After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. 'Follow me,'Jesus said to him, and Levi got up, left everything and followed Him. Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, "Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?" Jesus answered them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."

There are many different ways and avenues through which people may be introduced to Jesus, so they may come to place their trust in Him.  Our uniqueness are God's gifts and means too that may be avenues of blessing He has given to help us reach out in the diversity of our world. People come to Jesus down various paths, rich with experience, from different backgrounds - often laden with fears and burdens.

1.Thoughtful, Thinking . . . Some are on a quest to know. They want answers. They are looking for substance, for reality, for truth, for the heart of the matter.

2. Heart, love, wounded, healing community . . . Some are broken-hearted, battered and beaten up by life by sinning and by being sinned against, through the rotten choices & actions of themselves and others. They have stopped daring to believe in the healing of the soul or the body or the mind, let alone in the healing of memories. They do not expect to forgive or be forgiven or to know the power of forgiveness. They do not know how to start over, how to let go of the pastor the present with all of its perplexity, confusion, angst and pain.

3. Physical needs, sickness, emotional distress. Healing groups. . . There are helpful twelve-step programs for those with compulsions and addictions. There are those who have looked for love in all the wrong places.  They have made choices, or others have made choices for them, that have left them addicted to something or other perhaps addicted to sexual lust and pornography, addicted to relationships outside God=s plan for marriage. But they have done their best, many of them, especially given the influences & environments with which they have to cope. But they dare not believe there can be release or an escape. Many have adjusted their thinking & their theology to justify or rationalize what they know to be wrong as Paul shows us in Romans 1 or as something that God will overlook in love. There is the searchlight of His Word, with its rigourous standards and reflections of His holiness are quite beyond them, and they don't want to be involved with, or around anyone who can only point out their flaws, without offering hope, help and healing in exchange. They do not stay away from clinics & hospitals  when they know something=s broken because they hope the doctor can help them but they don't think that there is any healing for the soul,  let alone the body, in the church today. Is there? Have you found any? Or are we all deluded folk going through the motions?

I am impressed and encouraged by the Alpha program with its thoughtful presentations & opportunities for ineraction. We eat together & offer each other community, friendship &  support. Listening, or perhaps the most simple comment can bring healing to the soul of a wounded person, perhaps one who for years has not been able to find the grace of God. There are also many, practical & specific helps to get people involved (beyond Alpha). Jesus comes with us as we encounter people at: house parties, friendship exchanges, family times, in daily circumstances and 'chance' appointments, especially when we seek to help the poor, the berieved, the friendless, the alien and the outcaste. In our text, new Christian, Matthew, throws a party for his friends and invites Jesus!

There are Many Gospel Settings in the NT for Faith-begetting. Jesus had so many different kinds of encounters with many different kinds of people. Some audiences were public and some were private. Some were with large crowds, others were to one or two, or ten. There's Jesus on the mountainside teaching the Beatitutes, giving us some of the most quoted texts of all history, or at the seashore, the waves lapping & sucking at the sandy beach; He's riding the pulpit at the fore of a disciple's little fishing boat, or in a rugged coastal picnic as thousands gather to hear His wisdom where afterward He fed them all: the miracle of the loaves & fishes.

There's old Nicodemus coming in the middle of the night to the room where Jesus was staying, and there, following a prophetic exposure of his spiritual ignorance, Jesus teaches him the absolute spiritual necessity, the mystery miracle of the New Birth. And there's a worn out Samaritan woman at the well, at mid-day. Jesus at the local hospital as sick-people lay about the pool of Siloam. Jesus at the bedside of Peter's sick mother. Jesus along the way, so often, in dusty roads & crowded streets, stopping to talk - and touch folk, lepers, the blind, lame, the infirm. Our Luke 5 text is about the wonderful story of Jesus in a house ministry where the house crowded out and some enterprising, not easily put off men emboldened by faith lowered their lame friend down through a crack in the roof.

Matthew threw a party and invited His friends - and Jesus. He invited those who knew him best -- his colleagues & friends who had known, perhaps, his ability to cheat, or to swear, or to take advantage of people, not even sometimes by being dishonest but just by being shrewd & mean and by making sure that he got what was his whether or not they got to keep what was theirs. Maybe they also knew, from hours of discussion, his spiritual cynicism, that there was any truth to be had, any answers to be found, anything or Anyone beyond religious shysters and forms without substance. Maybe, when drunk or depressed, he'd admitted his own feelings of doubt & depression or his despair over his own kids. And they had not been able to help him for they too had similar problems. But now He had found something, Someone who had stirred up the dank pool of his heart with fresh springs and eddies so he found soul surging with longing but towards sure fulfilment and help, from despair to hope, from cynicism to fresh, child-like trust. He had found Jesus -- or Jesus had found Him.

And he just had to tell his friends for  his feet which had been wayward, perverse & rebellious, were being turned into the Way of Jesus that He knew now was the Way Home to Himself & to God. Two paths converged in the woods, wrote Robert Frost, and I - I took the one less travelled . . . and that has made all the difference! Life -- abundant, joyful, vast, vital and unending: he believed now that it all lay in following this Man, and he felt his whole being stirring into new life. He hadn't felt like he hadn't for years since as a little boy when the whole ocean of life with its adventure & beauty & discovery still lay at his feet, vast and unending.

The most eager, energetic & effective witnesses to Jesus Christ are those who have newly found Him. We can't get many longer-term Christians to come and bring a friend to Church, to Alpha, to Jesus. But those who are newly coming are excited about Him and not too busy or embarrassed to bring a friend to Jesus. The multi-faceted, variegrated grace of God that St. Paull talks about in Ephesians is reflected and refracted through our lives & personalities in various ways. Phillips Brooks' famous dictum about preaching: truth through personality - applies to how each one of us shares faith. Be yourself and dare to share your faith; tell your story, how it is that you came to know Jesus and how He hears and helps you each day.

I have entitled this: Alpha, Beta, Gamma . . . not because we are in some exclusive sorority or fraternity named by Greek letters but because we are in a friendship group called the Body of Christ, we have become friends with God and each other and we want to be open and welcoming to life's fellow-strugglers, seeking to share life in the embrace, encouragement & enabling of Jesus Christ our Lord. There are many ways through which God blesses our attempts more than our plans to do it perfectly. D.L Moody used to say when critiqued for his mass evangelistic crusades: I like the way I am doing it better than the way you are not. A house party is another model. And so is the men's supper, or a luncheon at a golf club to which we might invite friends as our guests to hear a speaker winsomely share the story of how he or she found Jesus, or Jesus found them) and help them to do the same. And so is friendship evangelism, one-to-one interations through the week with those we naturally encounter. We remember that folk don't have only to go to Church if they want to find God.

The Gospel is primarily relational. Ministries like Alpha welcome those who are seeking or at least curious and people come, not because of slick advertizing but because a friend has brought them. We introduce folk to Jesus through our own handshake and as we share food & table-talk, as we view the film,  discuss the questions and try to meet the needs that surface.

What do we know about Matthew who became a disciple of Jesus? He was rich enough to have a big enough house to throw a grand banquet. He had a ministry to 'up-and-outers' who also need to be introduced to Jesus. He worked for Revenue Rome; he was the one who told you the government wanted more. You can't run an army on a shoe-string budget, and build those great buildings & water viaducts & castles,and keep up the temple environs, without taxes. Then as now the government wanted more -- qirh death & taxes ever sure. Levi had a Jewish name but he was in league with the devil, as far as his average poor Jewish compatriot was concerned. He took from his own people & gave the proceeds to Rome although, if he was like others of his ilk, he might well skim off and pocket some of it.

At 'Tax Time,' mant folk try to find ways of beating the system; they want to keep more of what they've earned. We want, of course, better roads, health systems and good education - and child-care too, but we don't want to pay for it. Let the government pay, we say, forgetting that really that's us. We're not sure (and perhaps no governed people in the history of the world ever has been convinced) that the government wants to help us and others, rather than to fatten its own coffers, guarantee own salaries and maintain other perks of privilege. Matthew was the kind of guy we would have loved to hate, and no doubt plenty of folk did. But God didn't hate Him; He loved Him too, with an everlasting love as He does you and me, sending His Son to save and change Him, heart-side out, to make him a whole new person, so the real Levi might come out and play, work and begin to grow into maturity as He followed Christ.

The Pharisees, of course, were quite annoyed. Here was Jesus, that people thought was so good, this self-annointed prophet of God rubbing shoulders with the rift-raft, poor, ignorant, sinners. They thought they best stood up for God by being indignant when people let themselves go a bit or to access, instead of faking the fact that they were less than perfect. There'll always be people, religious types, who don't get it, don't get Jesus, who think their self effort do-gooding and haughty abstentions from this-and-that will gain God's credit. There were Pharisees in that day with bruised faces and they were proud of that. They got them by NOT looking at pretty women in the narrow streets of Jerusalem, even if it meant that, head down, they rammed themselves into a gate post or cobbled wall. Such people pretend they're good, even when they're not. They put on airs, fake it and delight in exposing the real or constructed sins of others. They compare their supposed goodness with others, and may be justified in their own minds but not in God's. Thank you, Lord, I'm not as bad as that guy. You know what a good person I try to be.