There was a congregation searching for a new pastor, and the committee had gone about their assignment with diligence and recommended their choice to the congregation with great enthusiasm and anticipation. The congregation called the pastor and were eager for his arrival and first sermon. The congregation were very complimentary to the search committee following the new pastor's first Sunday. He had given a marvelous message. The next Sunday the congregation was eager to hear another stimulating message and were somewhat dumb-founded. They began scratching their heads in wonderment as they heard the same sermon they heard the week before. But they gave him the benefit of the doubt, thinking perhaps he had just picked up the wrong set of notes. But then on the third Sunday, when they heard the sermon for the third time, some of the elders went to their new pastor and asked if he only had one sermon. The pastor replied that he certainly had different sermons to deliver, but he would not preach those until the people were fulfilling the first message!

Well, in somewhat the same vein, it is said by many that a preacher has but one sermon which they repeat under a variety of guises. In a sense that statement is true not only of the message that preachers like Pastor David and I deliver, but it is true as well of the message that God delivers to us through the scriptures, through the person of Christ Jesus our Lord, and through the Holy Spirit that speaks to us. It is the message of God's love and God's will for our lives.

To the lost, the message is:  "Come to Me! Come in and be blessed! Come in out of the cold and the wet and dry off and warm yourself beside and in the fire of My love. Come in to the sacred spaces and be amongst the people I have chosen. Listen to My word and allow My Spirit to heal you.

Come and allow My forgiveness to wash you. Come open your hearts and receive new life. Come, let Me break every barrier down and give you peace."

And to those who have answered the call, to those who have accepted God's invitation to receive new life, the message is: "Go out! Go where I will send you; go where I will lead you; go to the wilderness, to the highways and byways, to the market places, to the busy streets of the city and to the country lanes; go to where strangers dwell and go to the homes of your friends. Go, walk across the room and share My love, share My Word, share My fire and passion and show all the world the new life that God has for them. Show them love that is in the heart of God for them, the love we have received without having sought it, and in seeking it, haven't earned."

That message traces itself back befor the time of Abraham, back to the time just after Noah's descendants tried to build a tower into heaven, and for their pride-the same pride that led to the flood before them-were scattered over the face of the earth and unable to understand one another.

Sin has it's consequences.  Indeed  sin leads to alienation and to confusion and to enmity and ultimately to death. But God's will for us-God's will for the whole world-is not that we perish, but that we have life and not just life, but life abundant:  a pure and joyful and eternal fellowship with God and with one another.

And so, after Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, after the Great Flood, and after the Tower of Babel, God tried once again-in a new way-to call us all to Himself and to the blessings that flow from Him.

God called to Abraham and said "Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you.  I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you...and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you."

Abraham not only walked across the room, he went out from his home and from his people and from all that he knew and travelled into the zone of the unknown that God said He would show him and waited, though not always patiently, for God to fulfill His promises to him:

the promise of a son, though Sarah and he were old 
the promise of many descendants, though Sarah's womb was infertile 
the promise of blessings upon blessings in a land he would call his own 
though the lands he wandered in were occupied by people hostile to him 
and to God.

Going out in faith is not always an easy thing to do.  Going out to bless
others and to give them the chance to bless themselves by coming in
is not always an easy thing to do.

Our tendency is to want to stay inside-inside our comfort zone-inside
that which we know to be safe, and to enjoy the blessings that being inside
provides us with:  the familiar, the warm the holy.

In our Gospel we see Jesus-the one who moved from the comfort and security and power of being at God's side to being among us as one of us and suffering and dying as one of us-living out the message of the Gospel. We see him going out, walking across the room to invite a notorious sinner to follow Him, and to come into God's embrace.

We see Him call Matthew, a tax collector, to be His disciple and then, 
as Matthew responds to this unexpected love, to this grace of God
we see Jesus, the holy one of Israel, sit and eat with Matthew's friends-
friends who, like Matthew, are tax collectors and sinners. And we see Jesus criticized for it.

"Why" some Pharisees ask His disciples when they see Jesus doing this,
"Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?"

And Jesus, answers this often leveled criticism of who He is and what He was about, by saying, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick." And then He adds, "Go and learn what this means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice for I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."

It is not that Jesus had no regard for the righteous-in fact He loved them.  The next Matthew's gospel shows Jesus answering the request of a ruler of a synagogue to come and bring his daughter back to life-not an inconsiderable mercy, even for the righteous, I am sure you will agree.

But the core of the gospel reading is found in the reply of Jesus to His critics: in His saying that He has come to bring healing to the sick; that He has come to call sinners to come home to God.

This evening as a prelude to our four weeks study, Just Walk Across the Room, I want you to think about Abraham who was called way out of his and about Jesus whose mission was to bring healing to the sick because the well, after all, have no need of a doctor! and to call sinners to come and dwell with the righteous, because, after all, the righteous-those who are already in, those who know and experience God's love-have no need to be invited in!

And I want you to think about the hassles, the difficulties, the criticism that Jesus encountered because that was His mission...and...it is the mission He has entrusted to the church-to you and me!

We are a chosen people. You and I have been chosen by God to be His own and to receive the blessings promised to Abraham and his children after him. Through Christ we have been called into the household of faith. We are called to be blessed (as we most surely are...) And we are called to be a blessing-a holy nation, a nation of priests, to declare the praises of God to all the world.

We can't be that if all we do is offer God our word of thanks in this place.

We need to go out, to walk across the room to brothers and sisters who do not know we're related and to care for them in the same way that God cares for us.

Not an easy thing. But it is what we are to do.  How they react to our blessing;  how they react to our ministry is up to them... But what they react to, if indeed there is any hope, any love, any goodness offered to them, is up to us.  Amen!