Little People, Big Things

10-30-16 (Reformation Sunday, Proper 26 C Semi-Continuous)

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4; Luke 19:1-10

Little People, Big Things

There’s an aspect of sermon preparation that is both a blessing and a curse, sometimes.  Each week, one of the most sacred, most important things that we’re supposed to do as pastors is to take the texts for the week, to delve into them and live with them for a period of time, to listen to what they have to say - both to us and to you as a congregation - and to determine how best to communicate that word from God to a particular people in a particular place and at a particular time.  We’re given this incredible opportunity to really wrestle with the texts, to dig into the various meanings and interpretations that are out there, to look at the commentaries and hear the thoughts and musings of people who have devoted their entire professional lives to the meticulous study of these gospels in every little detail, so that when they tell us that the Greek of this text reads a particular way and with a certain nuance, we can know that they’ve done their homework.

As I said - it’s a true blessing to be able to engage with scripture in such a way, to weigh your own thoughts against the wisdom of various church scholars throughout the ages, to be a part of a conversation that has now been going on for over a millennium.  But there’s a bit of a curse to it, as well - especially when it comes to looking at the most familiar stories of the Bible, the ones that are a staple of just about every Sunday School curriculum, the ones we’ve heard so many times and from so many sources that we feel like we already know everything there is to know about the story.

For some reason this week, I had a lot of trouble working with the story of Zacchaeus, despite its incredible familiarity and the Sunday school song echoing through my head the entire time.  And, if I’m going to be completely honest, I struggled with it so much this time around precisely because of the depth in which the commentaries and theologians explore the text.  Take this thought, for example - the thought will stop you in your tracks for a moment - who’s the short person in this text?  The answer seems obvious - we’ve always said it’s Zacchaeus, after all.  It’s the story we’ve told in Sunday School and in song for as long as most of us can remember.  Zacchaeus was a wee little man and a wee little man was he and all that.  But would you believe that there are scholars and interpreters who suggest that Zacchaeus might not have been so wee, after all?  It all goes back to the Greek and the way the Greek language puts sentences together.  The text for the Zacchaeus passage in Luke is actually unclear in its use of pronouns, so when it says “for he was short in stature,” we really can’t claim with certainty that it isn’t Jesus who’s so short that Zacchaeus can’t see him for the crowd.  Of course, it’s awfully hard for us to really imagine a short Jesus - look at all the paintings over the centuries and the figure of Jesus dominates the image.  He’s head and shoulders taller than anyone else, and so we conclude that it just had to be Zacchaeus who’s the short one.

That’s just one place that the commentaries begin to raise questions, and we’re not even scratching the surface on this encounter from Luke’s gospel.  The one that has left me scratching my head more than any other is a question that gets to Zacchaeus’ very character in the gospel.  When we talk about Zacchaeus, we almost always talk about him as a crooked tax collector who repents of his sins the moment Jesus invites himself home for dinner.  The problem is that, if you look at some of the different commentaries out there, some scholars have actually made the case that we’ve gotten this image of Zacchaeus completely wrong - that Zacchaeus, whose name means “pure,” actually was an upstanding and righteous person, and that as he accepts Jesus’ invitation and the crowds begin to grumble against him, his statements about giving his possessions and repaying any whom he has defrauded are actually a defense of himself against the false accusations of the crowd!

Does it seem like a hard pill to swallow?  It certainly challenges just about every notion we’ve ever had about the story of Zacchaeus - but I have to say, the idea of a tall Zacchaeus defending himself in front of a vertically-challenged Messiah is just subversive enough for me to like it.  Nevertheless, all these possibilities ended up being that blessing and curse for me - because while all these commentaries and “what if’s” from the scholars provided a fascinating rabbit hole to run down in my own study and research, they somehow didn’t get me any closer to a sermon.  I had all this new information to process, and I kept coming back to it over and over again because I didn’t know just what to do with it.  Where do you go with the possibility that Zacchaeus may have been tall and that Jesus may have been short?  If we think of Jesus as being short, or as looking different than the paintings and our imaginations paint him, what does it do to change the story in other ways for us?  If Zacchaeus is righteous instead of the crook undergoing a transformation that we’ve always seen him to be… why does Jesus say that “salvation has come to this house?”

I had all these and more buzzing through my head, keeping me from getting anywhere toward some kind of coherent focus in a sermon.  But it was only as I was preparing communion to take over to the nursing home that it truly dawned on me: none of it ultimately mattered all that much.  Now, it’s not that the story itself doesn’t matter - in fact, it matters quite a bit.  But it dawned on me that as I was busy getting bogged down in all these little details and diving down rabbit holes, I was completely missing the greater truth at work right in front of me.  Because, you see, whether Zacchaeus is tall or short, whether he’s a righteous man or a reformed sinner, the reality stays the same: God is at work in this encounter with Christ.  If the story stays the way we’ve always heard it, then we see God at work effecting a profound transformation in the heart of a corrupt sinner.  If Zacchaeus is a good guy the whole time, we see his encounter with Christ as one that vindicates and lifts up a man whom everyone else has already written off as evil just because of his occupation.

Regardless of the how and why, the outcome is still the same: “Salvation has come to this house.”  Jesus goes to Zacchaeus’ home, has dinner with him, and elevates this tax collector into the narrative for our consideration.  Zacchaeus stands as a man saved at the end of the day, whether he had an incredible change of heart or whether he was vindicated in front of the people who scoffed at him.  God still worked in that situation to bring salvation, to change hearts and minds.

And ultimately, that’s a better message of hope for us in the long run, as well - because regardless of which story we choose to tell, no matter how bogged down in the details we may end up getting… we need to remember that God is still at work in the narrative no matter what.  So how do we see God at work in our narratives?  How do we still see God at work among us, affecting our stories and shaping us as reflections of His Kingdom?  How can we encourage one another to stand and keep watch like Habakkuk for the ways in which God is at work in our midst?

May God continue to work within our stories - may God be always shaping and shifting our narrative to continually reflect and resemble God’s own narrative, God’s own image.  And may we keep our eyes ever open to recognize those moments where God is at work and in power in our midst.  To God be the Glory.  Amen.