Romans 12:9-13; Luke 19:1-10
The tune has been swirling in my head all week: “Zacchaeus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he. He climbed up high on the sycamore tree, for the Lord he wanted to see.”
The song conjures up memories of my kindergarten Sunday School class at Emmaus United Church of Christ in Vienna, Virginia. I picture us singing away as we fill in our Zacchaeus coloring pages: a squat little man in a striped robe clinging to the branches of a giant tree.
Gospel stories are all about turning our expectations upside down. Just when we think we’ve figured out how the world works, Jesus says something to confound us. Things are not as they appear, he teaches. There is a deeper truth at work–God’s truth. What God sees and values is not always what we see and value.
And just when we think we’ve finally got Jesus figured out, he does or says something else to confound us, to make us go deeper, until we discover how much we still have to learn about the Realm of God’s Love.
Mrs. Butler, my Sunday School teacher, understood about the expectation-upending nature of this gospel story. She pointed out that Jesus doesn’t choose the big, strong, tall person. He chooses the short guy, the one who usually can’t even be seen. For us short kindergarteners, this was a joyous upending of our expectations, for it meant that we were noticed, that we mattered, that Jesus needed us.
When have you felt too small to matter? Have you ever heard Jesus calling you from out of the crowd?
My kindergarten memory points to one of the ways this story turns things upside down. This story has so many twists and turns it can leave us wondering which way is up. Each of the twists pushes us deeper into Jesus’ message; each of the turns prompts questions about how the gospel speaks to our own lives.
The first twist is in the set-up to the story. Yes, Zacchaeus is short. He is also rich. He is the chief tax collector, the boss. He gets rich by collecting taxes for the hated occupying government, the Roman empire. Tax collectors in Jesus’ time don’t receive a salary; they keep whatever extra they can collect–or extort–from the people.
We don’t know why Zacchaeus became a tax collector. I imagine it takes a certain kind of person to thrive in that position. I picture a slightly pompous man, who struts around town in his fancy clothes, assiduously refusing to care what other people think, collecting more and more stuff so he won’t feel his loneliness. Not the kind of person I expect to see climbing a tree.
But there he is. Something leads this proud man to get his fancy clothes dirty shimmying up a tree trunk. For some reason, he wants to see this scruffy-looking teacher who is known for his compassion for the very people Zacchaeus exploits. He risks making himself vulnerable–to the crowd and also to Jesus.
The first twist in the story is this absurd picture of a rich man up in a tree. Zacchaeus is not who we imagine him to be. There is more to him–a yearning, perhaps, for something more important than money and power.
What yearning have you hidden deep inside?
The second twist is that, out of all the people gathered that day, Jesus chooses Zacchaeus. By the time we get to chapter 19 in Luke’s gospel, we have learned that Jesus has come to proclaim good news to the poor. We have even heard him say it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the realm of God. It makes no sense to us–and surely it makes no sense to the crowd–that Jesus picks Zacchaeus.
Jesus sees something more than a man in fancy clothes in a tree. Maybe Jesus sees Zacchaeus’ loneliness, or his potential. Maybe Jesus wants to teach his followers that the realm of God has room for the people we assume should be excluded.
We are an Open and Affirming Congregation. For the last 19 years we have tried to live out a bold proclamation that the kin-dom of God is for all people, that God’s love is not constrained by the judgments society makes. We specifically name our welcome for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people who have been excluded by many churches. This gospel story assures me that Jesus rejoices with us in our extravagant welcome. It also challenges me to ask who we might today be judging as somehow unworthy of welcome. Who is the equivalent of the tax collector in our community?
The third twist comes in what Jesus says to Zacchaeus. It’s not surprising that Jesus focuses on hospitality; showing hospitality to strangers is a central biblical principle. The surprise is that Jesus doesn’t offer hospitality to Zacchaeus; he demands hospitality from Zacchaeus. He invites himself to Zacchaeus’ house for dinner. How brazen! How presumptuous! You just don’t do that!
Unless, of course, you are Jesus. Unless, of course, you want to challenge Zacchaeus to claim a part of himself he doesn’t even know exists.
When have you been asked to do something you just don’t do? How did you respond?
The fourth twist is Zacchaeus’ response. He climbed the tree because he wanted something from Jesus; instead Jesus asks something of him. I imagine Zacchaeus never invited anyone over for dinner. He defined his life by how much he could take from others, not by what he could give. Besides, everyone hated him, so they probably would have turned down his invitation.
So how does this self-centered man respond when Jesus asks him to do something he never does? He leaps down from the tree and rushes to get dinner ready. Zacchaeus climbed the tree because he knew something was missing in his life. When Jesus calls him down, he understands what that something is: the opportunity to give.
There’s more. Once Zacchaeus gets a taste of the joy of giving, he no longer chooses to define himself by what he can get. He vows to give away half his wealth. He realizes that he has hurt people with his greed, and he makes a commitment to work toward justice.
Wow! That’s a lot of twists, turning our expectations upside-down over and over and over. Does anyone else feel dizzy?
My kindergarten experience of the Zacchaeus story was of a twist that offered me a simple assurance: no matter how small I feel, I matter. My adult experience of this story is of multiple twists that challenge my easy conclusions about who I am, who my neighbor is, and how I am called to live.
The danger of this dizzying complexity is that we use our incomplete understanding as an excuse for inaction. That’s not what Luke has in mind. At the risk of trying to pin down something that cannot be pinned down, I want to lift up three calls to action I hear in this story.
The first call to action: Climb the tree. No matter how settled or comfortable our lives are, no matter how stuck we are or how much we have given up hope, we all yearn for something more. Listen to your yearning. Seek out hope, even if means getting your clothes dirty, even if it puts you in a vulnerable position clinging to a tree branch above a hostile crowd.
The second call to action: Stop! This instinct to put people in boxes and judge their worth–we all do it; it’s called being human. When we do–when we find ourselves judging another person as outside the scope of God’s love, we need to stop ourselves! The story calls us to stop pretending we get to draw the boundary lines of God’s kin-dom. Jesus calls us to stop trying to put limits on the power of God’s grace to transform lives.
The third call to action has two parts. Part I: Seize every opportunity to give and receive hospitality, for it has the power to change our lives and our world. Revel in the joy of giving; rejoice in the grace of receiving someone else’s gift. The realm of God breaks in whenever we give and receive freely–so come be part of the realm of God’s love.
Part II of this third call to action: Let your giving and receiving change you. Let a shared meal inspire you to deeper generosity. Let a new friendship prompt you to work for a more just world.
Zacchaeus was a wee little man–and he was so much more. May his example inspire us to climb the tree of our own yearnings. May Jesus’ response to this tree-climbing tax collector prompt us to stop trying to limit God’s grace. May our own giving and receiving change us. Amen.