Preached on February 20, 2011 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC as a part of a sermon series preached by senior minister, Dr. John Schluep.
Luke 19:1-10
Introduction
We are in the midst of a series of sermons in which we looking together at how the witness of the scriptures and of our own experiences might paint for us a picture of one way to view the church. In this painting, the church appears before our eyes as a healing center. For all of the wounds that we carry - wounds from things done to us, and things that we have done to others - the church is a place for healing: not a place to cover up the pain, or to distract us from the pain, but a place to heal, and sometimes that healing means that we have to go right through the pain which is at the center of the wound.
Dr. John has been describing this process, the process of cleansing the wound, being honest about our lives through confession, through forgiveness, both received forgiveness and forgiveness given to others, and the process of reconciliation. All of these are a part of healing from our wounds. Today, I want us to think about what God helps us to do to make it right again. I want us to consider this question: after the wounding, what kind of restitution can be made that will help us to heal?
Let us pray: O God of our wounded days and our healing days, we know that there is a time for tearing down and a time for building up, a time to sow and a time to reap. Give us the courage for this time, this day, this hour. Amen.
Zacchaeus is our story today, because Zacchaeus is someone who is wounded. He is wounded both by what has been done to him, and by what he has done to others.
What has been done to him is that he has been shunned by his community. No one likes him, no one acknowledges him, and they pick on the little guy, keeping him in the back of the crowd even though he’s shorter than anyone else and can’t see the famous rabbi who has come to town.
What he has done to them is to collect taxes for the empire. Israel was conquered by the Roman Empire, and now Zacchaeus is collecting the taxes that make Rome richer and Israel poorer. This is kind of like the Star Wars movies (If you will make that leap with me). In Star Wars, a strong empire, led by the emperor and Darth Vader, rules over all the planetary systems in the galaxy, does what it wants with them. And what Zacchaeus has done would be like if Luke Skywalker, instead of becoming a Jedi Knight, had taken a job with the empire and started showing up at all his neighbors’ houses with ten storm troopers behind him, shaking them down for taxes.
Or, if Star Wars isn’t your thing, it’s like Zacchaeus is with the mob, showing up at the neighborhood stores and saying “this is a nice place you got here. It would be a shame if anything happened to it. I bet it’s worth $500 a month to make sure you don’t have any accidents.” The Roman Empire is like having the mob for your government, and that’s only a partial historical exaggeration.
So, that’s what Zacchaeus has done, and maybe he deserves the scorn of all his neighbors. Or, maybe Zacchaeus thinks that they have pushed him around long enough, and he took this job so he could finally get some respect from them after years of being the little guy. And this is the problem with most of the wounds we carry. It’s not always easy to say who’s responsible. Who started it, me or you? Who started it, the person who hurt me, or the person who hurt them before and messed them up?
A few weeks ago, Dr. John preached on the importance of forgiveness in the process of healing, and he defined forgiveness as abandoning all hope of a better past. When we forgive, we accept the past as it is, for better or worse, and we let go of the past, we slip out of the grip that it has on us.
When Jesus comes to Jericho, where Zacchaeus and the community stand against each other, mutually wounded, Jesus doesn’t worry about the past. He doesn’t worry about who deserves blame. Instead, Jesus does a simple thing to restore Zacchaeus to the community. Jesus says that he himself, the famous rabbi that everyone has come out to see, will eat dinner with Zacchaeus.
Sometimes, something happens in our lives to remind us that we are connected to other people, and that they are connected to us. That’s what Jesus did back then, and it’s what God continues to do for us. Whatever wounds we have given each other, we are connected: you to them and them to you. And the next part of the process, the next part of healing from the wounds we carry, is to make things right. Restitution. Restoration of whatever was hurt, or stolen, or broken.
Zacchaeus says “I will give half my money to the poor, and for all the people I have defrauded, I will pay them back four times.” And four times, by the way, comes from the laws of the Old Testament. Zacchaeus wants to make things right. He wants to make restitution.
Now, as we consider restitution, we need to begin by getting rid of bad ideas. We need to say what restitution is not.
First. Restitution is not what we do to earn God’s forgiveness or grace. God does not wait for us to pay our penance, or fix what we’ve done, in order to forgive our sins. That’s not true. What is true is that we are loved, accepted, and forgiven just as we are. Zacchaeus doesn’t make restitution in order to earn the love of Jesus, he does it because it’s a part of his own healing, and the healing of the community.
Secondly, we need to dispel the idea that restitution can make things just the way they were. Restitution will not make things the way they were. There is almost nothing that can be fixed so well that it is like it never happened. Now, if you come to my office and borrow a book, and then your dog chews it up, and so you say “Matt, let me make that up to you” and buy a new copy, that’s like it never happened. But that is small potatoes.
What happens when you have lost or broken something that cannot be replaced? A fragile family heirloom, or a set of letters from the war?
You can’t un-ring a bell. You can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube. You can’t unsay what you have said.
What happens when the damage is intangible, when you have lied to a co-worker, friend, or spouse?
What if there has been abuse in the home?
What if violence has been committed?
What if we have waged war, and the damage is permanent?
So, OK, Zacchaeus can give back four times to the people he has cheated, but what if he has been cheating them for years? What if they have lost their house along the way? What if they lost their jobs and health insurance, and now they walk with a permanent limp because an injury went untreated? Getting their money back now won’t fix those things.
The point of restitution can’t be to make things just the way they used to be. The past is the past, and we need forgiveness. But the past does not have to define us. Our old wounds do not have to define us. And that is why we make restitution. That is why Zacchaeus makes restitution. It’s a way of setting a new course.
I think of Clint Eastwood in the movie Million Dollar Baby, about a stubborn old boxing trainer named Frankie Dunn. No one plays stubborn and hard-edged like Clint Eastwood. In the movie, we learn that Frankie is estranged from his daughter. We don’t know what has happened, but the wounds run deep, and even though he reaches out to her, he can’t make it right. He writes her letters, and they are all returned unopened.
One day, a young woman named Maggie comes to the gym, determined to be a professional boxer. Frankie says “I don’t train girls.” But Maggie keeps coming, and eventually he relents, and then, slowly, he comes to care for her. He gives her the support that she doesn’t get from her family. He gives up much of what he has and who he is for her sake. Just before one of Maggie’s fights, he presents to her a new robe for her to wear for her entrance to the ring. On the back it says Mo Cuishle. Mo Chuishle is a Gaelic phrase that means “my darling, my blood.”
He becomes a father to a woman who needs a father. Restitution. It can come in different forms, and along strange avenues. And just because we cannot undo what has been done, we can work toward restoration in this world. We can work to balance the scales. And in that work, we find healing.
In this congregation’s work with veterans, some of those who have been in war seek to make restitution as a part of their healing. If war has made orphans of children, then let us provide for the care of children in that country: schools and orphanages. Restitution.
If we have been hurt and wounded by others, then let us allow the wounding to stop with us. Instead of retaliation, let us choose restoration. Is there any more holy work, than to make right this broken world, in whatever way we can. Never are we closer to God. And here’s the amazing truth. When we work to restore things out in the world, we find healing in ourselves. And then, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, “your light will break forth like the dawn. You will be called repairer of the breach, and restorer of streets to live in.”
Monday, February 28, 2011
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Sermon - Made in Heaven
Preached on January 16, 2011 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC.
Genesis 1:1-5 and John 1:1-5
When you think about the world, taking everything into account, do you think that the world is basically a good place or a bad place? Is this basically a sacred world into which terrible things intrude, or is the world basically a broken and evil place in which moments of goodness are the exception?
Maybe you remember the joke that Woody Allen tells at the beginning of the movie Annie Hall. "Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says 'Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.' The other one says 'Yeah, I know. And such small portions.'" Allen’s character goes on to say “that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.”
We all know that life in this world is a mix of both goodness and evil, both joy and suffering. But which is the starting place? Deep down, is the world a sacred and holy place, or not? How you come down on that question makes a real difference, I think, because if you believe that the world is basically a broken and evil place (and I know that you can make a strong argument for that) then the sensible response is to escape the world, to find a safe place and hunker down. If you have this view, then you might see the sanctuary as a haven of sacredness, a place to find rest from the hardship and pain of the world, a place to be close to the God who is absent from the world outside.
But, on the other hand, if you believe that the world is basically a good and sacred place, then you come to church in order to celebrate the sacredness that surrounds you all the time. You come to thank God for being present to us everywhere. And if the week has been a hard one, then you come to remember the deep down goodness and gift of life.
The witness of the scriptures affirms this second view. Today we heard the opening words of Genesis, which proclaims that the world comes from God from the very beginning. I don’t believe that Genesis is a scientific story that explains how life arose on this planet; it is a theological story that proclaims God’s work in all the universe, and tells us that this world is shot through with the goodness of God from the very first word: let there be light.
And then there’s the gospel of John. These opening words from John’s gospel are interesting, because we find them to be beautiful and much loved, we also find them difficult to understand. They fall on our ears like poetry, and like poetry, they contain layers of meaning. The gospel begins with those words from Genesis: “In the beginning.” He’s quoting Genesis, so we know that this is going to be a universal kind of proclamation about what the world is and where it came from.
“In the beginning was the Word.” Now, in the original Greek language of the New Testament, it says “In the beginning was the Logos.” Logos is a Greek word that has a great depth of meaning. It means wisdom and intelligence, the unifying order of reason and creativity. Logos is a creative power. So in the beginning was this creative power.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” You probably already know that in just a few verses, the gospel is going to tell us that this Word becomes flesh in the life of Jesus, and that’s why there’s this confusing language about how the Word is both with God and is God. That’s how we understand Jesus. Jesus is with God, and Jesus is God.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” In other words, the world is God’s creation, all of it made by Christ, and it is good.
And now listen to the next sentence, and how it makes room for the mixed experience of life. “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
So, where did the darkness come from? The gospel doesn’t say. It says that the Word, which is life and light, created everything we know. So you would think that everything in the universe would be light and life, wouldn’t you? That would be the logical conclusion. But that would be false. We know that there is darkness, which is to say brokenness, suffering, ignorance, and evil. Wherever it came from, it is here. But the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. In just a few lines, the gospel describes our life as a mix of sacredness and brokenness, light and dark, but it proclaims that the goodness of God is at the center.
We come to worship in order to celebrate the sacredness of the world. That’s not to say that we never need the church to be a safe haven of escape. I know that some of you came to church last Sunday, and again this Sunday, with a great burden of grief for the victims of the shooting in Arizona. And there are some among us every Sunday who come with the specific burdens of their lives: grief, loneliness, anger. Sometimes we come to the sanctuary with our burdens, needing a place to be at rest and at peace, and that is what this place should be. But there is a problem with viewing the church only as a place for escaping the difficulties of life, and that is when we turn faith into just one more means of escape, alongside other ways of escaping the pain of life, from mindless entertainment to food, to cynicism, to alcohol and drug abuse. The danger is that church could become a way of shutting ourselves off from the presence of God in all of the world, when church should be the place that reaches out beyond these walls.
Some of you have told me that this is a place that helps you to see life with the right kind of eyes, to see the world as God’s gift to us, even with its hardships. In those weeks when it seems like all of your best efforts achieve nothing, worship reminds you that your work is a holy calling. When the people closest to you are driving you crazy, worship reminds you that these are sacred bonds of family and friendship. When the news is full of senseless heartache, worship reminds you that there is an ultimate order to our lives, watched over by God. Sometimes we lose our sight, and we turn to Jesus to restore our vision.
Some of my favorite stories speak of the same truth. I think George Bailey in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. We’re past Christmas now, so you won’t see it on tv for awhile. But I’m sure many of you remember the story of George, frustrated by his limited opportunities in Bedford Falls, and hounded by Mr. Potter. On Christmas Eve, a business mistake becomes a crisis and threatens to send him to jail. In his panic, he loses sight of the goodness that is all around him, until an angel shows him what the world would look like if he had never been born. Do you remember how this vision changes George, and how he celebrates his life, even when he still thinks he’s losing his business and going to jail? He runs through the streets yelling Merry Christmas to everyone, even old man Potter, and then he goes home and grabs his children close, and he is ready to turn himself over for arrest with a smile on his face, until his wife comes home, followed by all of the love and support of the whole town. The world is a sacred place.
I know many of you have also been surprised by the amount of care and support that surrounds you when your own life was in crisis. It was always there; you simply hadn’t seen it.
I was a junior in High School when we were assigned to read the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder. I went back to it this week, and read that scene at the end, in which we meet the townspeople who have died, and they are talking, and Emily, who is the most recently deceased, asks them if she can go back and relive a day from her life. Yes, you can, they tell her, but be careful, because it is so good, so wonderful, that it can be difficult.
Emily chooses her twelfth birthday. The first thing she hears is her mother calling up from the kitchen for the children to wake up for school. She hears her mother’s voice, telling her where to find her hair ribbon, chiding her to hurry, and all she can think is how beautiful is her mother’s voice, and how young she looks, and how sacred was every single day. “Oh earth,” she says “you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?”
That is a holy way of seeing, and of celebrating our lives and this sacred world! And God knows I need God to help me with those kinds of eyes, to see not just the church as sacred, but also the sunshine and the snow, the mountains and valleys, to see every regular family task as a fortunate moment to cherish each other, to see holiness in the faces of neighbors in these pews, and strangers I pass on the street. It was Gandhi who said that “If you don't find God in the next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him further.”
Have you ever seen an old photograph and been amazed at how lucky you were back then to be at that age, and to be in that particular place, and to be with those people. You’ve felt that, haven’t you? Remember that we will feel that way later when we look back on this day. What a gift it is to be alive on this day.
This is a sacred world. And yes, there is also evil and pain and brokenness, but healing from those things does not come from hiding out in the sanctuary. Healing comes when we find the strength from God to invest ourselves in the sacredness of the whole world; to see the world as it truly is and to give ourselves to it.
When Christ came into this world, when Christ became flesh and dwelt among us, he was not coming as a stranger from heaven to earth, he was coming home, to a home that he had made himself. He did not come to save us from the world. He came to save us for the world. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it!
Genesis 1:1-5 and John 1:1-5
When you think about the world, taking everything into account, do you think that the world is basically a good place or a bad place? Is this basically a sacred world into which terrible things intrude, or is the world basically a broken and evil place in which moments of goodness are the exception?
Maybe you remember the joke that Woody Allen tells at the beginning of the movie Annie Hall. "Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says 'Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.' The other one says 'Yeah, I know. And such small portions.'" Allen’s character goes on to say “that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.”
We all know that life in this world is a mix of both goodness and evil, both joy and suffering. But which is the starting place? Deep down, is the world a sacred and holy place, or not? How you come down on that question makes a real difference, I think, because if you believe that the world is basically a broken and evil place (and I know that you can make a strong argument for that) then the sensible response is to escape the world, to find a safe place and hunker down. If you have this view, then you might see the sanctuary as a haven of sacredness, a place to find rest from the hardship and pain of the world, a place to be close to the God who is absent from the world outside.
But, on the other hand, if you believe that the world is basically a good and sacred place, then you come to church in order to celebrate the sacredness that surrounds you all the time. You come to thank God for being present to us everywhere. And if the week has been a hard one, then you come to remember the deep down goodness and gift of life.
The witness of the scriptures affirms this second view. Today we heard the opening words of Genesis, which proclaims that the world comes from God from the very beginning. I don’t believe that Genesis is a scientific story that explains how life arose on this planet; it is a theological story that proclaims God’s work in all the universe, and tells us that this world is shot through with the goodness of God from the very first word: let there be light.
And then there’s the gospel of John. These opening words from John’s gospel are interesting, because we find them to be beautiful and much loved, we also find them difficult to understand. They fall on our ears like poetry, and like poetry, they contain layers of meaning. The gospel begins with those words from Genesis: “In the beginning.” He’s quoting Genesis, so we know that this is going to be a universal kind of proclamation about what the world is and where it came from.
“In the beginning was the Word.” Now, in the original Greek language of the New Testament, it says “In the beginning was the Logos.” Logos is a Greek word that has a great depth of meaning. It means wisdom and intelligence, the unifying order of reason and creativity. Logos is a creative power. So in the beginning was this creative power.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” You probably already know that in just a few verses, the gospel is going to tell us that this Word becomes flesh in the life of Jesus, and that’s why there’s this confusing language about how the Word is both with God and is God. That’s how we understand Jesus. Jesus is with God, and Jesus is God.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” In other words, the world is God’s creation, all of it made by Christ, and it is good.
And now listen to the next sentence, and how it makes room for the mixed experience of life. “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
So, where did the darkness come from? The gospel doesn’t say. It says that the Word, which is life and light, created everything we know. So you would think that everything in the universe would be light and life, wouldn’t you? That would be the logical conclusion. But that would be false. We know that there is darkness, which is to say brokenness, suffering, ignorance, and evil. Wherever it came from, it is here. But the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. In just a few lines, the gospel describes our life as a mix of sacredness and brokenness, light and dark, but it proclaims that the goodness of God is at the center.
We come to worship in order to celebrate the sacredness of the world. That’s not to say that we never need the church to be a safe haven of escape. I know that some of you came to church last Sunday, and again this Sunday, with a great burden of grief for the victims of the shooting in Arizona. And there are some among us every Sunday who come with the specific burdens of their lives: grief, loneliness, anger. Sometimes we come to the sanctuary with our burdens, needing a place to be at rest and at peace, and that is what this place should be. But there is a problem with viewing the church only as a place for escaping the difficulties of life, and that is when we turn faith into just one more means of escape, alongside other ways of escaping the pain of life, from mindless entertainment to food, to cynicism, to alcohol and drug abuse. The danger is that church could become a way of shutting ourselves off from the presence of God in all of the world, when church should be the place that reaches out beyond these walls.
Some of you have told me that this is a place that helps you to see life with the right kind of eyes, to see the world as God’s gift to us, even with its hardships. In those weeks when it seems like all of your best efforts achieve nothing, worship reminds you that your work is a holy calling. When the people closest to you are driving you crazy, worship reminds you that these are sacred bonds of family and friendship. When the news is full of senseless heartache, worship reminds you that there is an ultimate order to our lives, watched over by God. Sometimes we lose our sight, and we turn to Jesus to restore our vision.
Some of my favorite stories speak of the same truth. I think George Bailey in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. We’re past Christmas now, so you won’t see it on tv for awhile. But I’m sure many of you remember the story of George, frustrated by his limited opportunities in Bedford Falls, and hounded by Mr. Potter. On Christmas Eve, a business mistake becomes a crisis and threatens to send him to jail. In his panic, he loses sight of the goodness that is all around him, until an angel shows him what the world would look like if he had never been born. Do you remember how this vision changes George, and how he celebrates his life, even when he still thinks he’s losing his business and going to jail? He runs through the streets yelling Merry Christmas to everyone, even old man Potter, and then he goes home and grabs his children close, and he is ready to turn himself over for arrest with a smile on his face, until his wife comes home, followed by all of the love and support of the whole town. The world is a sacred place.
I know many of you have also been surprised by the amount of care and support that surrounds you when your own life was in crisis. It was always there; you simply hadn’t seen it.
I was a junior in High School when we were assigned to read the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder. I went back to it this week, and read that scene at the end, in which we meet the townspeople who have died, and they are talking, and Emily, who is the most recently deceased, asks them if she can go back and relive a day from her life. Yes, you can, they tell her, but be careful, because it is so good, so wonderful, that it can be difficult.
Emily chooses her twelfth birthday. The first thing she hears is her mother calling up from the kitchen for the children to wake up for school. She hears her mother’s voice, telling her where to find her hair ribbon, chiding her to hurry, and all she can think is how beautiful is her mother’s voice, and how young she looks, and how sacred was every single day. “Oh earth,” she says “you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?”
That is a holy way of seeing, and of celebrating our lives and this sacred world! And God knows I need God to help me with those kinds of eyes, to see not just the church as sacred, but also the sunshine and the snow, the mountains and valleys, to see every regular family task as a fortunate moment to cherish each other, to see holiness in the faces of neighbors in these pews, and strangers I pass on the street. It was Gandhi who said that “If you don't find God in the next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him further.”
Have you ever seen an old photograph and been amazed at how lucky you were back then to be at that age, and to be in that particular place, and to be with those people. You’ve felt that, haven’t you? Remember that we will feel that way later when we look back on this day. What a gift it is to be alive on this day.
This is a sacred world. And yes, there is also evil and pain and brokenness, but healing from those things does not come from hiding out in the sanctuary. Healing comes when we find the strength from God to invest ourselves in the sacredness of the whole world; to see the world as it truly is and to give ourselves to it.
When Christ came into this world, when Christ became flesh and dwelt among us, he was not coming as a stranger from heaven to earth, he was coming home, to a home that he had made himself. He did not come to save us from the world. He came to save us for the world. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it!
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