Normally, I would begin this sermon with some sort of story or anecdote or point to some crisis that I see in the text that Dick just read and how all of that affects us here in modern life.  And this is even a great week for it because we find ourselves in the middle of the recognizable story of Zacchaeus and as we just heard he was small of stature.  He was short.  And I am straining against the impulse to tell a short joke right now.  But I will hold back, because I am relatively sure you have already heard all the jokes that could be made about little ol’ Zacchaeus.

             That is one of the problems we face with the bible sometimes.  These stories we read week after week and year after year begin to lose meaning for us.  Because of the lectionary, which is a system of reading and preaching through bible in three years, we hear this story almost every three years.  For some of you who have been members of this church and other churches for decades, you may have heard this story maybe dozens of times.  And during that time you have heard all the cute little Zacchaeus stories or jokes you can stand and you heard how people back in bible time were shorter than we are today so this Zacchaeus must have been extra short. So I am not going to go there.  Where I am going to go is on the journey that Jesus is taking in this passage.

            As I mentioned several weeks ago in here and in the Sunday school class, these stories we have been reading lately are a part of a greater narrative journey that Jesus is taking from the north of Israel to the south in Jerusalem in Luke’s gospel.  If you look back at the stories in this section of Luke many of them begin with this phrase “he entered such and such town and was passing through”.  These stories are like a journal of Jesus’ travels as he proceeds to Jerusalem and the cross.  Luke uses the setting to move the story along and connect all the healings, parables, and miracles that Jesus performs.  The recent Lord of the Rings movie trilogy and the books that preceded shows another great example of this device.  Nine hours of movie along an epic journey from the shire to destroy the ring dotted all along the way with adventures and battles. Jesus is on another epic journey. It is a long journey and as Jesus enters the city of Jericho he is approaching its end.  He is maybe twelve miles away from his destination in Jerusalem.  Luke is three-fourths of the way through his gospel.  And it is there that we arrive in Jericho.  A crossroads of the ancient world.  The main east-west crossing north of the Dead Sea.  Archeologists tell us that Jericho is the second oldest continually lived in city in the world dating back to ten thousand before Christ until today.  In Jesus’ time, it was undergoing a renaissance of sorts as palatial villas were being built there, fantastic gardens were being planted, and a great amount of trade was taking place.  One of the men probably at the center of and benefiting the most from this renaissance was Zacchaeus.  He was a tax collector.  We are familiar with those because many of our recent parables have been about tax collectors and we know that they were looked down upon in Jewish society.  We know that they were stereotypically sinners.  Zacchaeus was different.  He was the chief tax collector, a Greek word used no other place in the New Testament.  Not only were people being taxed who lived in Jericho, but as a crossroads anybody that went through the town must pay a toll, as well.  You can imagine the incredible wealth this might generate.  And here we have Zacchaeus profiting from it. In the midst of all of that Jesus arrives.

            The usual crowd is surrounding him, so much so this time that short little Zacchaeus is forced to climb a tree to see him.  One of the nuances of this passage and others where it occurs that gets lost in translation and gets lost in the change of culture is this business about Jesus “passing through” or “passing that way.”  These are evocative words to the Jewish mind.  Many places in the Old Testament scriptures where God is depicted as “passing by” and those moments are of particular importance in the history of Israel.  They are moments when the distant God who is so unapproachable 99% of the time becomes approachable to us and reaches into our lives.  God seeks us out in this world.  And that is just what Jesus does here.  As Jesus is passing through Jericho, he seeks out Zacchaeus, calls him from his tree, and invites himself to Zacchaeus’ house.  Zacchaeus gratefully accepts, says that he will mend his ways, and is saved.  For as Jesus concludes, “the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost.”

            One of the things that is always important in writing sermons and studying the bible is to ask yourself, “who do I identify with in this story?”  Now the way I just told that story, many of us would identify with Jesus.  He was the primary character.  He saves the guy in the end after having sought him out.  He is the hero. He is not short.  Everything is in his favor.  Perhaps the character that is most like us is not Jesus, however, but Zacchaeus.  Now Jesus sees Zacchaeus, seeks him out, and saves him, but Zacchaeus is active in this process too.  In fact, of all the sinners that Jesus saves Zacchaeus is among the most active.  Not only is Zacchaeus looking for Jesus as he arrives in Jericho, he seeks him out and even climbs a tree because he is too short to see him on his own.  Zacchaeus even hosts Jesus at his house and even more remarkably repents of all his sins and promises restitution and to give to the poor. 

            Zacchaeus is the prime example of the human condition.  Sinner who makes his money on the edge of legality, convicted of his sin and wanting something more.  Notice the way this story goes.  Jesus did not get to town, preach about sin, and then Zacchaeus felt bad.  God was already working in Zacchaeus before Jesus even arrived.  Zacchaeus knew he was a sinner and if he had forgotten the other Jews around him would have pointed it out.  In the midst of all of that, he looked for Jesus.  He looked for salvation. And when Jesus found Zacchaeus, Zacchaeus found what he was looking for.  No longer a life of sin, but a new life reborn into grace as a repentant sinner.  Zacchaeus perfectly illustrates for us the interplay of God’s looking and seeking us out for salvation with all of our growing need to look for, seek out, and be saved by God.  The more we become aware of our sins the more we seek out God and realize that God was already looking for us.  This interplay reminds of the final scene of an old John Wayne movie.  I think it was the movie Chisholm.  One of the characters commented that “there was no law west of the pacos and no God west of the Mississippi” to which John Wayne responds “the funny thing about that is that law eventually catches up with you and they find that God has already been there.”  I think that that is true.  I want that to be true.  I want to live in a world where I believe that God is searching out for me in those dark moments of my life where I can’t even comprehend where God might be.  Thankfully, because of the bible and because of this passage I know that God is searching me out.  Looking for me, seeking me to save me. 

            A list was recently released of the most popular bible verses based upon frequency of use on the internet.  John 3:16, the “for God so loved the world” passage, was about twice as popular as any other.  The last verse of this passage, Jesus was sent to seek and save the lost, made the top ten.  I think it did so, not because it gives us a mission statement, but because it comforts us.  It comforts us to know that as we journey through this spiritual pilgrimage looking for and yearning for God and that God is looking for us too.  And that place where we meet, where God and I and all of you meet, that point is a crossroads, which I imagine links back to the setting for our passage. The crossroads town of Jericho.

            In this sermon, I have talked a lot about our individual lives of faith.  How we are constantly seeking out Jesus and how Jesus is constantly seeking us out, as well.  In all that discussion, I have not mentioned the church which plays a vital role in this whole story of salvation and all the faith journeys we are on individually.  The church is God’s chosen method of connecting and growing faithful believers together.  From the earliest days of Christianity, Christians gathered together to worship God and grow in faith.  Through mission and evangelism, we become God’s presence and voice in our communities.  Just as Jesus invited Zacchaeus into relationship, we too are charged to invite people into relationship with us and with this church.  We are charged to be that connecting point or crossroad in people’s lives where the world changes.  Look at the change that happens in Zacchaeus life at Jesus’ invitation.  Look at the transformation.  You can do that too.  We can do that too.  If you want to build a transformed and revitalize congregation here, these moments of connections, these simple conversations are the place that it happens for we too have been sent to seek the lost and show them their salvation.