Luke 19:1-9 Last week, in his sermon, Chuck explained that he, Mary Alice, and I would each be talking about what giving means to us. He also said that each of us had a different approach and that we had not discussed what we would say with each other. I was in Honduras last Sunday so I didn’t hear Chuck’s sermon and I decided not read it before this sermon, but I know that he talked about tithing, because that has been his experience and discipline of giving all of his life. It isn’t mine. I don’t tithe. I don’t calculate 10%. I don’t practice proportional giving. In fact, I just have a really hard time dealing with the whole concept of money at all. It doesn’t mean a lot to me. I don’t think about it much, I never really have, except when I don’t have any; and left to my own devices I would probably give most of it away. But, God in his infinite wisdom blessed me with my wonderful wife, Linda, who has a degree in finance and she has saved our family from economic oblivion. Now, before you shut down and say to yourself, “This guy is nuts, and anything he has to say about giving will be as nuts as he is,” hear me out. Linda and I do have a discipline and a understanding of giving that really works for us. It is a single sentence, “You can’t out give God.” You can’t out give God. It may sound naive and idealistic, but in my life I have found that it is as true and as real as gravity. The times when we have had the most difficult economic situations— and trust me, when you raise five children they happen often—have been the times when we have proportionally given the most. And our experience has always been that God has provided for our needs, without fail. So, I think that you need to understand that’s where I am coming from when I talk about giving. Well, what do I have to say about giving to the church? What do I have to say about the church budget? What do I have to say about the dreaded word that strikes discomfort in the minds of church goers everywhere? What do I have to say about “stewardship”? I think that my understanding of giving comes from the fact that I am an idealist about the kind of life that God wants us to live in this world. I always have been. Even before I understood much about what being a Christian was supposed to be about I was an idealist about how life ought to be. I had a vision for it. After all I’m a child of the 60’s. I was a hippie with the long hair and bare feet and an idealistic view that my generation could create a world where love and care and compassion and sharing would be the guiding factors of life. I could see a world where we wouldn’t need to balance power, where nobody would go hungry, and wars would end because people would come to understand that we needed each other and that we could all be of one mind and one heart. Give peace a chance. Boy, was that naEFve and unrealistic. I highly underestimated the self-centeredness of people, including myself. So I cut my hair and bought shoes and got a real job. But, no matter how unrealistic it was in practice, I never could give up that ideal, and the vision for that kind of world. And then I found that this kind of world had actually happened in history. It is written about in Acts 2:42-47. There it was. A community of people of one mind and heart, who shared their lives and their resources with anybody who had a need, and they loved doing it and they loved being together and people everywhere looked at them and saw something good, and many of those people had their lives changed and joined them. The difference was that God and his love was the driving force of this community, and my vision and my idealism was converted to faith and hope in the power of God. Then I went to seminary and studied and prepared to go and help create this kind of community again. Then I became the Senior Pastor of a church and . . . Well, what can I say. My idealism and vision was challenged yet again. Everybody was not of one mind, and sharing from the abundance of God’s gifts was always a source of conflict, tension, and discomfort. Do you know what the pledge drive is for a Pastor? It’s his or her report card. If the pledges equal the budget you pass, if not you fail. So the Pastor is responsible for motivating the congregation to give enough to meet the budget, but the Pastor isnsupposed to talk about money or make people uncomfortable during the process of motivating them. I have always hated stewardship drives because they are always about never having enough and are always about trying to convince people to give more so that we can meet the budget. But isn’t that the bottom line? Isn’t meeting the budget the bottom line? NO! The bottom line is being the kind of community that is talked about in Acts Chapter 2. The bottom line is being people who let God’s love guide their lives and who reach out and make a difference in other people’s lives. There is no question that it is possible to be that community. It is right here in black and white. It isn’t easy, but it is possible. The question is, how do we get there? Or maybe, how do we get ourselves to want to get there? I have a picture of how this works. Luke chapter 19:1-9, the story of Zacchaeus. Now a lot of us know Zacchaeus from the little Sunday School song: “Zacchaeus was a wee little man and a wee little man was he. He climbed up in the sycamore tree the savior for to see.” Well, there is a lot more to the story than the song tells. Zacchaeus was a wee little man, he probably suffered from dwarfism or some sort of disease that had deformed his legs and caused him to be extremely short. This meant that he was an outcast in the society. He was mocked and made fun of all of his life. Disease and deformation was considered to be the result of sin, either his parents’ or his own, and that put him on the edge of the society. He didn’t have a place where he could be accepted or taken seriously. He must have hated the hurt and the rejection to the point where he developed a hatred for the people themselves who hurt and rejected him. But he found a way to even the score and make a place for himself. He became a tax collector. It was the most despised job in all of Palestine in Jesus’ time. Tax collectors were chosen by the Romans to collect the tribute that the occupying armies demanded. The taxes were not for the betterment of the community, they were for the maintenance of the occupying army and for the empire back in Rome. So there was a quota to be collected. The tax collectors themselves were paid by collecting their fee above and beyond the Roman quota. That is to say, that whatever you were able to collect beyond the Roman quota was yours and since the tax collector had Roman soldiers standing at his side he could pretty much collect whatever he wanted. Zacchaeus was a wealthy man. There must have been a sense of sweet revenge for him every time he made the people who had mocked and excluded him pay. He might not be big in stature or respect. He might be the most hated man in town, but Zacchaeus was a big man in Jericho. Then Jesus came to town, and Zacchaeus had heard about him. He had probably heard about his miracles and his healings. Maybe in the back of his mind he thought that Jesus could have healed the deformity that made him short. We don’t know why, but we do know that he wanted to see Jesus. But he was on the outside again. He was too short to see over the crowd and nobody was going to let him through to the front. It was the story of his life. But overcoming obstacles was also the story of his life, and so he ran down the road a little way and found a tree that he could climb and be above the crowd. The people must have thought it was pretty funny to see the deformed little tax collector up in the tree trying to see Jesus pass. Then Jesus saw him and stopped. The people must have thought, “Oh, good, now the little creep is going to get his. This miracle-working rabbi is going to give him a tongue lashing. It’s about time.” But that isn’t what happened. Jesus tells him to come down “immediately” because he has to “stay” at Zacchaeus’ house. So Zacchaeus, the Greek says, fell down at once and welcomed him gladly. That means that he took him to his house and kissed his hand, washed his feet, anointed him with olive oil and had food prepared for him and they ate a meal together. Now the crowd must have followed them to Zacchaeus’ house. Houses generally would have been open and people would have been able to gather outside and look in. It probably didn’t take long for the people to realize that Jesus wasn’t going to Zacchaeus’ house to read him the riot act and so they started doing what people are so good at doing – they started to complain to each other. “Can you believe this? What is going on? He is having dinner with this little freak that cheats us out of our hard earned money and who works for the Roman oppressors, and he isn’t even criticizing his life style. What gives? What gives?” Now their complaining was probably not heard in the house, the Bible says that they were muttering. But out of nowhere Zacchaeus stands up from the table and says to Jesus, and he isn’t muttering, “Look, Lord!” We can also translate the Greek, “Behold, Lord” but it would be better translated “Wow, Lord!” “Here and now I give half of everything I own away to the poor, and for everyone I have cheated in any way I will repay them four times the amount that I got by cheating them.” Well, he would have cheated almost everybody in town at one time or another. Imagine this whole crowd of people standing outside hearing this, and imagine all of them standing in stunned silence with their mouths open in astonishment. And then Jesus says in a voice I am sure that he intended for all of them to hear, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a Son of Abraham.” Today everything is different in this house because finally after all of you have pushed him to the edge of your circle, after he has retaliated, and animosity has been his life and yours he finally understands that he is accepted in the family of God. Finally he knows that he is in the inner circle of God’s children and that has changed his perspective on life. And whether anybody in that crowd accepts him or his new perspective on life, he is going to live it out anyway, trusting that God will see him though the changes he will have to make in his life. What happened to him during dinner? What did Jesus say to him? How did all of this change in his life? What gives? Jesus gives. God gives. God gave Zacchaeus a new vision, a new perspective, a new outlook on what makes life worthwhile. Jesus somehow let him know that he wasn’t on the edge of the society, he didn’t need to justify his existence by putting others down, that he belonged and that he was loved and accepted just way he was, and set Zacchaeus free. We don’t know what happened to him after that day. We don’t know if he was ever accepted by the other people in the town, if he ever fit in, if he had any friends. The one thing I think that we do know is that God had given him a new vision of life and a new identity that no one would ever be able to take away from him. He was no longer the sum total of what he owned. He was way more than that. I love that story, because it says clearly that, whether Zacchaeus ever experienced acceptance and love in that town or not, he knew that he was accepted and loved and that he was a part of the family of God and he would never have to live his life any other way again. And I know it to. So, for me when we get down to talking about stewardship, and pledges, and the church budget and what you should give I just don’t do very well thinking about how much we don’t have or how far short we might be. I’m just not very good at the formulas and the percentages. But I have a vision for what we are called to be, and I know that if I let the love of God that powers my vision be the guide for what I ought to do, then I’ll never be able to out give God. And, I know that if we, as the people of God at First Presbyterian Church, can just focus on trying to be the kind of community of people whose lives are different because of what God gives us, then we will always have enough: Enough for ourselves, enough for each other, and enough to reach out in love. It is an idealistic vision, but I’m not letting go of it. Let us pray. |