[Sermon] The Scandal of Proximity

Dr. Kempton Hewitt

May 31, 2026 + The Holy Trinity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAVf1Fbi9Tw

Jesus doesn't call Matthew from a safe distance. He walks straight to the tax collector's table, sits down at his party, and refuses to sanitize the guest list. When the religious elite demand an explanation, Jesus quotes Hosea: "I desire mercy, not sacrifice." David Horton explores what it means that God's holiness isn't a fragile thing to be protected from the compromised and the broken, but a contagious fire that moves toward them. In Matthew 9, two people, one too complicit in the system and one too marginalized by it, discover that Jesus will not be kept at arm's length by either their guilt or their shame. The scandal isn't just who Jesus eats with. It's how close he gets.

Sermon Transcript

From YouTube's automatic captions, lightly edited by AI for readability.

Grace and peace to you from God our Creator and from Jesus Christ—the Savior who doesn’t stay distant in the heavens, but who meets us right here in the dust of our ordinary lives. Amen. 

I

If you look around the sanctuary today, you’ll notice the fabric has changed—and if you look at our liturgical quilt on the wall, you’ll see our marker has finally settled into that long, unbroken stretch of solid color. 

Yes, the triumphant whites of Easter and the fiery reds of Pentecost are packed away. 

In their place is green. 

We have entered the green and growing season—the long, sun-drenched months of summer. And in the church, we affectionately call this "Ordinary Time." 

Whatever the ancient Latin roots might intend, 'Ordinary Time' just sounds peaceful to our modern ears, doesn't it? It breathes of cool backyard shade, the smell of cut grass, and the quiet, slow-moving air of a summer Sunday afternoon.

And there is a myth we like to tell ourselves about summer—both inside and outside the church walls: we think everything is supposed to slow down. We treat it as a season to coast, to keep things light, to take a vacation from the heavy lifting of the rest of the year.

But as we turn the page today into the Gospel of Matthew, we find out very quickly that Jesus doesn't do "light."

We aren't being invited to relax in a pristine, manicured garden this morning. We are stepping out onto a cracked, dusty, sun-baked city sidewalk. The very first stories Matthew hands us to kick off our summer are a scandalous, rule-breaking collision of desperate people: a political collaborator throwing a raucous house party, and a bleeding woman sneaking through a hostile crowd to steal a miracle.

If you came here today looking for a sleepy, comfortable summer sermon to coast through, I have bad news for you. Matthew didn't come to help us rest in the shade. This green season isn't a spiritual vacation; it is the hard, beautiful, active work of tilling soil that has been compacted by the grit of the real world. 

For the next five months, we are going to be walking through this gospel. We might as well enjoy Matthew now while the getting’s good, because by the time we hit the fall, the parables get terrifyingly sharp. And if we are going to grow this summer, we have to be willing to get some dirt under our fingernails.

II

The street-level work begins immediately with the calling of Matthew. Now, let’s be honest: when we hear the word "sinner" or "tax collector" in church, we’ve been trained to think about personal, private morality—often boiled down to sexuality or whether someone cheated on their income taxes once and felt bad about it.

But a first-century tax collector was not a boring bureaucratic IRS agent who audited spreadsheets. Matthew was a political collaborator. He was an active agent of systemic, crushing economic oppression.

To make this sting in our own skin, think about the person who looks at a broken, weaponized immigration system and decides to join ICE—willingly tracking down and dragging families out of their beds. Think about the neighbor who looks at the crushing weight of homelessness—at the widening chasm between the wealthy and the vulnerable—and chooses to vote solely for their own security, concluding, "As long as the gate around my yard holds, it doesn’t matter if the rest of the city burns."

Matthew did not just work a job; he leveraged the localized misery of his own people for private luxury and personal protection.

Yet, if we are to truly understand the gravity of this moment, we have to look closer at the choices available under the empire. Was Matthew caught up in a monstrous imperial system too massive for him to control? Absolutely. And here is the agonizing reality of empire: sometimes, people take the job because the empire is so suffocating that they feel they have no other choice.

Rome designed a world where you either participated in the crushing or you got crushed. It is entirely possible that Matthew looked at the poverty around him, looked at his own family, and made a desperate, cynical calculation: “If someone is going to bleed my neighborhood dry, it might as well be me, so that my own children can eat.”

It is the tragic compromise made by millions today who take the soul-crushing corporate job, wear the uniform of an oppressive state, or enforce cruel policies because the alternative is economic oblivion. We can hold a fierce, uncompromising critique of the harm Matthew caused while still holding a deep, sorrowful compassion for the desperation that drove him to sign his name to the empire's payroll. He wasn’t just a cartoon villain; he was a human being who had bartered away his humanity piece by piece just to survive the machine.

And Jesus looks at him—at the traitor, the sellout, the institutional enforcer who compromised to survive—and says, "Follow me."

And what does Matthew do? He doesn't go to a quiet room to reflect. He doesn't enter a period of somber penance to prove his sorrow. He gets up, slams the ledger shut, walks away from the money table, and the very first thing he does is throw a massive, raucous, unapologetic house party. He invites all his friends. And his friends are, by all polite societal metrics, losers, bad actors, and fellow collaborators.

The religious elite—the protectors of societal and spiritual hygiene—are utterly scandalized. They ask the disciples a loaded question that echoes down through history:

"Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?"

Notice what they are actually asking. They aren’t asking, "Why is Jesus trying to convert them?" They aren’t asking, "Why is he preaching a sermon of repentance to those wicked people?"

No, their question is far more dangerous.

They are asking: "Why is he sitting so close to them? Why is he lingering in their living room? Why is he laughing at their jokes? Why is the Holy One of God breaking bread, dipping his hand into the same bowl, and sharing a table with the very people who tore our neighborhood apart? Why is he comforting the people who made our lives a living hell?"

We are furious because Jesus is refusing to draw a line. We are furious because he is looking at the people who broke our hearts—and the people who sold out to the system—and he is treating them like family.

But Jesus turns to them and quotes the prophet Hosea: “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’”

Let me be very clear: Jesus is not rejecting Judaism here. He is correcting a fatal spiritual pathology. The elite wanted the safety of the rules (sacrifice); Jesus demanded the vulnerability of relationship (mercy).

He is declaring a theology of proximity. He is saying that God's holiness is not a fragile thing to be protected by keeping the "unclean" or the compromised at arm's length. God's holiness is a contagious fire that moves toward the brokenness, offering a way out of the system to anyone tired of serving the empire.

III

And then, as if to prove exactly what this "desire for mercy" looks like in motion, the text moves from the dining room table straight into a stunning collision with another desperate body.

As Jesus is walking through the streets, the crowd pressing in around him, his stride is suddenly interrupted by a woman.

For twelve years, this woman has been suffering from a chronic flow of blood. In her religious landscape, this didn't just mean she was physically unwell; it meant she was permanently, legally unclean. Everything and everyone she touched became unclean. For over a decade, she has been entirely cut off from human touch, barred from the temple, and isolated from her own community. She has been completely impoverished by doctors who took her money but couldn't heal her pain.

She knows she has zero social capital. She cannot walk up to Jesus face-to-face, look him in the eye, and ask for a blessing. She knows the rules of her society—and she knows those rules say she has no business being near a holy man.

So she decides to break them. She decides to steal a blessing from behind.

She slips through the crushing, suffocating crowd, reaches out a trembling hand, and touches the very fringe of his cloak. She thinks to herself, “If I can just touch his garment, I will be made well.”

In Matthew’s account, faith is not a concept. It is not an abstract, intellectualized theory. This woman isn't standing at a safe distance giving mental assent to a theological creed. She is clawing her way into her own survival.

The theologian Caroline Lewis reminds us that in moments like this, faith is not a noun—it is an active, desperate, physical verb. It is a hand tearing through the barriers of systemic shame and social exclusion to grab hold of the life-giving power of God. It is the fierce, embodied refusal to let the empire have the last word on your body or your soul.

And what does Jesus do? In a world that would have condemned her for contaminating him, Jesus stops. He turns around, looks at her, and publicly validates her. He doesn’t scold her for coming in secret. He doesn't shame her for bypassing the proper institutional channels. He looks her in the eyes and says, “Courage, daughter,” he said, “your faith has healed you.” 

In that single word—daughter—a physical cure becomes a holistic healing.

Jesus doesn't just mend her body; he restores her name. He doesn't just stop the bleeding; he shatters the stigma. He turns to that gaping, stunned crowd and proclaims that this woman—the one who had to sneak around the back of the religious institution just to catch a glimpse of God—is not an outsider. She is not a trespasser. She is the ultimate model of what it means to trust the living God.

The gatekeepers held the keys... but she held the faith.

IV

This woman is the spiritual ancestor of everyone who has ever been told they are too messy, too broken, or too "other" to walk through the front doors of the religious establishment.

When I read this text, I cannot help but think of my queer ancestors in faith—especially now, as we enter the first week of Pride Month. While Pride today is often celebrated with vibrant parades and joyful visibility, it began as a riotous demand for basic human rights, led largely by trans women of color and queer activists fighting against systemic oppression.

That history of struggle is deeply mirrored in our spiritual lineages. 

For centuries, our queer ancestors in faith were explicitly told that their bodies, their identities, and their love made them unclean. They were barred from the very sanctuaries that should have offered them refuge; they could not openly enter the churches they were raised in, nor could they follow their explicit calls to ministry through the "proper" institutional channels. By remembering them during Pride, we honor both the pain they endured and the sacred resilience that paved the way for us, for me, today. And the work is never finished. Can I get an amen?

Much like the woman with the hemorrhage, our queer ancestors refused to wait for permission. They bypassed the gatekeepers and claimed their blessing from the edges of the crowd, operating in secret to take the healing and wholeness they knew belonged to them by faith.

1. I think of the Eucharistic Catholic Church, born on midnight on Christmas Eve in 1946, when a group of rejected believers set up a makeshift altar inside the Cotton Blossom Room—a gay cocktail lounge in Atlanta—refusing to let the church's rejection separate them from the body of Christ.

2. I think of Father Patrick Nidorf and the early saints of DignityUSA in 1969, a movement of LGBTQ Catholics who—when the Vatican hierarchy later issued a sweeping ban and closed the parish doors to them—refused to stop meeting, gathering instead in Protestant chapels and living rooms to celebrate the Holy Mass and take the Eucharist with their own hands.

3. I think of William R. Johnson in 1972, who stood before a hostile, agonizingly divided church association to claim his call to ministry—becoming the first openly gay man ordained in mainline Christianity, refusing to let institutional gatekeepers dictate whether or not the Holy Spirit had chosen his body to preach the Gospel.

4. I think of Reverend Clarence Cobbs from the 1930s through the 1950s, who built a sprawling spiritual sanctuary on the South Side of Chicago—a massive storefront-turned-mega-church where thousands of marginalized folks could sing and shout, cultivating a fiercely brilliant, queer-coded space of pure, unadulterated healing right under the noses of the cold, respectable elite.

I could go on and on about my queer siblings in faith who refused to wait for permission from the keepers of the status quo to be healed. They didn't beg an institution for the right to exist—they simply faithed their way into wellness. And Christ doesn’t just tolerate them. He loves them as blood. He pulls them into the party, sets a place for them at the table, and fiercely defends their joy. Christ backs them up today, just as he backed up the woman who slipped through the fractures of a broken system, reached through the crushing crowd, and claimed her wholeness from the hem of his robe.

V

Look at the beautiful, sweeping progression of Matthew 9.

The unlikely collaborator—the oppressor caught in the empire's jaws—is called out from behind his tax collector’s booth and into discipleship. And the forgotten woman who had to steal her healing in the shadows is called daughter and made whole.

Everyone—regardless of whether they are too compromised by the system or too marginalized by it—is blessed by the scandalous proximity of Jesus. He refuses to let the rules of the empire or the anxieties of the religious elite dictate who is allowed to be touched by God.

This morning, as we step into this long, green season of Ordinary Time, the prophet Hosea leaves us with a mantra for our summer: "Come, let us return to the Lord."

We do not return to the Lord because we have finally managed to curate our chaos, stitch our brokenness together, or satisfy the endless checklists of religious perfection. We do not return because we are ready.

We return because, as the prophet reminds us, God is the one constant in a shifting, fragile world. God’s grace is as beautifully inevitable as the dawn breaking over the horizon, and as fiercely reliable as the spring rains that split open the winter earth to make things grow again.

It is a grace that is inevitable even when we are trapped trying to buy our worth in the marketplace of compromise, and even when we are bleeding in the shadows of exclusion.

We return because we trust that God is exactly who God claims to be: not a demanding judge waiting for our total compliance, but a Savior who hungers for mercy rather than sacrifice. We return to a God who refuses to remain quarantined in the abstract heavens, but who enters the raw air of our sickness, pulls up a chair to our messy tables, and breathes resurrection into the very cells of our life that we believed were permanently dead.

And so, we do not simply close our books, dust off our clothes, and walk away from these ancient stories today. We cannot. Because the very same Jesus who locked eyes with a compromised collaborator at his table—the very same Jesus who turned his face to look at a bleeding woman in the crowd—has cleared a space for us right here, in this room, at this hour.

VI

We are about to move to this table. And I want you to look closely at it—the sheer audacity of it. 

This table is not a sterile sanctuary or an exclusive club for the spiritually hygienic. This is Matthew’s raucous, beautiful house party. This is the precise geographical location where the cold logic of the empire shatters, and the radical economy of grace takes over.

If you feel like an unlikely guest today—if your life feels tangled up and compromised by the systems of this world, or if you are carrying an exhaustion that you have had to hide in the deep shadows—this bread is for you. If you have had to sneak around the back of religion just to keep your faith breathing, look up. Christ is locking eyes with you right now, stripping away your stigma... and calling you daughter. Calling you son. Calling you beloved family.

We do not approach this “altar” offering the currency of our flawless sacrifices or the credentials of our perfect behavior. 

We crawl to this table simply because we are starving for mercy.

So come. Come to this table, not because you are bound by duty, but because you are invited by love. Reach out your hands. Touch the hem of his garment. Taste and see that the Lord is good. Come, let us return to the Lord.

And all God’s people said, Amen.