I Don’t Belong | Mark 2:13-17
The Way to Trust | Scene 2, Day 2
Once again Jesus went out beside the lake.
A large crowd came to him, and he began to teach them. As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector’s booth.
“Follow me,” Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him.
While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him.
When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Mark 2:13-17
The gentle waves of the Sea of Galilee shimmer in the morning light.
Fishermen clean their boats and mend their nets. Jesus walks along the shore, where the town’s economy hums.
He passes a customs booth, one of many stationed along the roads and docks. A man named Levi sits inside. His job: collect fees from merchants, fishermen, and travelers. Whereas the fishermen farm the waters, Levi farms taxes.
Everyone knows what tax collectors are. Parasites. Roman collaborators. Traitors who grow rich on their neighbors’ work.
Jesus stops, looks at Levi, and says two words. “Follow me.”
Levi puts down his stylus, stands up, and walks out of his booth—and all of the income it represents.
Later that day, Levi throws a party. His house fills with other tax collectors and people the religious community has written off. There is Jesus, right in the middle of it. Reclining and eating.
Outside, the Pharisees are scandalized. “Why does he eat with them?”
When you think of “them,” who do you picture? Have you ever been the one excluded, or doing the excluding?
I know what it feels like to not belong.
My father came from what he called a “middle-class” social-economic household. He was deeply class-aware, perhaps because he spent his life trying to rise above the circumstances into which he was born. He became an officer in the U.S. Army at a time when “officer” and “gentleman” were used in the same sentence. He was determined that his children would be given what he was not. So he and my mother taught us which fork to use. How to match our belt and shoes. How to carry ourselves. Honor mattered deeply to him.
Because of this I became aware of the power of belonging, long before I could articulate why. Of being honored, and of honoring others.
Honor is an important part of ministry.
Now, we might call it making sure someone is seen and heard.
Helping someone to be seen and heard is why I chose my first church after seminary. As a fresh 24-year-old seminary graduate-to-be, I visited a church about an open position. It was called Ginghamsburg, in the outskirts of rustbelt Dayton, Ohio. They’d just put a screen in the sanctuary—one of the first churches in the country to do so—and were looking for someone to be in charge of it.
It was a blue-collar congregation. In 1995, church was still mostly a coat-and-tie type of deal. But Ginghamsburg was different. On the Sunday I visited, I noticed a large man with a beard, jeans, boots, t-shirt, and a thick chain hanging from his belt loop. Nobody seemed to mind his presence. I sat in the balcony and watched him worship, singing with his whole heart.
I thought, this is where I belong. A place where a biker can feel comfortable, where you don’t have to look a certain way. I accepted the open position and spent years in an environment where I felt at home.
As time passed, my ministry context changed. My wife and I had a large family, and the financial burdens that came with it stretched me to a breaking point. In 2011, with my business and my faith bottomed out, another church called me about an open position. This one was in Buckhead, one of the wealthiest areas in Atlanta. I turned it down. Twice. The third time they asked, I finally said agreed to visit, at least in part because I had four children and needed to provide for them. Ministry doesn’t typically offer many opportunities for financial stability, and this was one. I saw it as God’s grace—a way to fulfill my responsibilities as a father while continuing in the work to which I’d been called.
Soon, I found myself in a world of my father’s aspiration, a place I’d been trained to navigate but never quite belonged to.
The people at the church in Buckhead moved through life with an ease that comes from old money. Country club memberships. Summer homes. Casual mentions of going to the Master’s like you or I might talk about grabbing coffee. They weren’t trying to exclude anyone—they were just talking about their lives.
I had the social skills my father taught me. I knew which fork to use. I could hold a conversation. But what I didn’t have was ease. And people can tell the difference. There was something in my hesitation that gave others an awareness I was performing a role rather than inhabiting it naturally. I’d sit in staff meetings or stand in the lobby after services, and even though I could keep up, I felt like I was always half a step behind, an imposter who’d learned to mimic belonging in that social world but would never quite feel at home.
So I kept my distance and stayed on the edges of conversations. Excused myself before the talk shifted to places I’d never been or experiences I couldn’t relate to. I wasn’t being rejected. I was preemptively removing myself from situations where I might be “found out.”
Now place that social experience onto the tax collector, Levi. That’s what the lie of unworthiness does. It doesn’t wait for actual exclusion. It teaches you to exclude yourself first, before anyone else gets the chance.
Levi knew this feeling. Tax collectors were social pariahs—despised, excluded, written off. He’d probably stopped expecting party invitations long ago.
When you’re new anywhere—a church, a social circle, a professional environment—you scan for signals, like the way people dress. The cultural references and jokes they make. The things they say—or don’t say—to a newcomer. Whether anyone makes eye contact.
The real question isn’t “What should I wear?” or “Where should I sit?” The real question underneath all of it: Do I belong?
Eric Clapton wrote the song “Tears in Heaven” after his four-year-old son died. In it, he imagines a heavenly reunion but asks a heartbreaking question: Would you know my name in heaven? Would it be the same?
You can hear the pain in his voice when he sings, “I don’t belong, here in heaven.”
That lyric captures the way many of us feel about faith. It’s not that we don’t believe in God so much as we don’t believe God wants us.
We’re not part of the good people club.
As a result, some of us—the proud, the self-protective—preemptively reject the whole scene just to avoid feeling the inevitable rejection we see coming. We become cynics about church, skeptics about faith, critics of “organized religion.” Not because we’ve examined the evidence and found it wanting, but because dismissing it first feels safer than risking exclusion.
What if the core of our distance from God isn’t disbelief, but unworthiness?
What if the lie we’ve absorbed is that faith is for “good people,” and we’re not on the guest list?
This is the dynamic happening when instead of passing by Levi, Jesus walks up to him—a tax collector, the last person anyone expected—and says, “Follow me.”
Levi wasn’t a Roman official. He was a local Jewish man working for Herod Antipas, collecting tolls and customs from his own people. Tax collectors didn’t earn salaries—they profited by charging more than required and pocketing the difference. They were parasites. Traitors. People who’d chosen personal profit over community solidarity.
You can imagine how his neighbors despised him.
The local community saw tax collectors as agents of an oppressive Roman power. They were out of sync and separated from God, the world, and their community, yet no longer cared. They’d stopped trying to fit in because they’d been pushed so far out that fitting in was no longer an option. They’d become über sinners, or category definers: tax collectors and sinners.
When Jesus calls Levi to follow him, it’s not just unexpected. It’s downright offensive to those who’d spent their lives doing the work and making sure they fit in.
But the scandal doesn’t stop there.
Levi throws a party. And not just any party—a banquet. His house fills with his friends: other tax collectors, people the religious community has written off. And Jesus is right in the middle of it, not maintaining professional distance, but eating with them.
Sharing a meal wasn’t casual. It signified intimate fellowship and acceptance. You didn’t eat with people you merely tolerated. You ate with people you claimed as your own.
The Pharisees see the party and they’re scandalized.
In their understanding of how religion worked, holiness required separation. You kept yourself pure by staying away from sinners. But Jesus is right in the middle of Levi’s party, laughing with the outcasts. Deliberately.
Notice what Jesus says when one of the teachers confronts him: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Jesus is exposing their assumption and showing a different priority: people first, not rule keeping or social approval.
Jesus quiets the voice that says, I don’t belong here. He gives us a better one: Come sit with me.
He called Levi while he was still sitting in the tax booth—still carrying the wrong credentials, still marked by choices that made him unacceptable. And Levi stood up and followed.
He calls you the same way. While you’re still carrying whatever makes you feel unworthy—the wrong background, the wrong class, the wrong choices, the wrong anything.
The only requirement isn’t worthiness. It’s honesty. Not “I’ve arrived.” Just, “I need help.”
The question isn’t whether you’re good enough for Jesus’ table.
The question is, will you let him pull up a chair at yours?
Pray
Lord, when I feel like I don’t belong, come sit with me. Help me notice those around me who silently feel the same, so that I may sit with them. Amen.