Text: Luke 19:1-10 The Message (MSG)
Zacchaeus
19 1-4 Then Jesus entered and walked through Jericho. There was a man there, his name Zacchaeus, the head tax man and quite rich. He wanted desperately to see Jesus, but the crowd was in his way—he was a short man and couldn’t see over the crowd. So he ran on ahead and climbed up in a sycamore tree so he could see Jesus when he came by.
5-7 When Jesus got to the tree, he looked up and said, “Zacchaeus, hurry down. Today is my day to be a guest in your home.” Zacchaeus scrambled out of the tree, hardly believing his good luck, delighted to take Jesus home with him. Everyone who saw the incident was indignant and grumped, “What business does he have getting cozy with this crook?”
8 Zacchaeus just stood there, a little stunned. He stammered apologetically, “Master, I give away half my income to the poor—and if I’m caught cheating, I pay four times the damages.”
9-10 Jesus said, “Today is salvation day in this home! Here he is: Zacchaeus, son of Abraham! For the Son of Man came to find and restore the lost.”
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen
We’re going to have to give old Zacchaeus a pass, because today is significant for two major reasons which we need to observe instead. First, today we remember the saints we have known and loved. The second, and related, reason is that today is Reformation Sunday.
Saints. What is a “saint”? What are the qualifications? What’s the job description? Our church is named after St. John – the author of the Gospel. Many other UCC churches from the Evangelical and Reformed side are named after John, as well as Mark, Matthew, and Luke. There are also lots of UCC churches named for Paul, too.
Then there are other famous saints, like St. Francis of Assisi, to whom the famous prayer is attributed, the one that starts, “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace,” which was also turned into a hymn which we have sung; St. Simeon Stylites, the guy who spent the better part of his life – 47 years, to be exact – perched on a platform high atop a pillar outside of Aleppo, in what is now Syria; St. George, the one who slew the dragon; those of us with Scottish roots might recall St. Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, who was one of the Twelve Apostles, and also has the distinction of being the elder brother of the Apostle Peter. You might also recall saints like St. Joan of Arc, who defended France during the Hundred Years’ War, but who was only canonized in 1920; St. Hildegard von Bingen, another high-powered woman of the Middle Ages, who was finally canonized in 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI; or St. Brigid of Ireland, who founded both a monastery and another school, the latter of which became known for metalworking. She was apparently a good friend of yet another saint, St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. Then, of course, there’s St. Mary, the mother of Jesus, who is called “Theotokos” (“the God-Bearer”) in Orthodox Christianity, and whom we often refer to as the “Mother of God,” because, well, that’s what she was.
The common denominator that distinguishes all these people is that they seem to be several notches above the rest of us. They have gone down in history as examples of faith to us, as persons whom we can emulate in some way. So it’s understandable that we wind up believing that to be a saint you have to be one of those ultra-courageous, larger-than-life individuals.
But when you go back to the New Testament, you discover that the title “saint” wasn’t just reserved for the “heavy hitters”; everybody and anybody who is in Christ is a saint. The Greek word used in the New Testament for “saint” is “hagios” (ἅγιος) means “most holy thing.” We are made saints, not by our own actions, but by the righteousness Jesus has imputed to us. Because of this, and this alone, we are all saints. No perching on pillars required.
Now, this is significant, because those of us in the Protestant traditions of Christianity (which includes all Christians who are not Catholic or Orthodox, whether they know it or not or like it or not) take our cue from the New Testament in this regard. Despite naming our churches after the Apostles, we don’t normally go in much for Saints with a capital “S.” We don’t pray to St. John, for example. We don’t venerate Mary or pray to her. We stick to what Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). That is to say, we don’t waste time on the JV team; we go right to the source. Another pillar of Reformed faith is the passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans (1:16-17) which hit Martin Luther like a ton of bricks: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel: it is the power of God for salvation to every one who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’”
Which brings us to the Reformation. One of the major flashpoints of the Reformation was exactly the question as to how Christians received salvation. The Church – and we have to note that, at that time, there was no such thing as the “Roman Catholic Church,” there was just “the Church” – said that only the clergy – the priests – had the authority to forgive your sins, that only the priest was the intermediary between you and the Almighty, that the priest had the power to send you to either Heaven or Hell, and that, finally, only through the Church could you be saved. It’s no wonder that so many people during the late Middle Ages were absolutely terrified of their priests! The Church kept its monopoly on Christianity in many other ways, too, one of which was its refusal to allow the Bible to be translated into the vernacular (i.e., into any language that wasn’t Latin); those who did met nasty ends (just ask William Tyndale, who had the audacity to translate the Bible into English[1]). Those days are, thankfully, long since passed. However, the underlying concept of the primacy of the Church still exists. Just a few years ago, the last Pope, Benedict XVI, wrote that non-Catholic denominations are not “churches,” rather we’re merely members of what he called “defective ecclesiastical communities,”[2] defective because only the Roman Catholic Church is The Church (in a way, he was actually right, as I’ll get to in a minute). In sum, this is an “institutional view” of the Church; when you become a member of the Roman Catholic Church (and presumably the Orthodox churches, as well), you become primarily a part of an institution, and only through that institution can you be considered a member of the Body of Christ and have any hope at all of salvation. To this day, this is still what Rome teaches.[3]
Our view of what the church is could not be more different. For us, there is not, and cannot ever be, anything like salvation through an institutional church. There is no sense there (at least, none that I can see) of coming to the Father except through personal faith in Jesus Christ, which is the hallmark of our reformed tradition. There seems to be no recognition of the Biblical truth that, as Luther said, we are justified by grace through faith. The full quote from Luther goes as follows: “A Christian man is free from all things; he needs no works in order to be justified and saved, but receives these gifts in abundance from his faith alone”[4] (emphasis added).
We recognize only Jesus Christ as “the sole Head of the church,” to quote from the section titled “What We Believe” on our UCC website. No Pope. There’s no one between us and Jesus. That section also tells us: “We believe that each person is on a spiritual journey and that each of us is at a different stage of that journey.
“We believe that the persistent search for God produces an authentic relationship with God, engendering love, strengthening faith, dissolving guilt, and giving life purpose and direction.
“We believe that all of the baptized ‘belong body and soul to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.’ … All persons baptized – past, present and future – are connected to each other and to God through the sacrament of baptism.”[5] Note that there’s not a single word about the Church itself being some necessary vehicle for salvation. That’s because WE are the church. You and I. Our denomination is a collection of individual believers who band together in a covenant with each other in local churches. We don’t consider the United Church of Christ to be an “institution” at all, and certainly not in the sense that Pope Benedict XVI had in mind. So, as far as that goes, he was right.
And this goes to the heart of what we understand when we talk about saints as well as what we mean when we talk about membership in Christ’s Body, the Church: One of the main ramifications of this is that we, as individual Christians, are solely responsible for the state of our souls. My responsibility as your pastor is to preach and teach the Gospel, to faithfully administer the two Sacraments instituted by Christ – Baptism and Holy Communion – to lead worship, visit the sick, marry couples and bury those who have died. The rest is up to you. Where the emphasis in Roman Catholicism is on the Church, the emphasis in our Reformed tradition is on the individual. We recognize that God has given us free will; but with great freedom comes great responsibility. For better or worse, we are in the driver’s seat – and we have to take seriously that free will that God has given us to either say “yes” to what He offers, or to say “no,” throw the dice, and hope for the best. No one else can do that for us.
But that doesn’t mean that we’re just left to our own devices. There is a silver lining. Remember that the other word Luther uses is “grace.” We are justified by grace through faith. This is not a test – because God’s already given us the crib notes! God does not set us up to fail. C. S. Lewis once wrote, “God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.”[6]
The Reformation happened almost exactly 499 years ago. For many people, if they think about it at all, it is an ancient bit of dusty history. To which I say, “not so!” What gave rise to the Reformation is as relevant today as it was then. As the Preamble to the UCC Constitution (yes, we have a Constitution!) states: “The United Church of Christ … claims as its own the faith of the historic Church expressed in the ancient creeds and reclaimed in the basic insights of the Protestant Reformers. It affirms the responsibility of the Church in each generation to make this faith its own in reality of worship, in honesty of thought and expression, and in purity of heart before God.”[7]
The phrases there that leap out at me are “claims as its own the faith of the historic church expressed in the ancient creeds and reclaimed in the basic insights of the Protestant Reformers” and “in each generation to make this faith its own.” The fact is that the world of 2016 is vastly different than the world of 1517. Things have changed greatly between all of the expressions of Christianity during those years. I just came across an article from a blog called “The Yes Factor” which has this to tell us about the increasing movement toward reconciliation between our reformed traditions and our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters: “On October 31st, 2016 Pope Francis will take part in a joint ceremony with the World Lutheran Federation in Lund, Sweden. This marks the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s attack on the Roman Church which launched the Protestant Reformation. The Pope released a statement, ‘I want to ask for mercy and forgiveness for the behavior of Catholics towards Christians of other churches which has not reflected gospel values.’ Even for a man known for radical departures from traditional norms, this is a quantum leap which can only benefit us all.”[8]
On the “Christian Forums” blog, I came across a discussion thread titled “What are the lessons of the Protestant Reformation?” where this specific question was posted: “What lessons, if any, do you think the Church learned from the Protestant Reformation? Are there things that perhaps you feel it should have learned and didn’t?” Here’s one answer that I found illuminating: “Since Vatican II, there’s a long list of reforms that the Catholic Church has instituted and, lo and behold, they’re exactly what the Protestants of the 16th century had championed and instituted in their own churches. And that is apparently not a coincidence or something that needed time to develop.”[9]
The Reformation has borne fruit! Our forebears in the faith, who suffered, and in many cases, died for their – our – beliefs – have been vindicated.
But this isn’t an “us vs them” thing. The real takeaway for us today is that the Holy Spirit has indeed been hard at work in the past five centuries, opening hearts and minds to insights and gifts of faith that each side can give the other. Today, as just one example, we have an organization called PACA – Prescott Area Churches Association – and all of you are familiar with what we do together, UCC, Lutherans, Baptists, and Roman Catholics. Such an organization would have been unthinkable even fifty years ago.
So today I invite you, my fellow saints, on this Reformation Sunday, to give thanks to those pioneers of our faith, to keep praying that their legacy will continue to be honored, and to work toward the day when what they deeply yearned for – a totally renewed and unified Church – will indeed come to pass – “that they may all be one” (John 17:21).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale
[2] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/19692094/ns/world_news-europe/t/pope-other-denominations-not-true-churches/#.WBTyYfSrE4g
[3] The Roman Catholic Church is necessary for salvation – CCC 846, “How are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the Church Fathers? Re-formulated positively, it means that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body: Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.” (from the Catechism of the Catholic Church)
[4] Luther, Martin, quoted in Eerdmans’ Handbook to the History of Christianity, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1977, p. 360
[5] http://www.ucc.org/about-us_what-we-believe
[6] http://cslewiswisdom.blogspot.com/2011/06/cs-lewis-on-perseverance.html
[7] http://www.ucc.org/beliefs_preamble-to-the-constitution
[8] https://theyesfactor.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/prophetic-voices-martin-luther-william-barclay-robert-lax/
[9] http://www.christianforums.com/threads/what-are-the-lessons-of-the-protestant-reformation.7879191/