“Zaccheus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he. He climbed up in a sycamore tree for the Lord he wanted to see. And as the Lord passed by that way he looked up in the tree. And he said: ‘Zaccheus, you come down from that tree,’ for I’m going to your house today.” It’s one of those little children’s songs that stays with you for a lifetime. Zaccheus may have been a “wee little man,” that is short in stature, but he made up for it in the financial muscle he could flex and the weight he wielded in the lives of his fellow villagers and surrounding neighbors. And, considering his size, I imagine that he might well have flexed his muscles and thrown his weight around with a little greater zeal than the average-sized tax collector. Contracts for collecting taxes in a particular region were often farmed out, by the Roman government, to wealthy foreigners who in turn hired locals to do the actual work. Zaccheus, a local, was the chief tax collector in Jericho. He and those who worked under him made their money by adding a surtax to the tax collected for the Roman government. Opportunities for graft and corruption abounded and were fully exploited. Zaccheus was despised by his neighbors because of his collaboration with the occupation forces of the Roman government and because of the legalized thievery to which he and his colleagues helped themselves as the expense of their neighbors. Zaccheus climbed into the boughs of the sycamore tree to see Jesus in part out of curiosity. It was said that Jesus was a friend to tax collectors and sinners, which made him something of a novelty among religiously observant Jews. It is possible too that Zaccheus hoped to be noticed and perhaps have the opportunity of developing an acquaintance, even a friendship, with Jesus. The tax collector was a pretty lonely fellow who could use a friend. But it was more, I think, than mere curiosity or the hope of friendship that prompted Zaccheus to turn out to welcome Jesus to Jericho. It was, in truth, a search for salvation. Zaccheus was as the hymn puts it “rich in things but poor in soul.” He had the money to buy most anything that he might want, and yet no matter how much he had he never seemed to have enough to buy the thing that he wanted most of all—the thing that would fill the empty place in his soul. His full to overflowing financial cup with which he had sought to fill the emptiness within him was paradoxically the source of the emptiness of soul that most plagued him. Zaccheus came to Jesus in the hope of having that emptiness filled. The yearning for wholeness in life can never be had in the way we expect. We ourselves look for a sense of meaning, purpose, and peace in our life for we know intuitively that they are essential to any sense of wholeness in human life. Yet we do not find them by making meaning, purpose, and peace the goals towards which we strive in life. Rather they come to us and the wholeness for which we long comes to us as we seek to know and to do God’s will in our lives. It is being made right with God that we are made right with ourselves. Getting right with God, however, is not something that we can do entirely on our own. A hymn text I have long appreciated testifies: “I sought the Lord and afterward I knew, He moved my soul to seek Him seeking me. It was not I who found, O Savior true, No, I was found of Thee.” It was Jesus who paused amidst the welcoming crowd, who peered up into the tree where the Zaccheus sat looking down hopefully, and who invited himself to the tax collector’s house. He didn’t holler up into the tree: “hey, taxman, get right with God and then you can come down out of the tree and join the rest of us here.” No, Jesus invited himself into Zaccheus’ life, for as Jesus put it “the Son of Man came to see out and to save the lost.” What Jesus did in going to Zaccheus’ home and breaking bread with him was scandalous. It was a sign of acceptance and Zaccheus and his sort were far beyond the bounds of acceptance for those serious about obeying the law of God and conforming to conventional social practices. Yet it was this embrace—an act of pure, unmerited grace—that radically reoriented, indeed transformed the tax collector’s life. What was said between Jesus and Zaccheus, we are not told, but the end result was this: “Zaccheus 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.” Some might read this as Zaccheus trying to buy his way into heaven, but it was not that at all. You don’t have to buy what you have already been given. It was, rather, his response to having been embraced by the love and grace of God in the person of Jesus. You and I know a little about what that is like. When someone believes in you—really believes in you—you find that you begin to believe in yourself in a new and different way. You know that you are more than the sum of your successes and failures. You are a person of promise and you find yourself doing things and becoming a person you never dreamed possible; indeed, becoming the person the other has already accepted you as being. Several weeks ago someone placed this unsigned note in the offering plate on Sunday morning: “When I was attending your church as a child in the late 50's, I came across a giving envelope on the floor. I opened it and found 50 cents inside. I kept the 50 cents. Occasionally, over the years, I would recall this incident and regretted my actions. I was very young, but my actions were, nonetheless inappropriate (i.e. sin). I have confessed my error to God, and I know He forgives me. However, only recently have I felt convicted to return the money. Accordingly, I have enclosed $100.00 to replace the 50 cents. May God bless the use of the money to advance His Kingdom.” The commitment to give away half of what he had to the poor and to repay any whom he may have defrauded four times what he had stolen from them was an act of repentance, that is a turning away from one way of life, and a commitment henceforth to live as one who belonged to the kingdom of God’s gracious rule in Jesus. “Today,” said Jesus, “the kingdom of heaven has come to this house.” When you experience the forgiving grace of God in Jesus Christ, as did Zaccheus, you begin to see your life not simply as the sum of your successes and failures but as a gift of promise to be transformed by the values and priorities of God’s gracious rule in Jesus Christ. Your life is no longer entirely your own, and though you are very much a part of this world, shape and are shaped by this world, who you are and how you live is shaped primarily not by the values and priorities of this world but by those of the Kingdom of God. That includes your money. Indeed, how we use our money says as much or more about who we are and what we value than anything else in our lives. The way we manage our money is a significant indicator not only of our financial health but our spiritual health as well. Herb Miller shines an entirely different perspective on the annual church stewardship campaign when he writes: “The primary purpose of giving (to the church) is not to help the institutional church but to help the giver grow spiritually. According to Jesus, getting our treasure invested right helps us get our heart invested right. ‘Where your treasure is, there will you heart be also’ (Luke 12:34). Churches are not a business whose goals is to make money. Churches are a business whose goal is to make people, spiritually mature people whose hearts are in the right place—converted to God as the primary giver of quality life.” Funny, I don’t usually think of my money, or what I call my money, in those terms. It’s what we use to pay our mortgage, to put food on the table, to help our children out from time to time, to pay our bills, to support the church and other causes important to us, to provide for our needs and some of our desires. I have thought of my money as something—like all of life—that falls under the purview of the will of God, but I have rarely thought of money in terms of having potential for my own spiritual growth. And yet it does profoundly. Miller continues: “Someone suggested the following as an appropriate offertory prayer: ‘Lord, no matter what we say or do, here is what we think of you. Amen.’ Whether the church budget gets balanced is not a matter of ultimate importance. Whether our lives get balanced is. Our financial giving is one of the ways we do that” (pp. 7,8, Money Is Everything). I entitled this sermon “Robbing God?” It might more appropriately be entitled “Robbing Yourself?” for it is not so much God who is robbed as we ourselves when we live as if our lives are entirely our own to do with as we please. Jesus invited himself into Zaccheus’ life for, as he said, “the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.” Zaccheus, for his part, gave the Lord a place of lodging and found his life transformed. Jesus has invited himself into your life and mine as well, for we too are lost, and like Zaccheus you and I have given him a place of lodging within us. By God’s grace may we continue to grow into being the people God wills us to become in Christ and so find the wholeness for which we long. J. Dudley Weaver First Presbyterian Church Portland, Oregon |