Second Sunday After Pentecost

Pentecost 2A: Genesis 12:1-9; Psalm 33:1-12

Romans 4:13-25; Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

June 7, 2026

https://vimeo.com/1202976967

Good Morning, St. Aidan’s and St. Cyprian’s.

One of my first memories of being here at St. Aidan’s, a significant early impression of who this community is, was a Thanksgiving meal. It was November 2016 – yes, nearly ten years ago now – and I had just arrived a week or two before. The meal was catered by Small Potatoes, alas Michael and Elaine Jennings creation that is no longer with us. The food was set up at the end of this space, where our baptismal font usually rests. Tables were set up here. The line snaked along the side of our space as neighbors eagerly gathered for this delicious fare that we then sat down to enjoy together. I first met some of you then, as well as folks from our wider neighborhood whom I’ve continued to connect with along the way. There was a sense of extended family, whose boundaries are boundless. In a world turned upside down – in 2016 and now – a time of bewilderment, pain, and fear, I was struck by the joyous consolation, the irrepressible delight of the atmosphere. I knew immediately that this was the banquet of God, a Eucharist, the resurrection meal: the gathering, nourishing, healing power of God present among us, bathing us in mercy, infusing us with liberating life, preparing us to rise and carry out Jesus’ neighborly, communal, connecting, just, transformative work in the world.

Such a meal frames the gospel story appointed for this morning, the second Sunday after the Feast of Pentecost. The meal unfolds in a context of healing stories. Just prior to our passage, Jesus had healed someone who was paralyzed, saying “rise, take up your bed, and go home” (Matthew 9:6). There is a pattern of sitting down and rising up that marks this section of the gospel. After his invitation to the paralytic, Jesus has now gotten up and is making his way. As he walks, he sees and calls someone whom the other gospel versions of this story call Levi —ours alone names him as Matthew.^[1] There is a longstanding attribution of our gospel to this Matthew, indicating at the very least the significance of this call story to this gospel. This Matthew is sitting at a tax booth – he is a tax collector. As theologian Anna Case-Winters comments on this passage, “to be a tax collector for Rome was to be a collaborator with the oppressor. Tax collectors were [also] assumed to be thieves…collecting more than was required and profiting from the power of their positions.”^[2] Matthew was not exactly an inspiring example of liberating action. But Jesus specifically invited him to follow him. And so Matthew “got up” we hear. He rose. Yes, we should hear resurrection resonance – the Greek word here (ἀναστὰς, from ἀνίστημι) is often translated that way.^[3] And where do Matthew and Jesus go? To a meal. A meal at which other “tax collectors and sinners” flock. This causes some consternation among the Pharisees who ask the disciples why on earth Jesus would eat with such company. I wonder how the disciples might have responded – my guess is that they were as perplexed, if not offended, as well. But Jesus doesn’t give the disciples a chance to respond. Instead, he breaks in and says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (9:12-13). This was, in fact, a gathering for the offensive ones. A scandalous setting. Respectability politics were to be left at the door. It was a meal of mercy.

If there is any doubt about the power of the communal meal as a sign of Jesus’ ministry, the next vignette, which our appointed passage skips, is an interchange with the followers of John the Baptist. They wonder why they and the Pharisees fast while Jesus and his disciples – and all manner of others – feast. To this Jesus says, “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come, when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast” (9:15). Not only a communal gathering, but a wedding banquet is the symbolic space to which Jesus is issuing a wide-open invitation. There is a time to fast, to be sure, but this was not the time. The bridegroom was present. All are invited to the feast.  

This great banquet, this feast, furthermore, is not simply a party, but is a source of healing. As Jesus had shared earlier in response to questions about the gathering with tax collectors and sinners, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (9:12). The bridegroom, we might say, is also the physician. An important title for Christ in early Christian tradition was The Great Physician. Among those who expounded upon this theme was the fourth century Cappadocian theologian Gregory of Nyssa. In one of his letters Gregory wrote, “There are indeed two thresholds of human life: the one from which we start, and the one in which we end: and so it was necessary that the Physician of our being should enfold us at both these extremes, and grasp not only the end, but the beginning too, in order to secure in both the rising of the one who suffers.”^[4] The one who suffers, of course, is not simply one person. It is each and every one of us at one point or another. It is the world in which we live. It is the struggle in which we strive. And as we suffer, as we strive, the Physician of our Being, that Great Shepherd of the Sheep^[5] – to use another of the early Christian names for Christ – comes alongside us; joins us in our struggle; and most importantly, heals us. Christ invites us to the great banquet to offer us solace and consolation, sabbath and grace, salvation which is our healing, our liberation, our joy, our en-livening so that we can go out into the world as agents of that healing.

The vignettes that follow the story of the meal with sinners and tax collectors feature further rising. First, Jesus himself rises and follows as he is asked by a leader to come and lift up his daughter who had died. In getting up and following, he models that process of being sent forth. He leaves from the meal and models that being sent forth. As he makes his way to a funeral already begun, he is intercepted by a woman whose faith makes her well as she touches the fringe of Jesus’ garment. He makes his way through the laughter of disbelief that encounters him as approaches the house of the leader, and tells the mourners to disperse. He makes his way to the daughter who had died. He takes her hand, and she rises. The rising the sitting – the pattern persists. The Great Physician has risen, has gathered us in, and has brought us into his rising.

Even now. This pattern – of coming in and sitting down, of being invited into nourishment, sabbath and healing, and then rising and being sent forth to be about the ministry of healing in our world – comes to us here at St. Aidan’s. As our kitchen nears completion, we find ourselves in the threshold of a new chapter, looking forward to being further equipped to step into our food ministries, banquets such as the one I described at the outset. These stories greet us in the wake of what many of us experienced yesterday at Grace Cathedral as seven people were ordained, including our own Elaina LeGault who will be with us next Sunday. People came from all around our diocese and the wider church to celebrate and be equipped to carry forward the Good News, to be agents of healing, joy, and delight in the midst of a world that is deeply suffering and struggling. We are invited this day to participate more deeply in this pattern, to know that we are called by the Great Physician of our being, the Bridegroom, to come forward into spaces such as this, to be nourished with good food, to be connected in a great family with no borders, leaving respectability politics at the door in welcome of all— welcoming ourselves. And then, receiving nourishment and healing, we are invited to stand and be sent forth into the world again as bearers of Good News, agents of Christ’s rising.

^[1] The parallel stories are Mark 2:13-17 and Luke 5:27-32

^[2] Anna Case-Winters, Matthew (Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible) (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 133.

^[3] Case-Winters, 135

^[4] Gregory of Nyssa, Letter 17, which can be found online at https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/291117.htm

^[5] The phrase comes from Hebrews 13:20-21.