Henrietta United Church of Christ

1He entered Jericho and was passing through it. 2A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax-collector and was rich. 3He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. 4So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. 5When 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.’ 6So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. 7All who saw it began to grumble and said, ‘He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.’ 8Zacchaeus 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.’ 9Then Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. 10For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.’

Sermon

“Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he.” Some of you remember that song from your childhood. Zacchaeus himself might have heard songs a little like that in his own childhood. “Wee little Zacchaeus, little baby Zacchaeus.”

Did you ever get taunted or teased when you were trying desperately to feel a part of the gang? Maybe you were a little slow or maybe kind of nerdy. Maybe you looked plain or maybe you looked racy. Maybe you felt too gangly or maybe you felt too heavy. Or maybe you were just afraid you’d be seen as a loser, a misfit, or a nobody.

If we’re always haunted by a fear of not being acceptable the way we are, we’ll probably end up turning against our self in self criticism, self doubt, or emotional numbness. Or we’ll turn against other people in judgmentalism, resentment, manipulation, or power plays. All of these are ways of trying to protect ourselves from that painful, lonely powerlessness of feeling rejected or excluded.

This probably explains how Zacchaeus ended up a chief tax collector. Zacchaeus had trained himself not to need people’s acceptance any more. As a tax collector working for the Romans, he could take their money and possessions as a substitute for acceptance, and keep for himself whatever he could get away with. So what if people called him a traitor or a thief? He had the backing of the Roman soldiers if he needed it, and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. If they hated him, that was all the more justification for sticking it to them. Was he supposed to feel sorry them? Yeah, right!

When Jesus came to town, Zacchaeus found himself working his way through the crowds, probably being spat at, called lots worse things than “Peewee,” and climbing up in the sycamore tree to catch a look at Jesus. He had heard that this Jesus was a holy man, a miracle worker and a prophet. But that’s not what had brought him up into this tree. Zacchaeus had long since given up on finding any comfort in a religion that had its own names for people like him. But he had also heard that this holy man freely mixed with tax collectors and sinners as though they were his friends. Zacchaeus couldn’t even picture such a thing, though for some strange reason he wanted to. He just had to see for himself what a man like that would look like.

He soon found out. It wasn’t long before a man whose eyes danced with light and whose smile could thaw the coldest heart was looking up into the tree and inviting Zacchaeus to hurry down, so Jesus could stay at his house. Zacchaeus almost fell out of the tree. And as they walked together down the road, something inside Zacchaeus began to turn from a dark place of pain, powerlessness, loneliness, and fear towards a light that filled him with a sense of wholeness, peace, love, and generosity that he had never known before. He began saying the most unexpected things: he would give half of his possessions to the poor, and pay back fourfold anything he had defrauded people of. That would make him about as poor as everyone else. But that didn’t matter. He was now rich with what he had always wanted. In that brief encounter with Jesus, his whole life got realigned.

Zacchaeus’ experience holds a very important clue for how we can realign our own souls with a spiritual power that can take us to new levels of wholeness, creativity, joy, and fulfillment.

Now Zacchaeus had an advantage over us, to be sure. He had the actual person of Jesus in flesh and blood walking with him and talking with him. We don’t. But we do have stories of Jesus, like this one, that are sketched out with a bare minimum of detail, which then invites us to fill in what we don’t know with our own experiences and feelings and imaginations. These stories are written to help us put ourselves into these stories and be transformed by the power of Jesus ourselves.

And we also have in some small way what Jesus himself had in a big, powerful way. We too have a connection to the Source of all life–the Spirit of God–whose essential nature is total, unconditional love for each one of us. When fear, discouragement, doubt, and shame make us feel separate from that Source, we long for it more than we draw from it. But that very longing is the sign that on some deep level that connection is there. Otherwise, why would we miss it when we feel separate from it? And why would we feel renewed when we come together here and attune our souls to it again? And why would we feel a stirring of hope in us when we think about Zacchaeus turning from that dark place of loneliness, fear, powerlessness and shame and seeing his life lit up with generosity and joy?

So even without Jesus here in the flesh, that same Spirit of total love, affirmation, forgiveness, and truth that Jesus embodied so fully is within us and among us right here and right now. We can find it by turning to it in our humility and need, by trusting it, sometimes by throwing ourselves at its feet in total desperation, sometimes by gently opening a little more and a little more of ourselves to it.

As Zacchaeus turned toward this limitless Love that Jesus was offering him, something began happening to his basic beliefs about himself that had kept him in his dark hole of loneliness, pain and fear. His basic beliefs probably went something like this:

I’m a victim of an uncaring God that made me different from other people.

I’m not lovable or acceptable the way I am.

I’ll always be alone in this world.

Life is a cruel struggle to survive.

The only way to keep people from getting me is to get them.

Each of us has basic beliefs like this that are formed in the crucible of painful experience. Ours may be different from Zacchaeus’. Mine have included things like:

If I risk being myself, people will think I’m weird and not like me.

Being in my power is dangerous and gets me in trouble.

Emotional numbness is preferable to pain.

These beliefs that are born out of our pain and fears are very self limiting and disempowering. They strangle the unique spiritual energy that God put in each of us to develop, to express, to share with each other, and to offer to the world. And these negative perceptions of ourselves and the world tend to create the reality that we live in.

I think that what happened inside of Zacchaeus as he opened to Jesus’ limitless love was that his self limiting beliefs began to be transformed.

Instead of believing, “I’m a victim of an uncaring cruel God that made me different from other people” he began to realize, “God made everyone different, not just me. I may be small in stature, but I can be big in heart. That’s up to me.”

Instead of believing, “I’m not lovable or acceptable the way I am,” he could now say, “Whether other people find me lovable or acceptable is up to them. I know I am totally loved by God, so I can love and accept myself.”

Instead of believing, “I am alone in this world,” he could now say, “I can work on building bridges of acceptance, integrity and generosity with everyone I meet.”

All of us struggle with limiting, disempowering beliefs about ourselves and life. And sometimes our pain from the past combines with our fears of the future to give us a double whammy of negativity. Like when we lose our job, and our feelings of rejection combine with our fear of scarcity. Or when we lose our health, and our feelings of powerlessness combine with our fear of dependency.

Any time we realize we’re getting stuck in self limiting beliefs, we can put ourself in the story of Zacchaeus. Instead of aligning ourselves with our pain, fears, loneliness, and powerlessness, we can aligned ourselves with the total, unconditional, eternal love of the God who created us to learn to live in this world as free, open, whole, creatures, receiving and giving as fully as we can.

If losing your job sent you into the belief, “Nobody needs my skills any more, and I’ll never be able to compete against all those people looking for work,” what kind of reality would you create with that perception? You’d create the scarcity and powerlessness you believe in. But if you believed “I have skills, experience and new potentials I would love to share with the world, and I can use my job loss as an opportunity to explore new avenues, meet new people, and find new ways of making a contribution,” you would position yourself to create a very different reality.

What kind of reality would you create if you believed, “My disability keeps me from doing all the things I want to do. My productive days are over now”? Your world would shrink into a dark place of hopeless resignation. But what if you believed, “As long as I have breath and awareness, I can savor life’s gifts, give something back to the world, and offer love and wisdom to people God puts in my life”? How different your reality would feel to you then, even with the same disability.

Some unknown person said:

Obstacles can't stop you.

Problems can't stop you.

Most of all, other people can't stop you.

Only you can stop you.

But you–aligned with God’s healing, hope-generating love–can transform every self-limiting belief into a spirit-expressing belief. You can move from being a victim to a visionary. You can transform perceived powerlessness into the power to change your perception of yourself and the world, and thereby change the reality that you help create. You can be a co-creator with God of a life that expresses your own unique spirit, unwraps your gifts, deepens your soul, and shines your God-given light into the world. As long as you have breath and awareness, you have the power to do this in any condition and any circumstance. Such is the mystery and miracle of the life and the spirit God has entrusted to each of us, when our spirits are aligned with the Spirit of God.