Dove Sermons

What He Sees in You

Matthew 9:9–13, 18–26 (NRSVUE)

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There’s a kind of day most of us know well. You wake up with a plan. Maybe a short list, maybe a long one. You’ve got things to do, people to see, problems to solve. And then, somewhere around 9 a.m., the day starts making its own decisions. An unexpected phone call. A crisis that lands in your lap. Someone who needs something you weren’t prepared to give. By the end of the day you’re exhausted, not from what you planned, but from everything that showed up uninvited.

That’s the kind of day Jesus is having in Matthew 9.

And it didn’t start here. Before this chapter even opens, Matthew has already shown us Jesus healing a leper, calming a storm, casting out demons, and restoring a paralyzed man. He has barely taken a breath. And now, in these few short verses, we get another rush of encounters; a tax collector at his booth, a dinner interrupted by critics, a grieving father who bursts through the door, a woman reaching from behind in a crowd, a dead girl lying still in a house full of mourners.

One thing after another.

You might look at that and think Jesus needed a better system. A scheduler. An assistant. Somebody to manage the calendar.

But I don’t think that’s the point. I think Matthew is showing us something about the way Jesus moves through the world… what he pays attention to, what he won’t walk past, who he refuses to write off. And if we’re paying attention, it starts to look less like a chaotic day and more like a theology in motion.

Before we go further, consider this: In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a national public health crisis, and the data behind that declaration is sobering. According to a Gallup poll, one in five American adults reports feeling lonely every single day. The Surgeon General’s own report described millions of people across this country as feeling “isolated, invisible, and insignificant.” Not occasionally. Not just during the holidays. Every day. One in five. Look around this room and do that math.

That’s the world Jesus is walking through in Matthew 9. And it’s the world we’re walking through right now. The faces are different, but the hunger to be seen, really seen, not just noticed, is exactly the same.

The Man at the Booth

So, Jesus is walking (he’s always walking in this gospel) and he passes a tax collector named Matthew, sitting at his collection booth. And he just… looks at him. Calls him. “Follow me.”

That’s it. No background check. No interview. No probationary period.

Now, we have to understand what a tax collector was in first-century Judea. This wasn’t the IRS. These were men who had essentially sold their loyalty to the Roman Empire, collecting money from their own people and skimming off the top for themselves. They were considered traitors. Religious outcasts. The kind of person decent folks crossed the street to avoid. The kind of person other Jews wouldn’t sit with, eat with, or acknowledge in public.

And Jesus walks straight up to this man and says, “Follow me.”

What did Matthew see in that moment? We don’t know exactly. Maybe he’d heard about Jesus. Maybe he hadn’t. What we do know is that something in that invitation cracked something open in him. Because he got up. Immediately. He didn’t ask for time to think. He didn’t negotiate. He left his booth, left the whole apparatus of his former life, and followed.

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about this week: Jesus didn’t call Matthew because Matthew had already cleaned himself up. He didn’t call Matthew because Matthew had potential that was obvious to everyone. In fact, everything about Matthew’s social profile said he was the wrong choice. Jesus called him anyway. And the call itself was what made Matthew capable of answering.

Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a whole book about this… the German title was just one word: Nachfolge. It translates to “following after.” The Germans understand the word to mean “discipleship.” The four-word title, familiar to most Americans (the Cost of Discipleship), was a later addition to the English translation. Jesus calls Matthew to “follow after” him (nachfolge). And for Matthew, standing up from that table was his yes.

I’m learning this; God never calls us to something without first calling us away from something. Matthew left that booth. Abraham left his homeland. Peter and Andrew left their nets. You cannot get to what God has next for you while you’re still holding onto what God is calling you away from. And the hardest part isn’t always the bad thing you’re leaving. Sometimes it’s a perfectly legitimate thing, a good thing, a comfortable thing, that is simply no longer the most important thing.

The call doesn’t care how legitimate your current commitments are. It just asks: is there anything more important than this?

Dinner and the Question Nobody Wanted to Ask

So Matthew gets up and follows, and the first thing he does is throw a dinner party. His house. His crowd. Tax collectors, sinners, people the religious establishment had a file on. And Jesus sits down at the table with all of them.

The Pharisees don’t come inside. They stand at the edge and ask the disciples: “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

It’s a fair question. By the religious standards of the day, what Jesus was doing was genuinely scandalous. Table fellowship was loaded with meaning. Who you ate with said something about who you were, what you stood for, whose community you belonged to. The Pharisees weren’t just being snobbish… they were asking a real theological question. Why is a rabbi doing this?

Jesus hears them and answers directly: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

That phrase, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”, is a quote from the Hebrew prophet Hosea. And Jesus is essentially saying: you have been so focused on the mechanics of religion that you’ve missed the whole point. God was never primarily interested in your ritual precision. God was interested in your mercy. Your willingness to move toward the broken instead of away from them.

And then this: Jesus says sinners are like sick people. Not moral failures deserving punishment, sick people who need a doctor.

That reframe matters quite a bit. When you look at someone else’s sin as a wound rather than a crime, you respond differently. When you look at your own sin as a wound rather than a crime, you respond differently. Mercy becomes the reflex instead of judgment. And Jesus is saying that mercy, not ritual, not sacrifice, not doctrinal precision… mercy is the thing that actually draws people toward God.

But here’s something easy to miss in this passage. Jesus doesn’t go after the Pharisees the way we might expect. He doesn’t shame them. He challenges them. “Go and learn what this means”, he says, but he doesn’t throw them out of the story. He’s as willing to be present to their question as he is to the dinner guests at the table. The ones who think they’re righteous are just as much in need of Jesus as the ones everyone knows are sinners. They just don’t know it yet.

The Father Who Burst Through the Door

While Jesus is still mid-conversation, a leader of the synagogue, a man of standing, a man with a name and a reputation, comes into the room and falls at Jesus’s feet.

His daughter has just died. He believes, and this takes real faith to say out loud, he believes Jesus can bring her back. “Come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.”

Notice, Jesus doesn’t ask for qualifications. He doesn’t quiz the man on his theology. He gets up and goes. Just like Matthew got up and followed Jesus, Jesus gets up and follows this man. There’s something important in that symmetry. Jesus doesn’t just call people to follow him; he models what it looks like to follow the urgent need in front of you. He goes where the crisis is.

On the road to the ruler’s house, the crowd presses in on all sides. And in the middle of that crowd, something happens.

The Woman in the Crowd

She has been bleeding for twelve years. Twelve years of being considered ritually unclean. Twelve years of being excluded from worship, from community, from normal life. Twelve years of isolation that went so deep she probably stopped expecting anything to change.

She doesn’t come to Jesus directly. She doesn’t call out to him the way the ruler did. She comes from behind, through the crowd, and she reaches for the fringe of his robe, just the hem, just a touch, believing that even that will be enough.

And it is.

Jesus stops. Turns. Sees her.

“Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.”

She didn’t ask for an audience. She barely asked for acknowledgment. She was aiming to stay invisible, to take what healing she could get and disappear back into the crowd. But Jesus doesn’t let her stay in the shadows. He sees her. He calls her daughter. He names what she did as faith… real, legitimate, powerful faith.

Think about the weight of that word: daughter. Not “woman.” Not “the unclean one.” Not even just “you.” Daughter. It is relational. It restores her to a family, to belonging, to the community of God’s people that had excluded her for more than a decade.

Her healing wasn’t only physical. Her whole life opened back up.

There’s a pattern worth noticing in these two healings, the ruler’s daughter and this woman. They stand at opposite ends of the social order. One is connected, respected, known by name in the community. The other is nameless, marginalized, invisible by necessity. And Jesus responds to both of them with the same full attention, the same compassion, the same willingness to stop everything else and be present.

The kingdom of God has no tiered waiting room.

The House Where Everyone Had Given Up

So, Jesus arrives at the ruler’s house. There are already flute players outside… the hired mourners, the people whose job it was to mark the finality of death. The crowd knows it’s over. And when Jesus tells them the girl isn’t dead but sleeping, they laugh at him.

They had done the math. They knew what death looked like. They were sure.

Jesus sends them outside. He takes the girl by the hand. And she gets up.

Matthew doesn’t dwell on it. There’s no dramatic description of the moment. The girl gets up. That’s the whole sentence. But that simplicity might be the point. For Jesus, giving life back to someone is, not trivial, but natural. It’s what he does. It’s what he came to do.

The people who were laughing moments earlier spread the news throughout the district. The ones who were most sure nothing could be done became the ones who couldn’t stop talking about the fact that it was.

What Jesus Sees

Here’s what I keep coming back to in all of this. In every encounter, Matthew at his booth, the dinner guests nobody wanted to claim, the desperate father, the woman in the crowd, the dead girl, Jesus sees something that nobody else is looking for.

He sees past the label to the person. He sees past the reputation to the need. He sees past what’s finished to what’s possible.

Matthew’s whole religious and social world told him he was beyond calling. Jesus called him anyway. The woman’s whole life had told her she was beyond healing. Jesus healed her anyway. The mourners were absolutely certain that death had the last word. Jesus walked into the room anyway.

This is not optimism. This is not Jesus being a positive thinker. This is something more powerful and more costly than that. This is Jesus deciding, over and over again, that the person in front of him is worth everything he has to give. And then giving it.

The question the text keeps pressing on us is this: what do we see when we look at the people around us?

Do we see the tax collector, or do we see the man who hasn’t been told yet that he’s going to change the world? Do we see the unclean woman, or do we see the daughter God is about to call by name? Do we see the commotion and the mourners and the obvious impossibility of the situation, or do we see a girl who just needs someone to take her hand?

And one more layer to this: sometimes we are not the ones doing the seeing. Sometimes we are Matthew, sitting at the booth we’ve built around our own shame, waiting for someone to look at us without flinching. Sometimes we are the woman at the edge of the crowd, hoping that even the smallest contact with something holy might be enough to change things. Sometimes we are the one lying still in the room while everyone around us has moved on to mourning.

There’s a man in New Mexico named Matthew Pettit. He’ll tell you himself that his story includes a long history of addiction, criminal behavior, and more jail and prison time than he cares to count. By every social metric, he was the kind of person people had already written off. Written off by the system. Written off, probably, by some people who shared his last name. And then, a few years ago, someone made a different call. Instead of another prison sentence, he was given the opportunity of a treatment center. A second chance… or maybe more accurately, a first real chance.

He didn’t waste it. Today, Matthew Pettit is a first-generation college graduate, finishing his bachelor’s degree in Social Work. He advocates for formerly incarcerated people, helps others find their way back into their communities, and has worked to restore voting rights for people the system had essentially told to disappear. He describes that turning point this way: “That second chance didn’t just change my life; it gave me purpose.”

His name is Matthew. He got up from his booth. He’s still following.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s what happens when someone decides to see another person the way Jesus sees… not as what they’ve done, but as who they still might become.

Jesus is still walking. He is still looking. He still sees what nobody else is willing to see.

The call is still going out.

The only question left is the same one it’s always been: will you get up and follow?

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Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson