Our readings this week are 1 John 1:1-4 and Matthew 9.9–13, 18–26.

We have now entered the church season of 'Ordinary Time'.  It's really about the 'ordering' of the Sundays, not a sense of boring or mundane.  Nonetheless the way it imbues this season with the sense of the everyday can be a really fruitful ground in which our faith can grow.

I love the way the reading from 1 John plays into that sense of the 'everyday'.  John is writing about something amazing, and truly supernatural - 'the word of life... fellowship... with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ', but he grounds it in the natural, 'what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands.' Faith here is not something abstract, or intangible.  Faith is not only theory or dogma, it's touch, and sight, and sound.  Faith is presented as a relationship made manifest in the way it interacts with the world.  It's remarkable, in a way, that that even needs pointing out.  The very touchstone of our faith is the extraordinary claim that the ineffable, spiritual God who creates heaven and earth made themself known to us in a physical way - in the touchable, hearable, visible person of Christ.  

When we turn, then, to the gospels - the record of the God-man - it's perhaps no wonder that we find the way he lives out his faith to be deeply practical, visceral and embodied.  We've got some great examples in front of us this week in our little snippet from Matthew.

It begins with a lived parable.  The teaching, the abstract theory, that Jesus is working from is this (we know because he tells us!), '“I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners."  It's a lovely concept, opening us up to the idea that everyone - not just those who know the rules, and obey them - are being sought out by God.

Jesus, though, doesn't just preach it - he embodies it.  He's sharing this teaching whilst having dinner with a bunch of *shudder* tax-collectors, having called one of them in particular to be his disciple.  It's this shocking behaviour - visible, touchable, audible - that leads him to point out the teaching that grounds it, that others might join in.  And joining in is really part of the point. Note that when Matthew is called to follow Jesus, it leads to a share in his ministry of calling other 'sinners' - not in a theoretical way, but in a practical one: it's Matthew's house that this meal is taking place in.  Matthew is not a bystander in this feast of the kingdom, he's a host!

And the pattern continues: ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.' he says; and then he goes out and heals a woman suffering for 12 years from haemorrhages.

'Go away; for the girl is not dead but sleeping.' he says; and then he goes in, takes her by the hand, and raises her from death...

Extraordinary things - extraordinary things - happening in the everyday: the outsider turned into the host, the sick healed, the dead raised!  Happening because the faith Jesus shares isn't an abstract concept, or a set of ideals, theories or doctrine - but something he makes visible, tangible, and audible.  It's something with which he shapes the world around him.

What might happen if we set out to do the same?  If we let our faith become not only something we assent to with our hearts and minds, but something that we make manifest by our hands?  Something we not only carry, but begin to embody?