A Giving Contest

Psalm 119:137-144

Luke 19:1-10

I want to thank Leah Lewis and her crew on the Stewardship and Mission Committee for organizing and leading our preparation for a new budget year.

If you’ve been around churches all your life, you know how this works.  But if you’re newer to church, or even to this church, you might be curious about our practice of receiving tithes and offerings every week.  Or about the practice of making pledges or promises about what we plan to give in the coming year.

The truth is, congregations like ours live by the generosity and commitment of our members and friends.  That’s it.  That’s all we’ve got.  We trust that God is at work in our hearts and lives and that what we’re able to share financially will allow us to be the people God has called us to be.

There is no admission charge.  We don’t sell tickets.  You can’t buy a yearly membership.  There is simply a shared invitation to give generously to the ministry of the church so that we can be faithful followers of Jesus Christ.

The most important thing is not how much money is pledged, promised, or given in the coming year.  Our elders and the ministry committees they lead are prepared to make their visions for ministry fit responsibly the budget we have to work with.

The most important thing is that all of us give what we can with glad hearts.  The most important thing is that all we do flow from hearts that are joyful.  And there’s only one way to live with gladness and joy – and that is to continually open yourself to the experience of being loved by God. 

If you’re here, you’re here because you’ve been lost and God has come and found you.  You’ve been ashamed and God has removed it.  You’ve been an outsider or lonely, and God has welcomed you to a new family.  When God comes to us and meets us, it’s nothing like a transaction - (God does a little for us, we repay it by doing a little for God.) 

No!  This is an overwhelming experience of being loved and forgiven and blessed in a way that washes over you and wakes you up into a new way of life.  A life of joy.  And it’s out of that joy that we decide what we’re able to pledge and share with the congregation. 

If life is a giving contest, God is always the most generous giver.

When we come to this encounter between Jesus and Zacchaeus, Jesus is headed towards Jerusalem near the end of his ministry.  He has been engaged in public teaching and healing for nearly three years.  Word about him has gotten around.  A few people have become followers.  Some are curious.  Most are indifferent or confused by him.  There are some religious folks who are threatened by him and want him dead.  On his way to Jerusalem, he and his disciples come to the large city of Jericho.

In Jericho there is a man named Zacchaeus.  And we know just a few things about him.  He’s short.  We have come to know him as a “wee-little man,” which works well in the song.  Singing “Zachaeus was an average sized guy, and an average sized guy was he” just doesn’t sound the same.  But most young kids are short.  They know what it feels like to be half everyone else’s size.  So maybe that’s why kids like this story.

He’s Jewish, so that explains why he’s interested in seeing Jesus.  No doubt he’s heard the stories passed along by his friends and neighbors.  Perhaps there had been arguments about Jesus in the local neighborhood synagogue.

We know the kind of work he does.  He’s a tax collector.  Not just a tax-collector, but a Chief tax-collector.  That means that he was responsible for the collection of taxes on behalf of the Roman government among the Jewish population in Jericho.  This would have been a large population.  So he wasn’t a one-man band.  He would have had many collectors working under him.

And we know that this line of work was good for him financially.  He had become rich.  Here’s how it works if you collect taxes for Rome.  Roman officials give you the number to hit, and you add to that number a percentage for your own take.  It would have been impossible for the average Jewish person, living in Roman occupied Jericho, to know for sure what their taxes amounted to.  So it was rather easy for Zacchaeus and his underlings to line their pockets.

So you know enough about Zacchaeus to know that he wasn’t popular with the Jewish folks in Jericho.  Word had gotten round that Jesus would be traveling through Jericho.  And so the kids were out of school.  Businesses and shops and markets for the most part shut down.  People drifted from their homes into the town center to see Jesus.  Even half-pint Zacchaeus was willing to take a break from shaking people down to try to see this Jesus.

But the crowds around Jesus in the marketplace made it difficult to get close.  Most of us have been in this conundrum before.  Maybe a concert, or a parade, or a tourist site.  The crowds have swelled and gotten there before us.  And so you have to make a decision.  How much do you really want to see the attraction?  Sometimes we settle for staying at the back - catching a glimpse past other people’s heads, hearing only a snippet of what’s being said, missing the up-close experience enjoyed by those who got themselves right down front.

When we lived in New York, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade went south on Central Park West, just a half block from our apartment.  So you’d think we would have seen the parade up close.  But we never did.  Because to see the parade you had to get there at 4 or 5am.  So, we just walked out our front door at 10am, stood 100 yards back from the parade behind a huge crowd, and watched the balloons go by.

But if you really want to see something, you can fight your way to the front.  You can slither and slide, bump and maneuver your way past others.  You can usually get a good view if you’re willing to fight for it. 

What interested Zacchaeus, I suppose, were the reports of wonderful, powerful healings performed by Jesus.  People who were lame had walked.  People mute were able to speak and sing out.  Those possessed by demons had been delivered and made well.  And especially powerful were stories of Jesus befriending outcasts like himself: sinners, people of ill repute, dirty people, diseased people.

Zacchaeus was not content to stand back behind the rest of the crowd.  Nor was he content to watch out a window, or find a distant hill from which to view the action.  He is a man with quick wits.  And so he guesses Jesus’ walking path through the marketplace, and spies a tree on up ahead.  It’s a sycamore-fig tree.  Why are we told this?  Because unlike some other trees, it has low branches.  It can be climbed by a short person.

So we might be cheering for Zacchaeus at this point, impressed with his grit and determination.  But still, things don’t look good.  Of all the four gospels, it is Luke’s version that is the most critical of rich people. 

An early sermon by Jesus went like this: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God . . . But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort” (Chapter 6)

Jesus tells a story about a “rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day.”  And a beggar named Lazarus, covered in sores.  And that story didn’t go very well for the rich man (Chapter 16)

When Jesus invited a young man to follow him by selling his possessions and giving the money to the poor, the young man became sad, because he was very wealthy.   And Jesus responded to the crowds, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!” (Chapter 18).

So Luke has prepared us for a scene where Jesus meets another scrupulous, greedy, immoral rich person who wants to be religious in a superficial way but who doesn’t really want to change his or her life. 

It’s hard not to judge the smug, selfish ways of those who profit by shortcuts that harm others.  It’s hard not to take pleasure when we find that Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon Hedge Fund and many at SAC Capital Hedge Fund have been indicted for insider trading.  It’s hard not to cheer when we read that JP Morgan Chase has been fined $13 Billion for the mortgage fraud committed by two banks they’ve acquired. 

I remember talking to an investment banker at a party in New York, surprised at his willingness to talk about how much money he and his colleagues had made off of the housing crisis.  He was rooting for a similar bust in the student loan sector, because they were poised to make money from that crisis as well.

Fortunately for us, Jesus is more gracious and merciful than I am.  When Jesus reached the spot where Zacchaeus had perched in the tree, we might predict a thundering judgment: Woe to you, you cheating, conniving, profiteer!!  But that’s not what happens.  Jesus looked at him and said, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately.  I must stay at your house today.”

He calls Zacchaeus out of the tree with authority.  And he invites himself to Zacchaeus’ house.  We have an ongoing battle just to teach our children NOT to invite themselves over to other people’s houses.  But Jesus demands to come right into the middle of his life.

You see, Zacchaeus had planned to find a perch from which he could observe Jesus.  He was curious.  He wanted a little bit of Jesus.  He wanted a safe, predictable way to manage his relationship with Jesus.  So do I.  So do most of us at one point or another.

But Jesus doesn’t give Zacchaeus any credit for his curiosity.  Jesus demands a relationship of trust, openness, friendship, and shared vision.

In Luke’s words, “Zacchaeus came down at once and welcomed him gladly.”  Other translations say he welcomed Jesus with joy.  Zacchaeus didn’t get what he wanted.  He got something better.  He got an up close, dangerous, unpredictable, challenging relationship with the real Jesus.  And in spite of all it would cost him, he welcomed Jesus with joy.

Perhaps today we need a reminder that the life of faith is a life of joy.  It is lots of other things of course.  But above all else, it is joy.

The shocking point of the story comes when this ruthless, make-a-profit-no-matter-what tax-collector; this man who’d spent his whole life moving up the ladder, consolidating his advantage, collecting and training the right employees - this man is so glad to have been befriended by Jesus that he makes an astonishing promise.

“Look, Lord!  Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount” (v. 8).

This is an impressive conversion.  But if you stop here, then you’ve missed the whole story Luke wants to tell.  This isn’t a story about Zacchaeus.  This is a story about Jesus.  It’s Jesus who gets the last word.  And Jesus says, “Today, salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham.”

Zacchaeus’ neighbors had written him off and counted him out.  He was a dirty, second class Jew, not as good, not as religious, not as loveable as everyone else.  But Jesus refers to him as a “son of Abraham.”  That is, Jesus includes him where everyone else has excluded him.  Jesus feasts with him when no one else wanted to set foot in his house or invite him over for dinner.

And then Jesus adds, “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.”  That’s what this story is about.  Jesus shows us what God is up to in our lives.  And God reclaims people.  God gathers in outcasts.  God includes the excluded.  That’s what God had done for you and for me.

What looked at first like an amazing, over-the-top response by Zacchaeus, who shares half his wealth, and pays back four-fold those he harmed – Now even that becomes a rather small gesture compared to the way God comes in search of those of us who are lost.  What is most amazing is that God reclaims us, forgives us, includes us, and asks us to be a part of this new kingdom of love.