²⁷ After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him, ²⁸ and Levi got up, left everything and followed him. ²⁹ Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. ³⁰ But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” ³¹ Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. ³² I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

–Luke 5.27-31 (NIV)

If you have ever wondered if you are “lovable enough” to be loved by God, this story is for you because the answer to your doubts is a resounding “YES!” A bit of historical background will help us appreciate the power of this story. In Jesus’ day, the Roman Empire would  hire out locals to collect taxes for the Empire. This privilege usually went to the highest bidder and it should quickly be apparent that there was lots of room for abuse in a system like this. Why? Because it provided an opportunity for lots of folks to get rich, usually at the expense of someone else. Roman administrators could get rich by offering tax collection opportunities to the highest bidder. And why would local folks want to bid for this “opportunity”? Because there was tremendous wealth to be had. Each tax collector was responsible to pay his assigned quotient of taxes to Rome. Anything he collected beyond this was his to keep and if the locals didn’t pay what the tax collectors demanded–usually well above what their actual tax bill was–they’d face the wrath of Rome. Can we say made for extortion? Sure we can. This is why tax collectors were despised and hated, especially by the Jews, because they were perceived as being greedy, unpatriotic, and in the case of the Jews, unfaithful to God. Therefore, what a head turner it would have been for those who followed Jesus to see him call a person from one of the most despised groups of society to follow him. It would be like seeing Jesus call a member of Al Qaeda to follow him.

You just don’t do things like that.

But Jesus did do things like that and if we want to follow Jesus, so must we. For you see, no one, and I mean no one, is beyond the radical love that God has for each one of us. God created humans to love and enjoy him, to have a life-giving relationship with him. God did not create us to destroy us. Sadly, there will be some among us who will reject forever God’s gracious love offered to each of us in Jesus, but that is about them and their foolishness and stupidity, not about God.

And of course as the story in today’s lesson unfolds, we see opposition toward God’s great love and grace develop. Sadly this opposition often comes from “church folk” who have appointed themselves to be arbiters of good and proper behavior and God help anyone who gets in their way–even our Lord himself. Funny thing, that. We still have plenty of folks like the Pharisees around today.

Now let me be clear here. I am not advocating an “anything goes” morality. Nowhere in this story (or in any of the Gospel stories for that matter) does Luke give us any indication that Jesus blessed the tax collectors’ behavior or encouraged them to continue exploiting others to satisfy their greed and lust for power. Quite the contrary. Jesus called them to repentance (literally to turn around, to change their course of action) so that they could move from death to life, from their own darkness of sin and self-centeredness to God’s light. It’s hard to do that if you are busy condemning folks right and left and setting yourself up as the arbiter of God’s grace and love for all humans. No, Jesus wants everybody to wake up and smell the coffee and he is willing to get in the ditch with the pigs, so to speak.

In this story, then, we see Jesus putting into action the message behind his many parables, parables like the ones about the lost sheep and the prodigal son. Jesus wants everyone to discover who he is so that he can begin to heal us and transform us into the creatures he created us to be. This isn’t some kind of schmaltzy love because the stakes are high and they are real. Jesus knew better than any of us that God is not just a God of love; he is a God of holy love, and there are dire consequences for anyone who rejects God’s grace and mercy offered to us freely in and through Jesus. Think about it. If it really doesn’t matter what we do in and with our lives because we are “all going to go to heaven” anyway (a gross misunderstanding of the Resurrection in itself), why would Jesus have felt such an urgency to reach out to the least, the lost, and the most hopeless? Consequences there are, both wondrous and awful, and in stories like the ones in today’s lesson, we see the love of God reaching out to those who needed it most.

I can love a God like that. Can you?

What this means for us, of course, is that we can have real hope and a chance to be healed and transformed by God’s amazing love for us. It doesn’t matter who we are or what we’ve done. It doesn’t matter how awful or unlovable we think we are. That’s not the point because it is not about us. It is about God’s love for us and his power to redeem and heal us. No one is deserving of God’s love because we all fall short of the mark. But unlike much human love that attaches conditions to it if we want to continue enjoying it, God’s love does not work that way. He takes us where we are.

But it doesn’t stop there because God loves us too much to leave us where we are. If you dare to allow God’s love for you in Jesus into your life, you had better expect to be changed. It may take a moment. It may take a lifetime, but you will be changed if you let Jesus into your life and decide to follow him instead of following yourself or some other inadequate and unreal god.

What this will do, of course, is typically make you want to share God’s love with others and here we can gain an additional insight from Luke’s story today. We share God’s love in Christ by being real with others, by meeting people where they are, by letting people see Jesus in us in the context of our daily lives–things like acting with honesty and integrity, being respectful to others, taking a real interest in them and their lives, and acting charitably and mercifully toward them, even when they deserve none of it–and by daring to see in them more than might meet the eye. We can only do the latter when we keep in mind that all humans bear the Image of God, defaced as it might be (and in some folks it’s darn near impossible to detect God’s Image at all). We’ve all met folks like this in our lives and typically we run like hell to avoid interacting with them. But this is not the way of Jesus, the way of the cross. You cannot introduce people to Jesus who desperately need to meet him by running from them. You have to engage them in the context of your life and theirs. This takes courage, time, patience, and great perseverance. It also takes a lot of prayer because left to our own devices, we just don’t have it in us to do this kind of work.

But here’s the thing. We don’t have to do this on our own. We have the Power and Presence of the Holy Spirit living in us to help us follow Jesus. And we have each other because this work was never intended to be done alone. We are called to follow Jesus as his Body, the Church, and we set ourselves up for failure if we try to live the Christian life as rugged individualists. If you don’t believe me, read any of Paul’s letters. They were written to real people, to real churches on the ground, struggling to live faithfully to Jesus, and we see Paul urge and remind his churches repeatedly that they are to follow Jesus together, not just individually.

If you are one who is hurting or who feels unlovable, whether you are in the church or not, think again. You are not outside the amazing love of God. Just look at him in action when he became human and lived among us, stories like the one in today’s lesson. He wants to help you abandon everything in your life and in you that prevents you from living life fully and with joy, meaning, purpose, and power. If you really want to find out what it means to be human, Jesus will call you to lose yourself so that you can gain him, and when that happens, you will discover how to live fully as a human being. You have the witness and experience of countless men, women, and children that Jesus is the real deal and he can and will deliver on his promises to heal and transform you, and it will then equip you to share Jesus’ love and power (as well as yourself because he will use you to help him in his work) with others. Take him up on his offer. It is the best thing you ever will do for yourself and for God’s creation.