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November 11, 2007
The Fruit of a Joyful Heart
Luke 19:1-10
"Can Geoffrey stay at our house for dinner?” says your six year old child standing at the back door with friend Jeff peeking at you from right behind. What can you do? You know that your dinner plan was left-over meat loaf and macaroni salad...and there is just enough for the family, not enough for one extra - especially Geoffrey who has a tremendous appetite. Yet, here is your child, the one to whom you are always saying, “now be generous, share your things....” and the friend is waiting expectantly. In a moment of exuberance, in the joy of the moment, a child may offer just about anything to keep that moment alive. Even left-over meat loaf.
As someone has said, children seem to be naturally hospitable. They invite friends over to play. They invite all sorts of creatures to share their room. They seem committed to leaving the front door wide open. It takes years of what we like to call “socializing” to teach our children to be inhospitable. We drill into them that they must first ask us before asking their friends over for dinner or to stay the night. We insist our home is not a rescue shelter for injured ants, birds, spiders or snakes. We teach them to close and lock doors and never to open them to anyone unknown.
While some of these are measures to protect our children from an increasingly scary and dangerous world, many of these lessons are passed on so that we may always have the opportunity to say “No.” We want to be able to set some limits....and draw some lines. We want to be able to say “no” but we don't want to do it in front of someone's face. Especially not the little kid from next door.
The crowd which seemed to follow Jesus seemed to want the same thing, didn't they. They wanted him to say, “no” sometimes. They wanted Jesus to respect some limits. All through this Gospel of Luke, they have been cringing from time to time as he crosses the lines that society has so carefully marked in the sand. We've got welfare moms, soccer moms, suburbanites, hunters and tree huggers, addicts and vegetarians, foreigners, Midwesterners and people from the East Coast – each in their own niche carefully partitioned off.
Like us, the crowd wanted Jesus to think a minute before he extended his, by now all too generous spirit to yet one more from the fringes, from the other side of the line. The crowd, including the disciples wanted him to be discriminating and careful about the people whom he sought out...the people with whom he dined.
You have heard this story of Zacchaeus many times, I am sure. It is a story about one of the special seekers we find in the Gospel of Luke, the people who could spot Jesus in a crowd, whether it was the crowd of merchants and bazaar shoppers who clustered around the gate of Jericho where blind Bartimaeus got wind of Jesus passing and was called into his presence, or the crowded street where a woman weakened by hemorrhage reached out and touched his garment and was called out in from of the crowd. We can guess that Zacchaeus must have had a pretty bad reputation, for Jesus was able to pick him out as he moved through a throng of people, the little guy in the sycamore tree, and call him by name. “Zacchaeus, hurry down from that tree...”
Luke tells us that Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector, a manager of the Roman imposed system of free-agent tax collection. He had a certain state-imposed goal for receipts from his territory. How he collected them was his business – if he took in more than his assessed total, it was all gravy. He was notorious, for perhaps no better reason than that he was very rich and the source of his wealth was no doubt out of the hides of his neighbors. Yes, Zacchaeus is one of the despised. Shouldn't Jesus have known better than to cross that line – to propose walking over his threshold in order to share a meal?
Murmurs and grumbling from the crowd, “What kind of a rabbi is this?” what kind of role model...he eats with the worst of the lot. He shares a table with tax collectors and sinners. “All who saw it...,” it says -- the whole crowd agrees that Jesus has made a poor choice of dinner companions. Fredrick Buechner, the novelist who is also a pastor, conjectures about the scene. “All Jericho hugs itself in anticipation of hearing [Jesus] give … [Zacchaeus] holy hell. “Woe onto you!” “Repent! Wise up!” is the least of what they expect. Jesus says, Come down on the double. I'm staying at your house.” 1
I read a story recently about a minister who had gathered with a group of adults with multiple handicaps and spent some time telling the story of Zacchaeus so that they could talk about it. She said, “When I finished the story one of the men with Down's [Syndrome] said “I know how he feels.” I asked him to tell me more. “It is worse when people pretend you don't exist than when they make fun of you. At least when they make fun of you they see you.” How many people do we turn our backs on and never see? Jesus sees them. 2
It is in those moments, those meetings that lives were changed and what scholars 3 call the “Jesus Movement” began. In each encounter, the momentum of the crowd may have wanted one thing, but Jesus did another and lives forever different. Those who were seen, those whose names were called, became the movement that became the church. These folks from the fringe – the little ones, the broken ones, the silently hurting ones – they are the saints of the church. They are the ones whose needs turned Jesus' head and who in turn, as transformed people, became the bearers of the good news to all the world.
Jesus once said that it is with “little ones,” like our children, that the Kingdom of Heaven will be built. As we have noted, children have a natural generosity of spirit, a spirit which the realities of the world unfortunately dull down and tame as they enter the mainstream of adulthood. Zacchaeus joined the movement when he recovered his natural hospitality -- when he took the risk of being spotted and the Lord invited himself to dinner. “Today, salvation has come to this house...”
There are ways in which each of us feels like Zacchaeus at times, I think. When we feel misunderstood, our talents underutilized, our potential not engaged by the world of work and the demands of the secular age. Those of us fortunate enough to have a good job or a steady income don't worry about money. Some of us are getting by on resources that are being stretched to the limit. But all of us have locked up inside a person that needs to be loved and needs to be needed. Dare we risk being spotted in that mode....up a tree or otherwise. If our yearning gaze was met by Jesus, could we let him in?
It was Martin Luther who noted, “all the many countless blessings which God gives us here on earth are merely those gifts which last for a time. But [God's] grace and loving regard are the inheritance which endures throughout eternity. In giving us such gifts here on earth he is giving us only those things that are his own, but in his grace and love towards us he gives his very self.” Jesus' act of grace and favor alone was enough to change Zacchaeus' way of life and fill him with joy.
Do we need any more? It seems to me that is where the Church comes in. God offers grace and favor to each of us but it is us, the living, on-going Church that has to take up the Good News and communicate the Gospel in all its richness. We respond to God's grace and favor by becoming and being the Church, doing the work of the Church, supporting the Church, continuing to share the wonderful gifts God has given to us.
Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, once said the church is the only institution which does not exist for itself, but for others. Yet how often are we preoccupied with our own survival, or embroiled in churchy debates which fail to take into account the needs of those in the world around us? Both individually and collectively, we might do well to take a break from our routine activity and often hurried worship in order to look and listen for those who are the little ones – the ones on the margins. In an age which speaks of a “mission-shaped church”, as one person put it, 4 “we can no longer expect people to fit into all our institutional moulds. Instead, we might remember the maxim of all good design -- form follows function.” Let who we are as the church be shaped by the ministries that emerge as we seek to care, not only for one another, but for the people who aren't here – but are out there – sitting at counters, on park benches, or in the lounge of country club or a fine house on a hill.
Jesus would notice all of them – affluent and poor, upright and downtrodden – and he would say come here! Let's get together at your place – or you could try mine!
These who encounter the transforming presence of Jesus in their lives and invite him to come in are doing more than responding to an invitation – their hearts are being changed. Goethe is quoted as having once said: “Treat someone as they are, and they will become worse; treat them as they ought to be, or as they aspire to be, and they will become better, because our aspirations are the most real part of us.” But more than that, a new way of life is emerging for them that involves giving as well as receiving the grace of God. And Zacchaeus said, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor...”
We will never know all the risk takers whose generosity of spirit made them the saints of this particular church. We know there were many...and I know that you who have been part of this congregation for some time can name a few. In countless ways, people with hospitality making room for Jesus in their lives -- by nurturing this congregation and its mission and finding their own lives blessed and enriched. Ironically, it is the “little ones” like Zachaeus who often stretch the most. Their legacy is the fruit of a joyful heart.
The story is told of a wanderer who encountered a old farmer planting mango trees....he was ancient of days and could hardly walk, but he labored to plant his trees. “Why do you spend your last days planting mangoes that you will never see grown to maturity or bearing fruit?” asked the wanderer. “All my life I have enjoyed the rich succulent fruit of mangoes that I did not plant, why should I not plant trees to bear fruit for whoever may enjoy them long after I am gone? Besides, the man who plants because he will reap the harvest has no faith in life.”
Those who in their lives have encountered the Lord and followed him on the way are they a who have planted with no expectation of personally seeing the harvest. They are those who know by faith that they make a difference. For Jesus the way led to Jerusalem. For we who are the inheritors of his gift of love...the way leads to life...that life is the energy by which this congregation becomes light to the community and generations yet born. Jesus said, “Zacchaeus come down from the tree....for I am going to your house today.”
When Zacchaeus let him in his heart become joyful and his life was totally changed...so, shall we open the door? Amen.
1 Frederick Buechner, Listening to your Life , Harper, San Francisco, 1992.Go Back
2 Ann Brizendine, Northwest Missouri, also on the InterNet Go Back
3 Marcus Borg, uses this phrase to develop an understanding of the early church and what attracted people to be part of it, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, or Living the Heart of Christianity, both are Harper, San Francisco.Go Back
4 Peter Davidson, Sermon-of-the-Week Contributors Forums, on the Web Go Back
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First Presbyterian
Church of Cedar Rapids
310 Fifth Street SE Cedar Rapids, IA 52401
Phone: 319-364-6148
E-mail: church@fpccr.org
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