Going out on a limb

          I am going to go out on a limb, and guess that none of you have ever heard a Lutheran sermon about Jesus’ time with Zacchaeus… these 10 verses from Luke’s Gospel…

          You see, every year at All Saints Sunday, we have a choice between reading the All Saints Gospel Reading, and this reading that includes Zacchaeus…

          Isn’t it strange?
He is obscured, not only by his physical stature, but by the way we do our business here at church, the way we structure what gets read when.

          This man, later sainted, possibly the 4^th Pope of the Roman Catholic Church… disappears under the weight of how we do things in church…

          And I would go out on a limb, and suggest that there are plenty of ways we do things in church that obscure our status as saints of God…
-we’ve-always-done-it-this-way,
-faith is only supposed to happen inside the walls of a church building,
-only some people ought to be up on the altar or on full display in the congregation,
-being church means baptizing the practices of our surrounding culture…
all these ways we can obscure God’s goodness…

I would even expand out this point to suggest there are ways we do things in our society that obscure the Child-of-God-ness, the holiness, of whole groups of people
—ableism, sexism, racism, homophobia, biases and acts of discrimination of all sorts…
those structural sins can send people to the same place as Zacchaeus… hidden and forgotten…

          Zacchaeus, so short he cannot see, cannot see our Lord, among the crowd…
in fact, I wonder if his vast wealth,
his striving to be the top tax collector,
Zacchaeus’ climbing to the height of hierarchy in a job where knowing at all times who is above me on the grand pyramid scheme of Roman tax extortion is a necessity…
Where climbing up, up, up that tree is the only way to not be left behind…
I wonder… if that was all compensation,
compensating for his short stature… “you all physically look down on me… but I can look down on you, because I’m a tax collector”…

          Yes, his height puts him in this strange situation that leads to him hanging there, overlooking Jesus from a sycamore tree…

          And I would go out on a limb—a fairly sturdy limb, by my estimation

(after all I’m a man with a congenital heart condition, so I’ve been there)

I would suggest Zacchaeus is not the only saint of God whose physical limitations might be alienating,
might make you feel like you are less than,
might make you feel a need to compensate in ways that are uncompassionate,
and believe you are not enough.

          I would also go out on a limb and guess none of you know what Zacchaeus’ name means…
it means innocent, or clean…
Imagine a kid named innocent, a Mr. Clean…
what expectations his parents had for him…

          And how far he fell from their expectation
—being a tax collector is a dirty business for a man called clean…
we know Zacchaeus was far from innocent, he’s rich in a profession where you can only be rich by being guilty.

          And I would go out on a limb and guess there are many for whom familial expectations, honoring the names we’ve been given, can weigh us down, especially when we don’t measure up, don’t fit the clothe cut for us.

          Zacchaeus, cut down to size, deflated from the protective puff of being tax collector of tax collectors… knocked from his perch by the crowd’s grumbling, making Jesus guilty by association, as they…
all of them who had ears to hear, say, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.”

           Sinner.

          Sinners are to be exposed, disowned, isolated, condemned, lost…
I would go out on a limb and guess we’ve all been there on some level, right? Our sins, real and perceived, have left us cut off and cut down.

          But hear this, in the face of systematic overshadowment, physical limitations, the weight of expectations,
and Sin, Death, and the Devil…
-Christ sees us out on that limb and calls us by name.
-He joins us, transforming our life through repentance and renewed right relationships.
-He brings salvation, and makes us to belong to that company of saints…
With the saints from Abraham to Zacchaeus—A to Z, and everyone in between, including all those present in pictorial form with us today!

Through Jesus Christ we wear the spotless raiment and raise the ceaseless song—we sing our praise anew, we live our lives for you!
Thanks be to God.