Proper 26C & All Saints
Nov.
3, 2013
Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 149
Ephesians 1:11-23
Luke
19:1-10
What if it doesn’t really matter to God how nice we are?
On the one hand, that would be a terrible thing. Being nice
to each other smoothes over a lot of problems. Being nice greases the wheels of
a squeaky society. It doesn’t cost us much to be nice to strangers, to be
courteous while we wait in line for coffee, or behind some who has a seemingly
bottomless grocery cart, or who cuts us off in traffic – in any number of
places in everyday life it makes everyone’s existence so much better if we are
nice.
On the other hand, I don’t think God chooses saints because
they are nice. In today’s Gospel story, Zacchaeus was not nice, and no one
(except Jesus) was nice to him. Zacchaeus was like someone else we know:
Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone,
Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old
sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out
generous fire, secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.[i]
These are popular characters in our imagination, these
Scrooge-Zacchaeus types. Not nice at all, but dramatic, meaty,
attention-getting.
Like being nice, there certainly is a lot to be said for
spiritual discipline, for the practice of prayer, of meditation, of communion
with God. But what if, like being nice, none of that was what counted in the
clutch? What if God works through – soundrels? People with no discipline? People
who can’t keep it together? People who are greedy, self-centered, and, as
Dickens said, “solitary as an oyster?” In other words, people like us?
What if, on this All Saints Day, God reminded us that we did
not need a finishing school education to get into heaven? What if God took us
all – nice and not-so-nice, short-tempered and generous, poor and, even, rich?
The story of Zacchaeus is the story of conversion: dramatic,
immediate, shocking and thorough-going. Zacchaeus’ only preparation for this
conversion was his curiosity about Jesus, and for Jesus this was enough:
salvation came to Zacchaeus. The one who was the furthest out, the biggest
sinner, the least likely candidate, the most lost, was the one Jesus held up as
the model of salvation. The one who had hoarded his wealth, who had stored up
his many ill-gotten gains, is the one who now finds his true wealth in giving
it all away. No longer is his game about preserving his own self, but about
serving the redistributive justice of God.
What does it say about God that is it not the “nice” but the
lost who matter? It says that we are back in the game. We don’t have anything
to prove to God; we can’t possibly be good enough, and we can’t tell God
anything that he doesn’t already know. But we can – wake up! The insistent
demands of the kingdom of God are all around us, if we would but see. “To be a
spectator of Reality is not enough,” wrote Evelyn Underhill, a 20th century
writer about the spiritual life. What is demanded is participation: “… and for
this, a drastic and costly life-changing is required.”[ii]
What does it say about God if people like Zacchaeus, like
Scrooge, even, are the people God uses to bring about his reign? To help return
to the world to the way God created it to be? What good news indeed that all of
us could be saints, that all of us could be bearers of the Good News, that all
of us could leap down from our sycamore trees, that we would divide up our
store of hoarded goods, that Jesus would come to our house for dinner, and we
would all have a very good time?
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