Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The great feast which we mark today, All Saints’, has become a sort of hybrid celebration. On the one hand, we remember the faithful departed, which is really what All Souls’ Day (the day after All Saints’) is about, but it’s good and proper as far as I can tell because Scripture tells us that we are all saints (with a small “s”) by virtue of our Baptism.

That said, the historic focus on this Holy Day has not been on all the faithful departed but on that peculiar group of women and men before whose names we put a capital “S”, “Saint”. We are all, scripture tells us small “s” saints, but we also recognize that there are women and men of special virtue whose memory ought to be celebrated. It is a great part of our tradition, so I’d like us to focus on that for just a minute.

First, what does it mean to be a Saint? Well it comes from the Latin “Sanctus” meaning “holy”. The word in New Testament Greek which was eventually translated into “sanctus” or “holy” is “hagios” which simply means “set apart”. From an anthropological standpoint, there has since humanity became civilized six or seven millenia ago been a sort of preternatural drive to set certain things apart from ordinary, profane things. This probably started with reverence for the dead, but developed to include tribal rituals and the like which were defined by what French sociologist Emile Durkheim termed “communal effervescence.” So, it seems that something about us means that we need to be able to set things apart, to distinguish the sacred from the profane.

As Christians, though, we believe that there is something in addition to the way we evolved as a species and became civilized which creates this need. In short, we set things apart because there really are “holy things.” There is something objectively, ontologically different about certain aspects of our individual and communal lives. There is something different and special and real about what goes on at the altar, which is why we have a sanctus (or “holy”) candle up there and why we ring sanctus (or holy) bells and why we have holy water fonts right by the church doors to remind the faithful both of the fact that this space is holy (set aside for worship) and that we are holy (set aside for God in Baptism).

But why holy people? Why capital “S” Saints if we are already set apart, made small “s” saints in Baptism? It seems somewhat undemocratic, doesn’t it. Well, first of all, there are some ways in which Christianity as we have received it from Jesus and the Apostles is egalitarian and some ways in which it just isn’t. We are all part of the body, of the priesthood of all believers and there isn’t any human being who is superior or inferior to any other in the final analysis. But we do have a hierarchical church and a hierarchical priesthood and it seems to me that a faithful reading of Scripture and of the Tradition of the Church suggests that this is as it should be. Most importantly, we have Christ as the head of our body. Christ is our King, not our duly elected president who happened to get enough votes from the apostolic electoral college.

There are those whom Christ calls to a special order of ministry, to represent Himself to the people. For one thing, that’s why we have an educated, trained, ordained, professional college of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons in the Church. This is (to me, anyway) not a source of pride but of the most intense terror and sense of unworthiness imaginable.

There are also those whom Christ calls to be His most special representatives to a particular time and place and situation and whose lives of devotion can serve as a model for the rest of us. Or, as our Book of Common Prayer eloquently puts it, there are some called to be “the chosen vessels of [God’s] grace, and the lights of the world in their generations.” Some of us, myself included, call on these men and women to intercede for us, just as many ask a friend or a priest to pray for them or a loved one. For others, this is not a part of their piety, but the examples of the Saints can still instruct and inspire us. The courage of the martyrs, the wisdom of church doctors, the temperance of virgins, the fervor of evangelists, the conviction of those who work for Christ’s reign of justice and peace, should stir up in us the will and wherewithal to be vessels of God’s grace in our own generation. Their emulation of and commitment to our Lord and Savior should inspire us to be a little bit unsatisfied being small “s” saints. Our godly discomfiture should spur us on to try to be capital “S” Saints [just like that sweet hymn we just sang said , “I mean to be one, too]. Most of us won’t make it, which is okay, but we may find a greater satisfaction when we rest from all our labors, and know that we did our level best to confess before this world the name of Jesus.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The last time this Gospel came up I made a radical suggestion–namely, that though we have always assumed that Zacchaeus was short, and that’s why he climbed the tree to see Jesus, it is entirely possible that Jesus was the short one. It is unclear in the language of the Greek original to whom the pronoun “he” in “because he was small of stature” refers. Being of below average height myself, I like this alternate reading, obviously. It also dovetails nicely with my sermon last week, in which I said that tax collectors in First Century Palestine were thugs who extorted money from the people. It’s easier to imagine a big burly geezer wringing money out of someone than it is to imagine a “wee little man” doing the same.

It doesn’t really matter who the short one was, though, as one needn’t be tall to be intimidating. Nota bene: Bruce Lee, Winston Churchill, and Alexander the Great were all the same height as I am, and Lawrence of Arabia was a couple inches shorter. The point is, like I said last week, that tax collectors were known for the fear they inspired, so Zacchaeus, whatever his height, should be thought of as a rough customer you wouldn’t want to cross, rather than a cute little fellow from a Sunday School song. We don’t get the full impact of the story unless we recognize that Zacchae’us was a frightening, nasty guy in the eyes of the crowd.

“And when they saw it, they all murmured, ‘he has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.’” It’s this sort of person Jesus came to seek and save.

And Zacchae’us, unprovoked, not yet confronted by Jesus, knows what will be coming when the Lord arrives at his house later on. The mere presence of Jesus is enough to bring conviction into the heart of this hardened source of terror and abuse. “If I have defrauded any one of anything,” he says, “I restore it fourfold.” This would have been his obligation under the Mosaic Law, as it is recorded in the twenty-second chapter of Exodus: “If a man shall steal…a sheep, and kill it, or sell it; he shall restore…four sheep for a sheep.” So, here, Zacchae’us is promising to remit his debt according to the law. But his other promise is not simply the fulfillment of an obligation, but a gift of penance and thanksgiving: “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor.” Such grace from such a bully!

There are a number of things we can learn from this: none of us is beyond saving; the proper response to receiving grace is to give graciously- an important thing to remember as we are asked once again to consider our commitment of time, talent, and treasure to Christ’s church; simply opening up to God’s presence will convict us and set us right. But, I think, the most important thing for many of us to learn is that we cannot permit our prejudice to make us deny God’s ability to turn around the lives of those most unlovely to us. That chap you know who’s been in and out of prison; the guy who gets into fisticuffs down at the bar; the drug dealer; the terrorist. God can save them, too. He can turn them into gracious, charitable people, just like he did for that nasty chief tax collector in Jericho. If we don’t hold out hope for “those people”, if we don’t see them as having the potential to be better men and women than us, then we think we can limit the power of God, and that, my friends, is a losing proposition.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

To get the full impact of the parable Jesus tells in this morning’s Gospel, I think we need to step back and examine the preconceptions with which we enter into the story today. “Two men went up into the temple to pray,” Jesus says, “one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.” Even if we hadn’t heard this particular parable a hundred times, we’d know who’s supposed to be the good guy and the bad guy, right? Well, no. If you’ve grown up in the Church you might have a pretty strong sense that Pharisees were Jesus’ enemies, the “bad guys.” They have come to be regarded as a lot of hypocrites.

But, Jesus never denounced the Pharisees as a whole, only individual Pharisees. To his audience, the Pharisees were well-respected religious leaders, and I think they’re due for a bit of rehabilitation in our own day. Yes, they were a bit rigid. But, if nothing else, they were on the whole a faithful group of religious Jews who spent a great deal of energy in their quest to abide by God’s law. At the beginning of the story, Jesus’ audience would have assumed the Pharisee was going to be the good guy.

And then there’s the tax collector. We know that tax collectors were not well-loved by Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries, but I don’t think we know the extent of their unrighteousness. To us, taxes are a necessary evil. None of us likes paying taxes, but it’s for the common good and the men and women who work for the Internal Revenue Service are doing an important job.

Tax collectors in Jesus’ day were not just officious bureaucrats executing a necessary task. They were thugs. You see, the Roman Empire would have told these tax collectors how much they expected from each taxpayer, and then it was up to the individual tax collector to determine by how much he would overcharge each of them. His salary would basically be how much extra money he could collect through extortion. The Empire understood that this was the case, and would encourage the tax collector to wring as much out of his already overtaxed compatriots as he could.

So, Jesus sets his audience up to expect the opposite of what he gives them in the parable. We have a good, faithful person and a thug, and a standard view of justice would hold that the Pharisee—whom we can assume was being honest about fasting and tithing and so forth—would go home from the temple justified, and that the tax collector would get his just deserts. Perhaps the Pharisee was being a bit haughty, but he had earned the right to be proud of his faithful obedience.

Jesus turns the expectation of his audience on its head, and we can assume that they didn’t like what they heard. We wouldn’t if we were in their shoes.

It all gets back to that same old struggle we have in accepting how God works. As much as we might affirm the fact that our salvation is not our own doing, that our justification is a gift from God rather than a reward for our goodness, we never seem to believe it deep down. And, sometimes, our religion can have the opposite effect of what religion ought to have. It can convince us that we are righteous people set up to reap the rewards of our righteousness, rather than sinners in need of saving. It is paradoxical, but it seems that the best among us can have the hardest time being justified. The tax collector knew that he was a sinner, and could say the one prayer that really meant anything besides “look at me, ain’t I grand.” He could say that prayer which needs to be on the tip of our tongues, too: “God, be merciful to me a sinner!” When we can get beyond being impressed with how good we are, we can say that, and we can remember how merciful God has always been to us.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.