Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

When I was growing up, one of the exciting days in the summer is when dad brought home the TripTiks for our annual summer vacation. Those were the days before GPS or electronic instruction from a kind voice in the car.

The TripTik, provided by AAA, was a personalized paper map for your journey. It came in a cool little book that allowed flipping page to page as you make your trip. Every page showed a narrow section of road, highlighting the route you were supposed to take and pointing out places to eat, stay overnight, or stop for gas. Each page was like a small strip cut from a much larger map, giving you only what you exactly what you needed to get to the next destination.

What I didn’t understand then was that a TripTik was both useful and incomplete. It showed the route, but not the whole landscape. A map is not the same thing as the world it describes. The TripTik was the then-modern expression of human nature to map our experience and give us guidance for the road ahead.

Human beings are mapmakers. We form impressions and categories. We organize. We sort. We label. We tell ourselves stories that help us make sense of what we are seeing.

Most of the time this serves us well. The problem comes when we forget that our maps are maps. Over time, those maps become embedded in laws, institutions, customs, and assumptions. The lines we once drew become so familiar and unexamined that we stop noticing they were drawn at all.

In Bryan Stevenson’s memoir Just Mercy, he writes about how quickly a person can become identified by a single fact. A crime becomes a life story. A conviction becomes an identity.He writes, “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

That observation feels very close to today’s gospel. Matthew’s call to follow is recorded in three of the four gospels. Today we hear it from the book that bears his name. In this telling, Matthew is identified simply as a man sitting at a tax booth. When Luke tells the story, Matthew becomes “a tax collector.” To Matthew, perhaps he was simply a man sitting in a particular place. There’s a whole story to his location that only he knew. To everyone else, the map was already drawn.

Tax collector.

It was more than a profession. It was a moral judgment, a political identity, and a social category all at once.

Or so people thought. Jesus walks by and says, “Follow me.” And Matthew gets up.

To a first-century audience, those few words would have been astonishing. Matthew really was a tax collector. But suddenly everyone encounters a landscape that is larger than the map. They just went around a corner that wasn’t on the map that was provided.

The next scene takes place at a dinner table.

“Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

Notice how naturally the categories appear. No names. No stories. No questions. Jesus responds by quoting Hosea: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” He doesn’t simply hand them a new map. He invites them to redraw their understanding.

Hosea wrote during a time of political anxiety and religious uncertainty. Wealth was increasingly concentrated among a few at the top in the palace and temple. The nation was driven by fear but wrapped that fear in religious language. People longed to recover a past they believed was slipping away. Political leaders made desperate calculations. Religious leaders performed the required rituals. Sacrifices were offered in the hope that God would bless the plans they had already made.

Yet Hosea hears God asking a deeper question: What kind of relationship do you think we have?

“I desire mercy and not sacrifice.”

The word translated as mercy is hesed in Hebrew. There’s no one English word that captures its meaning. Steadfast love. Loving-kindness. Faithfulness. At its heart, hesed is relational. It is love that remains engaged. Love that keeps showing up.What Hosea experiences is not simply something God wants. Or a reminder to follow the rules. Hesed is something true about God.

Eventually Christian theology would describe God as all-powerful, all-knowing, and unchanging. Those ideas emerged for important reasons, but they can sometimes make us miss the surprising God we meet in scripture. Abraham argues with God about Sodom. Moses argues with God after the golden calf. Jonah becomes furious because God relents and spares Nineveh.

Again and again, the biblical writers portray a God who listens, grieves, forgives, relents, and begins again. A God whose greatness is revealed not through distance from creation but through profound engagement with it. In fact, it seems that God evolves alongside the cosmos.

Mercy is God’s character.

For years I assumed Jesus was identifying the tax collectors and sinners as the sick people in the story. Yet Jesus never actually says that. Instead, he sends everyone back to Hosea.

“Go and learn what this means.”

Which raises an uncomfortable possibility. What if the people most confident in their diagnosis, the ones who know the map best, are the ones who need healing? The next stories become demonstrations of what mercy looks like.

A woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years reaches out to touch Jesus’ cloak. Her condition has become her identity. Yet Jesus calls her “daughter.” Relationship takes precedence over diagnosis.

Then Jesus enters the house of a grieving father. The girl is dead. The mourners are not wrong. Death is real. Grief is real. Yet Jesus acts as though the map is not the whole landscape. He takes her by the hand, and she rises. She does the same thing Matthew just did. She gets up.

Mercy keeps discovering possibilities beyond what appears settled.

Matthew rises from a tax booth.

A woman rises from isolation.

A girl rises from death.

The gospel is not that God ignores reality. The gospel is that God sees more of reality than we do: more possibility, more future, more life, more of us. God is the landscape.

Jesus doesn’t hand out instructions as though there were only one right answer and one wrong answer. Instead, he calls us back to our God-given capacity to imagine a future that isn’t trapped by the past, all with the Spirit as our companion, travel advisor, and gentle voice saying, “Um you missed a turn. But it’s okay. Now we’ll see something different.”

“Go and learn what this means.” That’s our discipleship journey. Figure out what mercy means when it’s in the driver’s seat.

But first, let’s have a meal.Let’s gather everyone with a history. Everyone who’s been around the block. Everyone who has a story to tell, and everyone who will never tell their true story out loud. Let’s gather those sitting in the chairs assigned by social systems, political systems, religious systems. Those who have been diagnosed. Those who have been categorized. Those who were handed a map they didn’t help draw. Let’s gather those who think it’s all over. Those who have been told who they are. Those who have been told what their future will be.

Because at this table sits the One who sees more.

The One who saw more in Matthew than a tax collector.

The One who saw more in a woman than her suffering.

The One who saw more in a little girl than her death.

The One who sees more in us than we can yet see in ourselves.

Yesterday was yesterday.

This is today.

The first day or the week.

This is Easter.

Take heart.

Your faith has made you well.

Get up. And then get out of here.