Please pray with me.

 

God of all time and space, may my words and our  meditations be acceptable in your sight, our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

 

This particular Sunday has several meanings.  It is Halloween, and it has quite a history in itself.    The name is a contraction of ‘All Hallows Eve’.  It was brought to this country in 1840 by Irish immigrants escaping the potato famine in their native land.  Their culture was rooted in Celtic history, and it celebrated October 31 as the last day of summer, and was called ‘Samhain’ (sow-en – like cow-en), the Celtic New Year.  On that day the disembodied spirits of those who had died the previous year would come back in search of living bodies to possess for the next year.  It sounds like some of the movies we have seen over the years!  The laws of space and time were suspended, allowing the spirit world to intermingle with the living.  Of course, the living didn’t want to be possessed, so they quenched the fires in their fireplaces so their houses became cold and dark.  They dressed up in ghoulish costumes and noisily paraded around the neighborhood, being as destructive as they could, to frighten away those spirits. Of course, as time went on the belief of spirit possession waned, and the practice of dressing up in this way took on a more ceremonial role.

Tomorrow is All Saint’s Day, and that has a long history as well.  In the fourth century there is mention of a feast that was dedicated to the saints.  St. Chrysostom of Constantinople , who died in the early fifth century, was the first Christian we know of to assign the feast to a particular day.  That didn’t become established in the Western Church until the Roman bishop, Bonifice IV, consecrated the Pantheon in Rome to Christian usage as a church on May 13, 609.  The Feast was observed annually until Gregory III’s time, who ordered its observance shifted to the day we now observe it on, November 1, in 835.  On that date Gregory dedicated a chapel in the Basilica of St. Peters to all the saints.  Basically, it is a universal Christian feast, held for the purpose of remembering and thanking God for all saints living and dead, and for glorifying Jesus the Christ.

Today is also Reformation Sunday.  (See how it all begins to pile up on us here?)  The Protestant  Reformation was the movement that led to the establishment of the Protestant denominations of Christianity, like our own.  It was on October 31, 1517 that Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg , Germany .  His statement denounced a number of practices then common in the Catholic Church, including the selling of indulgences or documents granting the forgiveness of sins.  This Sunday is usually used to explore the doctrines, history, and personalities of the Reformation, such as Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli; and the founders of the Presbyterian tradition, John Calvin, Philipp Melanchthon, Theodore Beza, and John Knox. 

And, this Tuesday is the presidential election.  We could say a lot about those ten Christian principles in an election year that I believe all of you received in ‘Shared Life’, either by email or by snailmail I just want to say, come this Tuesday, exercise your responsibility and privilege as a citizen of this country and as a person of faith, and vote. 

So, since I’m not going to talk about any of those things, let’s look at the story about that ‘wee little man’, Zacchaeus, a high ranking employee of the Roman occupation forces who became quite wealthy through the practice of charging more tax revenue than was called for.  We think of contemporary equivalents - predatory lenders, paycheck-cashing businesses, and many corporations.  Zacchaeus was very unpopular with the populace in general, which explained why he couldn’t get through to see Jesus.  If a lot of elbows are being thrown at you, you are not going to go very far.  He had to know that he was not liked, and we wonder what his life was like, especially outside of his close circle of peers, those who did about the same thing as he did.  He surrendered to the crowd’s anger, but he was not to be denied. He found a tree and climbed it.  So, here we have the richest man in town up in a tree! Jesus came by, looked up, called Zacchaeus by name and invited himself to dinner.  This caused quite a rumbling in the crowd because people known as holy and wise teachers didn’t consort with that kind of person, outside the bounds of polite society. 

No doubt Jesus saw the sinner, saw the one who took advantage of the socio-economic order of the day for his own benefit, saw the man who contributed to the sorrow of many people.  How could he not see that?  But he also saw deeper.  He saw the object of hatred, of ribald humor.  He saw the wealthy outcast who was empty inside.  He saw the nicely dressed, corrupt bureaucrat up in the tree -an easy target for the prophetic word, “Thus sayeth the Lord.”, an easy target for politically motivated diatribes, for clever satire; and yet Jesus refused to go there, refused to indulge in condemnation as others had done.  Who knows? It looked as though Zacchaeus had already consciously condemned himself.  Perhaps he felt the irony of the situation, a man with his occupation, with a name like Zacchaeus, which in Aramaic means ‘pure’ or ‘righteous one’. 

Now in every age there is time for the prophetic word.  There is time for challenging the corrupt ones.  There is time for urging the wealthy to share their wealth, no matter how they came by it.  Who knows what else Jesus said to Zacchaeus.  This is a brief story.  We are not shown much, just the bare outlines. 

We know that Jesus knew how to challenge those in power, as well as those at the bottom of the social ladder, and he knew the right time and the right place.  So Jesus’ act of breaking through  barriers of class, political allegiance, and ethics, got through to Zacchaeus.  This act of connecting with the unacceptable one overrode the noisy unhappiness of everybody else who were watching and murmuring over this breach in protocol. Zacchaeus’ soul was transformed.

He saw his reliance on wealth and position and security, no matter the cost, for what it was, and he knew that it was not sufficient anymore to give him ultimate meaning. He knew his own separation from God, his own separation from his own true self,  from God’s purpose for the People of God, and from the townspeople. He knew that he was alone. 

Therefore he took Jesus up on his invitation, had him to his house for dinner, that act of breaking bread that signified acceptance, being safe with one another, and community.  Undoubtedly this satisfied Zacchaeus’s ego.  But even more important was that his own emptiness was not rejected but rather was filled with the possibility of redemption.

Can you imagine giving up half your candy on Halloween?  Can you imagine giving up half your possessions with lots of witnesses around to witness your promise to do that?  Zacchaeus also  promised to give back not just dollar for dollar, but four to one.  Try to calculate that one!  He probably went from the top of the economic heap to the bottom quarter.  His repentance was a self-emptying action.  But it also filled Zacchaeus with joy as he found a new way to live.  The test, of course, would be to follow through, and demonstrate to the whole town that the old self was now gone, and that the new had come.  The former self with its corrupt finery was dead, buried, replaced by the new self, clothed with the simple garments of love, gratitude, and justice.

Zacchaeus took the plunge and now lived into the meaning of his name, ‘pure’, ‘righteous one’.  Jesus gave witness to this change, this transformation that so touched Zacchaeus by proclaiming that salvation had come to that life, that house.  Salvation: wholeness, redemption, restoration of God’s purpose in the human life, rescue from falsehood, healing of brokenness.  Surely Habakkuk’s verse, “The righteous live by their faith” became a reality in Zacchaeus.

Well, the impact of such a change would have been tremendous with the resulting redistribution of wealth, the shift in the quality of relationships, and the reign of God becoming reality in this one person’s life - almost like a mini-Reformation. The damage that people who are like the unredeemed Zacchaeus cause is a lot worse than a lot of Halloween hijinks.  And not many of them are subject to the uncertainty of elections.  (I wasn’t going to talk about all that.) 

The main thrust of the story is that even though the power structure of that society condoned what Zacchaeus was doing, he decided to pursue a new quality of relationship by denying that social agreement, by saying it was wrong, that there was a better and different way to live. His values, the very core of his being, changed.  He found new life by losing his life.  That is, what was important to him previously, the very patterns of his existence, were changed, and he could no longer maintain his life as it had been for many many years.

Well, what does this mean for you and for me?  I think we need to ask, along with many others in the long history of the Christian faith, ‘What must I do to be saved?’  Now, Reformed theology says that we are not saved by works.  We are not saved by earning points with God.  We are not saved by trying harder, by being better.  Rather we are ‘justified’, which is a legal term meaning being found innocent of wrongdoing in a court of law.  We are saved by grace through faith alone.  That statement was the basis of the Protestant Reformation.  As Abraham was declared righteous, that is, in right relationship with God, so was Zacchaeus.

Let me ask you something.  What changes do you and I need in our lives?  What are the demands that the life of discipleship places upon us?  Or, to put it another way, how is our Christian walk moving us towards joy, and a different quality of relationship with God, neighbor, and self?  Zacchaeus’s repentance, backed up by the return of all that money, were the result of his experience of a new quality of life.  Perhaps, since you and I are the product of a culture that practically deifies money, or rather deifies the power and security and sense of control that we get from having money, perhaps we need to look at our attitudes towards money as well.  It is not the root of evil – rather, the love of money, the attachment to money, is. 

There is a book called, “Your Money or Your Life”.  It takes a good, hard look at how we kill ourselves by living for the American dream.  It puts fort h the possibility that there is another way to live that gives life instead of brings death.

How is Jesus calling us to a different quality of relationship?  How do you and I need to be released from the bondage of the past, the addictions, the regrets, the rage, the refusal to forgive, the old, tired arguments?  We can also ask what Jesus is saying to this congregation, which is perched up in the tree of transitional ministry?  Do you hear Jesus the Christ inviting himself into this house so that he may commune with you?  ‘Come down, Old First.  I need to be in your house today.’  Do you hear that?  If the answer is ‘yes’, how might your relationships within this community change?  How might your corporate sense of identity, your corporate self-image change?  What would fall away, no longer wanted or needed or counted as valuable, and what would joyfully take its place?

Each one of us has the power to open ourselves to the movement of the spirit.  Zacchaeus chose to say ‘yes’.  He chose to allow Jesus very close to his heart.  You and I are being invited by this story to open ourselves, yes, to lose our lives, to give of ourselves, to enter into a new quality of relationship so that we and many others might have joy. 

All of you, I believe, have received a letter from the Stewardship Committee, and since this congregation cannot do its work very well without voluntary giving of its wealth, time, and energy, it is time to think and pray about matters of stewardship, that is how we are being called to respond to the call of God’s love set loose in this City, in this congregation, in our very lives. If we simply reduce the word ‘stewardship’ to a hurried filling in of a blank on a piece of paper, we have not done what is needed.  That is simply an impatient, or dutiful, or even slightly resentful response to the never ending demands of an institution.  I think we are invited deeper.  I think we are invited to approach all of life by placing ourselves into the story.  Then, you see, we become Zacchaeus in the tree, and Jesus walks by, looks up, and says, ‘Jeff!  Hurry!  Come down!  I need to come to your house today!’  Or we become a person in the crowd watching this unseemly, unexpected exchange, or we become one of Zacchaeus’s fellow tax collectors, or we become one of the Roman soldiers watching the crowd for signs of trouble.  Or, we become one of the children who, in my imagination, are already up in that tree and who have to share their space with that big adult who invades their space.

So, then, what happens in you, what happens in me when we put ourselves into the story and listen?  I am going to ask each one of us to live with this story this week, to look into the story this week, as a way of allowing God to speak the redemptive power of the Good News into our lives. If we fail to let it become personal, then we hear a nice story, but it has nothing to do with us.  You see, when we let stories into our hearts like this one, and we engage in conversation in our imagination - what would it be like for Jesus to look at you and say, ‘Hurry, come down.  I have to eat with you today!’ – then we can look forward to new adventures, new possibilities, and new hope.

May the Spirit work through and through this text as we make it ours, as we live the story this week and beyond.  Amen

Living One, teach us, touch us, show us the light of your presence.  Amen.