First Reading:
1Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, To the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: 2Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 3We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of everyone of you for one another is increasing. 4Therefore we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith during all your persecutions and the afflictions that you are enduring. 11To this end we always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith, 12so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Second Reading:
19He entered Jericho and was passing
through it. 2A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a
chief tax collector and was rich. 3He was trying to see who
Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was
short in stature. 4So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore
tree to see him, because he was going to pass that
way. 5When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said
to him, Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay
at your house today.
6So he hurried down and was happy
to welcome him. 7All who saw it began to grumble and
said, He has gone to be the guest of one who is a
sinner.
8Zacchaeus stood there and said to the
Lord, Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor;
and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times
as much.
9Then Jesus said to him,
Today salvation has come to this house, because he too
is a son of Abraham. 10For the Son of Man came to seek out
and to save the lost.
There's an amazing transformation that happens in Zacchaeus in this scripture passage. When the story started he was the chief tax collector and he was rich. By the time the story was over, he had given up half of his possessions, promised to pay back 4-fold any fraudulent collections and Jesus was declaring that his household was saved… and it all happened in one night! As I reflected on the transformation this week I couldn't help but remember something I read a while back about transformation… it's adapted from something written by Danaan Perry.
“Sometimes I feel that my life is a series of trapeze swings. I'm either hanging on to a trapeze bar swinging along or, for a few moments, I'm hurtling across space in between the bars.
“Most of the time, I hang on for dear life to my trapeze-bar-of-the-moment. It carries me along a steady rate of swing and I have the feeling of certainty, that I'm in control of my life. I know most of the right questions and even some of the right answers. But once in a while, as I'm swinging along, I look ahead of me into the distance, and I see another bar swinging toward me. It's empty, and I know, in that place deep within me that seems to know things, that this new bar has my name on it. It is my next step, my opportunity for growth, it's my aliveness coming to get me. In my heart-of-hearts I know that for me to grow, I have to release my grip on the well known bar of the present, I have to let go to be able to move to the new one.
“Each time it happens to me, I hope and I pray that I won't have to do it. But in that place deep within me that seems to know things, I know that I need to release my grasp on my old bar, and for some moment in time hurtle across space before I can grab onto the new bar. Each time I'm terrified. It doesn't matter that in all my previous hurtles, I have always made it. Each time I am afraid I will miss and that I'll fall and be crushed on the unseen rocks below. But I do it anyway. And maybe this is the essence of what some call the faith experience. No guarantees, no net, no insurance policy, but you do it anyway because somehow, to keep hanging onto that old bar doesn't seem like a viable alternative.”
Of course Zacchaeus wouldn't have understood the imagery of the story at all… the idea of swinging through the air on a trapeze would have been totally and utterly foreign to him, but I think there were probably a couple of times throughout the night and the days to come that he would have related with the feeling of uncertainty that comes along with a radical transformation in his life.
When Zacchaeus heard that Jesus was coming he was interested in learning who Jesus was, it's only natural… this is the 19th chapter of the gospel of Luke… Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem where he was eventually going to be executed. There were people talking about him and momentum was growing. In fact, it's later in this very chapter that Luke records the triumphal entry into Jerusalem… the celebration we know as Palm Sunday where Jesus was hailed as a king. So of course Zacchaeus was interested… but he didn't want to get too close.
I've told you before about tax collectors and their place in
society… and for today suffice to say that people didn't like
tax collectors because they felt ripped off by them, and as the chief
tax collector they would have especially despised Zacchaeus. There
are some scholars who say that where the text says he was short in
stature
it wasn't a comment about his height at all, but it was
actually a play on words to say how little he was liked by the
community. The crowd certainly wasn't going to make it easy for him
to be there… So Zacchaeus was reduced to climbing a tree in
order to see Jesus as he went by. And that was the extent of his
hope. I think he was as surprised as anyone else when Jesus looked up
and said Zacchaeus, come down. I'm staying at your house tonight.
That very well may have been one of those moments where he saw that trapeze swinging toward him and he knew it was an opportunity for growth and transformation but I can't be sure of that. I wish we got some of the story of what happened that night. I wish that we got a window into how the transformation happened… what Jesus said, what he did, what Zacchaeus said and what he did… but we don't. The scriptures only tell the story of the encounter and the response.
Jesus came, Zacchaeus was curious, Jesus called, Zacchaeus came, Jesus went to be with him, and Zacchaeus was utterly transformed. Somewhere along the line that night he figured out first that Jesus was worth following and second that at least for him, following Jesus meant changing his relationship with money and with people.
His encounter with Jesus taught him the first principle of stewardship… that anyone (and everyone) can use what they have to do God's work in the world. He may have been utterly despised by others because his job had him use people to make money… but by the end of the story the tables were turned and he was using that very money to make things right with people. He gave half of everything he had to the poor and he used what must have been a substantial portion of what was left to restore the relationships between him and the people he'd hurt by paying them back 4 times as much as he took.
And if we make the assumption that he wasn't going to defraud more people, which is a fair assumption given the rest of the story, then he really did let go of the trapeze-bar of security because he also gave up the extraordinary earning power of his position as the chief tax collector…
But when Jesus went to his house the people didn't know the
transformation that was going to take place… they grumbled
because of who Zacchaeus was. They said He has gone to be the
guest of one who is a sinner.
But by the end of the story it
became clear to me that who Zacchaeus was wasn't really the point.
The point was who he was becoming, and why… Jesus said that he
must stay with Zacchaeus. It was part of his mission that's expressed
in this passage as seeking and saving the lost. There was something
that he had to offer and that Zacchaeus was ready to receive. And so
where he let go of the trapeze bar that represented security, the one
he reached out and grabbed as he was flying through the air was one of
trusting in Jesus Christ. And the reason I know that's the case is
because Jesus proclaimed Today salvation has come to this
house.
Whatever happened that night in the part of the story that
we aren't told, it's clear that there was a fundamental shift in
Zacchaeus… things that once stood in the way didn't matter as
much, things that once may have seemed impossible now clearly weren't.
He became a follower of Christ and it happened because Jesus came into
his life.
The whole story boils down to God's initiative, and Zacchaeus' response. Just like our faith journeys boil down to God's initiative and our response. There are many transformations in life… some are quick and painless, some are longer-term or harder to deal with; in some of them we may know exactly where we're headed and in others we may feel like we've lost track of the bar that we wanted to grab onto. But in all of them, we can trust that God is there with us, because God does take the initiative to reach out. That's part of the nature of God. It's who God is. God invites us to become a part of the work that God's doing in the world… whether it's through the financial gifts that we're going to pledge here this morning, through our own involvement in mission and in service, or a whole variety of other ways… we're invited to release that which once was in order to grasp what will be. We're invited to let go of things that stand in the way of discipleship and grab hold of trusting in Jesus Christ. Every day we do that, we become followers of Christ and there may just be an amazing transformation that happens in us. Thanks be to God.
The foregoing sermon was given by Rev. Dan Holland at the United Parish of Bowie on November 7, 2010.
© 2010 Daniel Holland
