“Let’s Do Lunch!”

Luke 19:1-10

October 31, 2004

St. Paul UMC, Little Rock

Rev. John A. Fleming, Senior Pastor

By the time that I arrived in her first grade Sunday School class, Miss Nancy Williams was somewhere in her mid to late one hundred and twenties. She had taught the first grade class at my home church for as long as anyone could remember. The rumor was that she was teaching fifth and sixth generation of family members. Miss Nancy was the complete Sunday School teacher. She looked the part. On any given Sunday, you could find her dressed in her best long dress, complete with high heeled shoes. Her hair had tints of gray in it and it was always on top of her head, up in a bun. Not a hair dared to be out of place.

My mom usually walked me and my sister to our class every Sunday morning. We were not flight risks, but we were shy, and loved to stay with our mother, who volunteered in our church’s nursery. During that year, our classes were on the second floor of the church’s educational building. Together we climbed the steps, took the hallway to the left, followed it around to the right, and into the alcove that housed the first, second, and third grade classes. Once we were safe in our classes, mom would head to the nursery.

I would like to invite you to take a tour of Miss Nancy’s first grade classroom. As you walk through the door, in front of you was a circle of chairs, one big chair and ten or twelve small chairs, perfect sized for five and six year olds. They were the kind of chairs that allowed our feet to touch the floor. To the right of the circle of chairs was a bulletin board that was complete with pictures of Jesus and that year’s attendance chart. The first thing that you did when you went to Miss Nancy’s class, was to reach for a gold star to put by your name in hopes of perfect attendance. On the other side of the room, with a small chair near it, was Miss Nancy’s piano. It rivaled her in years. It’s ivory keys were yellow. Miss Nancy loved to play that piano and she loved for her class to sing. Almost every lesson that she taught included singing. It was around that piano that I learned some of the great Sunday School songs, like this one: Jesus loves me this I know. For the Bible tells me so. Little ones to Him belong. They are weak but he is strong. Yes, Jesus loves. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so.” And this one, “Jesus loves the little children. All the children of the world. Red and yellow black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.” If memories of Sunday School teachers gone by and now flooding your soul, it is all right. That is natural. Miss Nancy also taught us this one, “The B-I-B-L-E, yes that’s the book for me. I stand alone on the word of God. The B-I-B-L-E.” Maybe I remember the day that Miss Nancy moved us from the circle of chairs where she shared a story to the circle of chairs that surrounded the piano. Maybe I am just making this up for our sermon. But maybe I remember us sitting there, after hearing the story, and learning a new song. The words of this one went like this, “Zacchaeus was a wee little man, 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’m going to your house today.” The words of the song tell our gospel lesson for this morning, found only in Luke’s gospel. Kids love this story, in part, I guess, because of the picture of Zacchaeus climbing a tree to see Jesus as he came that way. It is a situation that kids have found themselves in before, not being able to see things, needing to be in a tree, or standing on someone’s shoulders to see what is really happening. And climbing trees, little boys and girls love to do that sort of thing. I cannot remember the last time that I climbed a tree. Maybe I will do that again some day.

What happened to Zacchaeus in that tree is a great story, skillfully told by Luke. The truth is that it is more than a children’s story. It can say something to people of any age. Luke tells us that Jesus was passing through Jericho on his way to Jerusalem. Jericho was an important city, a big city, a busy city. It was one of the main trade routes between the east and the west. It was a place that usually bustled with activity. Jesus coming there, like it had in so many places, caused a commotion. Luke tells us that a large crowd was following Jesus around the city. In that crowd was Zacchaeus. A man that everyone in town knew about, a man that they all tried to avoid. Luke gives us a couple of clues to help us understand what this story was really about. He tells us that Zacchaeus was the chief tax collector of his town and that he was rich. Luke did not need to tell us that he was rich. That was a given because of his chosen profession. If you were here last Sunday, then you heard me say something about tax collectors. Internal Revenue Service agents of our day are not liked. But because they are honest, they are thought better of that the tax collectors of Jesus’ day. The tax collectors of Jesus’ day were local residents hired by the Roman government. The arrangement that they worked under was not a bad one. Of the monies that they collected, they handed sixty percent over to Roman officials and kept forty percent for themselves. So there was an incentive to collect as many taxes as you could. There was also an incentive to be as ruthless as you could. Zacchaeus was enterprising. Luke tells us that he was a chief tax collector. That means that he had other tax collectors working under him. They did the dirty work and he sat back and counted the money. Yes, Zacchaeus was very rich.

He was also hated. That, too, was a given. No one was hated more than tax collectors. They lived off people’s misery. They worked for the enemy. They were considered immoral and sinners. And because they were, they were exiled from the religious community and they were blackballed from social activities. No one would want to go out to dinner and to make small talk with a tax collector. Well, as it turns out, there was one person who wanted to do that. His name is Jesus.

Picture the scene. Jesus is making his way through Jericho. The crowd is pressing in on him. Someone on the edge of the crowd ran ahead, climbed a tree, in hopes of seeing who this Jesus really was. There was no indication that he hoped to have a personal conversation with the savior. Jesus makes his way through that crowd, passes by the tree, looks up and sees Zacchaeus there, holding on to a branch. Jesus stops and calls out to him with these words, “Come on down, Zacchaeus. Let’s do lunch!” If you were there, you would have heard the gasps from the people in the crowd. They are shocked. Jesus has just made lunch plans with an outsider!

I cannot remember the name of the name of the game that I played when I was a kid, but I do remember the object of it. The purpose of it was to form a group of people. These people were to join hands and to try to keep anyone from getting inside their circle. Usually a kid at a time tried to do that. He used all possible means. He tried to crawl under someone’s legs. He tried breaking the grip of the two weakest team members. Sometimes he even lunged over two person’s arms, in hopes of getting inside. It was hard to get inside. Some were successful, but it was very hard to do that. We still play that game. Now it is not a child’s game. It is real and sometimes hurtful. We form our little groups and try our best to keep other people out. Zacchaeus, friends, was an outsider who wanted to be an insider. No one wanted anything to do with him. He was out there on the fringes and unfortunately, he got used to that life.

Luke’s gospel, more than the other three, tells us that Jesus came for the ones on the fringes, the ones who were left out, the ones who were shunned and shut out. Yes, Jesus came for the outsiders. I love the passage of scripture that has Jesus saying, “For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” Being a sinner, in Jesus’ day, was the official category of the left out. Jesus came for the ones on the fringes. Zacchaeus was “officially” there because of what he did. We are on the fringes, sometimes, but there is no official word about it. We are on the fringes, sometimes, just because we feel that we are. The left out game is real, friends. And if you feel that you are there, I have something to say to you. Jesus knows who you are. In fact, he can pick you out of a crowd. He went to the ones who thought that their lives didn’t matter and told them that their lives do matter. He comes to people whose lives naturally gravitate toward the fringes. People who think that they deserve to be a part of something great and wonderful like a community of faith. Now I think that I should say this. Sometimes we are the fringes because of the way that we behave. We behave such a way because we think that it is expected. At other times, we move from the fringes toward the circle. We work hard to do that. With that hard work and a little bit of success, we make it for a while. But then something happens. We feel as if we have lost it all, and head back to the outside, where we belong, or at least where we feel comfortable. Sometimes what makes us head toward the outside is an affair or a divorce. When it happens, we wonder, “What will my friends think? What will the preacher think? Can I ever be whole again?” I have a friend who is in the middle of such a thing. He is a good friend, perhaps one of my best friends. I have called him a hundred times. He will not call me back. In the time since I saw him in April, I have received one e-mail from him. I want to tell him that I am his friend no matter what! Sometimes these situations makes us head for the hills! I wish that that was not the case. Why does it have to be this way?

If you are there, then I have something to say to you. You cannot hide from Jesus. Climbing a tree will not help. He will see you up there and call you down. Staying at home won’t help. Do you think that Jesus doesn’t abide in homes? Immersing yourselves in work won’t help. Jesus tends to hang out in workplaces, too. Jesus will find you in these places, call you down or call you out and in essence say, “There is something that you need to know.” The Bible does not tell us what the lunch conversation was like. Maybe it went like this, “Zacchaeus, I have heard about you. I know all about you. I just want you to know that your debts are forgiven. Whatever it is that you have done immorally in the past is forgiven. The past is the past, so you can forget it. You are free, Zacchaeus. I just want you to know that.” Perhaps Zacchaeus said this back to Jesus, “Lord, I want to do something with this new life that you are offering me. I want to give to the poor half of everything that I have. If I have cheated anyone, I want to make that right, too. I will pay it back, four times the amount.” I think that Jesus would have liked that.

I would like to tell you that this is a stewardship story. After all, the lectionary editors put this story in the fall of the year, the time when churches are thinking about stewardship. And we are still about $50,000 shy of what we know it will take to do our ministry here in 2005. Some of your pledges are still out. Pledge cards are available near the office this morning. It would be easy for me to say, “Be like Zacchaeus, give the church fifty percent. But if you cannot, then ten percent would be just fine.” Yes, I would like to tell you that this is a stewardship story, but it is not. The truth is that it is a story about one man’s salvation and what happens to him when he encounters Jesus, how his life is changed, and how he made it through the open arms of his savior. Let us pray.