I ran into an old high school classmate this week while I was having lunch downtown. I recognized him immediately. I was surprised he remembered me, that he knew my name.

I went to one of the large public schools in this town, and not only was it big enough that everybody didn’t know everybody, but there were, shall we say, certain “groups” of people that hung out together.

The particular group this person was in and the group that I was in – let’s just say we didn’t run in the same social circles.

In fact, I remember going to our 10^th year class reunion, and a whole decade later, guess what? You could just see the reunion – it was outdoors at a public park – drift off into the same groups that we tended to run in during high school.

Well, here this fellow and I were having lunch this week, and I don’t think he’ll remember me and he does, by name even, and we start chatting. I knew what he’d been up to because he’s a prominent professional person in town, but he had no idea what I’d been doing since high school. We got caught up.

And you know, eventually, after about a half-hour of conversation, I realized I now knew more about his life than I ever had in going to school with him for all those years. Where he lived, where he had gone to college, that he has three children, that his older brother died a year ago, that he was going through a divorce …

I realized this was a conversation that wouldn’t have even happened in high school. Social convention dictated who you talked to, who you walked the halls with, and – of course that most-important bastion of social decorum – who you ate with in the lunchroom.

So as my friend went back to his office last week and I went about my rounds, visiting Phyllis and Margaret, stopping in at a Christian coffeehouse downtown, stopping in to meet the pastor next door and finally returning home to continue studying this week’s scripture, right there – in the Gospel of Matthew – the 9^th chapter that was read today, we see Jesus going about his business and then stopping to eat.

And who did he have dinner with? Tax collectors and sinners! Or, as Eugene Peterson says, he ate with a lot of disreputable characters and got all cozy with the riffraff.

If you think that’s not a big deal, think back to that high school cafeteria and imagine all the “in” people sitting down next to all the “out” people and all the petty divisions we dreamt up in adolescence being cast aside. What, after all, were most of those little cliques based on? Often on things no more enduring than looks or athletic ability.

Jesus dining with tax collectors and sinners was even more odd, more awkward, more shocking. In fact, it was scandalous! Sinners weren’t just unpleasant to be around, they were considered unclean. If you were a good Jew, that meant you worshiped at the Temple. And to worship in the Temple, you had to be considered ritually pure.

Today, Muslims are to wash their feet before they enter the mosque to pray. In that day to enter the Temple you had to be spiritually clean and that meant you couldn’t eat with those who were beneath you. It also meant, among other things, you couldn’t touch a menstruating woman, and you couldn’t come in contact with a dead body.

You think I’m making this up, right? Why is he talking about that in church?

The point is there has been no shortage of ways that humans have come up with to say “you’re in and you’re out.”

            “We like you and we don’t like you.”

            “You’re a jock so you can sit at this table; you’re not so you have to sit over there.”

            “You have money, so we’d like you in our club. You don’t, so maybe you’d be happier somewhere else.”

            “You look like us so you should come to our church. You don’t, so maybe you shouldn’t.”

And Jesus walks right in, and sits down at the lunch table where he isn’t supposed to sit, and encounters everyone staring at him and saying, “Man, are you crazy?” and he breaks bread and he eats with them and he catches up with what’s going on in their lives.

And if you think that’s amazing, then see even deeper in this Gospel.

In this passage of the Matthew, what is Jesus about (besides eating)?

            He’s about healing.

Laurel Dykstra says that in the 8^th and 9^th chapters of Matthew, nine people are healed. Healing is one of the signs of the kingdom of God, which Jesus came to proclaim. Who is healed tells us who this kingdom is for and about. Do you see who it is for? Women, children, servants, people with disabilities, the poor, sinners. Specifically, people whom society of that day cast off to the side.

In this passage, we come across a tax collector, a bleeding woman and a dead girl. What do they have in common? They were considered unclean. Contact with them would make Jesus, or any one else, ritually impure – separate from God in concrete practical terms. Jesus eats with tax collectors, touches a dead body, and is touched by a bleeding woman.

In doing so, Jesus transgresses the boundaries that exclude people and teaches us, invites us, shows us, implores us to do the same.

Jesus says to you: Are you sick? Poor? Cast out? Cast aside? Do you not have a place at the table? Well, you do now.

This spring: as part of my work for this church I met with Bill Morton, pastor of a once large but now small congregation in a neighborhood of Minneapolis that is quite a lot like this neighborhood. When he came to the church, the congregation was divided, and the members thought the church was going to die. He went on to say, and I love this, “We’re a church of misfits.” Bill said that proudly. Because it was just the kind of church where Jesus would go to eat and share and speak and listen. And then Bill said, “I had to tell them they had everything they needed to be the church. They were a community of Jesus Christ.”

Friends, as a community of Jesus Christ, you stand as heirs of a long, long line of people who have inherited a promise from God. It’s a promise that dates all the way back to Abram, who received God’s promise that if he went where God led him, he and all his descendants would be blessed. Abram, who as Morris Niedenthal says might have needed a cane to balance himself as he went and a hearing aid to hear the promise of God …

You see, we can’t come up with an obstacle, a reason, or an excuse for God not loving us and Jesus not being with us. Jesus says, I’ll eat at your table. And moreso, I’m here to heal you, no matter your occupation, your status, your talent and ability, your type of body, your addiction, or what anybody else says about you.