11.04.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Luke 19:1-10
So who was this Zacchaeus guy? Back when I was a Sunday-school going kid, the story of Zacchaeus seemed to surface all of the time. As a child, you have an image in your mind of this little rich guy, a tiny little gnome of a man with his fine linen robes and a beard fragrant with scented oil and his Gucci sandals. He’s scampering around behind the throngs gathered to see Jesus, running back and forth frantically like a seven year old who’s downed half a case of Red Bull. But he can’t see a thing, so he hikes up his skirts and clambers up a tree. There, Jesus sees him, perched up there, looking ridiculous and completely undignified.
Kids love anything in which adults look silly, and Zacchaeus certainly looks silly here...although if Jesus had then hit him in the face with a pie and given him a wedgie, it’d have been even better. But when you grow up, and you learn what Zacchaeus really did for a living, this story starts seeming a little less silly.
He was a tax collector, and that doesn’t mean anything like what we would visualize today. When we think of a tax collector, we see in our mind’s eye a mid-level Internal Revenue Service employee. They spend most of their day in a dismal cubicle in a large windowless room with a hundred other IRS employees, managing the inflow of revenue from the citizens of our republic. As much as no-one enjoys paying taxes, the folks who collect our revenue get paid modest salaries, and are as honest and hardworking as the rest of us.
That was not the case back in the first century. To build it’s roads and it’s public works and to pay it’s well trained legions, the Romans needed cash. To gather that revenue, they relied on local networks of entrepreneurs to collect taxes. Those tax collectors were expected to operate as subcontractors, and were given wide latitude in how they gathered the revenue. All Rome expected was that those contractors would pass along the correct amount of money from each citizen or resident. Rome also told the tax collectors that if they wanted to have any income, that would need to be on top of the tax..and they were free to set that rate themselves. So Roman tax collectors only took what they absolutely needed...right? Suuuure they did.
Tax collectors made sure they did very well for themselves, tacking on as high a percentage as they possibly could. You couldn’t say no to them, either. IRS audits may be unpleasant, but if you refused to pay your Roman taxes the penalties were...well, let’s just say they made Guantanamo Bay look like a vacation on the French Riviera.
So tax collectors took whatever they could, and as much as they could. They were universally despised in Judah as traitors and profiteers...but they did really, really well for themselves. Rome didn’t care. Why should it? So what if the poor suffered? So what if it wasn’t really fair or just? As long as the revenue was raised, it didn’t matter how you raised it.
Now, I’m a Virginian. My home state has plenty of it’s own “issues.” But as I look across the river at Maryland, I find myself baffled at how a version that same peculiar Imperial mindset seems to have wormed it’s way into every single administration, be they Republican or Democrat. Revenues need to be raised to pay good teachers and competent law enforcement professionals, to build roads and schools and libraries.
For some reason, though, Americans respond to politicians who honestly tell them what it costs to have all of those things by throwing them out of office. We’d rather elect a shambling zombie with a taste for brains than someone who raises taxes. In Virginia, in fact, I think we’ve done just that at least twice in recent memory.
So instead of committing political hara-kiri, Maryland leaders keep coming back to the same magical solution to all of the state’s funding woes. Slot machines! They’ll miraculously fix everything! It’ll renew the horse-racing industry, which, as we know, is the primary engine driving any vibrant 21st century economy. It’ll fund our schools! It’ll pay our cops! It’ll magically fix all of our problems...and we’ll have soooo much fun doing it!
Of course, anyone who’s spent more than 35 seconds inside a casino knows that slot machines are not necessarily the most soul-enriching way to spend your time. You put in your money...and then you press the button. And you press the button. And you press the button. And you press the button. And you put in more money. And you press the button. And you press the button. Wow. That’s. So. Exciting. Whee.
But for many people, gambling is exciting. The prospect of those winnings, the anticipation of beating the odds, those things get our brains all fired up and excited, pumping out opiates and making us forget the outside world for a while. Some folks can handle that buzz....but many cannot. It can become an addiction. For people on a limited income, or people who are struggling financially, or people who are trying to start out in life, gambling can become a destructive and consuming obsession.
Sure, it’s a tax. It’s a tax on the poor. It’s a tax on the addicted. It shatters families. It tears apart relationships. But for the modern day tax collectors-for-hire of the “gaming industry,” that doesn’t matter. They get a huge bite off the top. What does it matter what broader impacts it has? The money’s getting raised, isn’t it?
For some reason, there’s been a consistent resistance on the part of churches to this approach to revenue. We resist it, but in state after state, our opposition has been rolled back. The desire for that easy money is simply too strong.
But it’s an important desire to resist. Because that’s just not how funds should be raised in a democracy that cares about it’s citizens. It’s also not how we should go about raising revenue in God’s Kingdom.
We’re in the middle of revenue-raising season ourselves. Our congregation, this little church in Bethesda, is in the midst of encouraging all of you to give to our stewardship campaign for 2008. That means it’s money-raising time...and as much as I hate doing it, we need to talk about it.
Every one of you should have gotten a letter this last week asking you to prayerfully consider giving to support the ministries of this church. It also asked you to consider how you can apply the gifts that God has given you to the life of the church in the coming year. And, no, you don’t need to give away half of your income like Zacchaeus did. But you do need to think realistically about our life together in this church, and how you can really support it.
A great deal has changed here in the last four years. Back in the 1990s, this church was blessed with a modest endowment, which has enabled us to make some necessary upgrades to the building and keep our doors open. But that endowment is tied to the markets, and every single year we’ve cut into the principal of that endowment to keep the heat on and to make sure your pastor has a nice shiny new Beemer parked out front. Well..not so much that second one.
The fact is that we’ve used less of that endowment every single year. Where it once was over 90% of budget, it is now just a tick under 80%. This year, we reduced our reliance on those funds for the first time in a decade. If we can increase our giving for 2008 by the same percentage we did in 2007, then we’ll need that crutch even less. That still means, though, that we’ve got a long way to go before we’re self-sufficient.
If we believed in gambling, we’d take a look at that endowment and give very little. Everything will be fine. The stock market will just keep on going up forever. We don’t have to contribute a thing. But the truth of the matter is far different. If there’s a mild downturn in the market...and if our giving doesn’t continue to grow...we could easily be flat broke in five or six years. That’s the reality of it. The fantasy that we can just keep going forever as we are is a gambler’s delusion. Really building anything...as we are striving to build this church...does not come easy.
It takes time. It takes commitment. It takes effort. It takes prayer. If we are to be good stewards over our life together, we have to understand that it’s never wise to gamble with the future of anything you care about.
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