Sodom and Zacchaeus

Isaiah 1:10-18

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; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation - I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to of good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. Come now, let us argue it out, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become wool.

Psalm 32:1-7

Happy are they whose transgressions are forgiven, and whose sin is put away! Happy are they to whom the LORD imputes no guilt, and in whose spirit there is no guile! While I held my tongue, my bones withered away, because of my groaning all day long. For your hand was heavy upon me day and night; my moisture was dried up as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and did not conceal my guilt. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD.”  Then you forgave me the guilt of my sin. Therefore all the faithful will make their prayers to you in time of trouble; when the great waters overflow, they shall not reach them. You are my hiding place; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with shouts of deliverance.

2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12

Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, to the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing. Therefore we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith during all your persecutions and the afflictions that you are enduring. To this end we always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Luke 19:1-10

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.” Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”

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It would sure be convenient not to have had the first reading this morning about Soddom and Gomorrah, just to focus on the cute children’s song about Zacchaeus, the ‘wee little man,’ who climbed up a tree, but it would be irresponsible to ignore the prophet Isaiah today. Not only today, of course, but my own context as a member of the LGBTQ community means that I cannot ignore a story showing up in the lectionary that has been used against my people for too long. It’s one of those trigger stories because of how it’s been weaponized. We know the Bible can be used as a weapon, we hear it being used as a weapon still, even quietly when we simply tolerate difference. Zacchaeus sure knew how scripture could be turned against a person. We had a tax collector in last week’s parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee at prayer, and here is a real-life encounter Jesus has with a man who makes his living by gathering money from his own people to pay those who colonized and sought to erase his culture and history with violence and threats of violence.

Religion has used power for centuries to oppress and control, just like any other human institution which seeks to organize and impose authority. Whether we’re fighting over land or food or ideals, we’ve seen and known a history of violence for far too long, often using religion as the excuse to back up our personal fears, rather than as it should be, which is to set us free from those fears.

This is the reason prophets like Isaiah are so relevant today, because we keep repeating history and need the reminders again and again that we have nothing to be afraid of. See, Soddom and Gomorrah were completely awful to guests and travelers, to those in need and those who sought sanctuary within their borders. Their sin was not homosexuality, as many have said, but their will to violate outsiders and devalue their own who did not make them comfortable, either by class or gender or economy. The way the story of Sododm and Gomorrah has been turned against my people has turned those who use it into violently inhospitable Sodomites themselves. Ironic, isn’t it? Every time we try and use scripture to exclude other people from God’s vision and God’s kingdom, we cut ourselves out of that vision. Because the kingdom of God is all-inclusive, values every single life, and does not depend on uniformity or assimilation to function. God made a world of space for diversity and curiosity and seeing one another as we are rather than as we would want others to be for our own ease. Somehow we decided we could order the world better on our own terms, and in came the black and white thinking of either/or extremes, shutting down community for the sake of efficiency and shame-laden competition. How can we learn to actually see one another if we insist on these externally-imposed definitions of who is acceptable and who isn’t?

When Zacchaeus climbed that tree to see Jesus, it was to get his own contact with God that the community around him did not allow him to have. They did not make room for him in the crowd, they did not take his shortness of stature into account, they saw only the tax collector, and not the child of Abraham’s covenant with the Divine. God, however, saw Zacchaeus, and Zacchaeus’ own home became a sanctuary for the very God his neighbors claimed to serve by excluding him. He may not have been socially acceptable to his community, they may have been terribly offended at Jesus’ decision to eat with ‘that sinner,’ but ‘that sinner’ was as much a child of God as any of them, indeed behaving more like one of Abraham’s offspring than those who would exclude him on account of their piety.

When the people of God gather, there are always more people present than we see, always more voices than we hear, always more history than we are aware of. God’s kingdom is bigger than our imaginations of what it should or could or might be. And the Spirit of God is constantly working in and among us to unchain us from our fears and set us free from our anxieties. Our God is a God of salvation, and the judgment we fear is only that we might have wasted our living on being afraid of dying, killing ourselves and one another in an effort to protect ourselves from some false threats of being wrong or less right or not good enough to love and value. Jesus went to be the guest of a man whose reputation was tarnished by his neighbors’ insistence on imposed and impossible social perfection. Jesus made himself vulnerable to loving those who considered themselves insiders and to those who were made outsiders. Wherever you find yourself on that spectrum these days, whatever you are afraid of losing or never even accessing, your value and worth lie not in your piety or religiosity but in the love which has already been poured out for you, the love which died at the hands of our fears to take those fears to the grave, the love which comes to us in so many different forms and kinds and colors that we are never without it even when we refuse it.

Whatever your context, God lives in that real space and time alongside you and within you. Whatever your fears about being good enough or right enough, God is bigger than those fears. Whatever you struggle to accept, either in yourself or in others, remember God who created the world in the beginning called it good and blessed it. We do not have to live in a world that runs on divisiveness and suspicion of others, of ranking people good to bad, because the sacrifice of God on the cross showed us both the outcome of that path and the hope of a reality greater, the promise of resurrection and new life and second chances and reconciliation. We, too, are children of the covenant, and God’s prophets speak to us today as much as to their own time, of a vision that sustains our hope in God’s promised future come to us in the here and now.