A Little Short

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.02.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 19:1-10

Do you remember the first time you ever bought something?  Can you remember the first time you ever used money?

It’s a tough thing, stretching your mind so far back, because so many grownups are struggling to remember all of their deadlines and their teenager’s insane schedule and when their two year old has playgroup.  Even with our magic devil boxes there to tell us what to do, it’s hard enough to keep track of all of that, without accidentally dropping your teen off at Gymboree and your toddler off at dive practice.

But remembering who we’ve been is a vital thing, and if you follow back through the deep dark thickets of growing up and go back to that bright little self you once were, you might find an echo of a whisper of that moment.

My first memory of money is a fragment, old and faded like parchment in my mind.  It’s so old that I’m not even sure it’s real, or if it’s a mingling of memories and dreams, blurred together by my subconscious mind over a lifetime.

I was four years old, and I was living in Nairobi.  My grandparents had come to visit, and Grandfather was going to take me to go get ice cream.  This, I think, is why I remember it.   Amazing, how the human brain prioritizes a memory when there’s ice cream involved.  

What was also important about this outing was that I was going to buy it myself.  I’d been given change over the course of my grandparents visit, in part to teach me about how money worked.

Because as when you’re a very little one, money just doesn’t quite process.  Things show up.  Toys just appear.  Food is there because it’s there.  And at some point, we start having to learn about this peculiar system we’ve created for managing exchange in our society.

I remember, frankly, finding the whole money thing a little bizarre.  That was probably because I was living in Kenya, which approached money in a way that seemed designed to be as hard to understand as possible.  You had a shilling, which was made up of pence, which may or may not have been made up of hapennies.  The hapenny was the subatomic particle of the old British monetary system, meaning it was kind of crazy money.  Here’s a penny, the smallest possible unit.  A hapenny is...half of the smallest possible unit.  Alrighty then.   

Above a shilling, there were crowns and gold pieces and bitcoins and doubloons and krugerrands.  Or something like that. It was all very intimidating.

I can remember how awkward it felt, the whole experience of trying figure out what to do with the money.  What if I didn’t have enough?  What if I didn’t do it quite right?  What if I didn’t end up getting ice cream?  What if I lost those shillings and they fell out of my pocket?  I remember checking my pockets regularly for the reassurance of those round hunks of metal.

But I also remember how it felt vaguely magical.  I give you this little circle of metal with a picture of Jomo Kenyatta, and you give me ice cream?  Wow.

Wealth has that peculiar dichotomy.  While it makes exchange possible, and it makes it possible for us to do things in our culture, it quickly becomes a source of anxiety and personal struggle.

Luke’s Gospel struggles and wrestles with the spiritual implications of wealth more than perhaps any other of the books of the Bible.  It is Luke who retains most of the stories of Jesus that deal with wealth, and today’s story of Zacchaeus is no exception.  Like many of the stories we’ve been hearing from him over the last few weeks, this recounting of the actions of a tax collector is unique to Luke.

And quite a story it is, too.  It’s a fun one, one of those stories that I remember from Sunday School, because the images that it produces tend to stick in a kids head.  We hear about Zacchaeus.  He’s a man of some importance, and he’s rich, and while those are the details that were key to the story that Jesus was telling, they aren’t the details that stick in your mind.

Zacchaeus was a little guy.  He was small and scrappy.  He was...well...not particularly tall.  Maybe not quite in the Wizard of Oz Mayor of Munchkinland way, not quite in the Randy Newman Short People kind of way, but enough so that when the crowds gathered around this remarkable traveling rabbi, Zacchaeus just couldn’t see.  It was a forest of torsos and shoulders, and he couldn’t quite get a view.

This detail makes this story stick in the heads of kids.  Because if there’s one think a kid knows, it’s that feeling, of being small and lost in a sea of towering adults.  And the other detail that makes it cling is that this adult, this little man, he hasn’t lost his childlike willingness to express himself.  He’ll clamber wildly up a tree just to get a view, as if the opinions and expectations of everyone around him didn’t exist at all.

But beyond the shortness, beyond the silliness of imagining a little grown up clambering up a tree, the heart of this story has to do with wealth and the way we struggle with it.   Because just as Zacchaeus was a tax collector, and thus despised by everyone around him, he was also rich...and Jesus has a peculiar relationship with wealth.

What we do with our wealth, and how we function in a society where wealth allows us to act and to get things done, those things are often a challenge, even for those of us who are supposedly all grown up.  

Wealth and the dynamics of wealth tend to induce all kinds of anxieties and tensions in adult human beings.  We know, because it is the culture in which we live, that being a little short of stature is something we can get over.  Being a little short on cash, on the other hand, tends to cause a whole bunch more tension.  It gives us a sense of powerlessness.  It can paralyze us, leaving us unable to act.  Or we can find ourselves so anxious about wealth that we do not turn it towards a positive purpose in the world.  We hold it, we cling to it, and it does nothing.

In this story, Zacchaeus finds himself in a position to play host to Jesus.  Short though he may have been, his actions show that though he was a wealthy man who’d gained his wealth in a hated profession, somewhere, he hadn’t lost a part of his childlike exuberance.

Now as sermons about stewardship go, I’ll admit that using the story of Zacchaeus can seem like quite a stretch.  Particularly the “I’ll give half of everything I have to the poor part.  Yeah, sure, the IRS limit on deductibility is fifty percent of income, but c’mon.  That’s a pretty huge chunk of change there.  And generally, the pastors who get up there and tell you that they want to talk about cinctupletithing don’t make it through the next Sesion meeting.

I think what is more important for us to hear in this is the combination of purpose and attitude, as this tiny tax collector manages to deal with his wealth in a way that shows he understands its purpose.  The purpose of wealth, as Jesus presents it throughout the Gospels, is not wealth itself.  

He asks us instead to turn that wealth towards another purpose, in much the same way that we are all called to turn your life towards particular purpose.  And he asks us to do it in a way that reflects both exuberance and childlike hopefulness.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.