightly before God. You are, by any reasonable standard, one of the good ones.
And then you hear that this rabbi — Jesus of Nazareth — keeps hanging out with all the wrong people.
Here is the honest truth: most of us who gather for worship on Sunday morning are not the tax collectors in this story. We are not the sinners or the outcasts. We are the Pharisees. We are good, observant people who have built our faith into something coherent and, if we are honest, fairly comfortable. We have, in other words, put God in a box.
We all do it. We take the wild, uncontainable mystery of the divine and organize it into something manageable — doctrines, traditions, categories of who is in and who is out. And the box feels like faithfulness. But every now and then, we look up and discover that God has walked right out of it.
Both of these texts are about exactly that.
The story begins with a man named Abram — seventy-five years old, with everything to lose — hearing a voice that says: leave it. Leave your country, your kindred, your father's house. Leave everything that defines who you are and go to the land I will show you. Not the land I will describe in advance. The land I will show you — when you get there.
The call of God comes with a promise but not a map.
There is a shadow in this text worth naming honestly: the Canaanites were already in that land. And this promise has been used throughout history — and in our own day — to justify conquest and exclusion in God's name. But the text will not hold that weight. Because the promise ends with: In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. All of them. Every one. The calling is not to possess but to become a conduit of blessing for the entire human family. Not conquest. Communion.
Watch what Jesus does with that same story in real life. He walks past a tax collector's booth and says two words: follow me. No probationary period. No cleaning yourself up first. Just: follow me. And Matthew gets up and goes.
Then Jesus goes to dinner with Matthew's friends — the wrong crowd, every one of them — and when the religious authorities object, he answers with a word from the prophet Hosea: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Not the careful maintenance of boundaries. The actual encounter with the actual person standing in front of you.
Before the chapter ends, we get two more stories. A woman who has been bleeding for twelve years — nameless, unclean, invisible — reaches out and touches the hem of Jesus' garment. He stops. He turns. He sees her. And he calls her daughter. Then a young girl who has died is raised when Jesus simply takes her hand.
Three panels: the moral outsider, the ritual outsider, the one whom death itself has claimed. Jesus crosses every category of exclusion. And in each case, the direction of contamination runs backward — holiness turns out to be more contagious than uncleanness. Love is more powerful than the boundary.
So here we are, at the beginning of Ordinary Time — the long green season. Both texts are asking the same question:
What is your settled world? What is your father's house — the comfortable framework, the tribal identity, the understanding of God that keeps your faith coherent and your life unchallenging?
We are called not away from faith but deeper into it. Into a faith organized not around protecting what we have built, but around God's future — which is always larger than our plans for it. A faith that measures itself not by the quality of its boundaries but by the practice of its mercy.
The invitation is the same one Matthew received, sitting at his booth:
Follow me.
Not when you are ready. Not after you have figured out the destination.
Just: follow me — out of the settled world, into the land I will show you when you get there.
That is the work of Ordinary Time. May we have the courage to begin.