Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity
Come, as you are.
Amidst the chaos of a hospital, the beeping, the murmurs of staff and other patients, the beds being pushed around, the loud neighbour - there is a particular stillness around a hospital bed.
Those of you who visit hospitals regularly will know it. Some of you sit there as family members, friends, pastoral visitors, chaplains. You will know the strange holiness of those places.
At a hospital bed, very few people pretend. Illness strips away the brave face, the smart clothes, the busy diary, the sense that everything is under control. What remains is simply a person: vulnerable, precious, beloved, and in need.
And it is into exactly that sort of place that Jesus comes.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” He says it after calling Matthew, the tax collector, and after sitting at table with tax collectors and sinners. The religious people are shocked. Why would Jesus mix with people like that?
But Jesus, in effect, says: you have misunderstood my whole mission. I have not come to build a palace for the righteous. I have come as a physician for the sick. I have come to touch wounds, to sit with sinners, to raise the dead, to heal.
And the uncomfortable truth is this: none of us is completely well.
Some of us carry sickness in our bodies. Some carry grief. Some carry shame, fear, exhaustion, loneliness, bitterness, or guilt. Some carry wounds that nobody else can see. And some of us have become very good at looking well.
We know how to arrive at church with our smile ready and our answer prepared: “Yes, I’m fine, thank you.” But the Gospel will not let us pretend. We come to Christ not because we are well, but because we are not.
That is why the Church must never become a museum of perfect people, or a club for the respectable. At its truest, the Church is a hospital for the weak.
We see that in the Gospel. Jesus calls Matthew from his tax booth, right in the middle of his ordinary, compromised life. Then he notices the woman who has been bleeding for twelve years, hidden in the crowd, reaching out with the last of her hope. Then he enters the house of grief and takes a dead girl by the hand.
This is what Christ does. He notices the hidden sufferer. He enters the room of sorrow. He touches what others fear to touch. He brings life where everyone else has already begun to mourn. That is the Jesus we meet at this altar.
So when you come to receive Communion today, do not come pretending to be well. Come as Matthew came: called from the place where life is complicated. Come as the woman came: reaching out in hope. Come as the grieving father came: bringing the pain you cannot mend by yourself.
Come as Abraham went in our first reading: not with everything sorted, not with the whole map laid out, but trusting the promise of God one step at a time. And come as Paul tells us in Romans: not relying on your own achievement, but trusting the mercy and promise of God.
We do not come because we have made ourselves worthy. We come because Christ is merciful. We do not come because we are strong. We come because he is our strength. We do not come because we are already healed. We come because he is the physician.
And this matters for our common life in ordinary time, this long green season when the Church builds its faith week by week before Advent comes again. We are not a community of people with no wounds. We are a community gathered around the wounded and risen Christ.
That should make us gentler with one another. Slower to judge. Quicker to listen. More honest about our own need. The person beside us in the pew may be carrying a burden we know nothing about.
Many of you already share in Christ’s healing ministry: at hospital beds, in care homes, at kitchen tables, through phone calls, quiet prayers, and simple presence. When you sit with someone who is afraid or unwell, you are saying: Christ has not forgotten you. The Church has not forgotten you. You are not alone.
But we must also allow ourselves to receive that same ministry. Sometimes it is easier to be the visitor than the patient; easier to care than to admit we need care. So come to the altar today not made up, but as you are. Come with your faith, your doubts, your weariness, your grief, your sin, your hope. Come not to a museum for the righteous, but to a hospital for the weak as the late Pope Francis put it.
And here, right here, receive Christ: the one who calls sinners, who touches the unclean, who raises the dead, and gives himself as medicine for the life of the world.
For those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick, and today we rejoice - the physician is here.
