“Called by name; called into community; called to service.” Those three ideas are the essence of our Christian walk. Sam Shoemaker, the founder of the Pittsburgh Experiment, expressed it even more simply – “Get changed; get together; get going.” There it is – the essence of the Christian life in six words! There are a number of other ways that the same theme can be expressed, but they all boil down to the same three ideas – first, that we are called, individually, by God, to come into fellowship with God; second, that we are called into a community of believers, where we work out the meaning of this life together in fellowship with one another; and third, that we are called for a purpose – we are called to serve others, and to make disciples of Jesus Christ. We are blessed in order that we may, in turn, be a blessing to others. All three of these elements are vital parts of our walk, and like many aspects of the Christian life, they’re interrelated, as we’ll see this morning – while we’ll talk primarily about the first one, “called by name,” we’ll see that it quickly touches on the others as well.

We are called, individually, by name, when we first encounter the reality of Jesus Christ in our lives. For some of us, this happens at a definite time and place that we can name; for others, it’s a more gradual process of growing to that point. But there comes a time when we realize that we are known by God, we are called by God, and we make the decision to put our lives in God’s hands. As our reading from Jeremiah puts it, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” What a powerful, and awesome, and even frightening statement that is! But the good news is that it is Jesus who calls, not in judgment but in love. This is what is meant by grace – the unearned, unmerited love of God, extended to us not because we deserve it or have earned it, but precisely because we need it.

There are many places in the Gospels where we see Jesus acting in this kind of love, but I think that our reading from Luke this morning – the story of Zacchaeus – is one of the most dramatic, and it gives us an insight into how we, in turn, can be – and should be – Christ for others.

Zacchaeus is a tax collector. As we gather from the references in the Gospels to “tax collectors and sinners,” tax collectors were not highly thought of. When I was growing up, I sometimes wondered at that association. My sister had worked for the township wage tax collector, and he didn’t seem like such an awful person

But tax collectors in Israel in Jesus’ time were different. Israel was occupied by the Roman Empire, and the Roman emperor demanded the payment of taxes. In order to collect the money, the Romans recruited local people – Israelites – as tax collectors. The tax collector was allowed to use the power and authority of Rome to extract money from the people, and the Romans didn’t much care how they did it, or how much they collected, as long as the emperor got his required payment. The tax collector was free to keep the rest. Being a tax collector could make you rich – but it also guaranteed that you would have no friends. The tax collector was viewed as the scum of the earth – the low-life bottom-feeder who would sell out his own people to make a buck.

That is our friend Zacchaeus – the unloved, the unlovable, the despised collaborator and extortionist. Small wonder that no one would move aside to let him see Jesus – in fact, some in the crowd were probably amused at seeing him at the back of the crowd, jumping up and down, unable to see. Finally, the only way Zacchaeus can see anything is to climb a tree – a ridiculously undignified thing for a grown man, a proper Israelite, to do.

But as I’ve said before, Jesus sees things differently than we do. And as Jesus looks at the little man at the back of the crowd, hanging onto a tree, he doesn’t see what the crowd sees – the hated collaborator, the scum-of-the-earth extortionist. He sees one of his lost sheep – and one who’s probably a lot more lost than so many of the others pressing around him. And to the amazement of everyone, probably including his disciples, he calls out, “Zacchaeus! Hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.”

In those days, even more so than today, simply sharing a meal with someone indicated a real level of friendship and acceptance, and staying in someone’s home was even more so. There were certainly many people in the crowd who would have loved to have Jesus stay at their house. But Jesus doesn’t choose any of them. He doesn’t choose someone who’s there trying to demonstrate that they are somehow worthy of that honor – he chooses the one who is certain that he’s not – someone who never would have dared to imagine himself issuing the invitation. Jesus reaches out to the low-life tax collector, and in an audacious act of grace, he embraces him as a friend.

Zacchaeus’ response is immediate. He repents – he turns around and goes the other way. That’s what repentance means – to do a 180, to turn your life around. He immediately offers half of his wealth to the poor, and promises to repay anyone he’s wronged four times as much. The Jewish law prescribed that, if you wronged someone by accident, by simply making a mistake, that you simply restored the amount in question and justice was served. But if you wronged them by negligence or by deceit, the penalty was stiffer – you might be required to repay the original amount plus one fifth, or one half, or even double the original amount. Zacchaeus’ response is lavish in its generosity – “if I’ve wronged anyone, I’ll repay them not just double, but double that – four times as much!”

If you’re the practical sort, and do the math, and you assume that Zacchaeus has accumulated most of his wealth by wronging people…….Zacchaeus is going to run out of money pretty soon. But that doesn’t matter to him now. Zacchaeus has experienced grace, and as a result, he doesn’t need his riches any more.

Notice that all this has happened before Zacchaeus has really spent any time with Jesus. He doesn’t yet understand who Jesus is or what Jesus is about – he doesn’t have a theological context in which to understand Jesus. He’s simply responding to grace – the love and acceptance that he’s never known. The rest will come in time, but that grace alone was enough to lead him to repentance, and enough for Jesus to proclaim, “Today, salvation has come to this house.”

That’s often how it is with us when we first hear ourselves called by name – when we begin our faith journey. We respond to grace – to that which touches the heart – before we have the theological understanding of it. It was certainly the case in my life. Throughout junior high and high school, I was something of a loner. There were two or three major cliques in our high school, and I was one of those kids that didn’t really fit in any of them. Every class, every group, every activity was first a battle for acceptance before it was anything else. But all that changed when I walked into my first Young Life meeting. Young Life Campaign is a Christian organization that meets in homes, usually during the week, and its mission is to introduce kids to Jesus Christ. I walked into a living room packed with 50 or 60 high school kids, some of whom I knew, many of whom I didn’t – and was immediately not only accepted, but welcomed. I had never experienced that before in my life. What I was experiencing, without understanding it at the time, was Christ in them, and it kept me coming back to hear more, to understand – and to ultimately begin my own walk with Christ at a Young Life camp in Colorado. Those kids were Christ for me, in the same way that others have been Christ for many of us.

And that is what we’re called to do – to be Christ for others – to allow Christ to shine through us in a way that makes people want to know what it is that we’ve found. I knew that the kids in that Young Life club had found something that I didn’t have, and that opened the door to me finding Christ for myself. That’s the “called by name” part of our walk. And we’re “called into community” because it’s in communion with one another that that grace is expressed, expanded, deepened, and perfected. Notice that Zacchaeus couldn’t even express his repentance without involving the community – especially those he had wronged. He first restores that which was damaged, and then goes on to become a source of grace himself.

And so it is with us. We begin our walk when we realize that we are being called by name. That walk is deepened and nourished in community with one another, and we are sent out in service – to be Christ for others. That is what it means to be a Christian – literally, a “Christ-one.”

One of the things that I love about our men’s small group – and one of the things that I know I need – is the accountability portion, where we consciously and deliberately pose the question to ourselves, “How has my walk been this week? In what ways have I allowed Christ to shine through me, in my home life, in my work, in my community, in my church?” This is done, not in a judgmental way, but simply as a kind of spiritual “gut check” for ourselves. It’s important, I think, that we pose that question to ourselves at regular intervals. God puts opportunities for ministry, opportunities to let Christ shine through us, in our path all the time. But unless we’re consciously looking for them, we can get so absorbed in our own busyness that we “drive right by” and never even realize that they’re there. By asking ourselves that question at regular intervals, we increase our awareness that that is our mission, and put ourselves in a mindset in which we’re more open to being used in that way.

And it’s important that we pose that question to ourselves as a church at regular intervals as well. Our five-year plan, which we’re due to revise in the near future, is a process by which we can ask ourselves, as a congregation, “How is our walk? What are we doing to help people in this community hear the call of God? What are we doing to bring people into community in this church? How can we best express our call to service?” Right now, we have twenty people from this church on their way to Louisiana – folks who have heard themselves called by name, who have been called into this community of believers, and who are going out in service to be Christ for others. What other opportunities are there? That mission trip grew out of an objective of our current five-year plan. As we pose the question to ourselves again, I’m excited to see what other opportunities God has in store for us.

“Called by name, called into community, called to service” – or as Sam Shoemaker put it, “Get changed, get together, get going.” How is our walk as a church? How has my walk been this week?

Amen.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 8:00 pm and is filed under All Posts, sermons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.