3 November 2013

“Zacchaeus, the saint”
Luke 19:1-10 / Isaiah 1:10-18
Sunday of All Saints / OT 31C
3 November 2013


Today – this Sunday of All Saints – we who are the Church gather to remember and honor the Saints … those famous and not so famous, those who have touched many lives and those who may have only touched a few … including ours … those who have helped us become the people we are today … beloved parents, grandparents, spouses, friends, loved ones who through their lives have pointed us toward Jesus … some outwardly, publicly; others, through their quiet, steady, persistent witness to a Truth that was larger than just themselves.
And all that is well and good.
But for right now … I’d like us to put that image of today, those saints, those people, out of our minds … and instead … think about those people from our pasts who have been oh, so far, from what we might call “Saintly.”
The frustrating. The annoying. The obnoxious. The downright mean and out and out nasty people whose lives have crossed ours. The ones we’d rather forget than remember.
You know them. I know them. They’re those folks who, by their very presence in times and events in our lives, have done their best to ruin them … the times, the events … for us.
Maybe it’s intentional on their part … or maybe they have no idea what they’re doing and how the rest of us feel about them. It doesn’t matter; the effect is still the same. Sometimes, just their very presence, as they move into the room, sucks the fun and the life right out of the gathering. You can feel the mood change … people get uncomfortable, or at the very least, change the way they’re acting. It’s like a black cloud has descended onto the occasion, the event, the gathering.
You know them. I know them.
And being quiet, polite, righteous Christian people, we probably, likely, don’t say anything out loud when they enter the room or the party or our lives. But we sure think it. “Why’s he here? What’s she doing here? How could they have come here? It’s all spoiled, it’s all ruined now, because they’re here.”
There. Right there. You feel the tension, the knot in your stomach, the absolute lousiness of it all?
Good. Because now you and I are in the right place for today’s Gospel reading, the same place as Zacchaeus and the crowd there in Jericho.
We’ve done such a disservice to these eleven verses of Luke’s gospel over the years.
“Zacchaeus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he … he climbed up in the sycamore tree for the Lord he wanted to see, the Lord he wanted to see.”
Yecch.
That little Sunday School song makes Zacchaeus sound all cute and cuddly and clean and adorable. But it couldn’t be further from the truth.
Think instead of a short, smarmy, scuzzball character … Danny DeVito in the episodes of the “TAXI” TV show from the mid 1970s … Danny DeVito from pretty much any movie, for that matter … a nasty, money grubbing little jerk of a man who has done his best to alienate everyone around him. Yes, Zacchaeus’ name might mean “Righteous” in his native Hebrew language, but he was far, far from that … collaborating with the Roman invaders and occupiers, Zacchaeus made his living by collecting taxes (and probably charging extra so he could keep more for himself).
And the people … well, they likely thought of Zacchaeus in much the same way as we have about those frustrating, annoying, obnoxious people from our pasts … the ones who seem to have an uncanny knack of showing up at just the right moment, and ruining it for everyone.
So this isn’t a cute little Sunday School tale at all … but instead, a tough word about someone who has walled himself off from the rest of humanity by his greedy living … and those who have been on the receiving end of Zacchaeus’ greed … they’ve put up walls around him, too … isolating this virus in their midst … here, standing so high and close together, Zacchaeus can’t even see who this Jesus, who is coming to Jericho, really is.
Ah – Jericho. Jericho … the place where the Israelites followed God’s command, and the high wall which surrounded and protected the city from invaders came tumbling down. Jericho … the place from Israelite history where an outsider … Rahab, the prostitute … was saved because she heard and obeyed God’s call to help the Israelite invaders as they made their way into the promised land.
Guess what … more walls are going to fall in this Jericho story of Zacchaeus. More outsiders are going to be brought to the inside of God’s story.
I told you this is no sweet little kids’ tale.
The first wall to fall is the crowd’s will to ignore, to keep Zacchaeus out of the picture, to keep him out of their joyful day of celebrating that Jesus had finally come to their town.
Zacchaeus, resourceful, clever … no one ever should accuse him of being dumb … climbs up a tree to see Jesus.
And Jesus sees him, and calls to him, that he must stay at Zacchaeus’ house today.
Crash! But the walls don’t fall without complaint.
“All who saw it began to grumble and said, ‘He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.’” “Why’s he going there? How dare he show up and show himself to Jesus, after all that he’s done. Doesn’t Jesus know that this guy is the worst … a greedy, money grubbing little traitor?”
Ah … yes … that’s true. But something has happened to him in that brief encounter high atop the sycamore tree. Zacchaeus has heard Jesus’ call to him.
And that call to Zacchaeus sets off a whole chain of events in his life. A chain of events which has as its center strand … repentance. Turning around, hearing Jesus’ call to him, and … those walls come tumblin’ down. The walls he – Zacchaeus – has built up around himself, between himself and other people, between himself and God.
It’s a word of repentance from Zacchaeus for all time …
From the past: “If I have defrauded anyone of anything …”
For the present: “Half of my possessions, Lord…”
For the future: “I will give to the poor / I will pay back four times as much.”
It’s a word of repentance which recalls Luther’s first words in his 95 Theses – the opening words of the Reformation we heard last Sunday:

When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

So Zacchaeus – Mr. Unrighteous to the crowd who had built up their walls to shut him out of their lives … really does live up to his name … Righteous … he hears Jesus’ call to repent, to turn around in his living, to realize that it’s not all about him … for isn’t the real sin of the fun-sucker, the annoying, the obnoxious … the sin of being self-centered … from this Zacchaeus hears Jesus’ call to repent, to turn and become the good steward of the treasure with which God has entrusted him in his life …
… though, yes, it’s still baby steps; did you hear Zacchaeus couch his answer a bit, “If I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” Maybe that’s why Jesus doesn’t say in concluding this story, “your faith has saved you,” as he does to a blind man he heals in the story right before this. Instead he says the more distanced, “Today salvation has come to this house.”
Salvation is, indeed, at the very steps of Zacchaeus’ house, as Jesus stands there. We don’t know what happened to Zacchaeus after this, we can hope and pray that “his faith saved him,” too, and he did make good everyone he’d ripped off in the past, but we can’t be sure.
What we can be certain of is that this story is just one more place, one more time, when true righteousness comes from, is found in, the person who the crowd … we … would least expect.
Once again, Jesus calls and hangs out with the “wrong” people … those most annoying, most obnoxious, the ones we’d call the furthest from God’s grace. Yet there he is, calling the scuzzballs out of the trees, going to the homes of the cheats and the fun suckers and bores and black cloud gloomy gus types.
Leaving the crowd … US … to contemplate the words they and we both have had from long ago … a word which tells us where true righteousness, saintliness lies … not in our doing and being, our self-righteous living … if we would have the ears to hear …

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.

“The entire life of believers (is) to be one of repentance.” Lord, have mercy.
For the grumbling we’ve done and the walls we’ve put up which have separated us from others, all your children, created and sustained in your image. Lord, have mercy.
For not considering others first … their motivations … their needs … for our being too much like the crowd, unable to “get it” that those we consider to be like Zacchaeus would, could and do seek your salvation. Lord, have mercy.
For our readiness to stonewall up into being a self-righteous people … too rule and law bound for our own good, or for that of anyone else … rather than hearing and heeding your call to repentance which forms us into people of grace and forgiveness and salvation. Lord, have mercy.

How blessed are those whose sins are forgiven.
In the mercy of almighty God, I forgive you all your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Today salvation has come to this house … for the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.
May your walls keep coming down today, and the next, and the next … so that when the Son of Man stands on the doorstep of your lives, you, like Zacchaeus, will hear and heed his call into the way of salvation … the way of All Saints … in him. Amen.