Homily for Sunday, October 30, 2016 Graves
Chapel
Lesson: Luke 19: 1-10
(the story of Zacchaeus)
Collect
for today: Almighty and merciful God, it is only
by your gift that your faithful people offer you true and laudable service:
Grant that we may run without stumbling to obtain your heavenly promises;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy
Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
On two occasions
in my life, I have laughed so hard over something I was reading at the time
that I fell out of bed. The first
time I was a teenager, reading James Thurber’s comic masterpiece of a memoir, My Life and Hard Times. “The Get Ready Man” is one of the many
eccentric characters Thurber describes; to quote the inimitable Thurber, “The
Get Ready Man was a lank, unkempt elderly gentleman with wild eyes and a deep
voice who used to go about shouting at people through a megaphone to prepare
for the end of the world. ‘Get ready! Get ready!’ he would bellow. ‘The world is coming to an end.’” Now, you need to know that the setting
of Thurber’s memoir was the Ohio of his youth, in the early part of the 20th
century. Street corner evangelists
who like to warn us that we may be doomed to eternal punishment have been
around for a long time in America.
Shortly after my
falling-out-of-bed laughing experience with Thurber’s humor, I headed off to
Providence, Rhode Island, to attend college. I’d never lived in a city in my
entire life up to that point—in fact, I’d barely ever been north of the
Mason-Dixon line. Needless to say, I was pretty wide-eyed. However, when I encountered my college
campus’s own version of the Get-Ready man, my Christian upbringing, my
upbringing by generous and loving parents, caused me to recoil from his
message. The wild-eyed evangelist who always stood on George St. near the gates
that opened to our campus green had this to say, very loudly, as he brandished
a small book: “Here is a free New Testament for any Jew willing to read it.” When
I saw the self-righteous anger in the man’s eyes and thought of my college best
friend, a young man of Jewish heritage, I knew that what this angry man
preached had nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
Just as it stands
in bold contrast to the intolerant extremism of the world we inhabit today, the
message of Jesus defied the prejudicial intolerance of his own time. Jesus extended an open hand of love and
friendship to everyone he encountered, quite often the very people considered
sinful and unworthy by those who believed themselves to be righteous. Indeed, after Jesus calls out to
Zacchaeus in today’s story and invites himself to his home for dinner, we are
told, “All who saw it began to grumble and said, ‘He has gone to be the guest
of one who is a sinner.’” Why is it that many of us who consider ourselves good
people resent the idea that grace can be bestowed on those outside our circle?
When Jesus calls
to Zacchaeus, he says, “Hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house
today.” “I must stay at your house today.” Clearly, with those words, the Lord reveals that Zacchaeus
is part of his plan. Before Jesus calls out to Zacchaeus, we are told these
things: that Zacchaeus “was trying to see who Jesus was,” that “he was a chief
tax collector and rich,” that “he was short of stature” and couldn’t see over
the crowd. So, he climbs the sycamore
tree, just to get a glimpse of Jesus. How, in that press of crowd, does Jesus know
to look up—how is it that he always senses need and longing? Remember the story
of the woman with the hemorrhage who also encounters Jesus in a large crowd—and
who hopes that, simply by touching the hem of his cloak, she may be healed?
Indeed, she is healed by that touch and turns away, but Jesus, perceiving what
has happened, calls, “Who touched me?” He wants to meet the one who needed him
and sought him out, whose faith extended her hand to the fringe of his
cloak—and no further. When she fearfully comes forward to confess, Jesus
blesses her again—for her faith.
Even though the woman tried to remain hidden, her longing for healing,
goodness, and mercy called out to Jesus.
As Jesus says to those who grumble over his response to Zacchaeus, “Today,
salvation has come to this house, for he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son
of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”
His neighbors
revile Zacchaeus and consider him a lost cause because he is a tax collector,
in their eyes a stooge for the Roman rulers. Jesus knows his heart, knows that Zacchaeus can be saved by
love. What is the response of Zacchaeus to the generosity expressed by the
outstretched hand of the Lord? He says, “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.” In this
case, as in the other cases where we see sinners repent when Jesus reaches out
to them, we are not told whether or not Zacchaeus follows through on his
promises. Either we are to assume
that he does what he says he will do—or that his promise is enough to show
Jesus that he is turning in the right direction, whatever happens next. The generous grace of the Lord always
allows room for human imperfection.
So, what does it
really mean to repent? Contemporary evangelists, whether we encounter
them on street corners or on television, ask their audience to repent. “Repent, for the kingdom is at hand” is
just another way to say, “Get ready! The world is coming to an end!” I recently
came across this definition of repentance by 19th century Scottish
writer and Congregationalist pastor George MacDonald: “What does repent mean?
To weep that you have done something wrong? No, that is all very well, but that
is not repentance. Is repentance to be vexed with yourself that you have fallen
away from your own idea [of a good life]? No, that is not repentance. Turning
your back upon the evil thing; pressing on to lay hold of that which Christ
laid hold upon you. To repent is to think better of it, to turn away from the
evil. No man is ever condemned for the wicked things he has done; he is
condemned because he won’t leave them.”
“No man (or woman)
is ever condemned for the wicked things he has done; he is condemned because he
won’t leave them.” All of us make
mistakes; sometimes those mistakes are calamitous. Often, we make the same
mistakes repeatedly. Yet, in his invitation to Zacchaeus, Jesus offers the
grace the man needs to turn away from the sins he has committed. In essence,
the Lord says to him, “Turn away from the life you have been living. Leave the
selfishness of that life behind. Now that you have climbed a tree to see what I
have to give you, now that you know there is a better way, your only choice is
to leave that old life behind.”
The Lord says to Zacchaeus as he says to all of us, “When you know there
is another way, when you reach a point in your life where you realize the way
you are living no longer has meaning or value or goodness, then your only
choice is to let it go and trust in me. Follow my way instead.”
To follow the
gracious way of the Lord is to let the rule of love guide our behavior. When he
truly repented, Zacchaeus found himself so full of gratitude for the Lord’s
kindness and mercy that he offered to share half of what he had with the
poor. Will he ever sin again?
Probably! He is human and imperfect, as are all of us. I think it’s fair to say
that we often genuinely repent, and then we turn around and sin in some new
way. Yet we can take heart from the experience of Zacchaeus and trust that our
genuine repentance will always reconnect us with God’s mercy. After all, Jesus
had a plan for Zacchaeus, a despised tax collector, so surely we can believe He
has a plan for us.
I recently came
across a passage I had marked some time ago in an old Forward Day by Day, and the words from an unknown writer beautifully
express the nature of our relationship with the Lord: “If we are saved it is
because of what God believes about us, not what we believe about God. Salvation
is not relative. God does not pick ‘the best of us’ out of the barrel and
destine us for salvation. God wondrously loves. That is our single asset and
hope.”
Forget the internal
street corner preacher voices that tell you you are not good enough, that say
you are unworthy. I pray that in the days and weeks ahead, if you feel alone or
discouraged or just plain tired, you will remember that our gracious and
merciful God believes in you and loves you unconditionally. AMEN.
