Nobody's waiting for you to get it together first

There's a belief a lot of us can hold and it goes something like this, before God would want anything to do with me, I need to clean myself up. We think we should stop the thing we keep doing. Sort out the mess. Become the sort of person who belongs at God's table. So we wait. We keep our distance until we're presentable.

In this talk from our Jesus the Revolutionary series, Will Sopwith takes us to a story in the Bible that takes that whole idea apart. It's the account of a man called Levi, and it suggests the order we assume — fix yourself, then belong — might be exactly the wrong way round.

A man who wouldn't stay in his lane

The story sits in the early chapters of Mark, one of the four accounts of Jesus' life. And by this point, Will points out, Jesus is on a bit of a roll. He's turned up in a synagogue and unsettled things. He's touched a man with leprosy, which nobody did. He's told a paralysed man his wrongs were forgiven, which shocked everyone in the room. Story after story, Jesus refuses to behave the way a "respectable" religious teacher was supposed to. As Will puts it, he just will not stay in his lane.

Then comes Levi. Levi was a tax collector, which in that world meant a collaborator, someone who worked for the occupying power and skimmed off his own people for profit. To say they were despised by society would not be an understatement. And Jesus walks up to his booth and says two words: "Follow me." Levi gets up, and goes.

And if that's not enough, Levi throws a party and Jesus comes. He sits down to eat with a houseful of tax collectors and "sinners" (the label of the day for anyone deemed beyond the pale). To share a meal with someone back then wasn't casual. It said: I accept you. I'm with you. We're the same. The religious leaders are appalled. Why does he eat with these people? And Jesus gives them a line that has stuck for two thousand years:

"It's not the healthy who need a doctor, but those who are ill."

The tyranny of the school cafeteria

To help us feel what was really going on, Will reaches for something most of us know - the school canteen. There was an unspoken protocol, he says, especially in those raw teenage years when your whole social standing felt like it was on the line. Some people you simply did not sit with. And for some of us, we were those people. The sidelong glances, the sniggering behind hands, the quiet maths of who you were allowed to be seen with. Who you sat with told everyone where you ranked.

That's the pressure Jesus walks straight into and ignores. He picks the wrong table on purpose.

Pandita Ramabai and a bigger table

Will offers a second picture, one many of us won't have heard. Pandita Ramabai was born in India in 1858, the daughter of a high-caste Hindu priest who did something almost unheard of because he taught his daughter to read. She became so learned she was honoured with the name Pandita, meaning "learned one." Then life fell in on her. She was orphaned, then widowed, left to raise a young daughter alone.

She'd grown up believing God was distant, reachable only through spiritual practice tied to your caste, your education, your standing — not open to everyone. Then she encountered Jesus. And in him she found a God whose grace and acceptance were for all, regardless of caste. She almost certainly read this very story in Mark. At thirty-one she founded a centre for widows and orphans (of every caste) where they could gain skills, education and independence. She, too, refused to stay in her lane. She'd met a God with room at the table for everyone, and she built a table to match.

The two things that didn't happen

What makes the Levi story even more interesting, Will suggests, is what Jesus doesn't do.

You'd expect that once Levi signed up, he'd have to drop his dodgy old crowd. Instead he invites them all round, and Jesus happily joins the party. And you'd expect Jesus to set a bar — clean this up, prove yourself, then you can follow me. Instead, he just sits down and eats. He meets Levi exactly where he is and invites him to walk it out step by step, together.

There's no entrance exam. Jesus doesn't wait at the far side of your best efforts. He comes and sits down in the middle of the mess.

Everyone's sick, and that's the good news

In the Conversation Street chat afterwards, Matt asked, if Jesus came for the sick and not the healthy — well, who's actually healthy? "Everyone's sick," he said. The religious leaders who thought they had it sorted had missed it. So the honest question isn't am I good enough, it's am I willing to admit I'm in the same boat as everyone else?

Which knocks over the old assumption for good. Jenny added to the comments, "I definitely thought Christianity meant rules." Loads of people do — inside the church and out. But as Matt put it, you don't figure it all out and then come. You come, and Jesus helps you figure it out. Like wedding vows. You can say them in thirty seconds, then spend a lifetime living them out.

And if the worry is that faith just swaps one set of chains for another, there's a reframe worth thinking about in that you're already bound to something — approval, your salary, how work is going, the need to prove yourself. Nobody's truly free of everything. A free person simply gets to choose what binds them. Jesus put it as a yoke — the wooden frame that harnesses an animal to its work — and then said the amazing thing, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light." Still a bind. Just a kinder one, carried with help.

A table with your name on it

So here's the question Will leaves us with. Which of them are you — the shocked righteous one, the awkward companion, or the grateful guest who can't quite believe someone chose to sit with them?

You don't have to have it sorted. You don't have to clear a bar first. That was never the deal. If any of this stirred something, come and carry on the conversation with us — you'd be genuinely welcome, exactly as you are, at crowd.church.