Good morning, Beloved of God. Have you ever met someone who’s appearance, titles, or social status had you thinking they were one kind of person, only to learn they were the precise opposite? Or maybe you’ve been the person others assumed certain things about -- They saw your clothes, or your hairstyle, heard your accent or learned your job title, and their expression changed or they said, “Oh, you work there?” Have you ever heard people whispering about you behind your back, spreading rumors that couldn’t be further from the truth, while you had no way to set the record straight without making everything worse? It’s like when people find out I’m a pastor -- you, the bald lady? With tattoos up her arms and on her chest? Piercings all over her head? A PASTOR? Or this meme of Martha Stewart with Snoop Dogg -- “One of these is a convicted felon.” We all know who those who’ve never heard the backstory will assume is the One, right? If you’ve ever categorized others or been categorized by them, and judged poorly according to untrue or inaccurate labels, then you’re in good company with the man at the center of today’s gospel. His name is Zacchaeus, which by the way means “Innocent and Pure” -- put that in your pocket -- His name is Zacchaeus and from the jump, Luke wants his readers to know what the crowd knew about him: He was an agent of the Roman state who, having risen in rank to chief tax collector, was living high on the wealth he’d stolen from the poor public. Based on Luke’s introduction, they would have understood that although he was a born Jew, Zacchaues was no longer “one of us” -- he was one of them; one of the oppressors. He was “man of short stature” -- which is not necessarily to say he was literally short, but that he was a small man -- a man who tried to make himself bigger by exploiting his own people in service to Rome. In fact, according to some scholars, even stronger language is due here: He wasn’t just small; he was a miscreant, a scumbag. Total trash and an enemy of this crowd who had every right and reason to shut him out and block him from getting closer to Jesus, sending him scrambling up a tree instead. He was a liar, a cheat, a thief who fully deserved being cast out and lost to his social and religious community. If you’re following Luke’s set up, you’re probably beginning to see why what happens next sets the crowd on edge, grumbling about both of their lacking integrity. The set-up is the point. We’re supposed to be tracking with the masses, assuming the worst of Zacchaeus-up-a-tree when Jesus stops, calls him by name, and invites himself and, presumably, the disciples along with him, to the man’s home right now. As Zacchaeus climbs down and gladly, the text says, extends radical and immediate hospitality to Jesus and his crew, we understand why the crowd rumbles with whispers about Jesus’s well-known habit of dining with sinners and tax collectors and other small, unrighteous people. It’s what Zacchaeus says next that turns the story on its head. But before we go there, let me first confess that I didn’t know the story could be flipped until this exact portion of the text was underscored for me twice, by two different people. The second was Rev. Matt Skinner who dove into the verbiage of verse 8 in search of some other way to see the chief tax collector in a more compassionate and generous light. That was on Thursday. But three days before he said, it was Mary Ofstie who brought it up at our Monday Morning Bible Study, which I share not just to promote our little gathering, but to affirm that as your pastor, I only see what I see, you only what you see, and we get a much bigger and fuller picture of the gospel together. So consider this an open invitation not just to bible study, but to my inbox as well. Anyway, back to Monday morning. I had just shared that, according to most of the commentaries I read, this story is all about Zacchaeus’s conversion and redemption. It’s about how Christ’s mercy, rather than malice, led him to repentance. It’s about how Zacchaeus’s absurd and impossible promise to change -- to give half of all he had to the poor and the other half to repaying all those he’d defrauded -- was met by Jesus’s even more impossible and fantastical promise of Salvation, right then and there, from God’s own self. Forgiveness, restoration, and lifelong reparations. In that order. And yes, if that were the only possible way to see Zacchaeus and understand his story, it would be very good news. Because in that version, a lost brother is sought out and found, he is liberated from his sin, and he is restored to wholeness within his community, which is also made whole upon his return -- manifest salvation, indeed, for him and this whole house. Amen? The thing is, though, that Zacchaeus-the-sinner-made-saint depends on our assumption that Zacchaeus was, in fact, that sinner. But if you follow Mary Ofstie and Dr Skinner into the words he actually speaks in verse 8, another way blossoms and another man entirely is revealed, as the verbs we initially read as a promise of future reparations, come to life as they are in Greek: Active, Present, Now. Like this: “Lord, half of all my possessions I give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone, I repay them fourfold.” Not “I will give, I will repay” but: “I give; I repay.” Read this way, with present and active verbs, the roles of oppressor and oppressed are reversed, and suddenly we see that not only is Zacchaeus NOT guilty of the crimes he’s accused of; he actually abides by an exceptionally generous model of business -- one that keeps him honest and compels him to go four times beyond what the law requires of a tax collector found to have stolen from a taxpayer. While other tax collectors do steal from the purse of payments made, and then report those they steal from to the Roman Government as delinquent, Zacchaues consistently takes only what is due, justly represents his taxpayers to Rome, and restores overpayments at 400%, even to taxpayers who refuse to see him as anything but scum. Even to Taxpayers who, on this day, go out of their way to put their bodies between him and his salvation. Read this way, my holy imagination now sees a man of deep integrity, who took a job that no decent person would take because no decent person would take it, and because taxpayers deserved at least one honest and decent collector. I see someone who was so trustworthy with his work, that he rose to the rank of chief tax collector, where perhaps, he was able to use his position of relative power and privilege to restrain less honorable collectors from defrauding their clients. I see someone who did this work, year after year, head down, as those he actually served -- not Rome, but the taxpayers -- sneered at him, and cut him off from all cultural, communal, and religious life. And listen, friends: To be cut off like that was to wither and perish, which is what the word Lost actually means. It is to be shamed to death. That was his life -- and his family’s too, if he had one -- up to and on the day he was forced to climb a tree to see the one the people claimed was different and had the power to save. The power to See. And thank God he climbed, because the God who Sees saw him. Sought him out and named him, saying, “Zacchaeus, ‘Innocent and pure one,’ Come down right now, cause we’re gonna party at your house tonight.” Assuming that Zacchaeus actually is innocent and pure, and has long-suffered these peoples disdain, condemnations, and curses, you can imagine what this moment is for him: In front of all these people, Jesus tells the man who hasn’t enjoyed good company for who knows how long, to get his house ready cause he and the twelve are coming over tonight. That alone would be a kind of salvation, right? But the crowd still doesn’t know -- they don’t know how decent he’s been, but instead presume the worst not just of him but now Jesus, too. And that is when Zacchaeus decides it’s time to speak the truth, for both their sakes: “Lord, I give half of what I have to the poor and anyone I inadvertently defraud, I repay fourfold.” And when he finally speaks; when his excessive generosity, mercy, and righteousness become known, Jesus -- who in Luke’s gospel more than any other champions the cause of the poor and the oppressed against the rich who see their wealth as proof of Divine favor; Jesus, who said it is easier for a camel to move through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God; Jesus who just, 20-some verses ago in Chapter 18, lamented the rich man who was unwilling to give up his wealth, not even for eternal life; Jesus proclaims salvation, to the rich man and this whole house. Zacchaeus is saved -- not as in: promised eternal life after death, but saved as in: Delivered from being lost and left to die, cut off from the Kin-dom of God in this life. Saved as in: Liberated from the bone-crushing shackles of a lie. Saved as in: Restored to wholeness within his community and wider family. And that restoration -- that salvation -- comes to all of them: To Zacchaeus, and to the crowd, the People of Israel, who are this house. They are saved as in: Forgiven -- for unjustly condemning Zacchaeus. Saved as in: Liberated by the knowledge that they don’t stand alone against the Roman Occupation, but some work with them from within the halls of power, to undermine and limit its reach. Saved as in: Made Whole, for their Brother, who is also a son of Abraham, is home. And they are one again. And that is why Jesus has come: To seek out -- to diligently and urgently search for and make whole this man who was lost -- and this Holy House that lost him. What I love most about this story is how much bigger and more beautiful salvation becomes when it’s not just coming for one "obvious" sinner but for everyone. I love how it challenges us to turn a text over and flip it upside down, to listen not just to pastors but to any who have eyes to see, until we all are able to see each person on the page in the most generous light possible. And I love how it teaches us to take care of each other; to always assume the very best of each other; to seek out and urgently search for the deepest good in one another; and to love each other deeply, because we belong to one another and we are not us without all of us. We are not whole without the whole of us. All praise be to Christ whose salvation comes to this Holy house, to our Beloved Community, today. Amen.
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