Collect: Almighty and merciful God, it is only by your gift that your faithful people offer you true and laudable service: Grant that we may run without stumbling to obtain your heavenly promises; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen. (Psalm 19:14)
“Grant that we may run without stumbling to obtain your heavenly promises…” What a powerful image in our Collect today!
We don’t run for things anymore, do we?
We’re adults now. We walk or drive to where we need to go. Children run for things. They stumble. They fall. They get up. And they run again.
We lose the desire to run as we get older.
I’m not talking about jogging to get back in shape. I’m talking about running as part of our desire to be somewhere so quickly that walking isn’t fast enough, a desire so strong that we’d make ourselves crazy trying to walk instead of run.
When Pete Rose was playing baseball, the other players nicknamed him “Charlie Hustle.” He ran everywhere. If he drew a walk when he was batting, he ran to first base. When his team made a third out during an inning, he would run onto the field. When the other team made their third out, he would run off the field into the dugout. It was difficult to ever catch Pete Rose walking. He was that excited about the game.
Today we see in our Gospel story, a successful adult businessman running in excitement just to see Jesus.
In the Middle East, then and now, adult men don’t run. Especially wealthy men. It’s a sign of status to walk regally with one’s head held high. Children and servants run.
Yet as Jesus was entering the city of Jericho, just passing through it, the rich, chief tax collector not only ran to see Jesus, he even climbed a tree.
When’s the last time you climbed a tree? Or saw any grown-up climb a tree?
I used to do it all the time as a child but I can’t remember when the last time was that I ran or climbed a tree. Jesus mentions elsewhere in the Gospel that we need to be as children to enter the kingdom of God. Usually, we’re telling children not to run, aren’t we?
Left to their own whims, children will run through shopping malls, grocery stores — everywhere they can walk, they’ll usually run instead.
And that’s just how Zacchaeus is behaving, isn’t he? Just like a child.
This short, middle-aged guy running along the road, trying to get a glimpse of Jesus — I keep picturing Danny DeVito in a toga — unable to see Jesus, so he climbs a sycamore tree to maybe get a better view.
But while he’s trying to see Jesus, Jesus sees him and calls his name. To be able to call someone by name that one had never met was considered a strong indication during that time that one was a prophet.
When Jesus called up to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down…” You can almost feel the anticipation that the rest of the crowd must have been feeling.
Jesus, the holy miracle-man and prophet of God, the Messiah, the chosen one — he had just called out to that low-life, no-good chief tax collector by name. This would be great! Jesus was going to give this horrible little man what’s coming to him!
Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus, the Jew who not only collected the money that Rome demanded from his fellow Jews. He also forced them to pay extra to fill his own pockets.
As the chief tax collector in a major city like Jericho, Zacchaeus would have been rich without having to cheat people. But he was greedy, and took more money from his fellow Jews than he was entitled by Rome to do.
And then Jesus called to him. Oh, Jesus was going to let him have it now. The people could just imagine what Jesus was about to tell him.
“Zacchaeus, hurry and come down … your days of stealing from God’s people are over! You’ve been doing evil in my eyes, and I turn you over to them for punishment for your years of cheating them out of their meager earnings. You are an embarrassment to your people!”
Oh yeah, this was going to be good….
And then they heard the rest of Jesus’ sentence:
“… for I must stay at your house today.”
They probably couldn’t believe their ears at first. Then they started to grumble. “Rabbis don’t go to the houses of sinners. What’s going on here? Why would he stand under the same roof as a guy who’s not even allowed in the temple?”
You see, tax collectors have never been well-liked. In Jesus’ time, tax collectors were stripped of the privileges that came from being Jewish. They were banished from Jewish activities and not even allowed in the Temple.
That may not sound like much, but since Jews had to bring their sacrifices to the Temple on the Day of Atonement so that the priest could atone for their sins, not being allowed in the Temple meant no atonement and therefore no forgiveness from God for their sins.
So for a religious leader to go to the house of, and probably even share a meal with, someone so detestable that he couldn’t even enter the Temple was one of the most shocking things the crowd could have witnessed in their lives. That kind of stuff just didn’t happen.
Until Jesus.
Jesus saw the change in Zacchaeus, before Zacchaeus saw it himself. Zacchaeus had all the material possessions anyone at that time could want. A large house, servants, nice clothes, good food. But no relationship with God.
He was the kind of guy who was always alone in a crowd. No friends to speak of, maybe some Gentiles who hung around him because he had money, but his own people didn’t want to have anything to do with him. And he had brought it on himself.
He wasn’t born a tax collector. He didn’t learn how to swindle people in Hebrew school. He got tired of being the small kid everyone picked on, and found a way to get even, or get ahead.
While he was sitting in that sycamore tree, hoping just to see Jesus, he was probably just as amazed as everyone else when Jesus called him by name.
What an amazing feeling when we realize that God knows our name!
And, Jesus didn’t ridicule him for being short, or berate him for swindling his own people. Jesus called to him with words of love. And it melted his heart.
Whatever walls Zacchaeus had built around his heart over many years came tumbling down when exposed to the love of Christ.
And Zacchaeus repented. He changed his heart. He turned from his previous way of life.
He committed himself publicly to undo the damage he had done. He could have offered merely to repay any extra tax money he had taken, or even just promised not to do it any more.
By law, he hadn’t done anything illegal. Tax collectors bought their positions from the Roman government for a certain fee, and were obligated to provide Rome with a certain amount of tax each year. If they were able to collect more, well that was just good business acumen.
But now, through his changed heart, Zacchaeus looked at his “business ethics” as theft; and, under Mosaic Law a thief was required to replace what he stole four times over (Exodus 22:1).
So when Zacchaeus offers to repay four times the amount to everyone he cheated, he is admitting to the entire city of Jericho that he is a thief. He also promises to give half of everything he owns to the poor.
And Jesus tells Zacchaeus that salvation has come to his house. But not because Zacchaeus gave his money away.
Many people hear this story and think that giving to the poor will save them, make them right with God. Sure, Jesus wants us to do that, but it’s the change of heart that brought Zacchaeus salvation, not his donations.
It’s the same with us. We can’t buy salvation. But if we really are true disciples of Jesus, our change of heart will lead us to do good things for others — to want to do them, not to feel we’re obligated to do them.
Zacchaeus received salvation through Christ because Jesus came to seek and save the lost. In more common terms, Zacchaeus is a saint.
I know we tend to reserve that term for the giants of the faith, not little guys like Zacchaeus, or like any of us. But the Apostle Paul and other Christian writers thought otherwise.
Paul wrote a letter to the church in Rome detailing many theological issues. His salutation to the congregation who would be hearing this letter read to them (1:7) was:
“To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Later in Chapter 15 of the same letter (15:25), Paul tells them:
“Now, however, I am on my way to Jerusalem in the service of the saints there.”
In his letter to the church in Ephesus, Paul greets them the same way (1:1):
“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus:…”
Paul calls all the followers of Jesus Christ in Rome, Jerusalem, and Ephesus “saints.”
In fact, he refers to his fellow followers as saints 29 times in his letters.
The other New Testament writers use the term 16 times for a total of 45 references to all the followers of Jesus Christ as saints.
Yet somewhere along the way the church decided to raise the bar for sainthood to a level unattainable by almost everybody. And that’s wrong.
This week the church celebrated All Saints Day, followed by All Souls Day. On November 1, we celebrate the superheroes of Christianity, whom we refer to usually as saints. The next day is set aside for the everyday Christian sluggard who has died; the church calls it “All Souls Day.”
The tacit message is that we all have souls, but we’re not all saints. OK, it’s not really a tacit message at all; it’s downright blatant when you think about it. The message is that only a handful of people are saints, despite what that handful happen to tell us.
A selective sainthood is not biblical.
The Apostle’s Creed refers to the communion of saints, which is what we anticipate through the resurrection of the dead and life in the world to come. It’s not just “getting into heaven.”
Through Baptism we are made one in Christ. As Paul says, there is neither man nor woman, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free. We’re all equal.
But somehow we began to believe, as George Orwell would say, that some of us are more equal than others. We have created super-Christians who actually push us further away from following Jesus.
I know it may sound heretical, but the idea of purgatory makes a lot of sense to people when they compare themselves to St. Paul or St. Peter or St. John.
We convince ourselves that we’ll never be able to do the things they did, so instead of following Jesus and doing what he wants us to do, we give up on even trying to behave like saints and resign ourselves to remaining as sinners.
Instead of being saved by grace, we decide we’re not good enough to get into God’s heaven, so we need to go somewhere else when we die so God can burn off the tarnished spots on our souls for a few centuries while people pray for us.
Purgatory is so much easier than living as Jesus lived and doing what Jesus did.
But that also tarnishes the sacrifice Christ made for us. Either Jesus’ death on the cross fully atones for our sins, or it does nothing. If it is merely partial payment on our debt to the Father, we can never repay the difference.
Jesus Christ offered the single, perfect, once-for-all-time sacrifice for our sins to the Father. We are saved by our faith in Christ, not by waiting in Heaven’s green room until we’re clean enough to go into heaven.
A priest named Martin Luther discovered that idea 490 years ago on Oct. 31, 1517. He had spent his life beating himself with whips, praying on his knees at least two hours each day — one time for a full six weeks straight, pausing when exhaustion made him sleep — confessing his sins for hours at a time. He was trying to out-suffer Christ. Since Christ who had no sin endured so much suffering, Martin Luther with his many sins must face much more torture.
Finally, after many years of reading and even teaching the Bible, the passage in Romans 1:17, “the just shall live by faith” struck him. The Greek wording is “the right by trust will live.”
Luther realized that he was saved not by anything he could do, but solely by his trust in God’s promise to him that he has been saved.
At the time Luther was realizing this, a Dominican Monk named John Tetzel had been hired by Archbishop Albert to sell indulgences to raise money for the church, especially to complete work on St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
Tetzel was very good at selling indulgences, which were credits to count against one’s own sins or the sins of loved ones in Purgatory. His catch phrase was “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from Purgatory springs.”
Buying indulgences was no real hardship for the wealthy, but for the starving poor, an indulgence left them destitute, with a piece of paper signed by the pope, but no money left for food.
When Luther saw these people crawling in the gutter gripping their indulgences as they lay dying of starvation, he wrote 95 theses, or discussion points in Latin, and posted them on the church door as he and others had been doing for many years to bring theological ideas to the learned minds of the community, since the average person did not speak Latin. Usually, these ideas would be discussed and forgotten about.
Since this particular list of discussion topics included the idea that using such a large amount of money to buy indulgences instead of helping the poor was wrong, it started an uproar now known as the Reformation.
Corruption in the church had been going on for centuries, as the best efforts of many popes and cardinals could not crush it.
The 95 discussion points Luther nailed to the Wittenburg Door brought it all into the light and enabled the church to hold various councils that began to repair some of the damage the corruption had caused.
Luther’s change of heart, his realization that the just are saved by faith, led him to run ahead of everyone else theologically to get close to where he saw Jesus. He did not leave the church or try to start his own denomination. He was trying to fix the problems that he and many others had been seeing every day. He tried to follow Jesus as best he could, and was forced out of the church with a price on his head.
Many people don’t realize that the Church of England supported Rome against the followers of Luther. Henry VIII was declared “Defender of the Faith” by the pope for his support against Luther and the Reformation.
Henry’s later decision to divorce his wife against the authority of the pope began the English Reformation that created the Anglican Church. Our Anglican history did not support Martin Luther at the time.
Like Luther and Zacchaeus, we also should run forward to see Jesus up close. The change of heart that draws us closer to Jesus also changes the way we behave.
We see the suffering of others and feel the need to change our lives and help somehow. We realize that following Jesus means doing more than just believing in him.
Not too many years ago newspapers carried the story of Al Johnson, a Kansas man who came to faith in Jesus Christ. What made his story remarkable was not his conversion, but the fact that as a result of his newfound faith in Christ, he confessed to a bank robbery he had participated in when he was nineteen years old. Because the statute of limitations on the case had run out, Johnson could not be prosecuted for the offense. Still, he believed his relationship with Christ demanded a confession. And he even voluntarily repaid his share of the stolen money! (Today in the Word, April, 1989, p. 13.)
That change of heart, the desire to truly follow Christ, is what makes us saints in the eyes of the New Testament writers. They had no demands of a certain number of miracles or healings or agreements by various councils.
The “just are saved by their faith.” And all the saved are saints. We, like Zacchaeus, are saints. All Saints Day and All Souls Day should be conflated into one feast day for all of us who are saved by faith.
By the way, the name Zacchaeus is a form of the word Saccai, which means “the just.” His faith led Zacchaeus to run to Jesus and repent — to change his direction and draw close to God. Zacchaeus, in our Gospel reading today, is a living example of "the just" being saved by faith.
Amen.
