Prayer for the feast of Christ the King

Your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven

Through our lives and by our prayers,

your kingdom come.

Great Christ of all love,

            in whose cross all power and authority finds its ultimate end,

we come to pray now for those earthly powers

            which determine and dictate the lives of people.

We lay before you

            those powers which present as our governing authorities.

We pray for those who work in our government and the civil service,

            and for all others at a national and local level

            who hold their delegated power on behalf of us all.

We pray also for those governments around our world

            which have put aside any notion of appropriate representation,

            and whose actions are perpetrated from base motives.

May they see through you and in us a way of being human

            that respects the other, holds authority lightly but responsibly,

            and is ever alert to the temptation to selfish misuse of power.

Grant them eyes to see, ears to hear,

            and the courage to act with compassion and mercy.

Your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven

Through our lives and by our prayers,

your kingdom come.

Great Christ of all love,

            in whose cross all power and authority finds its ultimate end,

We lay before you

            those powers which present as military might.

We pray for those in our armed services,

            for soldiers and generals,

            for peacekeepers and tactical forces

            for law-enforcers and legislators of law,

            and for all others whose power relies on the application of force.

We pray also for those armies and militia forces around our world,

            which have put aside any notion of appropriate force,

            and whose actions are perpetrated from base motives.

May they see through you and in us a way of being human

            that respects the other, holds authority lightly but responsibly,

            and is ever alert to the temptation to selfish misuse of power.

Grant them eyes to see, ears to hear,

            and the courage to act with compassion and mercy.

Your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven

Through our lives and by our prayers,

your kingdom come.

Great Christ of all love,

            in whose cross all power and authority finds its ultimate end,

We lay before you

            those powers which present as economic might.

We pray for those in our banks and businesses,

            for those who have personal wealth,

            and for those who handle great wealth on behalf of others.

We pray also for those economic forces around our world

            which have put aside any notion of appropriate distribution,

            and whose actions are perpetrated from base motives.

May they see through you and in us a way of being human

            that respects the other, holds authority lightly but responsibly,

            and is ever alert to the temptation to selfish misuse of power.

Grant them eyes to see, ears to hear,

            and the courage to act with compassion and mercy.

Your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven

Through our lives and by our prayers,

your kingdom come.

Remember, Remember... Remembrance Sunday Sermon

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, 
Remembrance Sunday 
10th November 2013 11.00am

Luke 20.27-38  Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him  ²⁸ ¶ and asked him a question, "Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother.  ²⁹ Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless;  ³⁰ then the second  ³¹ and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless.  ³² Finally the woman also died.  ³³ In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her."  ³⁴ ¶ Jesus said to them, "Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage;  ³⁵ but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.  ³⁶ Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.  ³⁷ And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.  ³⁸ Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."

Genesis 4.8-10  Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let us go out to the field." And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.  ⁹ Then the LORD said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" He said, "I do not know; am I my brother's keeper?"  ¹⁰ And the LORD said, "What have you done? Listen; your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground!

       

Job 19.23-27  "O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book!  ²⁴ O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever!  ²⁵ For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth;  ²⁶ and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God,  ²⁷ whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another.

The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me;   

  That there's some corner of a foreign field 

That is for ever England. There shall be          

  In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;   

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,       

  Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,         

A body of England's breathing English air,     

  Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.        

 

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,        

  A pulse in the eternal mind, no less     

    Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;  

  And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,    

    In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

                        Rupert Brooke. 1887–1915

What will they think of me when I’m gone?

            Who will remember me?

They say ‘life goes on’,

            but the reality, for all of us eventually,

            is that it doesn’t.

It comes to an end, sooner or later,

            and then what’s left?

Some ashes to scatter, or a body to bury;

            some possessions to distribute;

            a reputation, perhaps, or some achievements of note;

            conceivably children or grandchildren

            or maybe just stories, so many stories,

                        to be told with tears and laughter

                        by those who have known and loved us

                        saying to one another, ‘do you remember when…?’

Do you remember?

Do you remember?

We’re in the season of remembrance at the moment,

            from ‘Remember, Remember the 5^th of November’

            to today’s and tomorrow’s Remembrance services

                        and two minutes silences.

And at such times,

            we particularly remember those who have been killed in war,

            those whose lives came to a premature and violent end,

                        leaving loved ones to grieve and cope.

Last week, I paid a visit to the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede

            and there, amongst the thousands upon thousands of names

                        which have been carved into the stone walls,

            I found the memorial to my maternal grandfather,

                        Sgt Frederick David King, DFM,

            a young man killed just a few weeks after his wedding day,

                        leaving a widow,

                                    yet to discover that she was pregnant with my mother,

                        and a few medals that now sit in a case at my parents’ house,

                                    speaking to us from beyond the grave

                                    of his bravery and valour in the face of danger.

And it matters to us that we remember the names, doesn’t it?

            It matters that the stories and the people are not lost to us.

This is one of the reasons why we have books of remembrance,

            keeping the person’s name and memory alive.

And it’s the reason we often mark a person’s grave with a stone,

            with their name carved as a permanent record

                        of the fact that they were once alive.

But, as anyone who has wandered through an old graveyard will know,

            eventually the stones weather, and the names and dates fade.

And books can be lost or destroyed,

            and even revered war memorials won’t last eternally.

Eventually, Sgt Fred King’s name and memory will be lost,

            as so many others, both before him and since,

            have also passed into obscurity.

And what then?

            Who remembers?

            Who keeps the memory alive?

            What becomes of what was once a person?

Such things were obviously preying on Job’s mind,

            as we heard in our reading this morning,

where Job cries out:

"O that my words were written down!

            O that they were inscribed in a book! 

O that with an iron pen and with lead

            they were engraved on a rock forever!”

For those of you who haven’t read the book of Job in a while,

            a brief recap might be useful.

The book of Job is named after it’s protagonist,

            about whom we don’t know a lot

                        (he is, after all, a fictional character).

            But what we do know, is that he is an innocent man.

Yet, despite his innocence,

            he suffers loss and pain through no fault of his own.

As the dialogue of the book develops,

            with Job and his friends discussing

                        what he has done to deserve such torment,

            Job starts to imagine a way in which he might go to trial with God,

                        seeking to vindicate his righteousness,

            and perhaps also to obtain an acknowledgment

                        of God’s mistreatment of Job.

In our passage for this morning,

            we meet Job in characteristically depressive mood,

                        clearly not expecting to see the desired vindication

                                    before his death,

                        and concerned that he will go to the grave unjustified.

In chapter 16, he calls on the earth to not let

            his murder at God’s hand, as he sees it, go unavenged.

He wants his innocent blood to continue crying out,

            arguing his vindication for all eternity.

In an echo of God’s words to Cain after his murder of his brother Abel,

            Job expresses hope that that the blood of his death

            will continue to cry out from the ground:

“O earth, do not cover my blood;

            let my outcry find no resting place.” (Job 16:18)

This idea of shed blood crying out from the ground,

            attesting to the righteousness of those

                        who have been un-righteously killed

            is one which continues to have great resonance today.

From Rupert Brooke’s heart-rending assertion that

            in the event of his death in war

            there will be ‘some corner of a foreign field

                        that is for ever England’,

to the poppy fields of Flanders,

to the mass graves of the 2^nd world war concentration camps,

            to more recent discoveries in Bosnia, Iraq and Syria…

the blood of the slain cries out from the ground,

            and it shouts and screams to the world

            that those who lie here did not deserve to die in this way.

And so Job contemplates his death;

            a righteous and innocent man

            who doesn’t deserve to die like this.

Job’s anxious desire is that he should ‘see’ God judge his case while he is alive,

            but he doesn’t, frankly, expect to be vindicated before his death,

so, despite his conviction that ‘in the end’ he will be judged innocent (v.25),

            he wants his case committed to permanent writing,

because he knows that whilst his life may be fleeting and soon-ended,

            the fact of his righteousness is an eternal truth,

            and his hope is that one day,

                        the record of his blamelessness will be attested before God

                        and will be proven to be true.

And so Job utters possibly the most famous words in the entire book,

            and possibly also the most misunderstood:

‘For I know that my Redeemer lives,

            and that at the last he will stand upon the earth’ (19.25).

Despite it’s usage within the Christian tradition…

            (and who, on hearing this verse,

                        doesn’t also hear the strains of Handel’s Messiah?)

But despite this,

            Job’s redeemer is not Jesus,

            and it isn’t God either.

Rather, Job’s ‘redeemer’ is his protestation of his innocence,

            it is his righteousness itself that pleads his cause

                        and will secure his redemption.

Job’s ‘redeemer’ isn’t some heavenly being,

            rather, it is his own declaration of innocence.

To understand why this is the case,

            we need to understand a little bit

                        about the Old Testament concept of redemption.

The world translated here as ‘redeemer’

            can also be translated as ‘vindicator’ or ‘champion’

and in the Levitical law,

            a person’s redeemer, or vindicator, or champion,

            was their nearest relative.

So, when a person died,

            their next of kin would be expected

                        to redeem their property for the family,

                        by buying it back to secure the family’s inheritance.

                        (Lev 25.25-34).

Or if a person was taken into slavery,

            their next of kin would be expected

                        to redeem them by paying the price for their release.

                        (Lev 25.47-54).

Or if a man died childless,

            their next of kin would be expected to marry their widow

                        and father a child with her on behalf of the dead husband.

                        (Deut 25.5-10; Ruth 3.12; 4.1-6).

Or if a person was murdered,

            their next of kin would be expected to vindicate them

                        by avenging their shed blood. (Num 35.12, 19-27).

So when Job states his belief

            that his redeemer, his vindicator, his champion, lives,

            he is objectifying his protestation of his innocence

                        into an entity that has something of an existence of its own.

His blood that will cry out from the ground for all eternity,

            his deeds that are written in writing that never fades,

            take on the character of an eternal affidavit of innocence.

The legal language continues,

            as Job states that his redeemer

            will, at the last, stand upon the earth.

In an ancient lawsuit trial,

            the last to rise was the winner of the dispute,

                        the final speaker won the day,

            the successful voice was granted the last word,

and Job believes that his blood crying out from the ground,

            will, at the last, rise up to affirm his innocence,

            and attest that his death was neither deserved nor sought.

So, what remains of a person when they are gone?

            What is remembered?

Job’s answer is that it is righteousness that endures eternally.

Bodies die, possessions are redistributed,

            children go their own way,

                        and reputations and mighty deeds are easily sullied or forgotten.

But a person’s righteousness? That’s a different story.

            Innocence from guilt is eternal

            and blameless deeds endure.

And so we come to the woman with her seven husbands.

            And once again we find ourselves in the murky world

                        of the kinsman-redeemer laws of the ancient Jews,

            And once again we find ourselves grappling with the question

                        of what remains of a person when they die.

There was a view that the value of a person’s life

            could be judged on whether they had managed

                        to bring children into the world,

            with a childless man’s life considered incomplete.

So, if a man died leaving a widow still of childbearing age,

            that man’s life could be redeemed

                        if he had a brother who would take his widow,

                        and father a child with her on behalf of the dead brother,

            so that the dead brother could live on through his descendants.

Clearly, this system is intensely problematic from a contemporary perspective,

            and it raises huge issues for us surrounding the rights of the woman,

            and her existence as a person in her own right,

                        rather than as part of the estate of her husband.

But within the worldview of the ancient near east,

            it had a certain logical consistency,

and it is this logic that the Sadducees are seeking to exploit,

            by making their argument Reductio ad absurdum

                        about the one bride for seven brothers,

            as they sought to demonstrate the irrationality

                        of a belief in the afterlife.

It all hinges around this question

            of what happens when a person dies.

What remains of them?

            How do they live on beyond the grave?

Is it through children, as the levirate law implied?

            Or is it through reputation and good deeds,

                        as the Sadducees believed,

            Or is it through some future resurrection to an afterlife,

                        as the Sadducees very definitely did not believe?

Jesus’ reply to the challenge of the Sadducees,

            takes us to an eternal truth of being,

            which is that nothing good is ever lost.

I’ll say that again:

            nothing good is ever lost.

In answer to the question of what remains of a person when they are dead,

            Jesus replies:

“Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living;

            for to him all are alive.” (Luke 20:38)

Descendants may die out,

            reputations and good deeds may be forgotten,

grave stones may weather to illegibility,

            and the writing in books may fade to nothing.

But God remembers…

            each moment is held safe by God,

            each instant of life finds eternity within the love of God,

Because God ‘is God not of the dead, but of the living;

            for to him all are alive.’

It may well be that the greatest service we can pay to the dead

            is to remember their righteous needs,

            and to ensure that they are not forgotten.

This, after all, is why we have remembrance Sunday,

            to remember the dead in war,

            and to ensure that the precious gift of their lives

                        doesn’t pass into obscurity.

We remember their deaths,

            but we also hear their voices:

            their blood crying out to us from the ground.

And what do the voices of the dead say to us today?

            Tales of valour, stories of bravery, honour, and loyalty, yes.

            But also, because we are remembering those dead in war,

                        stories of mercy, compassion,

                                    betrayal, suffering, terror,

                                                and of so many lives lost.

And the voice of Jesus, echoing to us down the millennia,

            assures us that each of these lives, remembered or not,

                        was a life that has eternal value.

            Each soldier has worth:

                        named or unknown,

                                    decorated officer or cannon-fodder Tommy;

            and in our remembrance of them

                        their voices are heard once again,

                        crying out from the ground for vindication, for redemption.

And they live still,

            they live among us through our act of remembrance,

                        and in our memories as we keep their memory alive.

Their stories matter to us because they keep us all human,

            and their blood cries out to us from the ground,

            protesting that they didn’t deserve to die like this.

But they live still, not just because we remember them,

            but because God remembers them.

Each life matters eternally to God,

            and nothing good is ever lost.

And this is true for them,

            and it is true for us also.

Whether we die a valiant death in the theatre of war,

            or in one of a million more ordinary ways,

Whether we die alone at home, or cared for in hospital,

            or suddenly early, or peacefully at the end of along life,

However and whenever we die,

            we too are remembered by God.

All the good life that we have lived

            is not lost at the moment of our passing,

but is held safe for all eternity

            in the loving embrace of the God of love,

who will not see even a flickering spark of life extinguished.

This is life eternal,

            this is the hope of resurrection.

And it begins today,

            eternity in each present moment.

For God ‘is God not of the dead, but of the living;

            for to him all are alive.’

How Small Was Zacchaeus?

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church 
3rd November 2013

Luke 19:1-10  He entered Jericho and was passing through it.  ² A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich.  ³ He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature.  ⁴ So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way.  ⁵ When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today."  ⁶ So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him.  ⁷ All who saw it began to grumble and said, "He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner."  ⁸ Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, "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."  ⁹ Then Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham.  ¹⁰ For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost."

Luke 18:18-27  A certain ruler asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"  ¹⁹ Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.  ²⁰ You know the commandments: 'You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; Honor your father and mother.'"  ²¹ He replied, "I have kept all these since my youth."  ²² When Jesus heard this, he said to him, "There is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me."  ²³ But when he heard this, he became sad; for he was very rich.  ²⁴ Jesus looked at him and said, "How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!  ²⁵ Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."  ²⁶ Those who heard it said, "Then who can be saved?"  ²⁷ He replied, "What is impossible for mortals is possible for God."

Today’s story from Luke’s gospel is one

          that I think I’ve known my whole life.

I can remember as a little child in Sunday School

          learning that song about Zacchaeus

                   who, apparently, was a very little man

                             and a very little man was he.

          He climbed into a sycamore tree,

                   for, in defiance of the normal conventions

                             of conversational grammar,

                   the saviour he wanted to see…

Well, we all know Zacchaeus, don’t we?

          Good old Zacchaeus, good old tiny little Zacchaeus.

But the question that occurred to me,

          as I was preparing for this morning, was this:

                   Exactly how little was he?

We don’t know very much about this pint-sized hero

          of the opening paragraph of Luke 19.

But I’d like to know just how vertically challenged he was.

I mean, would our fun-sized tax collector

          be small enough

          to fit this pulpit correctly,

                    rather than towering over it as I do?

Or would our well endowed Lilliputian

          be diminutive enough

          to walk under the communion table?

Or would our arboreal Borrower

          be petite enough

          to slip into my pocket?

Or would Zacchaeus be small enough, possibly,

          to pass through the eye of a needle?

You see, we cannot read the story of Zacchaeus

          in isolation from that of the rich young ruler

          from the previous chapter.

In the rich young ruler, we meet a good man,

          a law-abiding and godly man,

who ultimately goes away saddened by his encounter with Jesus,

          because he discovers that he loves his possessions

                   too much to be parted from them.

And then Jesus says,

          "How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! 

          Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle

                   than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."

So who then, we are left wondering,

          can enter the kingdom?

Is it only those who give away all their money?

          Are the righteous only to be found among the penniless?

I hope the answer to this is ‘no’,

          because I, along with many others, am far from penniless.

And so we come to Zacchaeus,

          a small man who has received something of a bad press over the years.

I started the sermon with a passing observation

          about the importance of grammar,

and I’m afraid we have to spend a moment or two

          on a technicality of Greek grammar

because it affects the way we read our passage.

Normally, Zacchaeus is presented as a bad man, a corrupt man,

          someone who has grown very wealthy by defrauding others

          and collaborating with the Roman occupation of Israel.

And his encounter with Jesus is normally understood as a conversion story,

          with his decision to give away half his money

                   and to repay those he has defrauded

          providing the evidence of his repentance and salvation.

And the Bible version we use here at Bloomsbury, the NRSV,

          certainly translates the story in this way:

⁸ Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord,

          "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."

But the difficulty here is that this passage, in the original Greek,

          is not in the future tense at all.

It’s in the present tense…

          In other words, Zacchaeus isn’t promising

                   to change his ways from here on in;

          rather, he is explaining that this is already his practice!

The RSV captures this sense much better:

And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord,

‘Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor;

and if I have defrauded any one of anything, I restore it fourfold.’

He isn’t so much repenting,

          as he is attesting his righteousness.

And if this reading is right,

          a very different Zacchaeus starts to emerge from the story.

He’s not the bad man who repents,

          rather, he’s a man trying desperately to be good,

          in the midst of a financial system

                   that tends towards corruption at every turn.

After all, he is a tax collector, and a chief tax collector at that!

          He’s the big cheese at the top of the tree,

                   and the tree he’s at the top of is pretty dirty in places.

          He’s a man who has managed to climb his way to the top,

                   but who knows that the climb has left his hands somewhat soiled.

          And so he already has a system in place

                   to ensure that his money doesn’t own him,

                   to ensure that his money doesn’t corrupt him.

          He gives half his money to the poor,

                   and if he defrauds someone, knowingly or not,

                   he repays them four times as much.

Tom Wright sums up the problem facing Zacchaeus,

          and it’s the same problem faced by so many of us…

He says, ‘Wherever money changes hands,

                   whether across a grubby table in a tin shack

                   or across a sparking computer screen in a shiny office

                             on the ninety-ninth floor of a Wall Street skyscraper,

                   the hands all too easily get dirty.

          Whenever money starts to talk,

                   it shouts louder than the claims

                   of honesty, respect and human dignity.’

In the eyes of his society,

          Zacchaeus the chief tax collector was a negative figure.

The game of ‘bash the banker’ is clearly nothing new,

          with those who succeed financially

          having always been an easy target

                   for those further down the pyramid.

Jericho was a centre for the collection of taxes,

          and the Romans worked with the Jewish tax authorities

          to ensure that not only were the taxes collected

                   for the local government of Judea,

          but also that taxes were taken

                   to pay for the Roman occupation of the land,

                   and to fund the wider regime of the Roman empire.

The Jewish population massively resented paying taxes to Rome,

          and regarded those who were involved in the taxation system

                    as traitors to their nation,

                   as collaborators with the Romans.

And so Zacchaeus would have been ostracised by his own people,

          pre-judged as a sinner

          because of his profession and his success.

Zacchaeus could protest his personal ethical code all he liked,

          but in the eyes of his own people,

          he was no longer fit to be called a Jew.

He was, to put it another way,

          lost to the house of Israel.

He had been crowded out

          by those who would belittle and demean him.

‘Zacchaeus was a very little man, and a very little man was he’

          you can almost hear the local children chanting,

          as he is diminished in their eyes.

Crowd-mentality can be an ugly thing, can’t it?

          As we collectively decide who’s in, and who’s out;

                   who’s part of us, and who’s lost to us.

Society fixates on certain people, certain professions,

          and rules them persona non grata.

And so some people live at one remove from society,

          not necessarily because they are bad people,

          but just because they don’t fit.

It seems there was something about Zacchaeus

          that drew him to Jesus.

Like so many of us who have money and possessions,

          there was something in him that nagged,

          something that drove him to seek a better way.

It’s surely no co-incidence that when Zacchaeus tries to see Jesus,

          he climbs a tree to the top,

          over the heads of the crowd who were in the way.

He might not be the bad man of his own legend,

          but he certainly seems to be a man who is used to getting to the top.

The crowd would have kept him in his place,

          but he is determined to catch a glimpse of the good rabbi,

          who is talking about a better way, a new way of being human,

                   where status and hierarchy case to matter,

          and where each person is valued for who they are,

                   not for who other people think they are.

And as so many others have discovered since Zacchaeus,

          when someone goes looking for Jesus,

          they discover that Jesus has been looking for them all the while.

In the background to Luke’s story of the lost tax collector,

          are three other stories of ‘lost-ness’ also unique to Luke’s gospel,

                   I’m thinking of the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin,

                             and the lost (or prodigal) son,

          all of which demonstrate that God’s primary concern,

                   as revealed in Jesus,

          is to recover that which is lost.

Like the good shepherd searching for the lost sheep,

          like the woman searching for the lost coin,

          like the father searching for the lost son,

so the Son of Man seeks those who are lost,

          in order to restore them

          and to bring salvation to their house.

The parables of chapter 15 become reality in chapter 19,

          and the stories of finding that which has been lost

take flesh in the telling,

          becoming real in the life of a little tax collector.

And so Zacchaeus climbed his tree,

          rising above the crowd that had already written him off,

                    had already consigned him to the back of the queue.

And the stage was set for his encounter with Jesus,

          the scene so beloved by Sunday School teachers down the years.

Zacchaeus looks down, Jesus looks up,
          their eyes met across a crowd...

          and suddenly everything is different.

Zacchaeus starts as a spectator,

          but quickly finds himself drawn in

          as an active participant for the kingdom.

Jesus does what he has done elsewhere,

          and invites himself to share a meal

          with the ostracised tax collector.

Luke’s gospel is particularly, and somewhat surprisingly,

                   positive about tax collectors:

          they are listed amongst those coming to be baptised (3.12, 7.29),

                   they come near to Jesus to listen to him (15.1),

          Jesus regularly shares food with them (5.29-30; 7.34),

                   one of the disciples, Levi, is a tax collector (5.27),

          and the tax collector in the parable

                   we looked at just last week goes away justified (18.13-14).

It’s almost as if, for Luke, the socially marginalised tax collector

          is the perfect example of exactly the kind of person

          who the religious establishment would write off

                   as unredeemably compromised

          but whom Jesus intentionally reaches out to.

The children’s song captures the moment beautifully:

          And when the Saviour passed that way,

          He looked into the tree and said,

          'Now, Zacchaeus, you come down,

          For I'm coming to your house to tea.'

In the ancient world, eating with someone was a highly symbolic action.

          To go to someone’s house, and to receive hospitality from them,

                   was to impart value upon them.

          To take the gift of food from someone

                   was to pay the giver an honour.

And for a rabbi like Jesus to take the initiative

          and invite himself to the house of a notorious outsider like Zacchaeus

          was an unusual move, to put it mildly.

The visit of Jesus to the house of Zacchaeus

          was an intentional breaking down of the barriers

          that had kept him apart from society.

To eat with him, to share food with him,

          was to impart to him an honour

          that no-one else would grant.

And it’s as Jesus sits at his house,

          that the righteousness of Zacchaeus is revealed.

It emerges that he is not what others had thought he was,

          he isn’t a man on the make,

          determined to succeed whatever and whoever the cost.

Rather, he is a man who has not allowed his money to own him,

          and who has discovered the possibility

                   of a life lived out of grace and generosity;

                   both generosity of spirit, and generosity of pocket.

The contrast with the rich young ruler couldn’t be more clear:

          The rich young ruler was publicly holy and visibly righteous,

                   a great man, a tall man,

                   the kind of man others would look up to,

                    as an example of someone who had it all and had made it work.

          And yet, when he met the call of Christ,

                   he discovered that his love of money

                   was keeping him from entering the kingdom.

          Zacchaeus on the other hand was shunned by his own people

                   he was looked down on as a small man,

                   looked up to by no-one.

          And yet, when he met the call of Christ,

                   he discovered that his generosity and humility

                   attested his righteousness far more

                             than any public display of holiness could have done.

His fourfold repayment to anyone who he may have defrauded

          was at the top end of that required by the Jewish law (Ex 22.1)

and his giving of half of his money to the poor

          was clearly a highly generous act.

But, and here’s the significant thing,

          we are not led to believe that either of these acts on Zacchaeus’ part

          left him as a poor or an impoverished man.

Half of a lot is still a lot,

          and even once the compensation has been given

                   to those who have been defrauded

          we can still think of Zacchaeus as a man of means.

And yet, his response is clearly adequate in Jesus’ eyes…

Plainly, ‘giving it all away’ is not the economic response

          that is required of everyone who would follow Jesus.

Perhaps what we can learn from Zacchaeus,

          the small man who passes through the eye of the needle,

is that what is required is a discovery and embodiment

          of the kingdom values of generosity and humility.

For some of us this may involve a radical transformation

          of our approach towards money

But others of us may find here a gracious assurance

          that we are loved and accepted by Jesus

          and welcomed into the kingdom of God.

Whatever it is that Christ asks of us,

          it begins with hospitality,

                   it begins with him reaching out to us

                             across all assumptions and attitudes

                             that would divide, exclude, and condemn

          it begins with the sharing of food,

                    and the breaking down of barriers.

Jesus invites us, too, to eat with him,

          and to see what we might discover about ourselves as we do so.

And so we come to the table,

          at the invitation of Jesus.

We come as we are:

          little people, tall people,

          the sinners and the righteous,

          the poor and the wealthy,

          the holy and the compromised.

We come, not because of any goodness of our own,

          but because we need mercy and help.

And as we eat with Jesus, and he with us,

          salvation comes to our house also,

          as our eyes are opened to the possibilities

                   of a life lived out of generosity and grace.

That which was lost is found,

          that which was excluded is made welcome,

and the new society of the people of God,

          that new way of being human that is the kingdom of God,

          becomes real in our midst.

So Jesus invites us to eat with him,

          and he comes to our house to eat with us.