To be like Zacchaeus
Luke 19:1-10
Isaiah 1: 10-18
One afternoon, a wealthy
lawyer was riding in the back of his limousine
when he saw two men eating grass by the roadside. He ordered his driver to
stop and he got out to investigate.
"Why are you eating grass?" he asked one man.
"We don't have any money for food," the poor man replied.
"Oh, come along with me, then," instructed the lawyer.
"But, sir, I have a wife and two children!"
"Bring them along!" replied the lawyer. He turned to the other man
and
said, "Come with us."
"But sir, I have a wife and six children!" the second man answered.
"Bring them as well!" answered the lawyer as he headed for his limo.
They
all climbed into the car, which was no easy task, even for a car as large
as the limo.
Once underway, one of the poor fellows says, "Sir, you are too kind. Thank
you for taking all of us with you."
The lawyer replied, "No problem; the grass at my house is almost a foot
tall."
The rich
and the poor. The Christian and the
orphan, the widow, the starving, the diseased and the vulnerable. I could scarcely have asked the readings to
come up with a less palatable subject than this on my first visit to
Shepherdswell. There is nothing that
makes me more uncomfortable than thinking about the poor in the world, there is
no subject we would rather avoid. It's
tiresome. I have heard sermons on
poverty before, and you probably have.
They spend the first five minutes explaining how concerned we as
Christians should be for the world, and then spend the following ten minutes
exploring how we can manage to take this on board without having to alter our
lifestyles, our budgets and our balances one little bit. We become very skilful at living with the
contradiction.
But this
morning here it is again. God going for
the jugular through Isaiah, saying his people make him sick with their
obsession with outward forms while the poor are starving on their
doorstep. All your festivals are an
abomination, futile, a waste of time, God says. When you lift up your hands to pray to me all I can see is the
blood of those you are ignoring on them.
How can I listen to you? Strong
stuff. And then the slightly more
hopeful story of Zacchaeus - the role model of the wealthy man whose conversion
is proved by the way in which he gives with startling generosity to the
poor.
At the
end of the day, these readings seem to point us to the fact that thinking about
the poor makes us uncomfortable because it is the temperature gauge on the
state of our relationship with our creator.
The measure of generosity we show to those who can never repay us is the
direct indicator of how much we have understood the generous love of God poured
out to us. Our emotional response when
we see those in need is a litmus test of our spiritual life. To be loved by God is to love the poor. Christianity is a religion of the poor, more
than it is a religion of those of us who are rich. God hates poverty with an everlasting hatred and he calls us to
hate it too. A man called Jim Wallis
once took a pair of scissors to his Bible.
He cut out every single verse that related to God's heart for the poor -
over 2000 verses - and was left with a tattered and lifeless book. He used to carry this defaced Bible around
with him and tell people, "This is
what happens when you take God's hatred of poverty out of the Bible."
Where do
we start to respond? If we are like
Zacchaeus we start with a recognition that our wealth is genuinely not the
foundation of our happiness. That's not
to say that things can't bring us joy - God isn't down on pleasure or the good
things of life - he made them, he turned water into wine. But it is to say that our things and our
money can't be God - they can't still the restlessness of our hearts, they
can't fill the God-shaped hole. We live
at a time when our lottery dream, Everyone wants to be a millionaire culture
tries to persuade us otherwise, and at a time when the big question we face at
Christmas is not, "Where shall we find the money to buy our
presents?" but "What shall we buy for people who have
everything?"
A man is walking down the
beach and comes across an old bottle.
He picks it up, pulls out the cork and out pops a genie.
The genie says "Thank you for freeing me from the bottle. In return
I will grant you three wishes."
The man says "Great. I always dreamed of this and I know exactly
what I want. First, I want 1 billion dollars in a Swiss bank account."
POOF! There is a flash of light and a piece of paper with account numbers
appears in his hand.
He continues, "Next, I want a brand new red Ferrari."
POOF! There is a flash of light and a bright red, brand-new Ferrari
appears right next to him.
He continues, "Finally, I want to be irresistible to women."
POOF! There is a flash of light and he turns into a box of chocolates.
Like Zacchaeus, the starting point for our education
in caring for all is in truly realising that as a meaning for life, wealth is
illusory. We don't want to be like the
man who was so obsessed with carrying his gold into heaven that he begged and
begged his angel to allow it. He was
eventually allowed to bring in some bars of gold, only to discover that when he
reached the pearly gates, St Peter asked him “Why did you bring pavement?” The wealth we so often seek after in this
existence bears such little resemblance to what will count in the next. This is our starting point.
We also need to have a real sense that all that we have is
not actually ours. We are only here,
rather than in a refugee camp, because God has allowed it to be so. Where does
it come from. A young man asked an old rich man how he made his
money.
The old guy fingered his worsted wool vest and said,
"Well, son, it was 1932. The depth of the Great Depression. I
was down to my last nickel.
I invested that nickel in an apple. I spent the entire day
polishing the apple and, at the end of the day, I sold the
apple for ten cents.
The next morning, I invested those ten cents in two apples. I
spent the entire day polishing them and sold them at 5:00 pm
for 20 cents. I continued this system for a month, by the end
of which I'd accumulated a fortune of $1.37.
Then, my wife's father died and left us two million dollars."
It was reported that when John
Wesley heard that his house had burned down, he said, "The Lord's house destroyed - one less responsibility for
me!" He clung lightly to his
wealth because he knew where it really came from.
If the first step is realising the fallacy of
trusting in wealth, the next is getting beyond the statistics of poverty. The statistics are appalling, but we hear so
many that we need to make an imaginative leap into the lives of those who
suffer in order to feel anything. I
thought we could try a small imaginative exercise this morning.
1. Take out all the furniture in your home except
for one table and a couple of chairs. Use blanket and cushions for beds.
2. Take away all of your clothing except for your
oldest dress or suit, shirt or blouse. Leave only one pair of shoes.
3. Empty the larder and the fridge except for a
small bag of flour, some sugar and salt, a few potatoes, some onions, and a
dish of dried beans.
4. Dismantle the bathroom, shut off the running
water, and remove all the electrical wiring in your house.
5. Take away the house itself and move the family
into the toolshed.
6. Place your "house' in a shantytown.
7. Cancel all subscriptions to newspapers,
magazines, and book clubs. This is no great loss because now none of you can
read anyway.
8. Leave only one radio for the whole shantytown.
9. Move the nearest hospital or clinic ten miles
away and put a midwife in charge instead of a doctor.
10. Throw away your bankbooks, stock certificates,
pension plans, and insurance policies. Leave the family a cash hoard of ten
pounds.
11. Give the head of the family a few acres to
cultivate on which he can raise a few hundred pounds of cash crops, of which
one third will go to the landlord and one tenth to the money lenders.
12. Lop off twenty-five or more years in life
expectancy.
This describes the living reality of over one
billion people in the world today. And
when I was thinking about it, apart from the detail of the radio being
available, it also describes pretty much the conditions in which Jesus himself
lived. Which shouldn't be much of a
surprise. Because, if we could be like
Zacchaeus, we would know that while meeting Jesus is also about meeting the
poor, meeting the poor is also about meeting Jesus. “When you did it for one of these, you did it for me.” The mystical presence of Christ is found in
the poor people of the world. For St.
Francis of Assisi the poor were a sacrament- a means of encountering God in the
mystical way. In the face of a poor
person he saw the face of Christ.
If you want to meet Jesus, you will meet him in the
poor. I heard a preacher in the summer
who gave short shrift to those of us who sometimes complain, “But I just don’t
feel God. I don’t really experience
Jesus being near me in my daily life.”
He said he was fed up of hearing this kind of comment. If you want to feel Jesus, he said, if you
want to see God, then look for him in those who don’t owe you anything. Who are poor, naked, in prison, on the dole.
So we are called to make a personal response to the
poor, to examine ourselves. Sure, there
will always be factors which make the poor seem undeserving. Lack of application at school, laziness,
corrupt governments, bad choices about debt.
But what’s at issue here is not whether the poor are deserving on a case
by case basis, but the very state of our souls. How much we love those who don’t first love us. When we stand before God on judgement day,
we will not be asked about our piety, our church attendance, our
orthodoxy. None of those things will
matter that much. But it would be good
to have some beggars standing next to us, some prisoners, some refugees. And let’s not become paralysed by the scale
of the problem - helping one is better than none.
So we are called to make a personal response to the
reality of the poor from our hearts, from our guts as a sign of our gratitude
to God. That’s what Zacchaeus did. But that will involve complex things. Examining lifestyle choices about, for example, our budgets. How we save and invest is just as important
as how we give. You are all aware of
the campaigns to end debt and change world trade rules to favour the poor.
There is also a campaign afoot to address the global crisis over water - in 24
years 2 out of 3 people will not have adequate supplies. Can I suggest that God is not just slightly
miffed by these issues, but he burns with hatred at the things that are making
our brothers and sisters suffer? And he
calls us not just to be informed about these issues, but for our lives to be
formed around them. Salvation has come
to us. Hallelujah! But the question is, what have we been saved
for? What are we being saved in order
to do? What is our mission as saved people?
We have been saved, in the words of Desmond Tutu, to make the world into a
level playing field. To be seen to be the
ones that put the disadvantaged first.
People who have been saved love to see others experiencing salvation.
It’s the right side to be on and it’s the most hopeful - more people have been
delivered from poverty in the past 50 years than in the previous 500. The future can be hopeful, and we can be at
the heart of it.
Which reading should we respond more to today - the
stern accusation of Isaiah or the example of Zacchaeus? Maybe as a church we should respond to
Isaiah. This is a crisis time for Christianity
in the West, and for the Anglican church.
We know that change has to be in the air. But what kind of change?
What would be the real sign of revival in the Anglican church? In Shepherdswell? Isaiah would maybe tell us that when we are known more for our
love for the poor, than our obsession with worship and Sunday services, then we
might be able to live again. What would
a local church that put the poor first look like?
And perhaps personally we can respond to
Zacchaeus. As Christian disciples some
of us feel nervous about the commitment
of faith. We feel like we want to climb
up a tree so we can take a peek, to find a place where we can take a
comfortable look, but where most importantly we can't really be seen. But if we are like Zacchaeus, Jesus comes to
us, looks up into our protected place, and says to each one of us, “I want to
eat with you, salvation has come to you, I love you.” And then he asks us to take a look round at our starving brothers
and sisters and asks, "And now what do you want to do?"