Scripture can be found here…
Welcome, saints of the church! Today we give thanks for and honor our membership in the household of God, a dwelling and community that transcends time and space.
Interesting, isn’t it? On this day named for saints, we have a gospel passage about a sinner.
Zacchaeus… he was a wee little man, the song and the story tells us, but his impact on the community was large. Outsized. He obtained a mountain of wealth through a shady occupation.
Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector, and tax collectors were hated because they made their living taxing their friends and neighbors, and passing along part of it to the corrupt and hated Roman government. Doing this, they became rich, and they were considered traitors—traitors to their religion, and traitors to their people.
But Zacchaeus—whose name is from a Hebrew word, meaning, “clean,” or “innocent”—he’s curious. Jesus has come to his town, Jericho. Jesus’ reputation has gone before him. People know about his teaching. They know about his healing. They know about the meals he shares with any number from a few to thousands. Zacchaeus wants to see him.
But, as I mentioned, not such a tall man, Zacchaeus. So, he finds a sycamore tree and shimmies up. There are different kinds of trees called “sycamores” around the world. In the Middle East, it’s a variety of fig tree, and the tree’s canopy is large and spreads laterally out from the tree. Its leaves are dense. You could hide in a sycamore tree, if you wanted.
Some Middle Eastern religions consider the sycamore to be sacred. They call it, “The Tree of Life.”
Jesus comes through Jericho, in the midst of a throng, because Jesus is definitely a celebrity at this point, and though there are no paparazzi, there are still multitudes like Zacchaeus, who want to get a look, who maybe, even want more—to be touched, to be fed, to be healed. And Jesus walks straight to the tree and looks up, and spies Zacchaeus, and speaks to him, with, I feel very sure, at least the tiniest hint of a playful smile around the eyes.
“Zacchaeus,” he calls out, “hurry and come down; I’m coming to your house today.” (Luke 19:5)
Now, in our culture, it’s not the usual thing to approach someone you’re meeting for the first time and say, “Guess what? I’m coming over, and I’m going to stay a while.” Neither is it very common for people to invite strangers in—though, there is that rare person who seems to have that level of open-hearted generosity combined with a certain amount of nonchalance about the risks involved. (I learned at her funeral this week that my birth mother, Molly, apparently, was that kind of rare person.)
But in Jesus’ era, the rules of hospitality were different. It was expected that people would offer a very open and extensive welcome to strangers. In a place where the climate could be as hostile as robbers or armies, your life sometimes depended on your being able to present yourself at someone’s tent or someone’s door, asking for shelter or protection. You were even expected to welcome your enemies in this way, because, some day, you might be in the position of needing them to welcome you. Scripture is filled with this kind of story.
Zacchaeus, whether he was hiding or not, appears to be delighted. And off they go.
But here’s where that S-word comes up—not saint, but sinner. And, let’s face it: Jesus is pretty much always hanging around those considered to be the “wrong” people. Just for fun, think about the last place you’d want to be—the worst, most sketchy crowd you can imagine. Of course, that’s exactly where Jesus is hanging out.
That’s the thing about those terms, “saint” and “sinner.” There are these ideas out there that saints are people who are heroes, superstars, Olympians of the faith. And sinners are the scum, the dregs, the bad people you wouldn’t be caught dead with.
But scripture tells us that we are, all of us, both saint and sinner. And saints are simply those of us who are members of God’s household, and that means all of us. Even traditions that venerate particular people as saints seem to notice this. I heard a story this week about St. Alphonsus, a Catholic saint I’d never even heard of before. I wondered what his heroism was all about. Turns out, he was a widower and father, who became a priest at age 40, and for the next 46 years of his life served as porter—doorkeeper—in the College at Valencia. He said, every time he heard a knock at the door, he imagined it was God standing out there, and he welcomed that person as if they were.
Sainthood doesn’t have to be about great heroic acts. It’s about our humanity, which happens to be wrapped up with divinity—because, after all, every human being is made in the image of God.
In the same way, “sinner” doesn’t mean the dregs. It simply means, human. Which is to say, imperfect. Foible-prone.
But to each of us—to all of us—Jesus says, “I’m coming to your house today.” Which is a wonderful reminder that God sees us with eyes of pure love, saints and sinners that we are, both at once. There’s a friendly little debate among scripture scholars about the things Zacchaeus says he will do—half of his possessions to the poor, fourfold reparations for cheating. It turns out, it’s possible Zacchaeus is promising to make amends in the future. But the Greek allows for a translation that Zacchaeus is already doing these things. I love this ambiguous language, because it is a perfect reflection of that loving gaze of God that sees us as we were, as we are, as we could be, as we will be—all at once. We are beheld in love, in all of it, through all of it.
Welcome, saints and sinners of the church! Today we give thanks for and honor our full humanity as God’s children, created in love. And, of course, we honor in love and remembrance those who have gone before us, and who now live in God’s perfect peace. I understand what this means for those of us who have the name of our beloved on this list… or, for that matter, who have ever had the name of a beloved in our hearts, year after year, because love is stronger than death. I know that this day speaks to our grief as well as to our hope. To name our saints, as we will in a few moments, is to say that we live with the loss of these people we love every day, even as our faith assures us that they have now been gathered into another room in God’s household. We miss them, even though we hold to a hope that God whispered into each ear, “You are coming to my house today,” and brought them to a place of joy we can only begin to imagine.
To be a part of this household—to have our hearts joined with others in God’s beloved community—the one we can see, and the one we can’t see—this means that we, even as we live in this world, live in an eternal one, too. Our hearts have gone ahead of us, confident that nothing in all creation can separate us from that love.
May the blessing of the eternal, triune God,
Alpha and Omega,
first and last,
beginning and end,
be with us all.
Thanks be to God. Amen.