November 3 -- All Saints Sunday

Got a voice mail message from my friend Edgar the other day:  “Dan, how you doin’ buddy.  Been a long time.  Things are good here.  You know: [chuckle] ‘first world’ baby.  I got first world problems...” He goes on...

But I’ve been chuckling and thinking about his message this week.  And I think about it today as we revisit and are reshaped by this beautiful Zacchaeus story about Christ’s transformative forgiveness and self-invitation.  I think it helps to start all that from Edgar’s angle: “first world”.  In other words, it helps to start by realizing that we’re up in the tree too, with Zacchaeus.  First world problems: can’t get a nice enough view.

I remember when we did some painting at our house in California some years back.  I’m thinking about giving the pastor’s study here at church an accent wall of color too.  I can’t think of a better example of first-world problems.  I mean we stressed out about this, maybe you have been before too — “What if we buy the paint we think we like, but don’t once it’s up on the wall?”  That’s a first world problem!  [I imagine we can argue why the color of our walls is so important.]  But c’mon...first world, baby.

We’re up there with Zacchaeus, friends, looking down on the rest.  Maybe we haven’t intentionally defrauded anyone quite like that dirty, little tax-collector Zaccaeus, but we’re all broken sinners.  And those of us in the first world have certainly squandered more than our fair share of resources over and against our neighbors, sometimes totally unknowingly.  (I remember when I learned what my carbon footprint was, just in eating a hamburger, much less driving a car or flying in an airplane.)  We’ve all defrauded or cut ourselves off from the rest (pretending not to see or just not caring).  Who would have thought that ‘falling short’ (of the glory of God) meant ‘climbing high’?  But we’ve got a perfect visual of that today: Zack up there in the tree.  (Picture from Nats parade.)  

And not only are we separated and isolated from other parts of the world, friends, we’re separated from each other.  And we know we need each other, we know we’re meant to be together, but still we want to climb that tree.   So we’ve tried to get both — we’ve invented the internet and Facebook so that we can have it all — the glorious tree house up high and the ‘connection’ too.  But of course that’s not a real connection; that’s not sharing a meal at home together.  What a difference.  (You should write an essay this week about the difference between spending an evening alone on Facebook (ok) vs. spending an evening at a dinner party with your favorite people.)

It’s an ok good view from up here, in the tree.  That is, until Jesus comes walking into town, stops at the foot of our tree...[pause] and then our view gets even better...

Sisters and brothers in Christ, God didn’t create us to live up above the rest, or apart from one another.  Isolated.  God made us for community — both in our neighborhoods and across our globe.  Community is at the heart of this passage.  Zacchaeus is being restored to the community, and that restoration of community is at the heart of his salvation:  “Salvation has come to this house today.”  Even with all our defrauding one another and grumbling about each other, we are meant to be together.  God made us for community.  God made us for each other.  And that’s at the heart of salvation.  Salvation is not just for you to get across the finish line, forgetting all the rest; no, salvation looks like a dinner party!

Sisters and brothers in Christ, Jesus walks up to our trees this day, looks up at us, and calls us down too.  Each of us.  We can all get caught up there…not just because of our first-world problems, but because of our human problems: our pride, our self-centeredness, and our fear.  We can retreat up the tree and want to live out our days up there, but Jesus walks up to our tree and says, “Come down.”  In fact he says, “Hurry and come down.”  What are you doing up there?  What are you doing locked up there apart from the neighborhood?  What are you doing walking on other peoples’ backs?  Come down from there.”  Jesus gently calls us down.  Not with a lecture about wealth and poverty, and money, or a guilt trip about our first-world problems, but with another surprise: the self-invite.

Biblically-sanctioned intrusion (just for when you feel like you might be barging in on a friend.)  “I’m coming to your house today,” Jesus says.  Didn’t see that one coming.  Like later in John’s Gospel — “Do you have anything to eat?” — our Lord lovingly intrudes and, in so doing, empowers, even the most unlikely of characters — the tax man!  Even you...even me.

All of us, called out, called down, called back to the earth.

This story is amazing because, notice the order here: Jesus didn’t offer forgiveness and salvation and then Zacchaeus came down and invited Jesus over to celebrate.  First, Jesus just invites himself over, tells him to come down.  First there’s the intrusion.  And then Zacchaeus makes this incredible statement -- “Half my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor.  And anyone I’ve defrauded, I’ll pay back 4x as much”!!!  Jesus didn’t ask for any of that, but Zacchaeus just couldn’t help himself.  He had been flung by God’s grace out of that tree...and just went crashing into a new life of radical generosity.  And that’s when Jesus says, “Salvation has come to this house.”  Zacchaeus has been restored to the community.  He’s come back to the earth.

Maybe there should be a St. Zacchaeus Lutheran church!  (I’m always thinking about church names.)  Why don’t we have that?  Because Zacchaeus was one of those turn-around saints.  In some ways that’s way more inspiring than all the saints who were always willing to share what they had in radically generous ways!  Zacchaeus let himself be flipped, cold-turkey, from incredibly stingy and conniving to radically merciful and generous.  St. Zacchaeus.
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Jesus is so bold, sisters and brothers in Christ, that he invites himself into our homes!  I don’t know about you, but my home’s a mess right now (especially in the middle of Oct-Nov busyness, my study’s a mess right now here at church).  The last person I’d want to invite over is Jesus.  But we don’t get to invite him, he invites himself.

This is where I don’t understand the language of some of our siblings in Christ, who say, “All you have to do is invite Jesus into your heart.”  No, he invites himself, ready or not!!

And as a result, everything changes!  It’s grace, it’s God’s arrival, that turns our lives around, not guilt or shame about our first-world lifestyles.  It’s love and relationship that changes our ways, not lectures about our self-centeredness and isolationism.  Do you see?  It’s grace, it’s love that brings us down — back to the community, to share all that we have.

Salvation, friends in Christ, comes to your house this All Saints Day...as the bread and the wine intrude, as the rain waters of our baptisms cause us to slip right out of the trees of our self-congratulatory exploits and carry us back into the muddy village.  Back to the table.

It was a bird’s eye view of Jesus.
But now, thanks be to God, we’re sharing a meal with him.  Now we’re across the table from Christ and therefore from each other.  Now everything changes.   AMEN.