Wisdom 11:22-12:2 | 2 Thessalonians 1:11-2:2 | Luke 19:1-10

Almighty, merciful God, by whose gift your faithful offer you right and praiseworthy service, grant, we pray, that we may hasten without stumbling to receive things you have promised.   Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

I‘ve often mentioned to you that I’ve been doing this work for a long time. It will be 50 years next year that I’ve been preaching and teaching.  It will be 30 years that I’ve been on this radio program, and when I go back and listen to one of the homilies I’ve given, I’m always struck by something.  My voice sounds a little different, but when I listen to the images I describe and the explanations I give, I realize I was at one point of understanding in my life, and now I’m at a different point, not that I contradict anything I said before. Well, maybe I had to change a few things, but basically it’s just that I see more.  I understand more.  I have a clearer picture of what’s really going on inside me and in the people I teach and preach to.  

So here’s one of the things I’ve seen change. I really began my ministry like a lot of young men coming out of a seminary, a Catholic seminary. I was ready to do this kind of work, and I believed that was how I could keep people from sinning. I thought that was probably the most important part of my job. I would do that by encouraging people to do sacraments, go to confession on a regular basis and always to mass on Sunday, and then get involved in some project in the parish, and they would be good Catholics. And they would basically learn from the images, the homilies and the images in Scripture, and they would learn one has to force oneself to stop doing bad things and just force oneself to do good things.  It seemed like an exercise of will, a strong, powerful will supported by sacraments. Sacraments mean promises. That’s what the word means, and so God is promising help, and we call it grace.  But what I think I missed is what I see in the readings today, and that is what Jesus came into the world to do is to save what was lost.  And I might think, well, you’re lost when you’re not in touch with the grace of God, which gives you the courage to force yourself to do the right thing, using your will.  But what I really think he’s talking about is, when you  are not doing what you should do, you have lost something, and what you’ve lost is a connection, not necessarily a connection with the church or with God, but a connection that the church and God hopefully are there to repair and to increase and to make healthy. And that’s the connection with who you really are. 

Who are we? What do we really want?  Do we really want the things that the world talks us into, things that seem so attractive and seem to be pretty effective in making us feel good, but somehow give us a gnawing sense, after we have them for a while, that they aren’t all that we thought they would be?  

I love the image of the first reading, when we listen to the Book of Wisdom, and it’s saying something about our human nature.  I know sometimes I get the feeling, as I look at my own human nature: why did I get stuck with this thing?  Why did I get stuck with all these longings and passions for things that I’m not supposed to have?  And it just seems like a kind of burden to have this human nature, until I begin to realize, perhaps more recently than ever before, that this human nature we have is a reflection of divine nature.  And in that Book of Wisdom, we find this particular passage, rich in its presentation that there is this mysterious figure, this God who is big, really big.  And isn’t it an interesting image that tells you when you think of the universe — and of course, now we know more about the universe than we ever did when this was listened to in the very beginning by those who were part of the Israelite community— that it’s not just those stars right above us, but the unlimited universe. There’s no end to it.  It goes on and on and on forever, and so the image is that this God who created us is so much more than any universe, which is like a little drop of dew on a leaf. So this God is big, powerful and wise, but his greatness, his awesome glory is his relationship with his people, the people he created, human beings. There are other beings, angels, but we humans have this inheritance, you might say, of having been made in the image of God so that, as we evolve, as we develop, as we become who we are, we reflect this beautiful, powerful, loving, forgiving God. And that’s our nature. It’s natural.  It’s not a way of life forced upon us, and the reason we feel it’s forced is basically because we haven’t evolved very much, because the process of living is all about evolution. And it’s evolution that we know from Darwin.  We know that we have gained abilities and strengths to do things from a most primitive time until now.

It’s interesting to me that, if you look back to the time that Abraham was called, what age were human beings?  What level of awareness did they have?  Well, they had just left the Stone Age and begun the Bronze Age. They hadn’t yet come into the Iron Age.  I used to think that those stories about God taking care of the Israelites and killing all their enemies — I often thought, “Didn’t they think it was kind of violent to kill all their enemies?  Didn’t that worry them?”  Well, I don’t think so.  They were not very evolved, and the thought that there was a God, out of all the other gods, that took such interest in them that he would show his love for them by conquering their enemies, simply means this is a God who came into their life not so much to take offerings from them and then perhaps give them something back — but no.  This was the God whose intention was that they grow and become who they are, and the only way, in the most primitive sense, could he do that was to keep them from being killed by their enemies. And I can’t imagine what the world was like back then. Enemies could be coming around the corner anytime and wipe out a whole village. I guess that was what they had to live with.  So if there was something that could protect them, that was the beginning of a relationship between human beings and their parent, God.  

If you know Erik Erickson’s work, you know that he talks about the first stage of human beings in terms of maturity and growth.  They have to form trust with their parents, and that means they have to understand that these people who they are now living with, once they realize they’re not really part of their mother anymore and they begin to sense their individuality, they need to feel that these bigger people around them are going to take care of them, feed them, nurture them, hold them, love them. And if that’s not there, something is deeply damaged, and so the very first stage of evolution, of becoming who God made us to be, is to learn that we are safe. That’s the beginning of our relationship with the world that we live in, but also in a spiritual way, we have to have that kind of trust in God that he’s there for us.  

And what a powerful image it is that he did this work of saving them from their enemies, and so if I look at my life and I say, “Do I trust in God?” I would like to say I do.  I do now, but there was a time I didn’t, because I thought, if his relationship with me was based on my sinlessness, then I can’t trust in a God who says, if I died, he would punish me and send me to a place of darkness and pain.  So as a child I was confused about my Father in Heaven, because I was taught that he would punish me if I made a mistake, but listen to the way this reading speaks about human beings’ mistakes.  I was taught I would go to hell if I sinned and didn’t go to confession.  In this beautiful image, this God looks at me, sees me as a growing, evolving human being and is not holding me to something that I can’t fully grasp yet; we don’t hold a child to some kind of responsibility they can’t achieve.  So this God of ours, in this Wisdom book, is saying, “I’m there for them. I love them, and I’m going to gently remind them of their sins so that they can repent. So as they grow and mature, I will point out the places where they might be going back to an earlier time and, not realizing what they know, making a decision that’s shortsighted, something that they would regret.”  And repentance means to regret.  So imagine that we’re always evolving, and our sins are those signs to us of where we’re not hitting the mark, where we need to repent, regretting that we did something that we now see is wrong.  And for a sin to be a sin, you have to know that it’s a sin, so it would involve being aware that I’m … well, it’s interesting.  The word could be regression, because the word regret comes from the same word. It’s like going back to something less than we are.  So what if you thought of sin as simply a regression, to go back to something that perhaps we were before, but we’ve grown beyond it, and we feel bad about what we’ve done?  Now, that’s a relationship with God that I can deal with in a way.  It’s a way I would like everybody to treat everyone else, because we are supposed to grow into an image like God, and so when we see God, we see the perfection we’re called to. And if it looks like it’s beyond our reach. We’re correct, because we can’t achieve it, but we can evolve into it — evolve into it.

So now we look at Zacchaeus, and Zacchaeus is an interesting man. He’s wealthy. He had  been making money off people. There are a lot of ways we make money. He was a toll collector, so anytime people moved around, he charged them for doing something that was, in a way, their right, but he still got money for it. And he was interested in Jesus.  It’s fascinating.  He was so attracted to him.  You wonder why he was a sinner, because he would have considered any rabbi, and Jesus was a rabbi, to look down on him and say, “You’re no good. You’re a sinner. You’re an outcast. We don’t want to have anything to do with you.  We don’t care about you.  In fact we’re not even supposed to get near you, because you’re so bad. We’re supposed to protect ourselves from evil, so we stay in our nice, little, enclosed capsule of goodness,”hypocritically, unfortunately, but isn’t it interesting that Zacchaeus perhaps had heard about this rabbi who said in this great quote: “Tax collectors and Pharisees are getting into the kingdom more than the leaders of the temple.”  That made their day, I’m sure.  So let’s say he was really interested in this man.  “Who is he?  I want to see him.”  He’s short of stature.  Maybe that’s the way to say he’s not yet fully grown.  And he gets up in this tree, and he looks, and he sees this man.  And the eyes meet with Jesus, and Jesus knows what’s going on inside of him, and he says, “I want to stay with you.”  He was constantly bombarded by Pharisees around him who were condemning his work and saying that he was wrong and off-balance and too liberal or whatever else they said, and yet when somebody recognized Jesus for who he was, who he is, that was awesome, and he was transforming Zacchaeus into a new man, moving him, in a way, up the ladder of evolution and becoming more conscious of his life.  And his regret was almost instantaneous, because he said, “Now I realize I’ve been living in a way that I really don’t want to live, and I’m going to repay everybody who I’ve ever taken money from fourfold, and I’m never going to do this again.” That conversion, based on a repentant heart that sees it’s no longer capable of doing the evil it was doing, because it sees more than it saw before, and sees through it and says, “There’s nothing in this that I really want. There’s nothing in this that really gives me joy, but this man, this Christ, seems filled with joy.  He seems like — I want what he wants.”  And that’s the mystery of conversion. You see someone. You see something in them, a light, a goodness, a patience, an understanding.  You see it, and you say, “I want that.”  And then, if you understand that’s what you’re made for, then the work really begins. 

Father, you have made everything according to a plan that brings fullness, that brings goodness, that brings joy to everything you’ve created.  Everything has the mark of your Spirit, your wisdom, your goodness. Bless us with open eyes to see you, to see us as we are, to know the union that we have with you as we continue to grow into becoming who you’ve called us to be.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.