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In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus makes a profound statement saying, it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. This week, guest speaker, Reverend Victor Teo, invites us to encounter the radical hospitality of Jesus and to consider how we are called to respond.

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This morning's reading is taken from the Gospel of Luke chapter 5 verses 27 to 39. Luke chapter 5 verses 27 to 39. Jesus calls Levi. Verse 27. After this he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi standing sitting at this tax booth, and he said to him, Follow me, and leaving everything, he rose and followed him. And Levi made him a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at the table with them. And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners? And Jesus answered them, Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick, I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. A question about fasting. And they said to him, The disciples of John fast often and offer prayers, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours eat and drink. And Jesus said to them, Can you make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days. He also told them a parable. No one tears a piece from a new garment and puts it on an old garment. If he does, he will tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. And no one puts new wine into old wine skins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wine skins, and no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says the old is good. This is the gospel of Christ.

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Praise to Christ our Lord.

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Thank you.

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Good morning. What a joy it is to be back to see all the familiar faces. And I think you're sitting in the same places. Praise the Lord. So, Father, we pray this morning that you meet with us today. Help us, Lord, as we choose today to encounter you. So make our hearts ready, we pray. In Jesus' name. Amen. When I was in secondary school, although I don't look the part, oh now that this one can move. I love to play basketball. We will head to the basketball court after school, and then we will play in our school uniform. But how do we decide who is on whose team? Do you remember how we did that last time? Or maybe even now. We will have the two strongest players to be the captain, correct? And then the captain will take turns to choose the player. The captain will say, I want you because you are tall and could secure the rebounds. I'll take you because you run very fast. I'll take you because you have expensive shoes. So as the names were called one by one, as one by one of them they were chosen, the group standing by the side would actually get smaller and smaller. And then if you're not one of the better players, you get very nervous, right? Because you wonder, when is it my turn to be called? And then you pray, Lord, please don't let me be the last one. Because if you are the last one standing there, it doesn't feel good. You feel invisible. It's as if nobody wants you. When the captain has you at the end, it's like bow pian, you know. It's not like, oh, they want you, but you're the last. I mean, make the numbers. So that dynamic in the basketball court is is the is the game. But that game, unfortunately, follows many of us well into adulthood. If you are a student, you see it in the canteen where the cool kids sit together. If you are a boss hiring a team, you filter through the resumes to find the best degrees. We are conditioned, whether we like it or not, to build a dream team by excluding the weak, excluding the clumsy and the unqualified. In the first century in Israel, in Jerusalem, the religious system operated exactly like that basketball court. But the stakes were much higher because the stakes were access to God. That was the question: who has access to God? If you look at the temple then, the temple in Jerusalem in those days, it was a building designed to keep people out of the temple. It was a masterpiece of construction, but I call it an architecture of exclusion. It was laid out in concentric circles, like a target like that. So the closer you moved towards the center, the more exclusive the temple was. So right on the outside, on the perimeter, you had the court of the Gentiles. And this was as far as the non-Jew could go. There was a literal stone with a warning sign to the non-Jews, do not enter or you will die, it says. So if you are a non-Jew, they say, Don't enter, stop. Then if you pass through that wall, you will enter the court of women, which was as far as a Jewish woman would go to worship. Beyond that, you cannot enter. And then the next one is the court of Israel reserved strictly for the Jewish men. And not any Jewish men, but Jewish men who were ritually clean. And beyond that was the court of the priests, where only the Levites could enter to offer sacrifices. And finally, in the dead center behind the thick curtain was the Holy of Holies. And this was the dwelling place of God, and only one man, the high priest, he could enter. And only once a year on the Day of Atonement. So the entire temple structure screamed a single theological message that God is in the center and you must stay out. And the Pharisees and the scribes acted as gatekeepers of this system. They were a little bit like the captains of the team. And they were incredibly strict about who makes the cut. They operated on a holiness code and they viewed being holy, sanctity, as something fragile, like a clean white shirt that must be protected from mud. So if you were not well, you were sick, you were out. If you are poor, cannot afford the sacrifices, you were out. If you have a dirty job, you were out. They built walls to protect God from the sinners, and they believe with all their heart that they were doing the right thing. They thought they were being very good captains. But then Jesus comes along in Luke chapter 5 and he walks right onto the basketball court, he ignores the captain, he ignores the statistics, and he starts picking his own team. And who does he pick? He doesn't choose the spiritual elite, the very clever ones, but he goes right to the absolute bottom of the social ladder. He picks Levi. He picks Levi. You look at our text today in Luke 5 from verse 27, wonderfully read for us. After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the tax booth. And he said to him, Follow me. To grasp the shock of the moment, we need to really understand who Levi was. Levi wasn't the kid picked last because he was clumsy, pudgy. But Levi was the kid that the other children wanted to beat up, you know. The Bible calls him a tax collector. In our modern Singaporean context, it sounds really very mundane. Sounds like a civil servant working at Iras. Is Gary? Was Gary? Okay, never mind. But in the first century Israel, a tax collector was synonymous with being a traitor. A traitor. Remember, Israel then was an occupied territory under the Roman Empire. And how did Rome collect taxes? They set up a franchise system. They would auction off the right to collect taxes to the locals. So it works like this. Who bids the highest will get the right to collect taxes. So different ones would say, I can collect one million, I can collect two million. And so the highest bidder will get it. And this position was very powerful because you can really set arbitrary taxes on the people. And to enforce it, you have the whole Roman army to support you. The tax collector was allowed to mark up the taxes, and then you can pocket the difference that you collected. So the tax collector in those days was very rich. He's like the school bully at the entrance of the school canteen. As you enter the school canteen, don't run out. You enter the school canteen, he will ask how much money you have. Then you say, five dollars, he said, give me four dollars. He will take that money away. If you have two dollars, he will take 150, 50 cents, cannot buy anything. Then he collects the money from everyone. He doesn't benefit the people, he uses it to buy his own things. So the hatred for people like Levi, the tax collector, was intense. They were considered unclean, they were banned from entering the temple, even the synagogue. They were banned in a court of law from giving any testimony because they were considered to be liars and cheats. So picture with me Levi sitting in his tax booth near the Sea of Galilee. He is likely very wealthy, wearing the finest imported cloth, clothes, with gold rings on all his fingers, but he is completely isolated, no friends, just despised. He's sitting in a golden cage, possessing everything money can buy, but having absolutely nothing that matters. And then Jesus walks by. Jesus walks by. The text says Jesus saw him, saw him. I thought it is profound because everybody looks at Levi and saw a traitor, a problem, a collaborator, a barrier to national holiness. But Jesus saw, he looked at Levi and saw a person, he saw a soul, he saw a potential disciple. And then Jesus does the most unthinkable thing. He acts like a captain picking a team, but he points to the person everyone else has rejected, and he just says to him two simple words, follow me. I thought this is God's amazing grace. Jesus says to Levi, come, follow me. The world tells us today, you have to prove that you are good first, and then I will pick you. The world says, clean up your act, pay back the money, apologize. Maybe in 10 years we will let you in, but you sit at the back, huh? But Jesus operates on a different timeline. He says, I choose you, I pick you right now. In the middle of his mess, you know, in the middle of his sin, right in the text booth there, Jesus says, Follow me. Jesus offers friendship before Levi changes his behavior. Jesus offered Levi that day hospitality. And you look at Levi's reaction in verse 28, this is where we see the power of that invitation. We read leaving everything, he rose and followed him. We often read this verse very quickly, we just read it like that. We know also that the disciples always follow Jesus. Peter, James, and John also left their nets to follow Jesus. It was a sacrifice. But for the fishermen, in the worst case scenario, the fishermen could go back fishing because there would still be fish in the sea. In fact, after the crucifixion of Jesus, we see them doing exactly just that. But Levi, when he stood up that day to follow Jesus, he could never go back. You cannot resign from the Roman tax service and then simply ask for your job back one month later. Because the Romans did not tolerate desertion. The moment Levi walked out of that tax booth, he lost his license. There would be a long queue, someone else would rush to take his place. So by standing up and walking out, Levi was burning all his bridges. There was really no turning back. But why would a man who loved money love money enough to sell his soul, betray his countrymen, suddenly choose to walk away from it all? Why? Because he was hungry. He wasn't hungry for food, he had plenty of money, but he was hungry perhaps for dignity. He was hungry for grace. He was hungry to be looked at with eyes that didn't hate him. He had spent his adult life being the person everyone rejected, and suddenly the most famous rabbi in Israel looked him in the eye and said, I want you on my team. That kind of love is irresistible. When you truly encounter the radical hospitality of Jesus, the things of the world, the status, the career, the bank account, one by one it will start to lose its grip on you, and you will become willing to lose everything just to be near Jesus. The radical hospitality of Jesus. What is hospitality? When we think of hospitality, I invite us to think this way. I invite us to think about space, the physical space and the heart space that we can offer to people. This space that we give people allows for change to take place, and this space offers friendship. As Henry Nowen puts it very well, he says hospitality, therefore, means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. So when Jesus saw Levi, he didn't see him as an enemy. He engaged him and he made space for him, he gave him an invitation to come in. So Jesus was offering Levi that space to respond. And in that short divine encounter, divine hospitality was offered. If Jesus didn't call Levi, Levi would still be sitting at his textbooth imagining himself as condemned. You see that? It is that space, that moment of space given to Levi. Radical hospitality. And then what was Levi's response? He threw a big banquet and feast. He received that hospitality from Jesus, and now he's about to give that hospitality. He probably wanted to introduce his new master to the people around him, his friends. We read, and then Levi made a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at the table with them. So Levi threw a big party, and who was the on the guest list? Are you usually so quiet? Who was on the guest list? Tax collectors. I must be very careful. I keep moving with this. The tax collectors, they were on the guest list, tax collectors and others. Why did he invite them? I think because they were the only friends he had. Because no good religious person would ever step foot in Levi's house. They wouldn't eat his food. They wouldn't sit on his chairs. So Levi just invites his Kakilang, his cliques, he invites the other outcasts. The others there is very telling. You know who are the others? Your guess is as good as mine. Probably the loan sharks, the gangsters, the people society had written off. So you imagine with me the scene inside Levi's house. It's not a quiet meeting, you know, but it's a very, very rowdy, messy banquet. It's a room of bad influences. The kind of crowd that the children are here that your parents will say, don't mix with them. Avoid them. But right there in the middle of them, reclining at the table, eating the food, laughing at the different stories, was Jesus. Jesus was right there with all of them. And then to the scene, just outside the house, the religious leaders, the Pharisees watching this unfold, they are furious, they are hopping mad. We read in the next verse, the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners? We need to understand their logic. We often treat the Pharisees as cartoon villains, but they weren't they were not trying to be evil, they were trying to be holy. Because in that culture of the day, eating with someone isn't just about refueling yourself, going to the Kopityam food court and eat. But eating was really covenant. To share bread with someone was a sacred act of intimacy. Because they have dipping bowls, but they don't deep ones, you know, they double deep. It's very close, you see, it's a very intimate thing. It's meant to say, I'm with you, I break bread with you, I accept you. And the Pharisees, they believe sin was like a virus. If you touch a sick person, you get sick. If you eat with a dirty person, you get dirty. So when they see Jesus eating at the table, they were horrified, you know. They are thinking, does your master have no standards? Doesn't he know who these people are? They did not approach Jesus. So they went to the disciples and they asked them. But Jesus overhears them. And then Jesus was the one who answered. Jesus said, Those who are well have no need for a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. So Jesus changes the metaphor entirely. You see, the Pharisees operated like a courtroom. In a courtroom, in a court, there is a judge who separates the guilty from the innocent, saying, You are bad, you are good, you are bad, you are good. But Jesus says, No, no, no, you got it wrong. This is like a hospital. In a hospital, there is a doctor who heals the wound. The doctor doesn't get sick when he touches the patient, but the patient gets well. He changes, radically changes. The metaphor. So as we as a church, as YCCA pursues hospitality, being hospitable disciples, perhaps it is helpful to pause and ask, what kind of building are we? Is this a museum for saints? A clubhouse for those who are well? Or are we, or can we be a hospital for sinners? When people walk into the church, do they feel like they need to put on a mask? Do they feel pressured to pretend that all is well? Or can people walk in here with their mess? How often do we put labels on people, cancel them out because it's messy? Radical hospitality simply means this: that we are okay with the mess. We make space and room for people. The Pharisees realize they can't win this argument, so they switch tactics. They do what many Singaporeans love to do, but YCCA don't know. You know why is that? They start comparing. They said to Jesus, you know John, huh? The disciples of John, this is John the Baptist, fast often and offer prayers. So do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours, yam tiam tia, eat and drink. How can? Look at John the Baptist's team. They look somber, they fast, they pray, but your disciples fast, fast, pray. How can like that? And then Jesus answers them with three short illustrations to explain why this way is totally new. And he wants them to understand that you cannot simply mix the old ways of exclusion with the new ways of grace. So he gives three pictures of why about this newness. And I will focus on the third one. The first one is the wedding. Jesus says, Can you make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? Jesus calls himself the bridegroom, and this is a massive claim to divinity. He says the wait is over, God is here. You fast when you are mourning and absence, but I am here now. This isn't a funeral, it's a wedding. Our faith at its core is a religion of joy. It's a feast because the king is with us. And then the second picture Jesus gives is about the patch coat. He says, No one tears a piece from a new garment and puts it on an old garment. He says to them, you don't cut up a brand new shirt to patch an old coat. If you do that, then you will ruin the new shirt and the new patch will string, the old one already strung after you wash, but the new one will string and tear away. So Jesus is saying, my gospel is not just a goyok, a patch for your old religious system. You cannot patch it like that. I didn't come to just fix up the Pharisees' rules, but I came to bring something totally new. And the third picture that Jesus gave is the wineskins. And it's the central point that I thought we can focus on. Jesus says no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskin. I thought I'll explain a bit of the science for us. In the ancient world, they stored wine in leather bags. It's not like our nice wine bottles, but they stored wine in leather bags made from gold skin. When you have new wine, you will put it in new skin. New wine goes to new wine goes to new skin. And that is good. Because when wine is new, it continues to ferment, you see. When it continues to ferment, it releases. Okay, let's try again, okay? When wine is new, there is fermentation. When there's fermentation, there is gas. So when there's gas, what happens? It expands. So it needs a new skin that can stretch. So when you put new wine in old skin, what happens? Burst, Jalat. Old skin is hot and stiff. I'm not talking about our skins, huh? But the wine skin. Old skin is hard and stiff. If you put bubbling wine, still wine that is fermenting, what happens? It bursts. You lose the wine and you ruin the back. Okay, let's do one exercise that you humor me a bit, okay? Everybody sit up straight. Sit up straight. Make sure you have nothing on your hands. I want you to be the old wineskin first. You cross your arms over like this. Put your arms over your chest like that. Hold it really tight. Squeeze hard. Squeeze very, very hard. Make yourself into like a fortress like that. It feels safe, right? Because you are protecting yourself. But answer me this: keep it like that. If Levi comes to you right now, can you give him a hug? You can. If Jesus tries to pour more love into your heart, is there any room to grow? Now the new wineskin is like this. The new wineskin, you unlock your arms and you spread them out as wide as you can. Don't hit your neighbor. But keep it there, keep it there. Keep it there, keep it there. Spread it out as wide as you can. This feels scary because you aren't protecting, you're not protecting yourself anymore, right? You are so open, so exposed. But now is there room why? Is there room for the new things that Jesus wants to do? So hear me, keep your hands there. Jesus says, My grace is too big for your crossed arms. I need a heart that opens wide. Keep your hands there. You look at your open arms, look at the space between the arms. You just made free space. So when your arms were crossed, you were a wall, no one could get in. But when you stretch, you create an empty space. And that space is where the stranger can come in and sit down. That space is where a bully can become a friend. The old wine and the old skin represents the religion of rules. It is the Pharisees' way, it is the logic that says keep the bad people out, stay separate, be rigid. It is hard and it cannot handle the messiness of life. But the new wine is Jesus. It is grace, it is the Holy Spirit. Grace is alive, grace moves, grace expands, grace reaches out to the Levites of the world. Grace demands a flexible container. Do you see that? You cannot just add a little bit of Jesus, koyot here, koyot there, to a rigid judgmental life. It won't work. Grace demands a container that is flexible, it demands a heart that can stretch. Now you can put your hands down. But everybody put down already. Why? Why do you put down? Tired, right? Because it is very hard to hold that pose. It takes effort, right? That's why Jesus concludes this portion with this very sad observation. In verse 39, he says, No one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says the old is good. Jesus is not saying the old wine is better, but he's saying we like it better. You like the old wine. Why? Don't need to change, ma. It's safe. We like our comfort zones, you see. We like knowing who is in and who is out. We like the feeling of superiority that comes from following the rules, and I do it better than our neighbor. I fast twice a week. I tithe. I'm not like the tax collector. I have a complete family. It feels good to our ego. But the new wine, radical hospitality, is scary. It calls us to sit next to people we don't understand. It asks us to stop being the captain who judges and start being the servant who loves. So many of us will say, no thanks. If I don't have the new wine, then I'll keep the old, then I don't need to change the bottle. I can be myself. The old is good enough. I'll stick to my safe, quiet religion. I thought we'll circle back to the basketball court that we started on. Remember the feelings of being picked last. Remember the fear of rejection, the shame of being the one that no one wanted. The Pharisees they built a temple that worked just like that basketball court, just like that. They picked the best and rejected the rest. They built walls of stone to keep people out because they wanted a team of winners. But Jesus came to build a different kind of team. He went to the sidelines to the bench, he looked at the people hiding in the back. He said, Levi, the traitor, tax collector, come follow me. No, no, Jesus didn't call him that. And he saw Peter, Simon Peter the loudmouth, he saw Mary Magdalene, the outcast, he saw you, he saw me. He didn't pick, check our stats, he didn't check whether we had branded expensive shoes. He didn't check our holiness score. He just pointed at us and said, I picked you. I picked you to be on my team. I picked you to sit at my table. And because Jesus picked us, everything changed, you see. Jesus didn't come to build a temple of cold stone that keeps people out, but he came to build a living temple made up of you and me. And like the wineskins, we are made of skin, flesh. In the Old Testament, the temple was made of stone, but in the New Testament, we are the temple. And we are not made of stone. We are not made of walls. We are made of skin. We are the new wineskin. Skin stretches, skin is warm, skin is alive. So if the church wants to hold the new wine of Jesus, we cannot be a fortress of stone. We have to be that living skin. Stone walls keep people out, but living skins stretch to let people in. Stone walls are cold, but living skin are warm. Stone walls can crumble, but living skins heal. So I urge us this week when you go back home to your office or school, when you meet someone who is different, someone who would usually be picked last. It is very helpful to remember Levi. I want you to remember that you were Levi once. You were the one who needed grace. And because you have been picked by Jesus, you now have the privilege of picking others. Who will you choose to be a friend to? Who will you choose to make space for? Don't be the captain that rejects them, but be the new wineskin that stretches to welcome them. Tell them the walls are down, the doctor is here, and there is a seat for you on this team. That YCCA can be that hospitable disciple that follows after Jesus Christ. Brought by my Sunday school teacher. Remember Joanne? Never mind. And I received the hospitality of the church. And that's why we stayed. You know what was the hospitality then? Praised land? Milo. You know they come in the the big um kettle pot with Milo and the cups, and then we have the memory verses and the coupons. We receive the hospitality of the church. And I invite us to really consider because sometimes the structure of the church, the walls of the church, unintentionally can keep many people outside. Yet the heart of Jesus is that of a hospitable father that welcomes everyone. So will you pause with me as we pray? Father, we thank you for your goodness. We thank you for your grace. We pray today that you meet our hearts, that we might see your heart, your love for people, and help us to tuck at our hearts, that we might be your hands and feet continuing the work, your work of loving people, no matter who they are. So I pray today that you help us to choose to be a friend to someone who is down and out, someone whom people will turn away and reject, but someone whom you love and call. Father, we pray that you help YCC YCCA grow into your likeness as hospitable disciples. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

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We pray that you've administered to by the Word of God today. If you'd like to know more about each Christian Church, please visit our website at yccanglican.com. Have a blessed day.