Food is an important part of any culture, with customs and expectations. Food interacts with our social lives, our cultural lives and thus our spiritual lives as well. Jesus was very active with His mealtimes and used who He ate with and how He ate to subvert the prevailing ethnonationalist religion of His day. Paul would later call this out even more directly, but Jesus moved more subtly and subversively.
In this story, we read about Jesus sitting down to eat with Levi and many other tax collectors. Tax collectors were outcasts because of what they did (collected taxes), how they did it (skimming money off the top), and especially who they did it for (the hated Romans).
Many of us have experiences of eating alone and feeling left out. This feeling is a microcosm of the pain and loneliness of humanity that Jesus came to save. Jesus addressed this directly when criticized for eating with these sinners and outcasts – He came for the sick, not the healthy. The catch there is that we are all sick. What separates us on one hand is whether we know we are sick or not. On the other, if we are privileged in our lives, society may not consider us sick, in the way that the poor and oppressed clearly are.
Jesus’ break in protocol cut against the expectations of those around him. Who are the people around us where social interaction would have the same level of impact?
Then Jesus gets criticized from another direction. This time it is not the religious establishment, but his fellow subversives. John’s disciples leaned towards putting on a show of suffering and fasting, while Jesus was constantly eating and drinking with all manner of unsavory sorts. Jesus prods them to be human. Often times, in various circumstances, we feel the need to set ourselves apart and stay aloof from those around us, from the enjoyment and fun that others are having. But Jesus poured Himself into those around him and called His disciples His friends.
As a church we try to emulate this and to be a “centered set” rather than a “bounded set.” The latter means there’s a clear boundary between those who are in and those who are out. A centered set, though, is more about the direction we are oriented. Bounded sets can work but often begin pulling in more than they were originally designed to – culture ethnicity, social group can all designate someone in or out. A centered set is risky because it gives access even to those in the fringes but may be uncomfortable for those near the center but heading in a different direction.
So the message here is to be human, living our lives intertwined with and among the people that surround us, and living in such a way that it points all those around us to the source of our identity.
— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, October 22, 2023