Luke 19:1-10 “Zacchaeus and the Call to Faith”

November 4, 2019

Worship was yesterday.  We shared the Lord's Supper.  Took a few minutes after worship to check out the interior of the Sanctuary.  I was in the custom of publishing the sermon on the blog.  The number of hits were...discouraging.  But the message is important.  So, for those who missed Sunday, here is a summary.

The Monday after the Sunday before.

                The Sunday School song I grew up with was “Zacchaeus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he…he climbed up in a sycamore tree, for the Lord he wanted to see…”  He was a little man, but a big deal, the Chief Tax Collector in Jericho, an important city on the Jordan River.  But to the locals, he was a ‘sinner’, maybe better understood as ‘traitor’ and ‘collaborator’.  He aided and abetted the Romans in their policies of taxation and made himself rich off the backs of his fellow citizens.

                He was a Jew. 

If I were to ask someone their faith, their country, and their ethnicity of origin, what would that look like?  For me, I am Christian, of the Presbyterian flavor, I am proudly an American, and I come from Canada but my forebears are from the Netherlands. 

For someone to be a Jew, that implies all this information and perhaps more. 

All of this is in Zacchaeus’ background, living in the identity of Judaism, like Jesus, but it seems to be irrelevant to him.  Rather, he chose riches over his faith, deliberately turning against his faith and upbringing to become a Roman collaborator and traitor in the eyes of his people.  Which is why the people branded him a ‘sinner’ and reacted so badly that Jesus was going to his house to eat.

But it was in Jesus that Zacchaeus found the truth of his faith.  Something drove him to make a fool of himself by climbing a tree to see this Jesus guy.  There was then a lightning flash of understanding as he found forgiveness and truth in Jesus.  There was repentance and there was restitution and his life was changed forever. 

The people didn’t like it, but Jesus told them the hard truth.  This was a Son of Abraham who had gotten lost and been found.

I think we are far more like Zacchaeus than we are willing to admit.  We are Christians, as a nation, still telling the pollsters we are all spiritual and such.  But church…well, Sundays are inconvenient for so many.  I pray for the lightning flash.

I pray that the truth Zacchaeus found in Jesus that renewed his faith will come to us.  I pray that we will wake up and embrace once again the wonder of the truth of our faith that comes in Jesus.  And I pray that we, the church, will be ready to welcome the joyous wonder-struck back into our midst.

Amen and Amen.