“Today Salvation Has Come to This House”
Luke 19:1-10; Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4
Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4
{1} The oracle that the prophet Habakkuk saw. 2 O Lord , how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save? 3 Why do you make me see wrong-doing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. 4 So the law becomes slack and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous— therefore judgment comes forth perverted.
{1} I will stand at my watchpost, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my complaint. 2 Then the Lord answered me and said: Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. 3 For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. 4 Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.
Luke 19:1-10
{1} He entered Jericho and was passing through it. 2 A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. 3 He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. 4 So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. 5 When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.” 6 So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. 7 All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.” 8 Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “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.” 9 Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. 10 For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”
The Sermon
It’s not hard to know where we come from, we amoral collectors of immoral wealth; we who are short in stature; we who are despised. We come from the same places everyone else comes from.
We come from the playgrounds. We’re the ones who are too short, so they get picked on. And if, like me, you happen to be named Zacchaeus, you get these playground geniuses who think they’re so clever: “Here comes Zacchaeus, too short to see us.”
But it isn’t the moronic things they say—“hey, Zacchaeus, stand up! Oh, you ARE standing up! Ha, ha, ha.” It’s not so much the thing they say to you.
It’s the things they don’t say—the way they leave you out. It’s the phone calls that you never get, the conversations that don’t involve you, the party you’re never invited to.
I was so self-conscious. I thought I stuck out like a sore thumb, and I was absolutely sure that everyone in the whole school was looking at me, all the time, in disgust.
When you think people are looking at you as you walk alone through the cafeteria, every move becomes something you think about and second-guess; and all the time, that chorus is playing in your head: Do I look like an idiot? Do I look like a total idiot?
So it was kind of nice, actually, to make it through a grueling, often lonely adolescence, and after a couple of turns of events, to get to a place where I was awarded the position of chief tax collector.
It turns out, of course, that everybody I went to school with—from the most popular to the smartest to the biggest achiever; to the most intimidating, the most obnoxious, the most beautiful and the most unreachable—all of them, every single one, without exception, was just as lonely, just as afraid, just as nervous; trying just as hard to find their place and not mess up too badly and for heaven’s sake not get laughed at—
and by all means, not to fail—because to fail is to be left out.
You fail to make the grades, and you get left out of the honor society, left out of the classes you wanted, left out of the unspoken fellowship of the kids who are going somewhere and always seem to know they’re going somewhere—how do they all know that? You can just tell they know it.
“At fourteen,” wrote Simone Weil in her spiritual autobiography in 1942, “I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair that come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my brother...brought my own inferiority home to me. I did not mind having no visible successes, but what did grieve me was the idea of being excluded from that transcendent kingdom to which only the truly great have access and wherein truth abides” (emphasis added. Waiting for God. New York: Putnam, 1951; p. 64).
To fail is to be left out—or that’s what it feels like, anyway.
You worry about failing to have the right clothes, the right hair, the right physique, the right attitude, the right sense of humor, the right awareness of what’s popular and what’s out.
And you feel like, if you fail at any one of those things, you’re going to be out too.
We didn’t know, at the time, that everybody feels that way. As we get older, we get more and more opportunities to look back and kind of distance ourselves from who we used to be, and we can shake our heads and laugh and go, “Man, I sure didn’t know much back then.” Everybody does that in one way or another. And everybody knows the loneliness and isolation, whether it hit them in fleeting moments, or whether it was the overriding theme of every day, from waking up in the morning to falling asleep at night.
But by the time I realized that, I was already raking in the money, hand over fist, from all those people that I had always thought had been deliberately excluding me from all the fun.
When I started out as a young bureaucrat and got my first paycheck, I thought, “This is the life; I’ve finally got my own money.” But as I progressed up the ranks to chief tax collector, somewhere along the line I started to think, “You know what’s really nice is that I’ve finally got your money.”
And so I was not what you might classify as “well liked.”
I don’t know that there are always words for what happens when a light comes on and you only gradually start to realize it.
I know I remember seeing a guy—tough guy, seasoned, veteran, a fighter—and I didn’t know whether he had just read something in the Bible, or had just seen the sun come up in a new way, or what; but I remember him standing there with a look on his face like he couldn’t quite remember where he was, and couldn’t believe his incredible good fortune in having lived to make it to that day, and all he could say was, “I never thought I was a believing man…”
I don’t know what happens. But when I heard that Jesus was coming, I knew I wanted to see what it looked like. I wanted to see what true grace looks like, because in my life I don’t have much to compare it to. I wanted to see what perfect love looks like, because I haven’t seen very much of that, especially from myself. I wanted to see what absolute faithfulness to God looks like. I had to see that.
And believe me: when you’re as popular as I was (which is to say “not at all”), and everybody’s been waiting to find something about me they could use against me—in my case, my diminutive stature—in a way that wouldn’t result in me just arbitrarily raising their taxes and taking the whole thing for myself, you can be pretty sure that if there’s a crowd, and I want to see something, they’re going to be “accidentally” bumping into me and knocking me over, and “accidentally” standing right in my way, and “accidentally” turning around with a hand stretched out and knocking the glasses off my face—“Oh, gee, sorry about that, Zacchaeus; couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”
But that thing was already going on inside me, and I found for the first time that I couldn’t get mad at people that I had done so much to defraud. I had no inclination to “have words” or to go home and plan some spiteful way to retaliate. I just wanted to see.
So I ran out ahead, and there was a sycamore tree. Sycamores in that part of the world have a nice, wide trunk you can climb easily, and they can get up to 60 feet tall. So I scrambled into the middle of it and climbed up, so I could look down at anyone who came by.
A sycamore is high enough to get a good view, and it’s big enough so you can hide in it. And don’t think I didn’t think about it.
Do you know what it feels like when perfect love is coming at you, and you know all too well how imperfect you are?
It’s almost too humbling, too overwhelming to imagine the flood of forgiveness it would take to absolve a lifetime of cheating and scheming and pettiness and intolerance.
And it occurred to me: why would this man want to get anywhere near me? Essentially, what I have done with my life is to prove the world correct when they assessed me as small.
Have you ever asked yourself in your darkest hour: What does a person who is as small as I am have to offer to the world? Why on earth would God or anyone care anything about me?
Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he
He climbed up in a sycamore tree, for the Lord he wanted to see
And as the savior passed that way, he looked up in the tree
And he said, “Zacchaeus, you come down!”
For I’m going to your house today.
“I said to the man at the gate of the year,
‘Give me a light that I may move safely into the unknown.’
And he said – ‘Go forth into the darkness
and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be better than a light, and safer than any known way.’”
(George VI, Christmas radio message, 1939)
And now I knew that the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.
I wish for all of you who go through life small in stature, unworthy, vulnerable, despised if only by yourselves: that you will find, deep within you, the message that has been carved there in the bark of a sycamore tree, waiting for you to find it:
“Today, salvation has come to this house.”
“O God, let something essential happen to me,
something more than interesting
or entertaining,
or thoughtful.
“O God, let something essential happen to me,
something awesome,
something real.
Speak to my condition, Lord,
and change me inside somewhere where it matters,
a change that will burn and tremble and heal
and explode me into tears
or laughter
or love that throbs or screams
or keeps a terrible, cleansing silence
and dares the dangerous deeds.
Let something happen in me
which is my real self, God.”
(Loder, Ted. Guerillas of Grace. LuraMedia, 1986).
No matter who you are, or what you have done or failed to do: today, salvation has come to this house.
Keith Grogg
Carolina Beach Presbyterian Church
Carolina Beach, NC
November 4, 2007
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