November 18, 2007 - Luke 19: 1-10 "Celebration Sunday"
The Rev. Stephanie E. Parker

What Wondrous Love Is This?

Love changes us. Love opens us up. Love calls us to rise when we fall and love sits with us and holds us when we just can't take IT anymore---whatever "IT" is. Love saves us. I'll say it again---love saves us. Love is the very essence of the Abundant Life of Christ and today we celebrate this miracle. With an open house and open hearts, we open ourselves to God and we celebrate and give thanks!

I looked up the word "celebrate" in the dictionary and it actually painted it in the sacred context, it said to celebrate was to set aside for special religious observances or ceremonies that made a public proclamation of a special event.

So today we as we do no less than make a public proclamation and bear witness to the saving grace of God's love and the power of that love to change us. Today we see our salvation. And in the story of Zacchaeus we see the intersection of what it looks like when perfect love meets a life that has been corrupted by--- who knows what. We don't know why Zacchaeus became a tax collector-the chief tax collector no less.

How and when does someone make the decision to become an outcast to the people and society in which they live? Many people of course never have a choice. They are born into poverty or they are not the "right" color or gender, or nationality or sexual orientation, or the right religion--the list goes on and on. And then bam! Through events most often outside of their control-they find themselves on the outside looking in.

But it looks like Zacchaeus made a choice. And his choice could do no other than to insure that he would be known as a traitor to his people and reviled by most everyone. Was it pure and simple greed? Maybe. Was it a hard luck life that made him feel this was his only choice? Perhaps. The point is of course we just don't know. But if we can wipe the Sunday school images out of our mind of a wee little man up a tree, what we see in Zacchaeus' story is a powerful and poignant portrait of what it looks like to be saved by love.

Frederick Buechner, in his book "Wishful Thinking, A Seeker's ABC" says this about salvation-it is a substantial quote so let's just relax into it and let it speak to us...

Salvation: it is an experience first and a doctrine second. It's doing the work you're best at doing and like doing best, hearing great music, having great fun, seeing something very beautiful, or weeping at somebody else's tragedy-all of these are related to the experience of salvation because in all of them two things happen: (1) you lose yourself, and (2) you find that you are more fully yourself than usual.

A closer analogy is the experience of love. When you love somebody, it is no longer yourself who is the center of your own universe. It is the one you love who is. You forget yourself, you deny yourself. You give of yourself, so that by all the rules of arithmetic and logic there should be less of yourself than there was to start with. Only by a curious paradox there is more. You feel that at last you really are yourself.

The experience of salvation involves the same paradox. Jesus put it like this: " He who loses his life for my sake will find it" (Matt. 10:39). You give up your old self-seeking self for somebody you love and thereby save yourself at last. You must die with Christ so that you can rise with him, Paul says. It is what Baptism is all about.

Loving God is not about tit for tat---I will love God and God will save me---To love God is to be saved. To love anybody is a significant step along the way.

Loving and Living for God is not about getting into heaven, because whichever side of the grave you happen to be talking about-to love and live for God IS Heaven! Salvation is a gift, not an achievement. You can make yourself moral. You can make yourself religious. But you can't make yourself love.

"We love," John says, "because God first loves us" (1 John 4:19).

Who knows how the awareness of God's love first hits people. We all have our own tales to tell, including those who wouldn't believe in God if you paid them. Some moment happens in your life that you say Yes to right up to the roots of your hair, that makes it worth being born just to have it happen. Laughing with somebody till the tears down your cheeks. Waking up to the first snow. Being held close by someone you love.

Whether you thank God for that moment or thank your lucky stars, moments like these are the ones that are trying to open up you whole life. If you turn your back on such a moment and hurry along to Business as Usual, it may lose you the ball game. If you throw your arms around such a moment and bless it, it may save your soul.

And then Buechner poses this question: How about the person you know who as far as you can possibly tell has never had or embraced such a moment---the soreheads and the slobs of the world, the ones that the world has hopelessly crippled? Maybe for that person the moment that has to happen is you.

So I go back to the beginning and I say it again: Love changes us. But now I think I must add that not only does love change us, but that through the power of the love with which God first loves us-our love can change the world.

And we are also back to Zacchaeus. Whatever pain or hardness of heart that had shaped him into a man who would choose a life of isolation and ostracism is melted in a heartbeat when the perfect love of God in Christ calls him down from a tree and breaks bread with him. He opens like a like a flower and receives Jesus--- and his salvation--- with joy. His tightly clenched fists open to receive the love of God and in so doing he lets go of all that robbed his life of vibrancy and vitality and connection.

You know there is a translation difficulty with this passage that is rather curious to me. Our translation says that in Zacchaeus' moment of transformation he promises: "Look, half my possessions I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much." But another equally valid translation says: "Look, Lord, I am giving half my possessions to the poor. And if I have cheated someone of something, I make fourfold restitution."

That Zacchaeus was corrupt we have no doubt, he was, after all, a primary figure in a corrupt system, but this translation hints that in fact greed may not have been the cause. Now I bring this up to make this point...There are a million and one ways that life invites us to fold in on ourselves and self protect---a million and one ways we can decide to clench our fists and shake it to the world around us.

Days like today are custom made for letting all of that go. Today as we celebrate the Abundant Life of Christ and joyfully bring our gifts to God's table we are invited by God and community into a generosity that knows no bounds. I promise you the Abundant Life of Christ can absorb your pain, it can absorb your isolation and it will SAVE you.

So I repeat the invitation that Andrew issued last week. What a beautiful illustration of our life together in Christ. I renew the invitation to approach this holy and joyous table this morning with open hands-hands that are splayed open that can both receive God's love and then allow that love to flow right through our open hands and fingers back out into the world that God so lovingly created.

Listen, do you hear it-that voice of eternal love and endless invitation: People of St. Paul in the Desert, hurry and come down, for I must break bread with you today-Today, once again, salvation has come to this house! Now that is something to celebrate! Amen.