Matthew 9:9-13
Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Happy St. Matthew Sunday friends of St. Matthew Lutheran Church!
As we celebrate the feast day or our church’s namesake, I wonder how many of you here know the story of how St. Matthew Lutheran Church assumed the name St. Matthew? Well, I reached out to one of our church historians, Ann Eberhard, this week to try to learn myself!
Here’s the story as far as I could make out: A group of German migrants arrived to Collinsville in the mid-1800s and began working at the Collins Axe Factory. They seemed to be a tight-knit group, as you can imagine new migrants to a strange country might be. They asked a German Lutheran pastor in Hartford to come out and lead services in one of the town gathering spaces in the German language. This group eventually grew large enough to build their own building and call their own pastor. They called the new church St. Matthew’s Evangelical German Lutheran Church – the official founding date was in 1885 – which I think was about 15 or 20 years after the initial gatherings started to take place.[1]
Now, I was struck that there is very little information or writing about the process of naming of the new church! I mean, these days, there are listening sessions, feedback circles, brainstorming sessions and votes all scheduled and recorded in church minutes to name new or merged churches! Perhaps these people just KNEW they wanted to call the church St. Matthew.
I think this seemingly incomplete short story on our church’s name is actually quite apt for our Gospel text today where we hear how Matthew, the tax collector, accepts his call from Jesus to come and follow.
Matthew’s call story is a mere TWO sentences in the Gospel of Matthew. All we know from what is recorded is that he quite literally drops everything and gets up to follow Jesus.
Biblical Scholars have traditionally thought that this Gospel has taken its name, Matthew, from this brief yet inspiring encounter we have with this Character.[2]
And because we are dealing with a character in a story[3] – I am hooked into this one because I really want to figure out just why Matthew dropped everything and followed Jesus so abruptly! And maybe, just maybe, our digging will provide us with a guess as to why the ancestors of this church called it St. Matthew.
At the beginning of this brief gospel story, we learn that Jesus interrupts his own journey to have an encounter with Matthew. Our text says that Jesus is walking along – he’s on his commute! – and he sees a man called Matthew sitting at a tax booth.
So, you know in a Disney movie, after you get to know the hero of the story who is drawn in warm colors like yellows, greens and golds and then we cut over to the villain of the story and all of a sudden the color pallet shifts to dark purple, grey, red and black? Well, you should have that kind of feeling when our Gospels mention “Tax Collectors” Bam bam baaaaaaaaam.
Tax collectors were considered the villain in Jesus society. They were ritually unclean, money changers who worked for the Empire and often overcharged people to skim off the top for themselves.[4] People in Jesus’s time would have immediately thought: This is exactly the kind of person who Jesus, a religious leader, should zoom past as fast as he could… and yet – Jesus stops and acknowledges Matthew. And Jesus goes even further, Jesus asks Matthew, the despised tax collector, to join him on his mission to bring about the Kingdom of God. Woah.
Ok, then our story takes us to a place where Jesus is having a meal. He’s with his new follower Matthew, his other disciples and he is now surrounded by other villains of society – sinners, more tax collectors and generally the people who good-upstanding citizens would never let come to a dining room table. And there Jesus is eating with them. Giving them attention. Presumably having conversation with them and generally caring about what they have to say. Woah.
We know that all these people who Jesus is eating with are the outcasts of society because we are then introduced to the Pharisees – who are the keepers of the ritual tradition and the leaders of society – they let us know that Jesus is eating with all the wrong sorts of people. They ask the other disciples why is Jesus eating with “those” people? And Jesus overhears the Pharisees snide comments and says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Woah.
Jesus is telling us A LOT about who he has come to be with, to eat with, and to care for in these five verses. Jesus’s character – God’s character - is laid on the line, plain and clear.
So, perhaps our church’s ancestors, those German migrants to the United States who landed here in the Farmington Valley of Connecticut, chose the name St. Matthew because they might have felt like they belonged to the people in our story who were invited to dinner with Jesus – at what appears to be a foretaste of the heavenly banquet table.
Just think: They were probably poor English speakers – which was the dominant language of the area after English colonialism.
They were likely just finding their economic footing through their work in the axe factory and so were not the wealthiest members of the community.
And I’m sure they were up against a myriad of prejudices for being new migrants to the area – something we are not unaccustomed to hearing about today…
These German migrants – whom society may not have accepted yet, who may have felt like the cast-offs, heard Christ’s call to come to the heavenly banquet table that Matthew the Tax Collector heard about in his tax booth. The ancestors of this church may have needed a place where they could experience the love, care, and connection to God through Jesus Christ – the one who asks for mercy for the world.[5]
St. Matthew seems to be a natural name for these people as they hoped to encounter Christ at the heavenly banquet table each week. St. Matthew was a natural name for a group of people who wanted to be an example of what Mercy looks like in the midst of their new community. St. Matthew was a natural choice which still inspires the ethos of the community we all still call home! A community that centers on Christ’s message of mercy in worship and then turns us out into the surrounding community to serve and to love others. Just this morning we heard from George about the amazing gift that our ancestors helped to create that we know as the endowment. This is a tool that not many churches have the opportunity to steward and to use for mercy in the world. St. Matthew, the tax collector whom Jesus showed love and mercy toward, is a beautiful and natural name for this church community.
But, like I said at the beginning, I’m not really sure of the full story behind our church’s name just like I’m not sure of the full story behind Matthew’s immediate choice to follow Jesus. And, if anyone has more information on the history of our church’s name, please do let me know! But for now, here in worship, you know what – the mystery created by the narrative gaps in both our Gospel story and our own church history, has actually provided us a wonderful opportunity this morning to explore some really important characteristics of who Jesus is for us in the world. Jesus is the one who brings mercy by an act of God’s grace to the outcasts and sinners of the world. Jesus is the one who sets the heavenly banquet table for all people and invites us all to join in drinking from the cup of blessing that is full of love and mercy.
And for that I give thanks to God. Amen.
The Rev. Ryan Heckman | Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024 | The Feast of St. Matthew
[1] Information from Seventy-Fifth Anniversary: St. Matthew Lutheran Church, Collinsville, Connecticut. A historical booklet published to commemorate 75 years of ministry. Kept in historical files, St. Matthew Lutheran Church – Avon, CT.
[2] Allison, Dale C. Jr. “Matthew” in The Oxford Bible Commentary eds. John Barton and John Muddiman with Loveday Alexander, Martin Goodman, Rex Mason and Henry Wansbrough. Oxford University Press, 2001. – I note that “tradition” names the Gospel ‘Matthew’, however most scholars now believe the Gospel was penned anonymously and only later attributed to Matthew (pg. 848).
[3] My character study idea comes from The New Interpreters Bible Commentary, Vol. VIII. “The Gospel of Matthew: Introduction, Commentary and Reflections” by M. Eugene Boring. Pages 107-118 of this commentary place Matthew within a literary context. Boring notes that Matthew is particularly developed as a story that fits the patterns of first century story telling.
[4] New Interpreters Commentary, pg. 235.
[5] These pieces of narrative in my sermon are illustrative only and do not necessarily have foundations in historical fact. The purpose of this section is to illustrate more powerfully why St. Matthew might have been chosen as a name for this church. At the end of the sermon, I note that the details about why and how are less important than what we learn about who Jesus shows himself to be in this Gospel story.
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