Prophetic Panic, a sermon delivered on November 4, 2004, in Christ Chapel by Dr. Anthony D. Baker, Interim Lecturer in Theology

The last few weeks have been overflowing with tensions of an overwhelming variety: conflict, confrontation, hopes, fears, anxieties, anger, jubilation, and curses. And so far I'm just talking about the Red Sox.

I realized several weeks ago that I - the new interim lecturing in theology - had been given the first sermon following Election Day. Then I read the texts, and saw that I had been assigned an Epistle lesson featuring Christ coming back to punish those who wield power unjustly by plunging them into eternal damnation in the fiery pit of hell. That's when I first began to suspect that I was a victim of some sick sort of Episcopalian hazing. But if that's how one pledges at seminary, what's a fellow to do?

In both of his letters to the Thessalonians, Paul expresses an intense desire to see Jesus again. We hear it in today's lesson in startling images: You who have suffered for your faithfulness and for your insistence on compassion, take heart. God is a god of justice, Christ will return in judgment. And the unfaithful will have to answer for their deeds.

The image is disturbing, but tell me it isn't therapeutic. We live in a time of great suffering. Corporate greed denies medication for the elderly and generic drugs for victims of AIDS in Africa. Poor children go to schools that are tragically underfunded because they don't score high enough on tests…because their schools are tragically underfunded. Mexican coffee growers are forced to sell their land to Starbucks and go find a job at Walmart. Innocents are dying in Sudan. And Paul speaks to both the sufferers and the abusers of power: keep an eye upon the horizon. Christ will return. And while our justice systems are corruptible and often fail, Christ's is incorruptible, and will never come up short.
These are times of great suffering, and times of great suffering are times ripe for prophets who will stand, like Paul, and claim God's justice for our times. But here we find ourselves confused. For these are not only times of great suffering: they are also times of great division. The world is bitterly divided. The United States of America are bitterly divided. The Episcopal Church is bitterly divided. Even the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest has a fault line just under the apparently unified surface. So it's a time for prophets. But from which side? In the Episcopal church, who is really living into the vision of God? Akinola or Griswold? Who gets to be the suffering Thessolonians, and who are the oppressive Romans?

The Gospel lesson today is also about a desire to see Jesus, perhaps it will help.

Luke, you may have noticed, has a sneaky tendency to get his readers tangled up in his script. We think we're just listening and learning, when suddenly we look around and realize we're on stage, and the words of a prostitute or a disciple are being read in our own voices. Here it's a tax collector: Zacchaeus. Maybe he'll help us decide who gets to cheer when Jesus comes back, and who ought to run and hide.

Now tax collectors are, of course, the ultimate sell outs, and Zacchaeus is their chief. The Romans occupy Israel, and everyone tries to find a way to get by. Some turn to family, synagogue, and Torah. Zacchaeus's way of coping is to grow rich off his fellow Jews by working for the Empire. We met another tax collector a chapter earlier, when Luke gave us the option of either identifying with the praying tax collector or the praying Pharisee: humble repentance or prideful disdain. In chapter 19, we don't get to pick. The conversation is between Zacchaeus and Jesus, and we never get to be Jesus. Nope: we're Zacchaeus. The sinner, the sell-out, the slimy little maggot whom the Jews rightfully wish they could see appear in an episode of celebrity death match.

And when Jesus passes by Zacchaeus, Luke tells us that the tax collector wants to have a look. Why? Has he heard about him? Is he just curious? Or does he suspect that Jesus is trying to pass by without paying the toll? Zacchaeus wants to see Jesus, and apparently he wants to see him pretty badly.
But he can't, because of the crowd. Crowds themselves become interesting characters in Luke. Jesus is always rebuking one, escaping one, parting one, and occasionally feeding one. Crowds are generally unfaithful: they appear with clubs, they shout hateful words, and here they block the view. Closing in from the right and left, they keep Zacchaeus from seeing what he most wants to see.
So he panics. He can't bear the thought of losing the moment. His mind races. He's short (which also adds to the rodent-like persona he's always had for me). He must get above the crowd. And then he sees the sycamore tree. The Medieval writers loved this passage, because of the pure hilarity of it. A sycamore is a frivolous fruit on a pointless tree; Luke is pulling our legs. This is the scene in the movie where the boss gets caught playing with Barbies. Zacchaeus leaves his money on the table, and he climbs the tree.

And Jesus sees the foolish panic that has treed this pathetic little man, and reads in it a deep desire that Zacchaeus himself probably can't even name. Zacchaeus, despite being the epitome of the sell-out, longs to see Jesus every bit as much as Paul and the faithful of Thessalonica do.

And Jesus meets the request. He invites himself over. And so Zacchaeus the dishonest thief becomes Zacchaeus the model of Jewish and Christian hospitality. Excessive hospitality, in fact: the pledge to pay back four times what he taken from his neighbors calls to mind a code in Exodus that even the Pharisees preferred to water down. Zacchaeus is not cutting corners.

And notice how the story ends: salvation comes to Zacchaeus's house because Jesus had come to seek out what was lost. Dzatasai: "to seek," the same root used for what Zacchaeus was doing up in the tree. Zacchaeus finds the Jesus he's looking for because Jesus has been searching desperately for Zacchaeus all along.

Now I'll admit that it would be a much nicer gospel if we got to identify with the holy once in awhile. It's always the sinners. The scabs. The sell-outs. Pathetic little weasals like Zacchaeus. And these are the figures who, time and time again, become the prophets. Zacchaeus becomes the perfect model of the sort of saint that Paul praises: faithfulness to God and boundless charity.

And he we are, on November 4th, 2004: Episcopalians, Gay people, Evangelicals, Americans. Nearly all of us have reasons to be sad, angry, bitter, and to feel powerless. These are times of great suffering. But here is the question both lessons ask us today: What is it that you most desire? What is our vision, the blockage of which has left us so divided? Equal rights? Traditional Values? Both may serve, both may be good and right, but neither is in itself a faithful adherence to the Christian gospel. Even democracy is corruptible, and thus less faithful to Christ's imminent reign than we like to think.

The truth is, the culture wars are ripping our nation apart, and they may destroy us-and that's tragic. But here's something far more tragic: they're ripping our church apart. And no matter which side we find ourselves on, if we settle for the terms offered to us by the American political landscape, we're selling ourselves short. What is it that you most desire to see? A democratic president? Democrats gave us NAFTA, which is currently burning a path of destruction through Chiapas, and enslaving the poor in developing nations to insatiable beasts with names like Walmart and Nike. Democrats imposed sanctions on Iraq that kept medicine and clean water out, and were responsible for the deaths of 1 million children over the course of a decade. Is a democratic president what you most desire? Is a Republican President really what we want? Republicans finished both jobs by utterly destroying Iraq and leaving it in shambles so that companies like Walmart could profit off its reconstruction. Is a Republican president what you most desire?

We're broken today. But why? What is it that you most desire? Luke invites us to be Zacchaeus for a day. And Zacchaeus is a prophet: not a self-appointed prophet who goes around with the self-assurance that his word is what the world needs. No, Zacchaeus is a different kind of prophet. He's a sinner. A sell-out. But a sinner and sell-out who experiences an absolute panic one day when he realizes that safety and security and political alignments are not what matter most to him: all he wanted was to see Jesus. And he was too short. The crowd was closing in. His vision was blocked. There was too much noise. It was time for radical measures.

I am Zacchaeus. You are Zacchaeus. The Anglican Communion is Zacchaeus. Christians of the United States are Zacchaeus. And this is a day for panic, repentance, and excessive hospitality. The temptation will be to look up at the crowd and assume we've seen all we need to see. I watch Fox News, I read the Nation, I'm with Bishop What's his Face. But here we stand in an absolutely critical moment, and everything depends on where our eyes come to rest. Paul and Luke both invite us to desire nothing but Jesus Christ: his reign of justice, of love, of true community, of faithfulness to one another.

And that's not American politics. American politics can never be about anything but preserving American power and security. And Christianity can never be about anything but making creation into a mirror of God's eternal reign: thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. I'm pretty sure that's not part of either the Democratic or Republican platform.

To live this well means reorienting our gaze. Redefining wealth, sexuality, illness, education, security, and morality all in terms of our ability as an entire society to become more like God. There is indeed a Christian politics, and it's our responsibility as faithful Christians to keep our eyes on the Christ in order to invite the kingdom to come to earth.

This is a time of great suffering. And this is a time for prophets. But while we congratulate ourselves on being liberal or on being conservative, Jesus is passing by. And if we don't realize that we're being suffocated by the crowd, if we don't realize how short we are, we're going to miss him. Our day is, for a variety of reasons, a defining moment for the Church of Jesus Christ around the world. A difficult moment, yes: there's so much noise, the crowd is overwhelming, so many places to look. But the stakes are too high to glance over casually and assume we've seen Christ. It's time to panic. It's time to start looking around frantically for a tree.