First Presbyterian Church of Watertown
Luke 19
“Going Out with a Bang”
The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry
November 4, 2007
When our eldest children were young my mother bought them an animated series of Bible stories on videos. Skeptical of what they might be preaching to my children I watched them. I must admit a bit of surprise that they were well done. Laura, in particular, really liked them. Her favorite was the meeting of Jesus and John the Baptist. She watched it over and over and would shout with glee each time when Jesus finally shows up at the Jordan to be baptized. I’m still not quite sure where this came from, but with the tenderness only a three year old can offer she would sigh as Jesus came over the hill ending John’s long wait to meet his savior, and as they met she would say, “It’s my Jesus.” No lie.
I must confess I too had a favorite video. It was their version of the Zacchaeus story. I say “their” version because most of the stories had been embellished with details not found in scripture or told from the vantage of someone other than the biblical author. For instance, when they told the story of Zacchaeus, they didn’t tell it from a narrative voice like Luke does; they told it from the vantage of Zacchaeus’ wife. They told the story from her perspective, how she lived it. And let me start by saying, Zacchaeus’ wife was really mad.
The folks putting together the children’s video asked the question, so Zacchaeus decides to give away all his money in a moment of zeal and excitement, how do you think that went over at home? Their answer was not well. In addition they picked up on the fact that Zacchaeus was bringing home a crowd of unruly Galileans for a party at the spur of the moment. The video opens with Zacchaeus telling his wife all the exciting news. And with each bit of information, her face grows more and more tense and frustrated until she finally explodes suggesting Zacchaeus may have had a moment in the sun, but he had ruined their lives.
Now it may be that the folks who made these children’s videos were stereotyping Zacchaeus’ wife into a kind of greedy shrew. That could be. Yet, I found it a rather intriguing coincidence that her character expressed all the same frustrations Biblical scholars have with this story. It turns out they are not pleased with Zacchaeus either. This story really doesn’t fit in the scene Matthew and Mark painted in Jericho; there are loose ends everywhere- this story is like peeking into a whole other world with lots of questions that linger long after the glance; and while it is somewhat consistent with Luke’s themes, it diverges at key moments. It seems that Biblical scholars always find fault and get the most uptight with the Bible stories children love the most. Go figure?
They really get hung up on two issues, issues that would have been a big deal for Zacchaeus’ wife. The first is one of authenticity. Did Zacchaeus really repent, really have a change of heart, or was this some sort of impulsive act and Jesus gets caught up in it as well? Last week I preached on the tax collector beating his chest, never raising his eyes, begging God for mercy. Jesus rattles the cages by saying this is a justified man. Here we are again with yet another tax collector with whom Jesus seems quite cozy, but this time there is no contrition, no sense of shame or remorse. Zacchaeus seems to be buying a round for the house more than he is changing his life.
Now I am going to make a little confessional here and this may come as quite a shock to some, but I too am a bit prone to impulsive acts that have rather grand dimensions. I’ve come home on a few occasions and suggested we go out to dinner so I could take some of the sting out of my latest folly. Don Quixote, Peter Pan, Ulysses I can relate a bit to these folks- a little bit. Now, with that picture in mind, what if this wasn’t the first time Zacchaeus had come home with a wild plan of exciting adventure? It may be that Zacchaeus’ wife had reasons to be frustrated. This is why the scholars are frustrated that the traditional marks of repentance are not part of the story. They don’t know how to trust Zacchaeus.
The other frustrating part is interpreting Zacchaeus’ promise or pledge. Was it half of what he would earn in the future or half of what he has now? If it was future earnings, that would be in line with a Pharisees pledge. With this his promise would be to lead the life of a religious leader from now on. Scholars like this because it would fit better in the culture. Yet it doesn’t work with the second part of his pledge to return exhorted money at 400%. It just doesn’t work.
This is where the pledge gets dicey in terms of living. Zacchaeus can make a big donation, but what if he is really giving away all he has? Doesn’t that just create one more poor person? What does that mean for his family? It doesn’t say in Scripture that Zacchaeus had a wife and a family so we don’t need to interpret his extravagance from that possibility. Yet, what the children’s video and the Biblical scholars point to is a kind of unsettling feeling. What does this extravagance mean? How is it going to work? Family or no family what do you do with this kind of gift?
The only way I have found to navigate these questions is to recognize that everything in the Zacchaeus story points to the future. He is a kind of open-ended story or question mark unto himself. And it is for that reason I don’t think this is really a story about Jesus. And that is challenging because the gospels are supposed to be about Jesus. But in this one, I don’t think so. Better yet, I don’t believe so. What if the story of Zacchaeus doesn’t fit well in the gospel narrative, the tradition of stories about Jesus, because it is a story about the church and not Jesus?
The only thing Jesus says is that I am coming to lodge at your house Zacchaeus, come down. From that point on it’s not about Jesus. The rest of the story is about Zacchaeus: how people grumbled about him, didn’t like that Jesus would be with him, and then his wild claim, or extravagant gift. This story makes so much more sense to me when I look at as an image of what the church is supposed to be and what we struggle to be rather than what the ministry of Jesus was about. It also helps explain what Jesus meant when he said, salvation has come to your house instead of “your faith has saved you.”
I want to go out on a ledge here and say, the story of Zacchaeus is not only a symbol of the church it may very well be the key to the life of the church itself. We are the open-ended question of Zacchaeus. Are we going to give our life away? And if we do, what does that mean? We read the story of Zacchaeus and a part of us says, “oh to be that extravagant, to give it all away, how wonderful,” while another part of us says, “are you out of your mind?” Both voices are in our story and most likely in our house.
We know what it is like to think big and extravagant. We’ve built a school in the village of Chivumu. I just received photos of the church that is being built as we speak from what we did with the choir; the pictures were taken by Don Klug, who with Ken Reed, put in shallow wells last month, bringing clean water to thousands of people. We know what this extravagance is like and we also know it is not a smooth path. You can’t just give money. And that is what I love most about this story. This is what Zacchaeus is about to discover. And for all intents and purposes this is what Jesus means by salvation. Zacchaeus is about to discover you can’t just give money.
We know this as a church. If you only give money and you don’t give your heart, if you don’t give your life away as it were, the money brings ruin or is wasted or is pilfered. There is a popular book right now called Three Cups of Tea, which is a kind of living parable of this truth. It is the story of Greg Mortenson and the schools he built in northern Pakistan. It’s a great read and a fun story. Yet, as I was reading it I could not help but nod and say, uh huh, yes. That’s true. There was nothing shocking in the book. There wasn’t because we’ve lived this as a church. What he was describing was that helping the children in one of the most remote places on earth is not about money. Money is the easy part. It’s about friendship and losing yourself to be born again as a part of a village.
Step after step Mortenson must leave behind western values of time and expediency and take up the life of a man living in a village that has never seen a school, doesn’t have access to electricity or transportation or anything else for that matter. It all comes to a head when Mortenson is driving the villagers crazy trying to build his first school “on time.” The village chief takes him up a mountain and says, “I thank merciful Allah for all you have done, but these people have been without a school for six hundred years, what is one winter more?”
At that moment the world, the village, the idea of helping people, the drive it takes to make a difference all of that stuff just floated away for Mortenson. All of sudden he found a deep peace. I want to say that is what Jesus means when he says salvation has come to your house. And that is what it means for salvation to come to a church. When we as a people, a congregation, begin to see world, the village, the idea of helping people as giving ourselves away and finding the peace of abiding in Christ, we are free.
I don’t know if Zacchaeus meant to give half of his future earnings or half of his current assets; I don’t know if he was married or if he was married that his wife was on board with his extravagance; I don’t know if this was real repentance or a moment of zeal. I don’t know. But I do know that if indeed he did seek to give away his riches, if he did try to help the poor, if he did seek to live a life of extravagant giving, if he truly did give his life away, then he would find himself seeing a whole different world soon and very soon.
Each year at this time we have our stewardship campaign. Each year I encourage you to take the leap toward tithing. Tithing is when you take ten percent of your income, before any bills are paid and you give it to the church. You return a tenth saying all that I have is from God; all that I have is a blessing, let this be a blessing to others as it has been to me. Every year I have someone say to me, that is too much, too wild, too far for me. Yet, all I can tell you is that when you do it feels like freedom.
Like Mortenson, I learned that money was the easiest hurdle to overcome. And that once freed from trying to make it a priority, making it a question, I discovered there are really great questions after it. That is what I love about the Zacchaeus story. Zacchaeus is about to discover there is whole other world out there, a whole other way of looking at life.
In the coming weeks Bob Gorman and the stewardship committee are going to lead you toward overcoming the challenge of giving money. The goal will ever be to have a congregation that tithes so we could lay aside this kind of low level challenge and truly step into the great ones of friendship and partnership and what it means to give our lives away, not just our money. The truth is, though, that while we are peeking into the next questions we are still hung up on the money issue.
The story of Zacchaeus is meant to beg the question, but what if we weren’t? What if we weren’t hung up on the money issue? For the next two weeks this will be the quiet or not so quiet theme behind the pledge cards and the testimonies. What if we were a congregation that tithed? What would we do then? Like Zacchaeus it starts with you. Will you bring salvation to this house?
Will your family bring the church closer to freedom, to be what God intended? Will you take the step of faith and tithe and in so doing begin to see that money is not the real challenge? I know. These are risky questions. But all great things are born of risk, a leap of faith as it were. Will you bring salvation to this house? Amen.