Boys in Trees

Proper 26C

My family loves an Episcopal camp in Sonoma County: The Bishop’s Ranch is where my kids spent their growing-up summers, and where my family’s parish took annual weekend retreats. It’s a beautiful piece of land that lent itself to worship and warm fellowship, but I have to confess—as a mother of multiple sons—the best part was that my boys had plenty of room to run around. They needed it… and so did I! We always concluded our parish retreats with an outdoor Eucharist, which meant that my sons were usually chasing each other hundreds of yards from the sacred action. But on a Sunday when this very passage from Luke 19 was the appointed Gospel, it happened that then ten year old Aaron had climbed nearby a tree. Of course he would do that, right?

He was watching the action from a short distance, and didn’t seem inclined to climb down for Holy Communion. It wasn’t an argument I was going to have with him that morning, but I actually didn’t need to. One of the Eucharistic Ministers—a blessedly tall woman—walked over to the tree, reached up to the branch where Aaron was sitting, and handed him a consecrated wafer. The Body of Christ. A huge smile spread across his boyish face. “This is awesome,” he exclaimed within earshot of all.

God comes to us, wherever we may be. That’s the principal lesson of the Gospels—of God coming to us in Jesus Christ—but it’s utterly congruent with the Hebrew Scriptures as well. God refuses give up on God’s beloved people, even though we sorely test God at times. You can hear God’s grief in the Isaiah passage that was just read: “remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed…” And when history proved us still unwilling or unable to change, God played the ultimate card: entering into the human condition, living and dying as one of us.

There’s no place God won’t go for love of us. God goes to a child in a tree, to a lonely person shut in at home, to a widow grieving his wife, to a church recovering from COVID. There’s nowhere God won’t go… so I wonder. Is there somewhere that we are not prepared to go for the love of God?

God also comes to us, whomever we may be. Child, woman with past, sinner, tax-collector. There’s no-one God won’t love, so I wonder. Is there someone we need to love as God does?

And then, if this morning’s Gospel is any indication, God would even go so far as to invite himself to our house. Perhaps we haven’t an entirely analogous experience of Jesus inviting us down from a tree to host him for dinner. But I think the lesson here is about intimacy. Is there someplace within ourselves where we are not ready to let God in?

Those are honest questions. You may already have been met by God, and have opened your house and your heart to Jesus. You may already be the one carrying Holy Communion or some other sign of God’s love to your neighbors. I’m not assuming anything less of you kind and generous people: I’m really preaching to myself right now. Because, much though I’d like to think that I’m responding to and sharing God’s love wholeheartedly, I’ll confess that there’s a few intimate aspects of my life that I still withhold from God. And I suspect that most of us withhold some part of ourselves from the transformative love of God. That’s human. God already knows that about us.

In Zacchaeus’ case, we know that he was curious enough to climb a tree, and that he agreed to invite Jesus to his house for dinner. That’s a charming story as far as it goes, but then it takes a startling turn. In the face of a complaining crowd, Zacchaeus opens his pocketbook as well as his heart. “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.”

Linger with that enthusiastic proclamation for a moment. It seems to me like a startling—if not extreme—reaction. Reaction to Jesus… for what? Noticing the short guy in the tree (which of course was not actually an appropriate place for an adult male to be hanging out)? Reaction to Jesus for calling him by name? To inviting himself to dinner? I can imagine that Zacchaeus was flattered by the attention, but there was clearly a deeper transformation occurring within him. The local tax-collector—a pariah in the community because he was an agent of a corrupt and exploitative empire—had suddenly become worthy to host the Son of God. And Zacchaeus rose to the occasion. He changed into the generous person Jesus called him to be.

One thing we know for sure; being met by Jesus changes us. Even more so when we invite him home with us. I know from my own spiritual journey and from talking with you about yours, our Christian transformation is never really a one-and-done. It manifests in many different ways over time: in repentance, in forgiveness, in loving kindness towards our neighbors, in prayer and study, and in radical generosity. We grow into all of these practices. And I am sure all were true of Zacchaeus, although the ones we hear about in today’s Gospel are his repentance and radical generosity. A man known—and likely despised—in his community for taking money suddenly becomes the one the Bible remembers for giving it back and giving it away.

Today is the launch of our annual pledge campaign: the season when we invite each other to commit generously to the ministry of this church in 2023. That’s the way the Episcopal Church funds its operations. That is, our worship and music, the teaching, feeding and pastoral care of this community and our neighbors, the use of our historic campus for partner ministries of care and recovery and encouragement. You’ll be seeing lots of images of loaves and fishes in your mailings and newsletter, as a reminder that God gives us enough, and even more than enough. That comes from an earlier story in Luke’s Gospel; the feeding of the 5000 where five loaves and two fishes fed everyone, with 12 baskets left over.

That beautiful manifestation of God’s radical generosity was not new to the Gospels, although versions of it are found in all four. It’s a story that intentionally echoes the Book of Exodus—the record of the Hebrew slaves liberated from Egypt—in which God fed the people with miraculous bread in the desert. Versions of abundant bread stories show up time and again in our Bible, and we enact them symbolically in the Eucharist every Sunday. Zacchaeus himself surely knew these stories. Even though he may have been shunned by his Jewish community for his profession, he still knew that the sign of the presence of God is more than enough. He knew it well enough to recognize God in Jesus. So he climbed down and opened his house, offering himself and his wealth as bread. And the people he may have had taken advantage of? They had more than enough.

God meets us exactly where we are: in the trees, on the streets, in the hospitals and in our homes. God meets us in our wealth and our need, in our pride and our shame. But he doesn’t leave us there. He calls us all to be actors in the grand drama of Jesus, who makes us—our bodies and bank accounts, our service and our souls—into enough, and more than enough. Come to the table, friends, where Trinity always has enough for anyone who comes hungry. And pledge to give generously as God invites you to, so that our church may continue to provide bread enough for others, and be bread for the world.