The Church of Litchfield Park, Litchfield Park, Arizona

Zaccheus works for the I.R.S. of the first century. But more damning than that is the fact that he works for the Romans, the occupying force of Palestine. Zaccheus has the franchise for Jericho. As I understand it, it was a cost-plus operation. He paid so much for the franchise, so much to the Romans every month, and the rest he kept for himself. It was a case of all-the-traffic-could bear, and Zaccheus made sure it bore plenty.

He is a thief and a traitor to his people. He is considered corrupt. His own neighbors believe that he has abandoned them for the Romans, and in so doing, he has forfeited his status as a faithful Jew. He’s on his way to hell, that’s for sure, and every time his name is mentioned, it’s always with a sneer.

When he was born, his mother gave him the name “Zaccheus,” which means “the righteous, the good, the pure.” But a mother’s hope had plummeted into just a servant of money and Rome.

And isn’t that part of the first problem in this story? Everybody knows Zaccheus. Or at least they think they do. Tax collector. Agent of Rome. Corrupt. They have defined him, then the pushed the off switch. No matter what else he might be: good father, caring husband, struggling to create a safe and secure life in the midst of a dangerous and precarious world....none of that matters. They have labeled him and that was that.

Don’t we do that a lot with each other?. Sum up others in ways that erode their humanity. Children get tagged as behavior problems, as impossible. A little fellow was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up and with sad eyes, he said, “Possible.”

Just possible. You hear it among the young, so cruel to each other. Jock, nerd, jerk. And in more subtle ways, we do it as adults. “She’s the talker. He’s so self-centered. She’s a little ditzy.”

And so we sum each other up, make caricatures of each other. We do not seek to understand each other’s complexity, our hidden struggles and beauty. We don’t need to do that for we have already made up our minds about each other.

Labels are always dangerous, because they are always divisive. Labels like failure, insensitive, racist, heretic, agnostic, black, white, feminist, chauvinist......they are dangerous because they reduce human beings into categories instead of viewing each person as precious, irreplaceable jewel.

Tax collector. That summed it up. We know him. Now, let’s move on.

But there is something different about this tax collector. Rather than being satisfied with the status quo, there is a yearning within him. For all his wealth, it still hasn’t brought him the contented life. We know this because we know something about the culture of the day. And there were two things a mature male never did: Run in public, and climb trees.

Some of us don’t do that today (or can’t). But he still could and he did. Which indicates that he was willing to be a little foolish in his search for a meaningful life.

God never comes to us when we are comfortable, self-satisfied, and self-sufficient. God comes to us most vividly when we are discontent, when we are yearning, when we are hungry for spiritual sustenance.

“If with all your heart you truly seek me,” the prophet writes, “you shall surely find me.”

Robert Raines, a United Methodist pastor received a letter one day that read: “I remember a poignant Sunday not too long ago. My depression engulfed me, a deep, dark fog with no glimmer of light. It took every ounce of energy I had just to get up and go to church, but I needed help. I got it. You said you loved a person because he was still searching. I knew you loved me because I was still searching...blindly to be sure. I needed that. To have someone say at that at that time was priceless.....I needed that to give me a hand-hold and a toe-hold.”

Old Zach was still searching. He had heard rumors about the man from Nazareth, that he was something special, someone sent by God. But he had to see for himself.

But he was short, or as we say today, he was vertically challenged. How could he see over the shoulders of the crowd gathered to watch Jesus enter into Jericho? He couldn’t. With his name, his reputation, his lack of stature in town, he was destined to be jostled and elbowed and smothered in the crowd.

So he swallows his pride, and runs on ahead of the crowd, and climbs a tree. It had to be a ridiculous sight, hanging there in the branches in the middle of the street. And while he is hanging there in the most improbable of places, he has the most improbable of experiences. He meets Jesus.

Jesus spies the little man dangling from the branches, and invites himself to dinner. We miss the impact of this event because eating together no longer has the symbolic and social power it had in that day. In the ancient middle east, to eat with someone else was to offer friendship, intimacy, to pledge one’s life to another. And Jesus did that with Zacchaeus, as he did with another whole band of frail, imperfect and insecure people...on the last evening of his life...in an upper room.

He went to dinner with Zaccheus. Which is why the crowd was so upset. “He had gone into the house of one who is a sinner,” that is, someone who doesn’t belong to them or God. When you study Luke you see that much of the opposition against Jesus was mounted because of his eating habits, his determination to include those who were excluded, his acceptance of those outside the norms and conventions of society.

So the God we see in Jesus is the one who takes a chance on us when no body else does, one who pursues us, one who embraces us, one who forgives us.

Listen. No matter how confused we are, no matter how much we have messed up, no matter where we have been, God doesn’t abandon us. We are loved passionately and unconditionally, just as we are.

A successful and hard-charging business man looked back over his life and said, “I have tried to live my whole life refuting what my father constantly said to me as a child, ‘You will never amount to anything’.”

What a legacy from a parent. But we all get those messages from parents, from friends, from people around us. Some are subtle. Some are overt. “You are no good. You will never amount to anything. Why can’t you be like your sister? What’s the matter with you anyway.”

And so we do everything to find acceptance and affirmation. We try to find it in the way we look, in our jobs, from our friends.

But our looks change as we grow older, and even the most exquisite model on Vogue magazine will have wrinkles some day. Jobs come and go; we can be doing exceptionally well in our work and the company can shut down. Even the best of friends can turn on us.

If we try to find our identity and our contentment from anything outside, we will always be subject to the whims of fortune and the moods of other people. Only one thing is constant. Only one thing is sure. And that is who we are in Christ. For in Christ we are loved as if there were only one of us in the entire universe to love. Listen to this paraphrase of Romans 8:

“For I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from his love. Death can’t, and life can’t. The angels won’t, and all the powers of hell itself cannot keep God’s love away. Our fears for today, our worries about tomorrow, or where we are–high above the sky, or in the deepest ocean–nothing will ever be able to separate us from the love of God demonstrated by our Lord Jesus Christ when he died for us.”

And why did Jesus really go home with Zaccheus? He had an agenda he wanted to spring on Zaccheus. He wanted Zaccheus to revise his estimate of himself. He wanted Zaccheus to recalculate his worth based on how Jesus saw him, and not anybody else. He wanted Zaccheus to know that someone believed in him, someone saw that he could be more than he had been--a cheat and a traitor. Lloyd Douglas captures the gist of it in his novel, “The Mirror.”

“Zaccheus,” said the carpenter gently. “What did you see that made you desire this peace?”

“Good master, I saw mirrored in your eyes the face of the Zaccheus I was meant to be.”^[1]

Jesus is offering Zaccheus the one and only way toward self-worth and affirmation: unconditional embrace and unqualified acceptance. Zaccheus then was on the road to change, a change that came about not because some preacher scolded him, not because some law judged him, not because some friend exhorted him, but because of a risky love that believed he could be the person God made him to be.

I know this is an old story, but I think we need to hear it every now and then. We need to hear that however low we have fallen, or however high we have risen, it makes no difference in the eyes of God. For God’s son, Jesus Christ, offers us self-worth. It’s not something we earn. It’s not something we deserve. That’s quite a thought, to know that JESUS CHRIST BELIEVES IN US. As William Butler Yeats put it, “I have believed the best of every man, and find that to believe the best is enough to make a bad man show himself at his best or even a good man swing his lantern higher.”

Thomas Edison was working on his first light bulb. To the amazement of his colleagues he handed his first finished bulb to a young helper, who nervously carried it upstairs to a vacuum machine. At the last moment, the boy dropped it. The whole team had to work 24 hours to make the bulb again. When Edison looked around for someone to carry the bulb upstairs again, he selected the same boy. That gesture probably saved that boy’s life. Edison knew that there was far more than a bulb at stake.

That’s the Jericho way. That’s the Jesus way. That’s what all of us need: not more criticism, although God knows we aren’t perfect; not exhortation to do better, although God knows we can. We don’t need any of that. What we need most is what God in Jesus Christ continually offers us: a self-worth that the world can never give nor take away. Someone is calling us today. Can you hear him? “Come on down from that sycamore tree, because I love you a lot, and I want to come to your house for dinner.”