Enough Room, Even For Us

 

October 30, 2022 – The 21st Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 26C

Isaiah 1:10-18; 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12; Luke 19:1-10

© 2022 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video of the service can be seen here with the sermon beginning around 18:00.

Zacchaeus might have been short, but I think it was his shortcomings that sent him climbing up that sycamore tree. Luke tells us that “he was trying to see who Jesus was, but, on account of the crowd, he could not, because he was short in stature.” It was the crowd that stood between him and Jesus. If he had been taller, he could have seen over them, but no one was willing to let him stand up front. Think about the last time you were at a parade. Doesn’t the crowd usually make space up front for children or other people who either need to sit down just can’t see from the back? Don’t we know intuitively how to line up with the taller people in back and the shorter people up front so that everyone can get a peek?

No one was willing to make room for Zacchaeus, and he knew better than to ask. Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector—a title Luke may have made up to convey either that he was some sort of district leader among revenue officers or simply that he was exceptional at his job—particularly skilled at squeezing money out of his fellow Jews in order to fill the coffers of the Roman Empire. Regardless, Zacchaeus’s job had made him filthy rich, and that was a problem—a problem for Zacchaeus but also an interpretive problem for us as well. 

Think about it. What sort of people did Jesus like to spend time with? And who were the ones Jesus was always after to change their ways in order to find their place in the kingdom of God? We know that Jesus loved surrounding himself with tax collectors and other notorious sinners—those people whom polite society refused to welcome—but he didn’t seem to care for rich people whose wealth created a chasm between themselves and the poor. So what was Zacchaeus supposed to do? He was a complicated example of someone whom society had rejected but whose wealth had made him powerful. Would he be welcomed by Jesus or brushed aside? 

Zacchaeus had heard about Jesus, and he wanted to see who he was, but he couldn’t get too close, or else he might be further humiliated. He had heard that this rabbi believed that even tax collectors could be accepted at God’s table, but he was no ordinary tax collector, and he wasn’t sure whether that radical welcome would include the likes of him. So he climbed up into the boughs of a sycamore tree and hid among the leaves, hoping to see Jesus but also hoping to escape notice.

But Jesus noticed him. “Zacchaeus,” Jesus said to the little man hiding up in the tree. Does it surprise us that Jesus knew the man’s name? How shocking that must have been to everyone who heard it! “Hurry and come down,” Jesus continued, “for I must stay at your house today.” Notice the imperative behind Jesus’ words. “I must stay at your house today.” I must. Something compels me to be your guest today. The presence of God’s kingdom and the perfection of God’s promises require that Jesus come and lodge with Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector. His riches and way of life should have represented an obstacle to God’s reign becoming manifest in his life, yet this was the man whom Jesus sought out.

No sooner had Zacchaeus scrambled out of the tree to take Jesus into his home than the entire crowd began to grumble that Jesus had gone to be the guest of a sinner like that. Usually, when Jesus dined with tax collectors and sinners, it was the religious authorities who grumbled—the goodie-goodies who didn’t understand why a religious leader like Jesus would spend time with the riff-raff of their day. But this time, Luke tells us that “all who saw it”—all who beheld this radical gesture of reverse hospitality—began to complain about what it represented. None of them was comfortable with the thought of a faithful rabbi—even one known for keeping company with societal outcasts—entering the home of a traitor as notorious as this chief tax collector. This was a step too far, even for Jesus. Even the reign of God, which Jesus had come to make manifest among the lost sheep of Israel, had its limits.

But then something remarkable took place. We don’t know whether Zacchaeus heard the grumbling, though surely he knew what the crowd thought. Standing there, he said to Jesus, “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.” That represented a remarkable transformation—that the man whose work and whose wealth had cut him off from God’s people was now offering to give back so much of what he had—but the text leaves some important ambiguity about whose transformation we’re witnessing in this instant. 

Although many English translations, like the one we use in church, render Zacchaeus’ words in the future tense—“I will give” and “I will pay back”—the biblical text actually uses verbs in the present tense—“Half of my possessions, Lord, I give to the poor; and, if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I pay back four times as much.” It could be that Zacchaeus was using the present tense to convey a future resolve, which would imply that this encounter with Jesus had changed his life so radically that from now on he would give all that money away. But it could just as easily be that Zacchaeus was describing the way he already lived, revealing a quiet generosity that no one in the crowd had ever known. That ambiguity has fueled debates among scholars and preachers for generations, but I don’t think it really matters because I don’t think Zacchaeus is the one whose conversion is the focus of this story.

“Today, salvation has come to this house,” Jesus declared, “because he, too, is a child of Abraham.” Could it be that those words become true not because Zacchaeus has undergone a moment of transformation but because all of us who look on now see this child of God in the light of God’s grace? Can it be that Jesus’ insistence that he dine in the home of the chief tax collector changes our understanding of who belongs in God’s reign? Maybe we are the ones whose conversion this story is about. Maybe we’re the ones who are supposed to be changed by this encounter.

We believe in a God whose love for the world is bigger than anything we can imagine. We believe that God’s grace is big enough for tax collectors and sinners. We believe that God’s welcome includes the poor, the widow, and the orphan. But do we believe that God’s love is big enough for us as well? Very few of us fit neatly into one of the biblical categories of people to whom God reaches out in love. Is there room for complicated sinners like us in the kingdom of God? Can we believe that God’s love is meant for us as well? Or are we so worried that we won’t be accepted that we scamper up into the branches of a sycamore tree in the hopes that we might get a look at Jesus from a safe-enough distance that he won’t bother to tell us what we are afraid he might otherwise say—that we don’t belong?

Zacchaeus went looking for Jesus, but Jesus went looking for Zacchaeus as well. “I must stay at your house today,” Jesus said, showing us that God’s kingdom cannot be complete until even the least likely among us finds their place at God’s table. None of us belongs at that table because we are good enough, holy enough, or generous enough. We belong because God’s goodness towards us is always enough. There can be no limit to God’s welcome because there can be no limit to God’s love. May we hear in Jesus’ words to Zacchaeus the same words that God speaks to each one of us—I must stay at your house today. May we see that God’s reign cannot be complete until all of us are there.

Faith Is Persistence of the Powerless

 

October 16, 2022 – The 19th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 24C

Genesis 32:22-31; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8

© 2022 Evan D. Garner

Just outside of the metropolis of Lineville, Alabama, halfway between Ashland and Wedowee and just north of Ofelia, is an institute for reverse missionary work known as SIFAT—Servants in Faith and Technology. Instead of sending people overseas to help those in need, SIFAT hosts community leaders from around the world—leaders who bring their particular problems all the way to Lineville, where, with the help of scientists, engineers, teachers, and agronomists, they explore what it will take to improve the lives of their own people back home.

Because SIFAT hosts so many people from around the world, they also serve as a place where independent missionaries and mission teams from nearby churches and organizations can come and experience a little taste of what life might be like in another culture. And I can tell you firsthand how jarring and bitter that taste can be.

A few years after I was ordained, I helped chaperone a group of youth at SIFAT for a spring break retreat. We weren’t going on a mission trip, but we wanted to broaden our understanding of what missionary work could be. One afternoon we were led to the Global Village—a tiny, makeshift hamlet in the middle of the woods, complete with a dirt road, tin-roofed lean-tos, a tiny market, several villagers, and a rather cantankerous policeman. We were split up into teams and told that our dinner that night would consist only of whatever our team could acquire from the actors in the village.

At first, this seemed like a fun game—a test that would challenge our ingenuity, pride, and persistence. Quickly, though, things became far more difficult than I anticipated. At one point, while our team was offering to do some manual labor in exchange for a few tortillas, some of the staff, who were posing as residents, stole our sleeping bags, leaving us without protection through the March night. When I complained to the policeman, he locked me up in jail for questioning his authority. 

When he wasn’t looking, I snuck out of jail, but I was dismayed to find that our youth, who hadn’t been given the tortillas they were promised, were now pretending to sell drugs to scrounge together enough food for the night. Then, one of them stole the backpack of a staff member, who thought she had tucked it away in a safe place, but, when the youth tried to trade the bag for food, we were told that the staff bags were off limits. I complained that our sleeping bags should have been off limits, too, but I must have raised my voice in an inappropriately confrontational way because I was then rearrested and given a stern warning by the policeman, who I honestly couldn’t tell whether he was speaking to me as a character from the village or a staff member at SIFAT who was worried I might take matters into my own hands.

The whole episode was designed to teach the youth that, in other parts of the world, people don’t get justice the way we do—that sometimes good, hard-working, honest people don’t get what they deserve—but the rage I felt meant that I was the person who needed to learn that lesson most. I understood how the game was supposed to work, but, when it was the youth on my team, whose welfare I was responsible for, who weren’t going to get anything to eat or any sleeping bag to sleep in that night, I lost it. There was nothing I could do to get what was right for my team—to get what should have belonged to us—and I snapped. It was truly a first-world, privileged response, and all it got me was thrown in jail.  

You don’t have to go overseas or even to Lineville, Alabama, to find people whose cries for justice fall upon deaf ears. They are all around us. They are our neighbors. They work hard and follow the rules and do their best, and, still, they don’t get what they deserve. They’ve asked for help. They’ve filed complaints. They’ve done everything they’ve been asked to do. And nothing. They have no earthly reason to believe that anything will ever change, but they keep trying. And their experience and identity help us understand this parable of Jesus.

Despite Luke’s editorial introduction, the story of the widow and the unjust judge has less to do with always praying and more to do with not losing heart. To Jesus’ hearers, this parable would have been laughably cartoonish. “In a certain city, there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people.” You couldn’t make it any more ridiculous than that—to describe a judge, the arbiter of justice, as one who had no concern for human laws or divine statutes. 

And in his court is a widow who just doesn’t know how to quit. She’s a widow, which means that she is completely powerless—totally dependent upon others for her survival. Her late husband’s property would not have passed to her but, if she were lucky enough to have a son, she might be cared for in that son’s household. And, if she didn’t have a generous and compassionate son, she might return to her father’s family but only if her late husband’s relatives were willing to return her dowry to provide for her care. Otherwise, she would subsist only on the charity of those who might throw the beggar-woman a coin or two out of pity. And the fact that the widow was standing before the unjust judge lets us know that she has no other options.

“Grant me justice against my opponent!” the widow said to the unjust judge over and over and over again. He was her only hope, and yet hope was something he would not give. There was no one to plead her case—no one to stand up for her. Only a faithful judge—one who cared about what God would want or what the community would recognize as just—would have granted her request, but Jesus’ exaggerated representation of callousness had no intention of giving into the widow’s demands.

As the story stands, there is no reason to expect anything to change. The widow has no power, and the judge has no pity. There is nothing anyone can do to make a difference. But then Jesus surprises his listeners with an even more absurd twist. Just when the audience knows that the story cannot have a happy ending, Jesus gives the helpless woman the strange power of annoyance. And the judge, using a word that literally means “strike me under the eye,” says something like, “I will give her justice or else she might annoy me to death.” And, in that powerless widow, we suddenly discover a new sort of subversive power that depends not on her physical strength or influence but on her refusal to give up.

“Hear what the unjust judge says,” Jesus tells us. Even when no one could see it coming—even when everyone was sure that the judge would never give into the widow’s request—her persistence—her refusal to give up—worked. How much more, therefore, should we expect our gracious God, who is just and who does hear the cries of God’s people who lift their voices to God day and night, to save those in distress? Our God is nothing like the unjust judge, yet how quickly do we lose hope when the justice we seek is delayed?

Jesus asks us to remember what those around us cannot afford to forget. Even when it feels like nothing will ever change, we have a reason to hope because we belong to God. The persistence of the powerless shows us what it means to have faith—not in the institutions of this world but in the God whose justice and righteousness will triumph over those institutions. Their unbroken and unbreakable witness teaches us not to lose heart.

Do we believe in the one who brought God’s people out of slavery in Egypt? Do we believe in the one who raised Jesus Christ from the dead? If that is our God, we cannot lose hope. If that is our God, we know what the future will hold. And, if that is our God, we must press on for the sake of those who are denied justice in this world—not because we have the power to pull down the mighty from their thrones all on our own but because we belong to the one who does. 

What Sort Of Faith?

 

October 2, 2022 – The 17th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 22C

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10

© 2022 Evan D. Garner

Video of this service can be seen here with the sermon beginning around 23:30. 

Lord, increase our faith! We could all use a little bit more. Just a tiny bit more faith and then we wouldn’t worry so much. If we had more faith, we wouldn’t worry about the economy and the stock market and whether we will have enough in retirement. We wouldn’t worry about politics or elections or Supreme Court rulings. We wouldn’t worry about our spouse or our children or our neighbors or our pets. 

If Jesus gave us more faith, we wouldn’t have such a hard time making our lives look the way God wants them to look. With more faith, we wouldn’t struggle to find the time and energy and money we wish we had to give freely to God’s work in the world. We wouldn’t find ourselves wanting the world to be a better place but not quite caring enough to do something about it. We wouldn’t feel pulled so sharply between the demands of this world and the demands of God’s vision for it. 

Lord, increase our faith! With a little bit more faith, temptation wouldn’t be so hard. Sin wouldn’t be so stubbornly difficult. And, when we fell, we wouldn’t fall so far, and we’d always have the confidence to get up and repent and return to the Lord. If only we had a little bit more faith. If only Jesus would give it to us.

For several weeks now, Jesus has been on a tear about what it means to belong to God and God’s reign. He’s told us that, if we want to follow him, we will have to hate our families and carry our cross. He’s made it clear that we will have to give up our claim on earthly wealth in order to partake in heavenly treasure. He’s reminded religious folks like us that our traditions and status don’t count for much and that it’s those who suffer the most who understand what it means to belong to God. No wonder the disciples are asking for more faith! If our entrance into the kingdom of God is as narrow and difficult as Jesus has made it out to be, we had better find some more faith, or else this isn’t going to go well for any of us.

But, as Jesus says, if we had faith the size of a mustard seed, we could say to one of those giant sycamores outside the church, “Be uprooted and planted in Lake Fayetteville,” and it would obey us. We don’t need more faith, Jesus tells us; we need true faith, deep faith, real faith. If we had even the tiniest speck of that sort of faith, it would be enough for God to work through us in mighty ways. Like a pinhole opening or the smallest crack under a door, faith like that—no matter how small it is—gives God an opening through which God can show up in powerful ways. If we want to belong to God and God’s reign—if we want our lives to be an image of what God is doing in the world—we should stop wishing for more faith and start looking for the kind of faith that transforms us.

And the best way to find that faith is to take a good, hard look at our spiritual posture. How are we approaching God? Are we looking for ways to make God’s kingdom come, or are we looking for ways to belong to the kingdom that God has already brought to the world in Jesus Christ? Do we seek a life that manifests our faith in God, or do we dream of inheriting whatever life God is calling us to? On the surface, the differences between those two kinds of faithful lives aren’t that significant. They sound a little like distinctions in faithfulness by degree. But, if we are to have the sort of faith that Jesus envisions for his followers—the kind of faith that moves mountains—we need to find that narrowest of sweet spots of believing in God in a way that lets God take over our lives and use us in ways more powerful that we could imagine all on our own.

I think that’s why Jesus responded to the disciples’ request for more faith with the provocative and problematic image of a slave coming in from the field. We can’t encounter this analogy without remembering the horrors of human bondage and acknowledging its legacies, which are still a reality today. We cannot hear Jesus hold up the identity of a slave as one we are supposed to pursue without also admitting that there is nothing good or right or holy about one human being owning another as property. 

Many English translations choose the word “servant” instead of “slave,” perhaps rightly implying that that role in ancient Palestine was more like that of an indentured servant than the chattel slave more familiar in the American context, but the human being in Jesus’ analogy clearly didn’t have the freedom to decide how to spend his evening, nor was he likely to receive any gratitude for the work he did. Part of me wishes that we could translate Jesus’ mini-parable into our contemporary context by making it a story about parent and a child or an officer and a soldier, but I don’t think that would convey the real point Jesus is making.

The issue isn’t being treated poorly or doing thankless work. That isn’t what it means to have the right kind of faith. In order to get across what it means to believe in God wholeheartedly and belong to God’s reign fully, Jesus must push the boundaries of what it means to belong to God’s kingdom out beyond where we are comfortable because there is nothing comfortable about belonging to God. No matter how hard we try, no matter how lofty our ambitions, we cannot belong to God on our own terms. We must give ourselves completely and unreservedly over to the vision God has for lives. And thanks be to God that, when we stop trying to fit God’s kingdom into our own understandings and allow God’s reign to remake our expectations completely, real faith takes control of our lives, and good things start to happen. That’s the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

This whole, long series of challenging teachings about what it means to be a disciple and what it looks like to belong to God’s reign has been Jesus’ attempt to get us to forget our place in this world in order to find our place in God. When Jesus tells us that we must forsake our families and that we cannot serve God and wealth, he is not saying that only orphans and poor people get into heaven. He’s showing us that our attachments to this world must dissolve completely if we are to develop a new way of being united with God. 

To answer that call, we don’t need more faith; we need the right kind of faith. And even the tiniest amount is enough. We need to find ways to believe that God’s will for our lives and for the world is the only thing that matters, and that’s not easy. No one said it would be easy, least of all Jesus. But, once even the tiniest seed of that faith begins to sprout in our lives and we catch a glimpse of the power of God manifest through us, that crack begins to widen, and that pinhole starts to open up. Pretty soon, God is using us to move mountains, and the things that once felt like they were standing in the way of God’s vision for our lives crumble away. That’s what happens when faith takes over. That’s what it means to belong to God.

Faith like that takes over when we let go. That sort of faith moves in when we get out of the way. When we stop telling God what we think God is supposed to be doing in the world, God will start showing us how God’s transformation is already taking hold. When we stop looking for the kind of faith that enables us to do what we think is best and start asking God to give us the sort of faith that trusts in God with our whole being, we will see just how powerfully God is at work in our lives and all around us. We don’t need any more faith than we already have. In Jesus Christ, God has already given us more than enough. We just need God to help us see it.