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When People Decided Who You Were Before They Met You · Faith at Work

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: For about two weeks now,
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I have been sitting with the two stories that we heard read this morning.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: The woman at Simon's table and Zacchaeus in his tree.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I have preached from both of these stories,
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, probably too many times to really count.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I have always preached them in the same way that all preachers do.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: She weeps enough, so she is forgiven.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: He climbs down and promises to change, so he is saved.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Simple math.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Guilty person meets Jesus.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Guilty person gets better.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: However, I have read these two chapters of Luke
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: In a different way these last two weeks from a new place.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I have realized that what is actually written there says something different
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: if we look at the actual words on the page.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it was always there.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: I just hadn't looked closely enough with an open relational theology to be able to see it.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with the woman.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Simon the Pharisee invites Jesus to a dinner.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: And by every outward measure, he does everything that a good host is supposed to do.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: He sends word.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: He clears a place at his table.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: And in first century banquet style guests,
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: they didn't sit at chairs like this picture is showing.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: They reclined at the banquet table a little bit farther away from the food,
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: propped on one elbow, feet stretched out behind them.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Simon has Jesus reclining at his table in his own house, in front of his own dinner guests.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that is not nothing we should recognize here.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: That is an invitation that really most Pharisees would never have extended to
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: an itinerant rabbi with Jesus's reputation.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: But Luke tells us that the woman gets in uninvited.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: The text just calls her a woman in that town who lived a sinful life.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Which in small first century Palestine means everyone at
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: that table already knew exactly who she was and exactly what she had done.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: But she comes in behind Jesus where his feet are stretched out from the couch
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: and she starts to weep.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Her tears fall onto Jesus' feet and she wipes them with her hair,
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: loose and unbound in a room full of men, which was its own kind of scandal.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: And she keeps kissing his feet.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: She breaks open a jar of perfume,
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: expensive perfume, perfume that she probably couldn't really afford to waste.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And here's where I have always stopped.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: The line everyone remembers, your sins are forgiven.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: And for years I have preached, that is the moment that it happens.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus absolving her on the spot because her tears and her nerve finally earned it.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: But if we look at the actual tense of the words in those verses, we see something different.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: It says her sins, which are many, actually have been forgiven.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Not are being forgiven right now because she's proven herself, already forgiven.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Past and saddled by the time she ever crosses Simon's threshold.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Something had already happened to this woman before she ever walked into that room
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: with her hair down and her jar of perfume open.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Luke doesn't tell us what,
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: and he doesn't tell us when,
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: and he doesn't tell us why and where, but the grammar tells us that it came first.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: This dinner isn't the transaction.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: It is the thank you.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: That is the same progression behind the story that then Jesus tells
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: to interpret what is happening.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: A moneylender had two men who owed him money, one 500 and one 50.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: And in the story, the moneylender cancels both, writes them both off.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then Jesus asks Simon, which debtor will love him more?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: And Simon, a little warily it seems, gives the right answer, the one who was forgiven more.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: If we look at it closely, that is not a formula for earning forgiveness through love.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's the opposite.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: The debt gets canceled first.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: The love is just what canceled debt looks like once it reaches a real grateful human being.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Simon gave Jesus a proper welcome,
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: but no water or a kiss or any ordinary oil because as far as Simon knew,
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: he wasn't harrying much of a debt to begin with and thus had little to be grateful
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: for.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: The woman gave everything that she had, tears,
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: her hair,
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  SPEAKER_00: a jar of perfume that was priceless to her
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: because she already knew exactly what she'd been forgiven and that freedom came
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: from it.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Here is what I want us to notice before we move to Jericho, which is the next story happens.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: This story was never meant to be a story about a sinful woman earning her way back
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: into God's good graces through enough tears.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: It is a story about a woman who already knew grace had found her walking into
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: a room full of people who hadn't caught up yet.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: A little later in Luke's gospel on the road to Jericho,
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: We found another, or I found another blind spot in the scripture.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I had always thought that I knew the heart of this story.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: It goes like this,
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: a man named Zacchaeus is standing in a crowd and he is trying to look
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: and find Jesus.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Luke tells us two things about this guy.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: First, he is rich and that he was a tax,
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: a chief tax collector, which meant that he didn't just collect taxes.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: It meant that he oversaw all of the people in the city that collected taxes.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the taxes were likely drawn from the immense bomb business that Jericho had.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Trade was flowing through Jericho on what we call the bomb of Gilead.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that bomb was typically worth twice its weight in silver.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: There was a lot of trade and money through Jericho.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the Roman occupation was taxing it.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Tax collectors were, as we probably all know, despised for good reason most of the time.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: They worked with the occupying government.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: The Roman soldiers stood behind them so that what they were gathering was in force.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone pretty much assumed that they were skimming off of the top.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: And usually they were correct.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: The chief tax collector was the one who was supporting the The whole extortion system.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Luke also tells us that the guy was short.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: He can't see over the crowd,
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: so he does something a wealthy,
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: powerful man in that culture simply would never ever do.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: He runs and then he climbs up a tree,
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: a sycamore fig tree,
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: broad and low branches,
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: easy enough for a person to climb,
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: which is exactly the kind of detail that tells us how badly this man wanted
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: to see Jesus.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: He makes himself ridiculous in front of the whole town just to get a look
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: at this itinerant rabbi.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus walks by and he ducks under that tree and he looks up
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: and he calls this man by name, Zacchaeus.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Come down.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: I am coming to your home today.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Crowd, they start murmuring and muttering.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Here's where, again, I had never read close enough.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Zacchaeus stands up in front of the whole crowd at the dinner and he says,
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: look, Lord, half of my possessions I give to the poor.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: And if I have cheated anyone out of anything, I pay back four times as much.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for years,
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: probably my entire ministry,
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: I have preached that as a brand new promise coming from Zacchaeus.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: A crooked man turning over a new leaf on the spot.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: But the verbs Zacchaeus actually uses are in the present indicative active tense.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Didn't know you were going to get a grammar lesson today, did you?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, look it up.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And what he's actually saying,
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: literally saying in the Greek is not I will give, but I give already.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Not I will pay back, but I pay back.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: He is not announcing a new plan.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: This is really important.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: He is describing what he already regularly does.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: And notice the other words too.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: If I have cheated anyone, not because I have cheated other people.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a confession.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: That is closer to a legal declaration.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now, as I was thinking about all of these things,
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, oh, can I really say this in church?
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because it is a change, right, on how we're looking at things.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I went looking.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: To see if I was reading too much into two verbs.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out that I wasn't alone.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Joseph Fitzmer,
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: who wrote one of the standard scholarly commentaries on Luke,
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: says that he reads it as the presence tense too.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so does an Episcopal priest named Elizabeth Keaton,
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: who points out that the name Zacchaeus It comes from the Hebrew word meaning pure,
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: innocent, clean, or righteous.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: And she argues that the whole point of the story is that he was living up
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: to his own name the entire time,
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: while the crowd underneath that tree had already decided,
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: based on purely his job, that he couldn't possibly be one of the good guys.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: If that is right,
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: the crowd wasn't grumbling because Jesus was eating with a villain who needed
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: to change.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: They were grumbling because Jesus was eating with a man they'd already convicted
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: of something they'd never truly investigated.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: He wore the uniform of the occupying government's tax system,
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: and that uniform did all the talking for him.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: But nobody in the crowd had bothered to ask what kind of tax collector he actually was.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: So when Jesus says salvation has come to this house,
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think he's handing Zacchaeus a reward for finally standing up
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: for what is right.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think he's standing in the middle of that crowd overturning
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: a verdict they'd already handed down wrongly Long before
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: that sycamore tree ever came into the story.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's a character that some of you may know from a set of stories many of our kids
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: and grandkids grew up on that I think fits almost exactly this story.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: In the Harry Potter series, Severus Snape.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Does anybody know who Severus Snape is?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: A few of you do.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: You're very timid.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want to be judged, right?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: I read it.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: I watched the movies.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: I thought they were cool.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Severus Snape spends the entire story looking like a villain, right?
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: He wears the mark of the enemy branded into his very own arm.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: He's cold.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: He's difficult.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: And everybody around him, including the boy the whole story is about, assumes the worst of him.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because of exactly who he appears to be affiliated with.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't until after he's dead that the truth comes out.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the truth is that he had spent his lifetime working against
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: the very side he appeared to belong to.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Protecting a child he seemed to despise out of a love nobody knew about until...
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: He died.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Almost nobody in that story ever bothered to ask what kind
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: of man was actually underneath the mark.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: They just read the uniform, same as the crowd underneath Zacchaeus' tree.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Luke doesn't put these stories in random order.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: A few verses before Simon's dinner in this same chapter seven, Luke, I mean,
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus heals a Roman centurion's servant and says
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: that he hasn't found faith like this anywhere in Israel,
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: not from an insider, it comes from an outsider.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: And two sentences before the woman ever walks through Simon's door, Luke says it directly.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: All the people, even the tax collectors and sinners, acknowledged that God's way was right.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Pharisees didn't get it,
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: but the tax collectors and the sinners,
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: the same groups that the woman and Zacchaeus belonged to, they got it.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: The very people at Simon's table who would never be allowed to have
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: a place were apparently already farther along understanding God and God's way
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: than Simon was.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: This is not an accident of order in the text.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Luke is building a pace.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the case is this, a welcoming posture says, come in, we'll be glad to have you here.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: But underneath it,
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: oftentimes not even meaning to do so,
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: the welcoming posture assumes we as the host are open to somebody coming in,
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: but we're doing them a favor because of it.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: The posture that Jesus keeps modeling assumes the opposite.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: That the stranger standing outside might already be closer to God than
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: the ones deciding who gets in.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: And if we embrace that,
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: if we embrace that,
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: that changes what we're actually supposed to be doing every time someone new walks
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: into our doors.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: We are not gatekeepers deciding whether they've earned a place at the table.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: More often than we'd like to admit, we're the ones playing catch up.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: There are at least four kinds of people sitting in this sanctuary today
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: and probably watching on a screen from somewhere else.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to speak to those four groups of people.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: First, to whoever in this church who has been wrongly assessed,
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: read by a reputation or a job or a mistake or a family name,
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: before anyone actually took the time to find out who you are,
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: remember Zacchaeus climbed his own tree just to be seen.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus called him by name because he knew what kind of man he really was.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it was different from what the crowd was saying and believing
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: who misread what kind of man he was.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: So as you leave this place this morning,
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: remember this,
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: you do not need to keep proving what is already true about you in Jesus's eyes.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: Second, to whoever has handed down a verdict,
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: on somebody else without ever really knowing them.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's the family to pews over.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's whoever showed up here last month looking or sounding different than you expected.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's someone you've decided you already understand because one story you heard years ago.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: Ask yourself this morning whether you have been the crowd under the tree.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Third,
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: To the disciple of Christ in this room who hold power in this church to decide
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: who belongs and who doesn't.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: Remember this, welcoming is not the same thing as including.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: And Simon's table proves it.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: He gave Jesus every correct courtesy.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: A guest host owes,
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: a guest, a good host owes a guest and still couldn't include the woman kneeling
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you're the one who decides,
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: who gets asked to serve,
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: who gets handed a key,
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: who gets a seat at the table where decisions get made, this one is for you.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: And lastly,
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: to whoever is still keeping a private ledger against yourself,
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: still trying to earn what this story says was already settled before you ever walked
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: through these doors, the woman's tears were never the payment.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: They were the thank you.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're still waiting to feel like you've finally done enough to belong to God,
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: hear this clearly.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: The debt was already canceled.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: You are allowed to stop paying for it.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: So however you're hearing this today in these pews,
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: standing in the back or out on the lawn or watching later on the screen,
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: every one of these four group is you.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: Distance does not change which one you are.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: This series that I'm beginning today is called The Empty Chair.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: So starting today and running through the middle of November,
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: we are going to keep coming back to one picture,
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: a chair that somebody pulled up to a table that wasn't originally set for them.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Welcoming reads the uniform and keeps a ledger,
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: who's earned a seat,
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: who hasn't,
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: who's already been sorted into a category,
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: and then we don't look twice at it any longer.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: Simon kept his ledger on the woman the moment she walked through his door.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: The crowd kept theirs on Zacchaeus before they had ever taken time to know him.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus tore both of them up.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the question this series is going to keep asking in a dozen different ways
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: and probably a dozen different scriptures.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: Are we the kind of church that reads the uniform,
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: the reputation, the rumor, and calls that knowing somebody?
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: Or are we willing to be the kind of church that tears up the ledger
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: because we finally understood how often we've got the verdict wrong?