Delivered on Sunday 21 September 2008 in St George's Chapel

Matthew 9:9-13

There's a curious little book by Ross Clark with the title, How to Label a Goat. It's really an examination of the red tape that seems to surround everything we do. Let me give you just a couple of examples:

·         Tewkesbury Council banned paper napkins from their meals-on-wheels deliveries for fear that customers might mistake them for an item of food.

·         South West Trains were ordered to remove 28 trains from its fleet because the electronic strips that flash up journey details inside the carriages were three millimetres below the approved 35 mm.

·         A Manchester car thief was given an Asbo forbidding him from walking or cycling anywhere in the city unless accompanied by his sister. Curiously, it did not ban him from driving or stealing cars!

Clark's point is clear - we live with a great many silly rules. On the other hand there are some very serious rules that some may well consider silly. You need only think of the recent news stories about the Gurkhas. Lance Corporal Rai, a member of the 7^th Gurkha Rifles, almost lost his life during the final assault on Port Stanley in the course of the Falklands war. Very seriously injured he received five pints of blood donated by British soldiers, and the skin that was grafted onto his extensive back injury was taken from one of fallen British comrades. Today, that same Lance Corporal, is leading a claim against the Home Office's refusal to grant settlement to Gurkha veterans who served Britain but retired before July 1997. Why? Because, it is argued, they failed to demonstrate strong ties to the United Kingdom. You'd have thought that putting your life on the line in service to the forces was a fair indication of more than a tenuous line - but then, I don't know the ins and outs of the whole story.

What I do know is that rules, and in particular rules of belonging have long been a bone of contention. In fact, it's exactly what we see in today's New Testament reading. Jesus calls Matthew to be his disciple and heads off to have dinner with him. On the guest list, it appears that there were also some fairly notorious people, perhaps thieves and murderers or maybe just people whose way of life was not in accordance with Jewish law. The Pharisees are most displeased. And they wouldn't have been the only ones. The tax collectors - of whom Matthew was one - had the reputation of both supporting the Roman occupiers and also of taking a little cream of the bottle of taxes. They were allegedly disloyal and dishonest. And while today we might protest against what we saw as injustice by, say, joining a rally, in the ancient world you showed your dissatisfaction by not dining with the offending folk. So why would Jesus, a practising Jew, choose to eat with the disloyal and the dishonest?

Well in answer to the Pharisees, those teachers of the Jewish Law, he cited a verse from Hosea: "I desire mercy, not sacrifice". The implications are clear. First, go away and read the scriptures. Second, mercy is more important than religious ritual and churchy rules. Ouch.

I don't imagine the Pharisees were best pleased with Jesus' remarks. And I'm not too sure that we would react any better. The easier course is nearly always to build walls between those who are in and those are out, to argue for clear signs of what it means to belong and what it means to be an outside. It's far harder to break down fences, to extend barriers, to be inclusive to a fault. And yet that is what this little passage is asking us to think about. And if it were just this little passage we might forgiven for not giving it our full attention - but it's not, the message occurs again and again. Throughout the Gospels Jesus associates with those beyond the normal religious set. Of course, Jesus isn't telling us anything about who can belong to a nation; he's not even telling us about who can or should belong to a church. What he's talking about it the kingdom of God, and he's insisting that we're not the ones with the membership cards - they belong to him and to him alone.