He Climbed a Tree

Sunday, August 25, 2019
Pastor Mark Aune

Luke 19:1-10

Dear friends in Christ, grace and peace. Amen

So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way.

I wasn’t going to do this to you today but we almost have to.

Zacchaeus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he.

He climbed up in a sycamore tree for the Lord he wanted to see.

Now that I’ve got the worm tune thing going in your head I want you to think about this bible song for just a minute. It is kind of mean. Would you want to be called a wee little man? I realize it is a children’s song but really, a wee little man.

Luke attaches some labels to him as well; chief tax collector, rich. Oh and he is short in stature as well.

The labels are intentional. They get our attention and as soon as we hear them we all pretty much think to ourselves, I’m not like Zacchaeus at all.

But hold on. Maybe you are. Perhaps you are more like Zacchaeus than you think you are. Luke says one more thing about him that is easy to pass over and it is an important descriptor of Zacchaeus.

He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature.

What is it that stirs in the heart of a person and causes him or her to want to see who Jesus is? Something was going on with Zacchaeus.

Word about this man must have made its way to Jericho because when Jesus entered the city the crowds came out to see him and Zacchaeus wanted to see him as well.

Was Zacchaeus lonely? Was he disappointed with himself and with his life?

Part of me wonders if he was tired of being singled out by the labels he wore out in public, by the judgement he felt from the people in his community. Was anyone ever glad to see him?

Whatever his need, and Luke doesn’t tell us, he was determined to see Jesus. So he climbs up a sycamore tree.

I was curious, how climbable is a sycamore tree? I don’t think I’ve ever climbed one. And I’ve climbed a lot of trees. So I looked up a picture of a sycamore tree and it is a very climbable tree.

It has large low branches that one could easily reach and it would be a perfect tree to sit a watch someone come by. The tree is an important part of the Zacchaeus story and it gets me thinking about the trees I’ve climbed in order to see Jesus is in my life. The things and the people who have served as a sort of tree that assisted me in getting a good view of Jesus.

Have you climbed trees like that? Trees with large, low branches that are easy to reach and give a good view. Trees that have helped you get a good view of Jesus.

If you are anything like Zacchaeus then there is something inside of you that is drawing you to Jesus and you know you need to see him – you know something is amiss in your life – you know there is an empty place.

It might be small or it might be large. And no matter what you do to fill that space, no matter how hard you try – it is still empty.

Do what Zacchaeus did. Climb the tree – look at Jesus.

Get a clear, unobstructed look at him and let him see you as well. He will see you up in that tree and he will look you in the eyes and he will call you by name and he will invite himself into your home.

This is the beautiful part of the Zacchaeus story. When 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.

Hurry and come down.

Do you hear the urgency in the voice of Jesus?

Do you hear the desire he has for Zacchaeus and for you and for me?

I must stay in your house today. Today!

So Zacchaeus hurried down and was happy to welcome him. Of all the people in town, Jesus sees Zacchaeus. And Zacchaeus welcomes him into his home with open arms and an open heart. And he is transformed because Jesus entered into his home and into his life.

Your heart is your home – this is the place where the empty feeling resides and Jesus wants to occupy that space.

He wants to come into your home and dine with you and be with you and fill you with a peace that nothing else can give you. Zacchaeus is transformed when he welcomes Jesus into his home. He is a changed person.

Up to this point it is a feel good story. And then the crowd gets involved. ⁷All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.”

There’s always a crowd isn’t there. There’s always someone sitting in judgment and let us be very clear here. The crowd is judging Jesus as well as Zacchaeus.

Why do we do this kind of thing? Why is the crowd always so full of judgment?

Is it because they feel like they are more deserving of Jesus’ attention?

Is it because of their strong dislike of Zacchaeus and what they feel is his betrayal of them since he is working for the Romans and because of that he is no longer one of them?

Or is it just easier to heap scorn on someone else when we are unwilling or unable to see and acknowledge that empty space in our own lives?

I received an interesting email from a young adult who was reflecting on this story. It made me think about the crowd. This is a portion of that email.

“How we can read the text, not interpreting Zacchaeus’ being called a sinner and tax collector representing our own shortcomings (pun partially intended), but rather how the crowd kept him from Jesus.

That’s been a huge part of my faith journey, and I’m not even really talking about myself. Just from growing up in the church and seeing the people I knew and grew up with acting as gatekeepers instead of having an inviting and giving spirit. Some examples that I’ve seen was a teenage girl who got pregnant or a man struggling with addiction being told that he couldn’t come to church anymore. Just generally watching the church hurt people for a variety of reasons.”

I don’t want to be part of that crowd and I don’t want the church to be that crowd. And in order for that to happen I have to recognize that I am short in stature, that I am a sinner and a tax collector. But it also means I need to keep climbing trees so that I never lose sight of Jesus.

And when he calls me to come down, I will come down willingly, with joy and I will welcome him into my home. I will welcome him once again and I will remember why he came for you and for me.

“Today salvation has come to this house. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”

Thanks be to God. Amen

Past Sermons

Mutually Encouraged by Faith

Sunday, May 19, 2019
Pastor Megan Torgerson

Romans 1:1-17

The book of Romans is a letter. An actual letter. Like, a letter written by hand and then sent to someone else for them to read. Paul, the author of this letter, wrote a lot of letters. Paul was an apostle, that is, someone who is sent – in this case, he is one who is sent to preach the good news of Jesus Christ to the furthest reaches of the known world. He’s really, really good at it.

At the time that Paul writes this letter to the church in Rome, he’s been doing this work for probably twenty years and is at the peak of his career. He’s developed a great pattern in his work: visit a place, get to know the people, continually share his faith with them, help gather a community of believers from all walks of life, and stay with them while they learn how to be followers of Jesus. Then Paul leaves – after all, he’s got other places to visit and more people to teach. He is an apostle – he is sent. But he doesn’t leave the church abandoned. He writes letters back to these churches, especially when he hears about crises or conflicts. Sometimes they need comfort, sometimes challenge, sometimes critique, but always he writes as one they know and love. They welcome his input.

The letter to the Romans is not like that. Paul has never been to Rome. There is already a Christian church there, one brought over likely from Jerusalem very early in the faith. And the church in Rome has recently seen conflict. A few years before the writing of this letter, the Roman emperor expelled all the Jews from Rome. Because Christianity was effectively a form of Judaism at the time, Christians were also exiled. After the emperor died and the Jewish Christians returned, they found a church that had continued to grow and develop – this time with Gentile Christians.

It’s hard for us to understand how shocking and despicable this would have been. Two weeks ago I preached on Acts 10, and how Peter’s vision of God calling all animals clean and good to eat flew in the face of millennia of culture, history, and society for Jewish Christians. Jesus himself was Jewish and kept these laws – surely if anyone else wanted to be Christian, they could likewise follow these rules. Peter’s vision and the general movement of the church revealed otherwise.

That didn’t mean it made things easy. It is hard to let go of tradition and expectation and legislation as the Spirit moves us to new places. I hear people struggle when someone sits in their pew or wears sweatpants to church. Let’s be honest: those are enormously trivial things. If still we grind our teeth at the thought of these worthless infractions how much more might faithful people be driven to despair by moving on from the purity laws ordained by God?

This is the faith community to which Paul writes. He writes to a church redefining and fighting. It is a church that feels a deep rift, a painful split, one that goes deep into matters of identity and righteousness, one that threatens to dissolve into name-calling and condemning and finger-pointing and disgrace to the very name of God in whose name they mean to gather – and if we’re honest, we know how that feels. Those fears are not unfamiliar.

So how does Paul start his letter? He has no standing in that church in Rome. They don’t even know who he is – and if they do, it’s possible that they might still remember him as he was in his youth, an aggressive persecutor of the early faith. What can he say that would possibly invite them to listen to him, to hear the word he will share, to receive the message that he hopes will join them together in the work of the gospel?

He keeps it simple: he tells them the truth. He tells them who he is, and it is fully wrapped up in who Jesus is. His self-introduction is the story of the gospel. Nothing he can say about himself means more than who he is in Jesus Christ.

He tells them he wants to come see them, that he wants to be with them, that he hopes he can share some spiritual gift – but even more than that, so that they might mutually encourage each other in faith. He doesn’t want to come to them because he’s better than them, because he can fix them so they can get things right, because they’re obviously sinful mess-ups who just haven’t been taught the truth. No, he wants to join them for mutual encouragement in faith. He wants to walk with them. He hopes he has something to offer them in his teaching and leadership, but just the same, he knows he will grow by being with them as well.

What if that’s how it’s supposed to be? What if we’re supposed to talk about what we believe and why, not because we’ve got it right and we want to establish our superior knowledge, but because we know that God works through our mutual encouragement in faith? What if we were not ashamed of the gospel, not afraid of getting it wrong, not worried that someone would think we were weird for talking about what we believe and why and then asking others the same? What if we trusted that the power of God was at work in this mutual encouragement? What if we were not so proud and short-sighted as to think that the way we see God is the only way God works in the world? What if we actually believed that God is at work in the world, that God has already been working long before we showed up, that we arrive as much to learn as to teach?

Ah, but I know the argument against it: we’re supposed to keep polite conversation, right? What don’t you talk about at the dinner table? Religion and politics, right? Look where it’s gotten us. It’s gotten us to a place where we can no longer have civil discourse, where we are more likely to condemn than to seek to understand, where we claim a Christian can only look one way, live one place, vote one direction, take one moral position. It’s gotten us built up and walled off and fighting against our own beloved members of the family of God.

So don’t do it. Take Paul’s example. Tell people who you are. Tell them where you’re from. Tell them what you believe. And then invite them to do the same. Make your story of faith as natural a part of your introduction as where you work and where you live and who’s in your family. And when someone’s story is different, listen to it. Hear it. See God at work in it. Be amazed. Allow for the mutual encouragement of faith, because this is how the gospel is shared.

No matter where you go from here, no matter where you find yourself, no matter what comes next for you – you can do this. You are called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel which is the power of God for salvation for everyone who has faith – no matter what. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Past Sermons

Faithful & Unfinished

Sermon

Obedience and Preservation

Sermon

When You Have to Go to Plan B

Sermon

The Right Time

Sunday, May 26, 2019
Pastor Mark Aune

Dear friends in Christ, grace and peace. Amen

Romans 3:28-30, 5:1-11

Romans is the Apostle Paul’s longest, weightiest and most important letter in the New Testament. He lays out in this letter the full richness of his experience with Jesus. We heard the main theme of Romans last week in chapter 1:16-17 where Paul says – For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. ¹⁷For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.

The theological term for what Paul is speaking about here is called justification. It means we are saved, justified before God, made righteous in God’s eyes not by what we do or don’t do in this world but on the basis of faith in Jesus. Faith alone.

In chapters 1, 2, and 3 the Apostle Paul makes the argument that God deals with all people on the same basis – all are sinners – all are under the power of sin. Paul is simply telling the truth here. He is saying out loud what all of us know about ourselves and the brokenness that is present in our lives. We are sinners and that is the truth, plain and simple.

In chapter 5, where we land today, we hear the pay off, the ‘so what’ of justification. The answer to the question of why does this matter and what difference does it make in my life and your life.

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.

That is such a great verse!

Therefore we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore we have peace with ourselves, in our hearts and in the depths of our soul.

Therefore we have the peace which passes all human understanding.

This is what it means when Paul says we are justified by faith.

To be justified by faith means we don’t have to justify ourselves. We no longer have to make excuses. We’ve all done it. We try and justify our actions, our words, our choices and our behavior. We do it because we want to be right. We do it because we think it will make us feel better. But deep down we know better.

It means we can stop trying to make ourselves worthy of God’s love.

It means we can stop feeling guilty that we don’t measure up to some standard that we or someone else has created for our lives.

I was listening to a podcast this week on a site called Working Preacher. It comes out of Luther Seminary. Professor Craig Koester, who teaches New Testament at Luther spoke about the term, justifying the margins, as it relates to word processing. Do you know that term?

As someone who didn’t take keyboarding in high school, don’t ask me why, and who is basically self-taught on the key board, I had to look this up to better understand why Professor Koester would use this term as it relates to the reading today from Romans.

“Justifying in margins has to do with where the text is aligned. Justification refers to whether the rows of text on a page appear straight up and down in line with the margin or show a ragged edge. Margin justification works in Microsoft Office programs the same way it does with other printed and on-screen text, but it’s much easier to justify margins in an Office program than it is using a typewriter for example.”[1]

I kind of like that example Dr. Koester uses. The margins of my life are aligned, straightened out and it is God who aligns my margins.

There is no longer a ragged edge. We could use that as a definition for sin couldn’t we.

My margins are justified. Your life is in alignment with God. Our edges are no longer ragged.

This is God’s work in Jesus. This is the God who is always seeking me out in order to straighten the relationship and make it right. This is good news. This is the gospel.

Paul keeps pushing the point in chapter 5. He reminds us what it means to be standing in grace and how much God does for us.

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. ⁸But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

God justifies the margins at the right time. Think about that. What does that look like for you?

We think of salvation as a onetime event and that is true. Jesus died on the cross and God raised him from the dead and it happened once. It only needed to happen once and this is what Paul is referring to when he says at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.

But what do your margins look like today?

Are they ragged? And if they are ragged what is the cause of them being ragged? What is it today that you are struggling with in your life that is causing you to be out of alignment with God’s purposes in your life, with God’s plan in your life, with God’s direction in your life?

Can you name what this might be for you, today? Take a look at what it is that keeps you from experiencing God’s peace and what do you need to do about it?

Confess it? Make amends with someone? Do the thing you have been putting off doing? Make the change in your life that will give you wholeness instead of ragged margins. You are the only person who can answer these questions.

And let me remind you of where you stand – what Paul tells us – Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, ²through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand

For while we are still weak, at the right time, God has the power to align our margins and straighten things out. The right time is today. Or tomorrow. Or next week.

Because God justifies our margins we have access to this grace in which we stand and we can boast in our hope of sharing in the glory of God.

This is truly where faith meets life.

At the right time God will empower us to do what we need to do.

At the right time God will give us what we need the most.

At the right time God will eliminate the ragged edges of our lives and bring us into alignment with His purpose and plan.

This is hope. This is peace. This is God’s justification.