“Zacchaeus was a wee little man and a wee little man was he…he climbed up in a sycamore tree for his Savior he wanted to see….”

Remember that one? That little rhyme has always shaded the way I heard that story.  Little Zacchaeus the tax collector was so short and no one liked him so he charged a little extra as he collected their taxes.  Hearing of Jesus he ran and climbed the tree like a cute little child and Jesus saw his faith and entered his house and heart.  Sweet story really…the cozy tale of an underdog scrapping his way to acceptance.

But, how is it that Zacchaeus has received such a sympathetic reading? Zacchaeus is not the underdog of the story…..but is actually a very bad man.  Not the short man that you love…but the little imp that you love to hate. Short, not only in stature but short on love.  He is short on fairness, short on compassion, if neighborliness was a ride at the amusement park he would be too short-of-soul to ride. 

Zacchaeus was a collaborator.  Roman occupation brought with it protection, for a price.  The peoples subject to their rule were taxed heavily for the freedoms permitted them as a part of the larger empire. Zacchaeus played a key role in collecting the taxes levied against the people, his own people. Romans sold contracts to a local like Zacchaeus, who would then recoup their overhead by collecting taxes from everyone in their province.  This was a system ripe for corruption… like a cross between the IRS and the “Sopranos.” Through extortion and intimidation Zacchaeus gathered this profits…all the while backed by the muscle of Rome. 

And Jesus saw him in the tree and said, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.” You would think that even Jesus would pick a better host for a dinner party.  I mean we are all aware of Jesus’ penchant for dining with those on the margins of society…the poor, the prostitutes, the unclean gentile masses.  But these people were victims….Zacchaeus was part of the dehumanizing system that made people poor in the first place.

For the masses, Jesus’ visit to the local tyrant was more than they could tolerate. Snickering, they couldn’t imagine that a man so richly vile deserved anything other than contempt from this poor man of God.  After all, for Zacchaeus, people were merely an investment. 

After ten years of experience in Academia you would think he should have known better.  It was a rookie mistake really something left for a first year professor…keeping office hours the day that final grades were posted. 

For professor Wiesenfeld, the assault of student consumers began first with a quiet knock on the door and grew into waves of voice mail messages and volleys of emails…all asking, no begging him for a better grade than the one he assigned.

Instead, students approach Wiesenfeld with an onslaught of excuses as to why they should be able to trade in their grade for a different one.  “I got a D in your class. Is there any way you can change it to “Incomplete.” Though they came up short they entitled to the grade without the work, the credentials with out the education…why?  Just because they paid their tuition? [Wiesenfeld, Kurt, “Making the Grade”, Newsweek, June 17, 2004]

These students seem more comfortable with the mentality of the mall instead of the formative pursuits of the academy. After all they paid good money, or at least their parents did. Like their last purchase, shouldn't they get what they want? This money market mindset distorts their roles, turning educators into grade brokers and students into investors.

If this mindset is poisonous for the academy then it is toxic in the church.  From the swindling televangelist who demands money for his promises of healing to the big giver who wants her own private pew…money used wrongly may weaken the churches role in forming disciples in the way of Jesus. 

Today is Reformation Sunday, the anniversary of when a not so wee little monk named Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door at Wittenburg Chapel.

One of his chief complaints: the sale of indulgences…whereby a person could purchase penance for the wrongs they committed…or were about to commit or were thinking about committing… It became a big business and the Church allowed and even encouraged this practice.  It was so lucrative that it funded construction in St. Peter’s Basilica. I guess that “all is fair in love, war and capital campaigns.”

Luther’s indictments kindled the fires of reformation that had been warming for decades. For Luther, grace could only be a free gift of God…not a free gift with purchase. The mission of the Church is transformation available to all, not transaction through material means of the privileged.

Money is still hard for us…the only thing more difficult than talking about religion and politics are the subtle ways that money underwrites them both. 

We tend to either think of money as an investment…in which we expect a return or as charity… given out of our excess. When we give it in the church, it is neither. Instead it is a responsibility and a response to the gift of God in our lives.  During this stewardship season let us all be mindful of how we frame our responsibilities.

This market mindset spills over into the way we account for our relationships.  With ledger in hand we are quick with the pen to mark a person as either a credit or a debit.

When someone is nice to us…credit.  When someone is mean… debit. When our love brings us flowers… credit. When they forget an important date… debit, debit, debit.  We begin to withdraw our love when the debits outnumber credits….until the relationship is bankrupt and the account closed. 

When we come up short it is never our fault, it is always someone else’s.  Strangely, though, when some else comes up short it is never our fault but simply a product of their undisciplined life.

We can be too quick to accept the brokenness within ourselves and too quick to deny the brokenness of other people. Too slow allow the grace of God to be for us both.   Where is our perspective to see that when people come up short there is promise for them and for us to stand tall again?

“She was a large woman with a large purse that had everything in it but a hammer and nails”says the opening line of Langston Hughes’ “Thank You Maam” As the story goes… It was dark…she was alone…it was around eleven o’clock as she was walking home from work towards her apartment.  She didn’t see him at first…she only heard the quickening of his footsteps as he ran behind her and then the pull from her purse strap.   It broke…the momentum sent the "would be" assailant off his balance and he fell helplessly onto his back with his feet sprawled in the air.

She simply turned around, saw the boy and kicked him right in the rear pockets of his “Levi’s.”  Curiously, she then reached down grabbed him, put him in a headlock and would not let him go.

“Was I bothering you when I turned that corner?”  “No”… “So, you put yourself in contact with me and if you think that contact isn’t going to last a while you got another thing coming…you are going to remember Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones.”

She kept him in a headlock until she reached her place…All the while talking to him…not like he was a little criminal, but like he was her own child…poor, alone and desperate.

She cleaned him up, and made him dinner and they talked some more…then she picked up her broken purse gave him ten dollars and told him to buy himself some shoes…and to “never make the mistake of latching on to anyone’s purse again.”

Standing on her stoop he wanted to say something more than “Thank you ma'am.” His lips moved, but he could not make a sound. Because he realized that now, standing on her stoop that he was a different person, not an unwanted criminal but a loved stranger. [Hughes, Langston, “Thank You, Ma’am”, in The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, (Back Bay, 1967)

I wonder if that is how Zacchaeus felt.  Jesus’ visit into his interior life did more than give the short little man a boost. It gave him a perspective on his life and from that perspective a rightful response.  He wasn’t just the man the he had become…he was still a Child of Abraham.

We don’t know what was said between Jesus and Zacchaeus in his house but maybe it was just the hospitality of Jesus, to invest love recklessly that made the change.

It’s impossible for us to payback the hospitality of God, it is too overwhelming; in response, we must simply learn to be the people that God made us to be.

Zacchaeus stood up and said, “Lord, here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor and if I have cheated anyone out of anything I will give back four times the amount.” Jesus responds, “Today salvation has come into this man’s house.”

As we encounter Jesus and our perspective is changed from that of a stingy miser to that of a generous Christian. We learn that, as Frederick Buechner once wrote, that people should be “treasured less for who they are or for what the world has made of them than for what they have in them at their best to be because ultimately it’s not the world that made them at all… [but God].” [Buechner, Frederick, Peculiar Treasures, (Harper Collins, 1979)]

Maybe we need to climb up into a tree or a pew in order to see from this divine perspective. There we may begin to see our spouse a little differently, instead of faults, gifts…in our children not failures…but possibilities, in ourselves…worth. Creatures all of us, created in the image of God, broken yet worthy of Grace. Now, can you see? Jesus is coming down the road ready to meet you. Are you prepared?   Amen.