Sermon delivered remotely by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of First Reformed Church of New Brunswick, NJ, on October 30, 2022, drawing from Isaiah 1:10-18 and Luke 19:1-10.
There are moments in our collective, social experience to which we all, generally speaking, know exactly how we’re supposed to react. Whether we’re tangibly part of these moments or not, when they happen they touch on all of us and, across bounds of race, background, economics, life experience, or anything else, we all intrinsically, indeed empathically, respond in more or less the same way.
When 9/11 happened, for example, statistically few of us in America were directly impacted by what happened. That morning, I was a high school student living in an old factory town in West Michigan. “New York City” had about the same level of reality to me as “Paris,” “London,” “Vulcan,” or “Minas Tirith;” it had been described to me, sure; I’d seen pictures of it, but I had no grasp of it as a real place. I’d never been there, and I had only heard distant rumor of people who had been - the tall tales of my parents notwithstanding. But, just like everyone else in America, when I watched the towers fall I felt the same mix of terror and anger rise in me. I felt struck, as though I had personally been attacked by whatever then-unknown individual had done so terrible a thing. I had absolutely no real connection to what happened, but the cultural context of the moment overrode my lack of connection so that I still knew exactly what to feel in that moment.
Ten years later, that same emotional experience would come to us again with the death of Osama Bin Laden, the terrorist who masterminded the attacks.
I still remember where I was when the word came out that he had been killed. I was sitting at my desk at the high school where I had been teaching in Tokyo. It was grading season and, as usual, I had finished my grading in about 10 minutes on my iPad while the rest of the teachers manually curved every score by hand because Japanese high-school teachers are notoriously low-tech. I was just sitting there, browsing through Facebook when it happened and friends, I have to tell you, this is where the experience went in a very different direction for me than it did for everyone else here in America.
You see, at that point in time, while everyone else had the benefit of direct access to American news media, and the whole 24-hour news cycle, I did not. Most folks heard that something big was going down, and just turned on the nearest TV and/or news website, so they got to watch it all unfold in real time.
Me, on the other hand? I had no idea that anything was even happening. So while most of the nation was anxiously tuning in to news stations and websites across the country, listening to broadcasters theorize on what this impending “big news” was going to be and forming, moment by moment, that shared cultural context in which the news would be received and understood, I didn’t even know anything was happening until people started posting their reactions on Facebook.
And I gotta tell you, seeing the reactions first without knowing what everyone was reacting to really changed the experience for me. Instead of the joyous, fist-pumping excitement and catharsis that the rest of America seemed to experience in that moment, I found myself feeling a great sort of dissociative terror, much like that feeling you get when you first walk in front of a mirror after a very long day at work (and several months of stress eating) and realize with horror that the way you thought you looked and the way you actually look are wildly, impossibly, terrifyingly different.
It was that sense of “Oh my God! Is that really how I look?” but scaled up to the community level, to the level of the national identity.
I still remember staring blankly at my screen, seeing good, kind, and loving Christians - people I had known my entire life - posting things like;
“His death sees God’s justice done!”
“I wish he could have suffered more, but praise God that he at least got some of what he
deserved!”
“I only wish we could’ve killed him twice!”
Of course, I didn’t yet have the context for these comments, so I didn’t have any way to justify them, to rationalize them, to make them make sense by dipping them into the bubbling miasma of collective emotion that everyone else was experiencing.
All I saw was just the pure, unadulterated hatred of the American community, painted across my screen like a Jackson Pollack made of vengeful fury. And it was seriously disturbing to watch. It was if the whole world had erupted into a sort of hate-fueled madness, drinking in the joy of violence, rejoicing in death and reveling in a complete rejection of the sanctity of life.
Of course, once I figured out who it was that everyone was talking about, once I heard the news for myself, everything made sense. For a moment I was once again in lock-step with the rest of the country, joyous that the great architect of that terrible day had been brought to justice.
But that word…that one word…stuck in my head.
Justice.
And every time that word was used, with every news article, every presidential statement, every Facebook post, every tweet…every time it came up, that same disturbed feeling settled upon my heart. Every time someone cried out that justice had been done, I felt the weight of the violence, the dissonant pressure of a world insisting that this death was right, and good, and true, clashing violently with the voice of God within me insisting that adding death atop death does not divine justice make.
Throughout that day, and on through the week there were prayer vigils, lifting thanks and praise to God for the death of Osama Bin Laden, celebrating up with joy the unnamed soldiers who ended his life and the political institution that had seen this glorious work done.
And there again was that pressure. That unresolved dissonance, like a 4-3 suspension that never drops the third, like plaid pants with a striped shirt, like the original ending to Quantum Leap….every time that word came up it felt like something unnameable, something in the deep magic of our collective souls had been irreparably broken. And no one had noticed.
And as the weekend came to pass, and good Christians from around the country came to church once more, continuing to celebrate the Resurrection we had just marked some three weeks before, as candles were lit in convocation, as assemblies both solemn and divine came together to lift up voices in praise and songs of Alleluia, to unite in prayers of love and peace, and to preach the word of God’s justice…again came that dissonant pressure; the irreconcilable, irreparable brokenness I sensed between my understanding of who and what we were as a people called to follow in the footsteps of the Prince of Peace and what I was seeing now, in the mirror.
Is this what we really look like?
Is this what God really looks like?
While pastors preached on that joyous, wonderful, and mysterious encounter with the resurrected Christ along the road to Emmaus, I felt these words from Isaiah settle uncomfortably over my heart instead:
“Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah! What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord;”
As much as we like to define Sodom and Gomorrah - the “heavy hitters” of sinful nations - as being rooted in sexuality, carnality, or sinful self-indulgence, the truth is that their sinfulness was rooted in a deep, spiritual hypocrisy. They were a great people, wealthy and prosperous, but they reveled in the suffering of others rather than embracing their blessings as the responsibility that all blessings truly are. Rather than allowing themselves as a people to be humbled, and in that humility to allow their hearts and their communities to be opened, they became a people of barriers. They trampled the poor and the needy, violently abused the immigrant and the foreigner, waged war across the region just to feed their ever-growing need for wealth, power, and respect, defining their sense of self by assuming the authority to declare that some of God’s beloved children deserved prosperity and ease, while others did not.
Of course this is nothing more than a history lesson, really. We know, as did the people of Judah to whom Isaiah preached, that Sodom, Gomorrah, and all the cities of the plains were self-absorbed hypocrites who lost sight of the universality of God’s love for humanity, who lost sight of the compassion with which we are called to embrace each other. We know of their unrepentant hearts, their unforgiving minds, and their spirits which had long-rejected the idea that all people should be reconciled to each other under the banner of God’s grace, mercy, and peace.
And we know that God obliterated them for it.
But we always take this history lesson from a safe remove; viewing the spiritual dissonance that inspired the Sodomites to oppress the poor, abuse the immigrant, revel in war, and embrace the hypocrisy of power and privilege, from the perspective of Abraham, far on some distant hill, watching the flames rise with a sad, sad smile.
Oh, those poor, poor other people, who could not heed the word of the Lord.
This is why Isaiah’s proclamation to the people of Judah was so striking in its time. He is telling the descendants of Abraham that the fire once witnessed from a safe distance has risen to consume them too.
And this is why Jesus’ actions in Luke are just as powerful.
When we read this story, we tend to focus on all the wrong bits, render it harmless and adorable rather than letting it be the disturbing example it is meant to be. We teach it to children in Sunday school with cheerful songs about how short Zacchaeus was, so that his attempts to see Jesus can be made non-threateningly cute. We read it as adults determined to make the most of verse 3 saying “he was trying to see Jesus,” building for ourselves a read of Zacchaeus’ character that portrays him as an excited seeker after Jesus, someone eager to repent, and to sit at the feet of the great teacher, rather than an unrepentant oppressor singled out of the crowd.
But, while I’ll grant that the scripture makes a passing mention of Zacchaeus being “short in stature,” pretty much all the rest of that is us reading into the text what we very much want to see. In the scripture, the description of Zacchaeus is shockingly blunt in how little it cares about his spiritual intentions: “he was a chief tax collector and was rich”
Tax collectors were reviled in those days, and not just for the reasons that we might imagine as modern-day Americans. Simply being a tax-collector wasn’t just a by-word in Jewish society for being corrupt, but for being so corrupt that you’d push your own grandma down a flight of stairs just so you could rob her of her last two pennies, jam them into your overflowing pockets, and strut off down the street whistling a jaunty tune ‘cause you’re two cents richer. Tax-collectors were infamous for their willingness to embrace the oppression of others because it rose them to a higher, more comfortable place in society. They defined themselves by their abuses, something they felt entitled to because of the privilege, power, and social position they had as tax collectors in Roman-occupied society. The thing is, tax-collecting wasn’t a well-paying job by itself; you could only get rich off it by embracing the benefits that came with it, and those benefits were the often violent abuse of the poor and vulnerable of society.
Tax-collectors, in short, were actual Sodomites.
So when the scripture notes that Zacchaeus wasn’t just a tax-collector, but that he was rich, it’s telling us that didn’t just hold this at-best morally questionable job, but that he embraced it so fully as to make himself rich in the process.
This changes how we read the rest of the passage, now that we’re not seeing him as “one of the good ones.” His desire to see Jesus pass by now reads more like a morbid fascination at some political figure, not as a desire to embrace the egalitarian teachings of Christ Jesus. His being “happy to welcome” Jesus into his home reads less with the friendly openness and wholesome eagerness of the Lil’ Zacchaeus we met in Sunday school, and more with the predatory smirk of a Ben Shapiro-type ready to build bad-faith justifications for all his abuses and wrap them in the presumed social justification that Jesus’ very presence in his home would seem to grant.
And his argument in verse 8 where he insists that all he has is fairly gained, the first thing he is recorded as having actually said to Jesus, feels an awful lot like a congressman defending the legality of the untold millions he’s made from lobbying, doesn’t it?
So…why is Jesus here? Why does Jesus come to Zacchaeus’ house in the first place and why, once he’s there, does he say that salvation has come to this house?
Well, part of the problem is that English doesn’t really have the same nuance as the original Greek. What we’re given in the Greek is “σωτηρία τῷ οἴκῳ τούτῳ ἐγένετο” (soteria to oiko totou egeneto), which we typically translate as “salvation has come to this house.” However, the verb “has come” here is usually translated this way in English as a matter of convenience, because the verb tense used here doesn’t really have an English equivalent.
There’s a reason why the KJV turns this into “salvation is come” instead.
Of course I’m not a Greek expert, but in reading this bit of nuance I tend to think that what Jesus is stressing here could also be readily understood simply as “salvation comes to this house.”
You see, God’s salvation isn’t especially picky. The love of Christ, the desire of God for repentance, reconciliation and peace doesn’t come to a stop once all peoples righteous and true are aboard. What Jesus Christ is modeling here, in the home of one of the worst people readily to hand, is the extension of God’s love not just to the abused, but to the abuser as well. Not simply to the oppressed, but also to the oppressor.
This is an aspect of God’s universal love that is a much, much tougher pill for us to swallow, if we’re being honest with ourselves.
Most of us, if we fancy ourselves good, and righteous followers of Christ, are invested in a great and terrible conflict today. Whether in America, Japan, or elsewhere in the world, our very identity is at stake as we fight against what I have often described as the theological equivalent of a parasitic infection; this strain of religious belief that holds that we are better than others. This idea that power, privilege, wealth, and social conformity are the boundary condition of God’s unending love, this concept of a God who excludes, condemns, hates and destroys, this thing has become - without hyperbole - perhaps the greatest existential threat to our religion as an organization since Herod got it into his mind to start stabbing babies.
And in this state of terrible conflict we do as all warriors do; we seek out our enemy and bring the fight to them. Rightly or wrongly, we rise to condemn those speak heresy in the name of almighty God. We organize our communities and order our places of gathering so that those who would oppress or condemn may not enter. We throw out the whole person, when their sinfulness is made known, and spare no thought for the human heart that still beats within them.
We cheer for the death of terrorists, make an end to bigots, exile the racists, eat the rich, and stroll right past the homes of the tax collectors without ever stopping to notice the pressure of that spiritual dissonance telling us that maybe, just maybe, as righteous as the anger feels, this isn’t the way God has called us to deal with the evils among us.
Obviously, I’m not saying that the bigots, the racists, the wealthy, the privileged, and the oppressors should be given a free pass to do as they like, that their sins should be excused or that they should be spared from the consequences of their actions.
But how often do we confuse justice, that great launchpad for repentance and reconciliation, with vengeance, which does not belong to us? How often do we assume that the punishment of the sinner is the goal, and not the repentance, healing, reparation and reconciliation that ought to follow?
I think it’s telling that we get so little of Zacchaeus here. There is no indication that Zacchaeus understands that Jesus’ declaration of salvation is an olive branch. In verse 8 he offers to pay back anyone he is found to have defrauded fourfold, but there is no indication that he ever realizes that wealth can be amassed oppressively, cruelly, even predatorily without ever having been done fraudulently or illegally. There isn’t even the slightest suggestion that Zacchaeus commits to changing his life, or following the teachings of Jesus at all.
While we love to imagine that this is a story of repentance, we don’t actually get that in the text itself. We add that ourselves later, because we want there to be a resolution; an ending that makes sense to us. We want that because we want real life to have that. We want to be able to sit down with our racist aunt, our sexist uncle, or that weird cousin who’s constantly posting hateful rants against the LGBTQIA community on Facebook or whatever, have a nice, easy, 10-verse long conversation before putting the issue to bed forever; before agreeing to disagree.
But the journey towards God’s actual justice starts with the mercy we extend to the hateful. It begins with us disciplining ourselves, and reining in the vengeful desires of our hearts so inflamed by real and true injustice and oppression that we can’t imagine doing anything other than punishing the oppressor with the fullness of our wrath. Justice begins when we abandon the easy solution of merciless condemnation of the condemnable, heartless damning of the damnable, and the vengeful and utterly warranted destruction of those who totally deserve it.
We want the fight to be over. We want to kill the terrorist, then turn up in church the next day singing Alleluia to the Lord as though we have done the hard thing. But the harder challenge, perhaps the hardest challenge we may face as Christians in this world, comes in surrendering our premature alleluias, packing away our “mission accomplished” banners, and realizing that the great journey of divine reconciliation begins with the unwarranted mercy of stepping into the house of the oppressor and telling them that salvation comes for them as well, if they are but willing to reach of it.
Being firm in the love and mercy of God absolutely means making sure that the oppressed and the suffering get the first fruits of God’s abundant grace, but that doesn’t mean that the oppressor gets kicked out of the table entirely. Our calling to love the unloved, feed the unfed, and to bring to the table everyone who’s been denied a seat by the wealthy, the privileged, and the powerful doesn’t therefore give us the right to deny seats at the table to others in turn. No matter how right that might feel to us, this table is God’s table; not ours.
In the end, we know that our calling is to build a world on Earth as it is in heaven; to make of our world a place where lion and lamb can lie together in peace, but we don’t get that by making sure there are no lions left in the kingdom. We get that by teaching the lions to peace, the lambs not to fear.
That’s what reconciliation looks like. Conversation, teaching, negotiating, learning from each other, repenting of our sins against God and each other; building together until the eventual realization of our shared dream for all God’s people to live together in unity.
It sucks. The journey is hard. It’s so much easier to cast down the oppressors, the bigots, the hateful, and the cruel, but we are not called to the easy path. We are called by God to the much more difficult path, the path that sees justice done in fellowship renewed, that sees oppression and injustice resolved through reparation and repentance, and which sees mercy and peace obtained not through victory, but through the loving bonds of openness and vulnerability.
But that is who we are.
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