Sunday
October 30
Climbing Down
By Marsh Chapel
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It is hard for me to tell, from this angle, which tree you are in. Given the troubles of this autumn, it is hard for me to tell which tree I am in myself, day to day. Has life chased you up the tree of doubt? Or are you treed in the branches of idolatry—idol-a-tree? Or are we shaking or shaking in the money tree? Or stuck without faith in the religion tree? Jesus calls us today, to come down out of the tree forts of our own making, and accept a loving relationship with Him. May we measure all with a measure of love.
Perhaps the presence of unexplained wrong provokes you to doubt the benevolence in life or the goodness in God. To doubt that ‘God is at work in the world to make and to keep human life human’ (John Bennett). Randomness may have treed you. And that is a natural, real thing.
For no one can explain why terrible things happen, as they do. But if we will come down a limb or two from our philosophical tree of doubt, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we may hear faith. God can bring good out of evil, and make bad things work to good. This is not a theological declamation, and certainly not a paean to providence. It is just something we can notice together, as throughout the Scripture does.
Joseph was thrown into a pit, and sold into slavery. He had to find his way, as a Jew, in the service of the mighty Pharaoh. He did so with skill, and rose to a position of influence, even with Potiphar’s wife chasing him around in his underwear. Then, a full generation later, a great famine came upon those brothers who had earlier sold Joseph down the river. They went to Pharaoh, looking for food. And who met them, as they came to plead? There was Joseph. He so memorably said, as written in Genesis 50: “You meant this for evil, but God meant it for good, that many might be saved.” Sometimes it happens that a bad thing in one generation prevents starvation in the next.
So, in Jericho, as Jesus found the wee little man sitting in the Sycamore tree, his fellows grumbled (vs. 8). Why would he take time with such a greedy, selfish person who makes his living off the sweat of others’ brows? We miss the power of the parable if we do not see this. This is Jesus taking up with those who have wished others ill, who have used the church for their own very well intended but nonetheless self-centered reasons. This is Jesus consorting with sinners. But sometimes a bad thing in the little brings a good thing in the large. Zacchaeus changes, and in so doing provides great wealth for others’ benefit.
Come down from this one tree, doubting Zacchaeus. We know that bad things happen to good people, that not all rain falls on someone else’s lawn. Sometimes, though, sometimes—not always, just sometimes–a bad thing early averts a really bad thing late. I have seen it, and you have too. It is enough to give someone up the doubting tree a reason to come down at least a branch. Think of it as existential vaccination. Think of it as masking, a masking that protects, that causes hiding and sight both, but that may in the long run bring healing.
It is the labor of faith to trust that where sin abounds, grace over-abounds. Even in this autumn of acute anxiety and depression. But one of the redeeming possibilities in this season of cultural turmoil is the chance that as a result, enough of us, now, will become enough committed to the realization of a just, participatory and sustainable world, that these darker days will move us toward a fuller light. Our troubles may just catalyze some of us to get religion, to get disciplined about living toward a common hope, as we said in the sermon October 16. Sometimes a bad thing in one part of history protects us from a worse thing in another part.
Let us not lose sight of the horizons of biblical hope, as improbable as they can seem. The lion and the lamb. No crying or thirst. The crooked straight. All flesh.
The divine delight comes still from saving the lost, including the forgotten, seeking the outcast, retrieving the wayward sons and daughters of Abraham. God wants your salvation. Your salvation “has personal, domestic, social, and economic consequences” (Craddock).
So come down Zacchaeus, come down from your perch in that comfortable sycamore tree, that comfortable pew, that skeptical reserve, that doubt. Come down Zacchaeus! And let’s all together get to work. The Lord Jesus Christ has need of your household and your money, and He responds to your doubt.
Come down Zacchaeus, down from your overly zealous leanings, hanging out on the branch of life. Idolatry comes when we make one or more of the lesser, though significant, loyalties in life to become a shadow of the one great loyalty, that which the heart owes alone to God. Zacchaeus had governmental responsibility, community status, a welcoming home, a fine family, and we can suspect he was loyal in these regards. Curious as he was, up on his branch, he had no relationship with the divine. Into this relationship, Jesus invites him. More precisely, Jesus invites himself into relationship with a man up a tree. He is invited into a whole new life, a new world of loving and faithful relationships, that stem from the one great loyalty.
We need to be careful about lesser loyalties this fall. Watch your balances of integrity and humility. Humility requires us to consider due process, to consider past practice, say, near elections, to consider the advice of others, and to consider the nuances of the situation and your conscience. Integrity, alone, bulldozes blazes and blasts past all these. Harm is done. Integrity without humility is the worst of the seven deadly sins—pride. We recognize the peril of integrity alone, the great steed of integrity, without the bit and bridle and saddle of humility. We hope to keep our righteous integrity in check with a steady, a sober, a non-apathetic willingness to continue on, a blessed endurance…even when in the short run what we hope for does not emerge. The concession speeches after a contest are often far more moving, more meaningful than the shouts of victory by the victor. Bless those willing to run and risk loss, and still stay committed to the lastingly right things.
Yet all of this involves a lesser loyalty than the one owed to God. We can forget whose water we were baptized into, if we are not careful. Rather, let us remember the student of Paul who wrote 2 Thessalonians: your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing (2 Thess. 1: 4).
Do you see the danger? Come down Zacchaeus, come down, before it is too late. Make sure your lesser loyalties—to government, family, home, all—do not cover over, do not shadow the one great loyalty, that all of your daily tasks do not eclipse a living memory of a common dream, a truly shared dream.
A common dream, a dream that our decisions in life about our callings, how we are to use our time and spend our money, how we make a life not just a living, will be illumined by grace and generosity.
A common dream, a dream that women—our grandmothers, mothers, sisters, daughters, granddaughters, all—granted suffrage only about 100 years ago, will be spared any and all forms of harassment and abuse, verbal or physical, on college campuses, in homes and families, in offices and bars, in life and work, and long having suffered and now having suffrage, will in our time rise up to be honored, revered, and compensated, without reserve, but with justice and mercy, and be accorded freedom, especially freedom and protection of their own bodies, their own selves.
A common dream, finally a dream not of this world, but of this world as a field of formation for another, not just creation but new creation, not just life but eternal life, not just health but salvation, not just heart but soul, not just earth, but heaven.
Come down Zacchaeus, come down, at last. Impediments to faith come through doubt and idolatry and resentment and religion, but none of these holds a candle to the harm that wealth can bring. In global terms and in historical terms, every one of us is wealthy. Ours are first world problems. Luke’s entire gospel, especially its central chapters, 9-19, is aimed at this point. For Luke’s community, the remembered teachings of Jesus about wealth were most important. That tells me that the Lukan church had money, and so do we. This is what makes the account of Zacchaeus, “one who lined his own pockets at other people’s expense”, so dramatic for Luke, and so Luke concludes his travel narrative with this clarion call: come down. The Gospel of Luke is winding down, right here, this morning, with the wee little man in the Sycamore. Be careful not to trip over wealth, power or health. We lose them all, give them all away, over time. They are impermanences. They go. Better that we see so early. Time flies—ah no. Time stays—we go.
Wouldn’t you love to know what Jesus said to Zacchaeus that caused him to give away half of what he had? I would.
Come down Zacchaeus, and feel the hurt of others. And: Soon we will all be dead. Maybe we could find ways to use whatever power we have now to honor God, love our neighbor, reflect our mortality, and affirm the powerless. Come down Zacchaeus, come down!
Before we left seminary in NYC, on the day after Thanksgiving in 1978, an odd event befell us. I worked nights as a security guard in those years and would come home to sleep at 7am. Jan had the day off, and left to shop, but left the door to our little apartment ajar, by accident. About noon a street woman found her way into the building and up into our floor, and then into our room. I woke up to see a very poor, deranged woman, fingering rosary beads, and mumbling just over my head. Boy did I shout. She ran into the next room and I stumbled downstairs to call the police. By the time three of New York’s finest and I returned to the apartment, the poor lady was in the bathtub, singing and washing. They took her away. Jan came back at 3 and asked how I had slept. The moment has stayed in the memory, though, as an omen. Our wealth is meant for the healing of the poor of the earth. Perhaps the Lord wanted me to remember that, to remember the poor in ministry, so I have tried to. Come down Zacchaeus, and use your wealth for the poor, as did Mr. Wesley and his followers.
Let’s talk for a moment about religion, shall we? Come down Zacchaeus, come down! No amount of religious apparatus can ever substitute for what Jesus is offering today, and that is loving relationship. No amount of theological astuteness can ever substitute for loving relationship. No amount of righteous indignation can ever substitute for loving relationship. No amount of formal religion can ever substitute for the power of loving relationship. Jesus invites us into loving relationship with him, and so with each other. That is salvation. Are we lovers anymore?
Like Zacchaeus in the tree, religion can presume to dwell above Jesus, high and aloof. Is it good to be above Jesus? It is not good to put myself above Jesus, not good at all.
It was the German monk Martin Luther who, in 1517, went alone and nailed his 95 theses to the door in Wittenberg, and thereby splintered inherited religion to bits. The words of this same Luther were read, as interpretation of Romans 8, on the rainy night in London, 1738, along Aldersgate Street, as John Wesley’s heart, at long last, was strangely warmed, and he came down from the tree of religion, to sit at table with the Faith of Christ. We remember Luther this Reformation Sunday every year. We pointedly remember that we are saved by faith, by faith alone, by grace we are saved by faith, and not by any or all the works of the law.
Luther recalls us down from the religion tree, to sit at the table of faith:
I must remove the law from my sight and act as one who receives; I will acknowledge that I am justified, and desire to receive the righteousness of grace, of the forgiveness of sins, of mercy, of the Holy Spirit and of Christ, which he (God) gives, while we receive it and let it happen to us.
The earth receives the rain in this way. It does not create it through any work, and cannot obtain water through any work of its own, but it receives the rain. As much as the rain is the earth’s own, Christian righteousness is our own…God grant that we may appreciate this distinction just a little (cited in G Ebeling, LUTHER, p. 123)
Jesus calls us today, to come down out of the tree forts of our own making, and accept a loving relationship with Him. May we measure all with a measure of love.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
