the gospel according to Luke 19:1-10
When I was 18, I had plans for college as many young people
do. I was registered for classes at
University of Southern Mississippi an hour from home. I had a dorm room assigned and, to my great
delight, my roommate was to be one of my very best friends in the world. I had a book list and new sheets. I had a schedule for first week events and a
date planned with a friend from a synod wide youth event for that first week
of orientation…we were planning Chinese for dinner and an evening of
alternative rock in a local bar…this was the 1990’s after all, we were trying
our best to bring the feel of the Seattle music scene to small town
Mississippi. I was excited about this
new beginning.
But something was off. There
was a young man in my life, a member of our congregation and its youth group,
who was beginning to show signs of mental illness. We had been very good friends through our
high school years, but now he was behaving erratically. He would show up in unexpected places or call
and indicate he knew things he shouldn’t have been able to know like what I was
wearing at that moment or who was coming and going from my house. Little things began to appear in places they
shouldn't or disappear from places they should be. Or he’d call demanding to know my work
schedule and what I was doing after and with whom. His self-entanglement in my personal space
was feeling more and more unsafe. And
then dropped out of his university and enrolled at USM. He asked what classes I was taking, in which
dorm I would be living. Worst was how he began to really endear himself to my
friends. I began to feel as though my
friends were no longer mine. That I had
no safe place.
So, thanks to their rolling admissions policy, the week before
classes began, I enrolled at Texas Lutheran College. I cancelled my courses and dates and roommate
and plans in Mississippi and moved 10 hours away.
I knew no one. New city, new
people, new culture. Now the folks at the
college in Texas were really nice people.
Lots of folks welcomed me. The
professors were kind. Class sizes were
small. There was a fair amount of stuff
to do even in the tiny town of Seguin thanks to the diligence of the college
staff and faculty. We even had a pastor
there…and he was pretty rad.
But I had no friends. I had no
transportation. I had no understanding
of why mariachi music should be played in the dining hall and parking lots at
seemingly random times or country music blaring from dorm rooms. I felt caught between two places: the place I had come from and this strange
place I had landed. I felt “out
there.” I felt like I was caught on a
hanging bridge. Swinging between two
worlds. I should belong in both places but really I belonged in neither
place.
I felt alone even though I was surrounded by people. I felt that no one understood me. That no one even saw me. I felt lost.
And then, one afternoon, I don’t remember exactly how it happened,
but I met Diana. And this is the part
that I do remember: she looked me
in the eye and invited me to dinner in the mariachi band inhabited dining
hall. And for the last 22 years, Diana
has called me out of my hiding places and lost places and loneliness and into
relationship not only with her but through her into relationship with the rest
of the world. And I thank God for her
daily.
Luke tells us a story today about a man named Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus was also caught between two
worlds.
He was a tax collector. We
know that tax collectors were considered sinners in the time of Jesus because
they worked for the empire collecting money from the poor in order to fund the
lavish lifestyle of the emperor and his cronies. In that peasant culture, if
you didn’t make a living by cultivating crops or caring for livestock, you were
considered a traitor to your people and a thief.
Luke calls Zacchaeus a “chief tax collector and rich”. This means that he is in middle management,
if you will. He oversees other tax
collectors and has the opportunity to charge his people more that the empire
demanded and to keep it for himself, and he could do this kind of over-taxing
through every single tax collector he supervised. So Zacchaeus is not just a traitor and a
thief. He’s the worst kind. He’s the ultimate traitor and thief. And he lives luxuriously we assume because
Luke tells us he’s rich.
So, Zacchaeus works for the Romans, but he is not a Roman. He is not welcomed at their tables or invited
to their homes. He does a job for
them.
Zacchaeus is a Jew. But he
is not welcomed at the tables of his people.
He is not invited into their homes.
He is a traitor.
Zacchaeus is caught between worlds.
Belonging in some ways to both but belonging in fullness to
neither. He is alone even in the vast
crowd. He is lost.
Now Zacchaeus has heard of Jesus.
He knows that Jesus is a teacher, popular with the crowds, and that he
is traveling through. Zacchaeus goes out
to see Jesus.
The crowd is thick. The
people there are desperate to see their teacher. And Zacchaeus pushes through the crowd to
see, too, but the people won’t let him in.
In his desperation to SEE what the fuss is all about, he climbs a
sycamore tree and lodges himself in firmly among the branches.
But here’s the really cool part:
Jesus walks along, looks up, sees Zacchaeus and calls to him by
name. Jesus sees through the crush
of people into the heart of Zacchaeus and says, “come on down. I need to stay at your house.”
Now, of course, the people grumble.
By now in the Gospel according to Luke, we’ve come to expect that we
should grumble, too. This guy is a
traitor to his people, and he’s RICH… In
the upside down kingdom of God, the rich are supposed to have a very hard
time. Jesus has been preaching this sort
of economic justice for chapters now. So
perhaps his followers feel justified in their anger, in their exclusion of
Zacchaeus. Maybe they think that Jesus
has “lost it” a little bit. And they
complain, “why has he gone to be the guest of a sinner?”
And perhaps because Zacchaeus recognizes that due to Jesus’
interest in him he has a platform on which to speak, or maybe because he wants
Jesus to approve or maybe he just wants his name cleared or for Jesus to
understand the truth (lots of possibilities here and the text isn’t all that
clear), Zacchaeus says, “hey. I just
want you to know half of my possessions, Lord, I give to the poor; and if I
have defrauded anyone of anything, I pay back four times as much.” The Greek doesn’t say “will give” but simply
“give”. And this is important because
this means that Zacchaeus is already functioning in this unethical,
unjust system in a just way. He is doing
his part to bring about the kingdom…living out kingdom values in the midst of
the empire. He’s pretty radical! And very, very brave.
But the people of his village did not recognize it. They were so angry
at the system and those who participated in it that they could not see that
this chief tax collector acted out of kingdom values. They blamed him unjustly
for the unjust system he was a part of. As my friend Terry Kyllo says, He
wasn't just short, he was short of friends.[1]
But Jesus sees him.
All throughout the Gospel of Luke, Jesus sees those whom society has abused,
marginalized, and cast out. Jesus
doesn’t just stumble upon them, but he seeks them out. He surrounds himself with them. He holds them up before others and says,
“Look. Here is my beloved. Here is my sibling. Here is the one, here are the ones, whom I
love.”
All throughout the Gospel of Luke, Jesus shows us that God is
exactly not who we were expecting. And
every time we get confident enough to declare just who God says is “in” or is
“out”, Jesus reforms our way of thinking about God.
That’s a large part of our celebration today. Not so much that we are rejoicing in a split
from the Roman Catholic Church. In fact,
when Luther set out to make a difference in that unjust system 499 years ago,
he wasn’t trying to begin a new church, he simply wanted the church he loved to
be better than it was. We
commemorate the split from our siblings in this vast body of Christ. But we celebrate that Luther changed
the way we see God.
Luther recognized that he had been worshipping the wrong God…he had
been taught about a God who punishes and despises us on account of our
imperfections. A God who sent his only
son to be beaten up, to take the punishments that we deserve because of our
wicked humanity. Instead, through the person
of Jesus, Luther began to see a God who delights in our humanity. Who calls us “good” even when we aren’t
particularly good. A God who know us,
who seeks us, who offers salvation, which means healing, through relationship
with Godself…through love.
And so we are propelled through that love to build relationship
with one another.
Right now, in North and South Dakota, the people of Standing Rock
Tribe are also looking for a bit of reformation. They are protecting their ancestors’ graves,
our water supply, and their sacred sites from Big Oil. And they are doing it through prayer and
passive resistance. But they are being
met by police with rubber bullets, noise cannons, dogs, and sticks. They are threatened with assault rifles and
grenade launchers. They are being arrested,
numbers written on their skin, and they are locked in dog kennels. They are being strip searched and separated
from their loved ones. Forced to sleep
on concrete floors. Sometimes the women and
the children are given tarps for cover.
Sometimes they are not. They are rounded up from their places of worship
and dragged through the dirt, but yet they remain committed to the protective
work that they are doing. They show up
again and again every morning.
Because this movement isn’t only about water or oil. It is also about the ways in which Indigenous
peoples in this country have been marginalized and abused since the time of
Luther’s Reformation. It is a people
calling for a nation to honor its promises and all of its
inhabitants. It is a tribe, supported by
500 other tribes, begging, no demanding that they been seen,
known, and loved not in spite of who they are, but because of who they
are.
Will we see them? Will you see
them? See the Water Protectors at
Standing Rock as beloved and valuable children of our same Creator?
We are being called at this moment in time to reform the way this
country treats its members. Black and
brown people are every bit as beloved and cherished by God as white ones are…if
we read the Gospel with honest eyes and we recognize that the oppressed, the
cast out, the abused, are beloved by God and are the ones whom God pulls
especially close (the last shall be first and the first shall be last, remember?),
we have to be willing to admit that at this point in history God is most
assuredly screaming into this nation's seemingly deaf ears that Native Lives Matter and
that Black Lives Matter. And if we are indeed
to be one nation under God, we must reform ourselves to God’s way doing
things. Actual justice for all.
If we are called, and I believe we are called, through this reformed church to be the hands and
feet of Jesus in this world, we have to see our siblings, hear their cries for
justice, and put our own bodies in motion for the in-breaking of the kingdom in the unjust system of these United States.
Diana saw me and brought me from that place of outsider into
community and into relationship which continues some 22 years later. Jesus saw Zacchaeus sought him out and
brought him salvation, which is healing, and, we can assume, back into community. We, the body of Christ, must see our
siblings at Standing Rock and demand that they be welcomed into community and
into places of respect not in spite of who they are but because of who
they are…beloved by God.
Hear the Good News: through
the person of Jesus, you are sought out, you are freed, you are forgiven, you are beloved. And in response to that Good News, let's put our bodies in motion for the reformation of this world. Through your actions, others just might see
God.
Amen.
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