Mercy Insists on Belonging - Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

There is a curious little place in Waterbury, Vermont that draws visitors from all over the country. Tucked away among the trees is a small cemetery, complete with headstones and epitaphs. People wander through, stop to read the inscriptions, and sometimes even leave flowers. The cemetery belongs to Ben & Jerry’s.

When the company decides to retire an ice cream flavor, they give it a proper burial in the Flavor Graveyard. There are tombstones for flavors that didn't catch on, flavors that became too expensive to make, and flavors that simply had their moment and passed. One of them reads, "With aching heart and heavy sigh, we bid Rainforest Crunch goodbye, that nutty brittle from exotic places got stuck in between our braces.”

It's a little ridiculous. And yet there is something strangely endearing about the place, because the Flavor Graveyard honors a simple, universal truth: we all carry around losses, big and small. The flavor that didn't last. The day that didn't go as planned. The version of our life we quietly buried somewhere along the way.

In today's Gospel, everyone Jesus meets is carrying some kind of loss. Take Matthew the tax collector, who has essentially lost his place in the community. He is seen as a traitor to his own people, not the sort of person respectable people invite to dinner. Or take the woman in the crowd who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years, which means not only twelve years of pain, but also twelve years of ritual uncleanness and isolation from her community. And we also encounter a leader of the synagogue, who has lost his child. Everywhere Jesus turns, someone is experiencing loss and isolation.

When Jesus sits down with Matthew, the Pharisees object that he is eating with tax collectors and sinners. And Jesus says something startling in response: "I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” He is quoting the prophet Hosea, and it is the key to everything in this passage. But notice that we can easily underestimate mercy here. We tend to imagine it as something soft, like a gentle tolerance or a polite looking-away. The mercy of Jesus is nothing like that.

He sits down to eat with Matthew before Matthew has had any opportunity to prove himself worthy of the invitation. The Pharisees are not wrong that this is scandalous. In their world, in most worlds, you eat with people who have earned a place at the table. Jesus simply pulls up a chair and holds one out for the tax collector, too.

Then a woman reaches out from the crowd and touches the edge of his cloak. She is ritually unclean, and anyone she touches becomes unclean. She knows this, and she reaches out anyway from behind, hoping no one will notice. Jesus notices. He stops and turns. He calls her daughter. Not "woman," not her name, daughter. In a crowd where she has been invisible, Jesus gives her back something her illness had stolen. Not just her health, but her belonging. With a single word, he names her as his own family.

Then he goes to the house of the grieving leader and takes the dead girl by the hand, which means he too becomes unclean. He crosses every boundary everyone else assumes should stay in place. Again and again, mercy over distance. Mercy over propriety. Mercy over his own ritual purity. There is nothing sentimental about this. The mercy of Jesus is costly, inconvenient, and scandalous. It requires him to stop when he is already on his way somewhere else. It asks him to touch what others will not touch. It calls him to eat with people who have not earned it.

Which brings me to the interruptions in today’s story, and what they have to do with mercy. One of the things that strikes me about Jesus in the Gospels is how often he is interrupted, and how he never seems to treat the interrupters as inconveniences. People stop him on the road. They push through crowds to reach him. He is perpetually pulled off course by people who need something. And every single time, he turns toward them.

I think Jesus understands something we forget when we are busy and on our screens and moving efficiently through our days. The interruption is not a detour from the ministry. The person standing in front of you is your ministry. And I think we have all experienced what can happen. Think of a phone call you almost didn't take. A conversation you nearly cut short. A neighbor you stopped to check on, almost by accident. Those moments don't always feel holy when they're happening. They feel inconvenient. But sometimes, looking back, they turn out to be exactly where God was.

The mercy that Jesus calls us to is not a feeling. It is a direction, a posture — toward the person at the edge of the crowd, toward the one kept at arm's length, toward the grief everyone else is politely stepping around. Mercy will always insist on belonging.

And so we come back to that little graveyard in Vermont. We smile because it is absurd; it is for ice cream, for heaven’s sake, and ice cream does not actually die. But it touches something real, because we do carry around our losses. Whether it is the day we thought we were going to have, the plan that didn't survive contact with reality, or the version of ourselves we thought we would be by now.

Whatever you are carrying, whatever loss you have quietly buried somewhere along the way, Jesus is already walking toward it. He sits down at the table before you have done a single thing to deserve it. He stops for you in the crowd. He takes you by the hand.

And he does the same for the ones nobody wanted at the table. Mercy will always insist on belonging. For them, for you, for all of us who have ever stood at the edge of the crowd, hoping someone would notice. Thanks be to God.