The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

The Ven. Richard I. Cluett

Luke 19:1-10

Why might this passage be of any interest to you? What in the world could you possibly have in common with Zacchaeus? Is your life anything like that of this first century Jewish tax collector? Is there anything for you to learn here that could possibly be of use to you?

Well, to begin with I want to dispel a view of Zacchaeus that has gained quite a bit of traction over the centuries, particularly in the last few decades. It may seem like a picky point, but I believe it is an important one. It is this; the scripture does not tell us that Zacchaeus is the worst of the worst of sinners. We have come to believe that not only was he a representative of an unpopular government (that being Rome), but that he also took advantage of his position as tax collector to line his own pockets at the expense of his fellow citizens. The take on Zacchaeus is that he was “the worst of the worst”. One of “those people”.

The translation of the scripture that we heard this morning points us in that direction. We heard, “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." So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, "He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner." Zacchaeus 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." Then Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house…”

The King James Version and the Greek read a bit differently. “And when they saw it, they all murmured, saying, that he was gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner. And Zacchaeus stood, and said unto the Lord: Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold. And Jesus said unto him, this day is salvation come to this house…”

So, it is not I will restore, but I restore. Not I will give to the poor, but I give to the poor. It is my practice to do these things. This is how I live my life. This is how I try to be fair in my work and to do what is good and right in my life.

He is not somebody who routinely rips off people. He is not someone who neglects the poor. He tries to live a righteous and just and fair life – even while being an agent of a repressive government. And Jesus says that he will come to his house – even before Zacchaeus has told him about himself, he says he will come to him.

Zacchaeus is not “the worst of the worst” of sinners. I think he is just an average Joe in many ways. He tries to do what is right. And Jesus comes to his house. Jesus enters, not just his house, but also his life, because even an average Joe or Jane loses the way from time to time – lost to him- or her- self and needs to experience the Good News that Jesus brings.

Now that, I believe, puts Zacchaeus pretty much in the same category of sinner that you and I inhabit. Not that any of us is the agent of a repressive government, at least to my knowledge.

What we have here is a cathedral full of people, who try to do their best. Try to be fair in their dealings with others. Try to remember and respond to the needs of those who are poor and in need. Try to live according to a code that honors our selves, our families, our community, our faith, and our God. We try to base who we are and what we do on what we have heard, and learned, and known, and believed about God’s way and God’s will for us.

But if we didn’t need to meet Jesus again and again and again to help us find and keep on the good path, the right way – what are we doing here this morning? Why would we be here?

I think we are here because we want to be visited by Jesus, to experience the Good News of Jesus in our lives. We are here because life is so hard at times, because life is so uncertain at times, because life is so chaotic at times, because life is so frightening at times, because life is so depressing at times, because life comes at us like water from a fire hose that beats us down, rather than gives us a refreshing drink.

A beloved dies. A job is lost. A marriage ends.  Life seems to have lost all options but one. A child turns away. Sickness, disease and disability strike. The money’s gone. We have lost God.

Who has not been so hungry for what we have heard about Jesus, who has not been in such need of what Jesus has to offer that we would not extend ourselves, even to the point of climbing into a tree to get a better glimpse of that goodness? If there is such a person here this morning that has not been there, then I say to you, “Just wait. Give it time. The world, life, circumstance, bad luck, fate, karma, call it what you will, it will at some point bring you to a time and place when you will do almost anything to have Jesus come to you, come into your life, to receive what Jesus has to offer.”

There are times when wanting to do and to be good are not enough. We just don’t hack it. They are not enough. And the good news of today’s’ gospel is that Jesus is seeking us, even before we know we are seeking him.

How do I know this? My name is Zacchaeus. I am Zacchaeus. I try to do and to be good. If I wrong someone, I try to make it right. I remember and respond to those who are poor and in need – out of a generous heart. But from time to time, I have been lost. From time to time, life has beaten me down. From time to time, I seem to have just run out of resources and I am at my wits end, depleted, empty, and I eagerly seek what Jesus has to offer. I might even climb into a tree to have Jesus come back into my life with healing and strengthening and direction and purpose.

As it was for Zacchaeus, so it is, I believe, also for Rick, and Joe and Jane, and Barbara, and Frank, and fill-in-the-blank with your name. So also to you and to me, Jesus will come and enter where you live, enter into your life.

And he will bring what we need, be it strength, or forgiveness, or healing, or direction, or meaning, or succor, or mercy.

I think we hold the humility of our humanity in common with Zacchaeus of Jericho. And as Habakkuk reminds us, we don’t ever want to lose the vision, the vision of what Jesus will bring when he enters into our life.

Maranatha! Come Lord Jesus. Eagerly I seek you. Enter into my house; come into my life – again. Let me catch a glimpse of your life-giving Spirit. Maranatha! Amen.

The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 25C)

The Rev. Jerry Keucher

I’m Jerry Keucher, and I’m delighted to be with you today. I’m very grateful to Dean Pompa for inviting to work with the Cathedral this year on the annual giving campaign.

This week you will receive a mailing asking you to reflect on what you plan to contribute to the work of the Cathedral in 2011. Then two weeks from today, on All Saints’ Sunday, there’ll be a big ingathering of all the pledges and estimates that you’ll be making for next year. I’m here today to give you something to reflect on over the next two weeks.

I want to tell you a story about the first house we owned. We had it for three years before selling it for the place we’ve lived in ever since. It happened almost 30 years ago. Long before I was ordained, in June of 1980 we became urban homesteaders. We bought an abandoned house in a very iffy neighborhood on the North Shore of Staten Island. The large Victorian houses in the area had been converted into apartments and rooming houses by slumlords who had milked them dry, left them vacant, and then sold them to other people like us.

“Move-in condition” in the neighborhood meant that you could move in; it did not imply that any plumbing, electrical, or heating systems were operable. The man who sold us our house held a private mortgage because no bank would make loans in that area. The banks calculated that the value of the houses and lots was zero less the costs of demolition. The previous owner thought that the people buying his properties were fools.

By December I was wondering if he had been right because we could not make it. My partner, a priest and an artist, was not working as a priest and made next to nothing from his art. The wind blew against the sheets of plastic we’d stapled to the windows that we couldn’t afford to repair. The oil company demanded cash for its deliveries, so the tank was often dry. My job paid me once a month, so we were broke three weeks out of four.

I had already taken a second job as the organist at a parish in nearby Bayonne, but we still had to borrow money from a friend that month to pay the mortgage. Things were that serious. We were pledging what I thought was a generous amount, but we had fallen behind in our weekly pledge. It was just one more bill that we couldn’t pay. I had done all I could do, and it just wasn’t enough.

At an Advent Evensong at the church in Bayonne the rector took a liberty with the lectionary and preached on Malachi 3, beginning at verse 8, in which the prophet brings God’s accusation of theft against the people. “Will a man rob God?” the old language says, “Yet you are robbing me! But you say, ‘How are we robbing you?’ In your tithes and offerings!...You are robbing me…Bring the full tithe into the storehouse…and thus put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts. See if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.”

I remembered my childhood. My mother had brought us up to tithe. I asked her once through gritted teeth, as I was putting ten percent of my allowance into the envelope for church the next day, “Why are you making me do this?”

“So that when you’re big you’ll tithe on your grownup income,” she said. “How do you know I’ll do that?” I asked, somewhat surprised that she could see the future. “I know you will,” she answered, “because ‘as the twig is bent, so the tree is inclined.’”

I’m not sure what I would have done without that sermon at that time and the memory of my upbringing. But that’s the great thing about God’s providence. God gave me the gifts of that sermon and that upbringing, so God gave me a way out of my financial difficulties in December 1980. My prayer is that God might be giving some of you a similar gift this morning.

“OK, God,” I said, “OK. I’ll put you to the test.” For the next few weeks I stopped thinking about the $15 a week that we were pledging. When I got paid at the end of that month, I wrote a check to our parish for ten percent of what I put into the bank. It worked out to more than twice our weekly pledge. I turned in the check and held my breath.

Nothing happened. That is to say, the windows of heaven did not pour money down on us, and our windows were still covered with plastic. However, something else didn’t happen as well. We didn’t go deeper into the hole. We paid back the friend the next month and still met our obligations. We were somehow, and I’m not entirely sure how, better able to make ends meet on 90% of our income that we had been on 100%.

In reality, everything happened, and it happened in us. Writing that check made me know and feel immediately that money is a tool: it’s just a means, not an end. And more or less of necessity, it raised my trust in God to unprecedented levels.

The gifts to the church are always the first ones I enter after the direct deposit hits the bank. (And — though this is just personal preference — our tithe is always on the gross. I figure if we’re not going to rob God, why chisel Him? And then the tax refund is free money that’s already been tithed on. But that’s just my preference. There’s no obligation here, just an invitation.)

I went back to tithing as an adult out of sheer desperation. But even if you’re not as desperate as I was, I think there’s still something you want. You want not to be anxious about the little things. You want a relationship with God. You want an experience of God. You want to get to the place where your will and God’s will are the same — where doing what you really want to do means doing what God wants. I think you want your heart to be with God. Why else would you be here?

So if you want your heart to be with God, here’s a way forward. Put your money where you want your heart to be. Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Your heart follows your money, not the other way around. We think it’s the other way around. We think we spend our money on the things that are important to us, but those things are important to us because they’re what we spend our money on. Put your money where you want your heart to rest, and your heart will move there.

So stop thinking about what you give as another bill that has to be paid, or as a tax, or as club dues, and for heaven’s sake, don’t let it be just a tip that’s less than you spend on lunches or your commute.

Make your gift a first-fruits offering. Set a percentage in your heart, and give that percentage off the top whenever you get money. And don’t give at other times. Break the tyranny of the weekly envelope. If you get money once a month, give your percentage once a month, and don’t sweat the other weeks. If you’re self-employed and income is really erratic, then just give back to God when God gives to you. Don’t worry about the weeks in between.

I’ve told you the percentage I give, but I’m convinced that the percentage doesn’t matter. What matters is changing the pattern of how you give. If you give a set weekly or monthly amount, you’ve turned your contribution into a bill. You factor it in with all your other obligations. If you think about your money they way most people do, when you sit down to pay your bills, you add them up and then see if you have enough to pay them. This increases your anxiety about money.

If you give a percentage off the top, the pattern is different. First, you look back and see how much God has given you since the last time you sat down to deal with your money. Then you make a gift to God that is in direct proportion to what God has given you. Then you see how you and God will deal with your obligations.

The point is first, make your gift a percentage of whatever you just received; second, give it off the top before you pay anything else.

This will change your life. Percentage giving off the top means that each time you sit down to pay bills, the first payment you make is a thank offering to God that is in proportion to what God has given you. You may think paying your bills is the least religious thing you do. Percentage giving off the top turns paying your bills into an act of worship because you’re putting your trust in God. It changes how you think about your life and what you have. It’s the most powerful way to use the powerful tool that is your money in the service of your spiritual transformation. I’m quite serious. This changed my life. This will change your life.

Percentage giving off the top: that’s my sermon. Have you noticed what my sermon has not been? I haven’t said a word about how much the parish needs your money. I haven’t mentioned budgets or capital needs. I haven’t browbeat you or played a single guilt card. I haven’t said ‘should’ or ‘ought to’ a single time. Look, you’re all bright people. You know perfectly well that if the Cathedral is going to thrive, it isn’t all going to happen with other people’s money. If you all don’t support your parish, why would anybody else? So I’m not going to dwell on that, because it’s obvious.

My point is rather different. I know that you want this parish to thrive. I know you want it to be here so that future generations can meet God here just as you have. I’ll bet most of you wish that you could do more. Well, I’m here to empower you. I’m here to tell you, and to show you, and to witness to you from my own experience how you can be as generous as you’ve wanted to be. And one of the most powerful tools you can bring to your spiritual transformation is sitting in your bank account.

The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa

Good morning. I am guessing that you, like me, were entrenched, captivated, and fixated on the story of the rescue of the Chilean miners this week. What a story, and how refreshing for us to focus on good news when we so desperately needed an opportunity to focus on good news. What an amazing story, a real life story–the raising of the human spirit, the persistence of the human spirit, a group of miners trapped, gathering together in communion in desperate times. Once they were discovered, waiting, waiting, seemingly patient and seemingly calm, from this side of the earth. The stories are really quite amazing when you hear them, about how they ordered themselves to stay in communion with one another. Someone rose up and took leadership, they assigned chores, they worked, and they had a daily ritual. They took on roles.

Somewhere along the way after they had been discovered, one of the first things they asked for, it is reported, was a crucifix. Soon after that, they began to ask for statues of Mary and other saints because they had made themselves a chapel underground. Around that chapel, they gathered for corporate and individual prayer. Miner #21, Jose Enriquez, requested that 33 Bibles be sent because he wanted to lead Bible study. What a miraculous, miraculous story, and a miraculous focus on prayer. Some of the quotes as the miners were released, as I am sure that you have read, were quite amazing. One of them was quoted as saying, “I have seen the devil and God down there, and I reached out for the hand of God.” Another miner said, “There were 34 of us down there. God never left us.”

It is surprising to none of us that in difficult times, we tend to turn to God, don’t we? Especially in difficult times, we tend to turn to God. But what a miraculous story, and I am using that word with intention, what a miraculous story of how, worldwide and in that place, under that ground, prayer became part of what would sustain, lift up, and hold up this newly-formed and unintended communion of people.

The scriptures today, particularly the Gospel, do, indeed, focus us on prayer. Particularly the story that Jesus tells, the parable of the widow and the unjust judge, is a message to the disciples that they must be persistent in their prayers, just like the widow who had worn out or was going to wear out the unjust judge. So, too, the disciples must be persistent in their prayers. Jesus knew that his disciples would have difficult times, difficulty being the living community that followed the teachings of Jesus in a hostile environment. Jesus knew that they would need to be persistent in staying connected with the holy.

Today we look at the experience of prayer. What do we say about prayer? Is there really power and purpose in prayer? How do we approach prayer? What is prayer and what isn’t it? Certainly, it seems, we have a modern and living-day example in the Chilean miners who were indeed persistent in their prayers. It is said that in those first 17 days, when they sat in darkness without food, rationing it out by the teaspoon, that it was their prayers and their stories that they told one another that became the communion of power and purpose, that literally kept them alive for 17 days. In the days that followed after they were discovered, it was the rituals that they encountered in community, prayer being part of that ritual, that kept them together and patient and hopeful in their days of waiting. A disciplined ritual of praying in that make-shift chapel, corporately and individually, became the fabric that led them day by day.

St. Augustine says this, “What can be more excellent than prayer? What is more profitable to our life, what sweeter to our souls, what more sublime, in the course of our whole life, than the practice of prayer?” Satchel Paige, who I have to quote in the midst of baseball season (he was a pitcher), “Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.” Abraham Lincoln said, “I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.”

Prayer…but what will we say, what will we say today about prayer, in our modern-day miraculous example? What will we say today if the miners had not been rescued? It happens, you know. Would they have been any less persistent in their prayers, and would God have been any less present, present to them, and they less present to each other? Would their prayers have been without power? Surely, I am not the only one who asks those questions. This leads us, I think, into what prayer is and what it isn’t.

Prayer…sometimes we approach it as if it is a whim, a whine, or a wish, and I have participated in all three in my life. You know, the prayerful whim: God please don’t let Roy Halladay throw one more pitch down the center of the plate to Cody Ross, whoever he is. You know, the whim prayer, God please let me get an A on my report. Please, God, don’t let me get stuck in this traffic. Prayers of whim.

Prayer of whine, and I don’t use this with any judgment. I am a full supporter of whining in appropriate times and places. Prayers of whine: Why me? Why me, Lord? Why did this have to happen to me? Why am I on such a bad luck streak? Why me? This is also called lament, and the scriptures are full of it. Why, oh, Lord, why? Of course, in an egocentric moment, we have to ask the question, well, why not? Why not me? Why not? It seems sometimes frivolous to say, but it is the truth. It happens to all of us. It is the gift of being human, the gift of having life, its triumphs and its challenges. Why not me?

I think the most difficult and challenging part that we sometimes see in prayer is the wish prayer: God, I wish you could take this away from me. Please take this away from me. Jesus, even in the garden, may have prayed the wish prayer. God, can’t you take this away from me? Can’t you please take away this pain, this loss, and why did it have to be at all? Can’t you please give me back what once was, my life as I knew it, the relationship that I have lost, my father who has died so suddenly? I wish, God, it didn’t have to be.

Our prayers are difficult when we ride the continuum of whim and whine and wish. But what is prayer, then? What is it? And where is its power? Søren Kierkegaard said, “Prayer does not change God, but it changes the one who prays.” Samuel Shoemaker, Episcopal priest and one of the founders of the AA movement, said that “Prayer does not change things for you, but it, for sure, changes you for things.” How many folks participating in a 12-step program have come to know the power of that statement? Prayer may not change things for you, but it, for sure, changes you for things. Henri Nouwen says that “Prayer is the bridge between our conscious and unconscious lives. To pray is to connect these two sides of our lives by going to the place where God dwells. Prayer is soul work, because our souls are those sacred centers where all is one and where God is with us in the most intimate way. Prayer is the invitation into sacred intimacy.”

We all know intimacy in that limited human way, but the gift that we get when we experience intimacy, a place of safety, a place of trust, a place of delight and passion, of vulnerability and courage, of a peace that surpasses all understanding, a relationship into sacred intimacy, is where our desperation is met with understanding. Our sadness and despair is met with a lap to put our heads in and a soothing hand running fingers through our hair, a light touch, wiping away our tears. That sacred place of intimacy is where our delight is met with unbridled joy, our courage is lifted up and emboldened, and our imagination is set free, where our deepest wounds and hurts that we often hide from the world are able to be shown, and they are accepted, and they even are embraced. This is where prayer leads us, into an unshakable communion with God.

The Lord be with you. Let us pray.

Listen, O Lord, to my prayers and hear my desire to be with you, to dwell in your house, and to let my whole being be filled with your presence. Let me at least remain open to your invitation to intimacy. Let me wait attentively and patiently for the hour when you will come and break through all the walls that I have erected. Teach me, O Lord, to pray.

By the way, the New York Times talked about the delivery of the miners in this way. “Miracle at the Mine” is what Good Morning, America called it, and said it was a nativity scene witnessed world-wide. We have witnessed a nativity scene, new life born out of deep intimacy with God. Amen.

The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

The Rev. Canon Mariclair Partee

If today is the first day I have talked about Pee Wee’s Playhouse in a sermon, it certainly will not be the last. That Saturday morning kid’s show was a defining experience of my youth- it was a riot of color and camp and cartoons and talking furniture, and my brother and I watched it long after we had graduated from its recommended audience age, because it was unlike anything we had ever seen before in our short lives.

There were fancy cowboys and a lady with a big red beehive, a genie, a talking chair, pterodactyls, and in the middle of it all, a man-sized child in too short pants. Our favorite part of each episode was the word of the day- it was disclosed in a whisper at the beginning of the show, and every time it was spoken over the next hour, everyone had to scream as loud as they could.

It was a creative and fun way of building our vocabularies, and also of teaching us about concepts that were a little abstract for our young minds. It was really quite brilliant as a teaching tool.

I will not state outright that the scholars and theologians who devised the Revised Common Lectionary were fans of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, but the way a theme is chosen, and stated and restated and stated once again in the selected readings, particularly in these later Sundays in Pentecost, leads me to suspect they have more than a passing familiarity with some of the concepts.

The word for today is faith.

Walter Brueggeman, biblical scholar, tells us that “faith” in these readings has many dimensions and nuances, and cannot be reduced to one thing. It is honest sadness, tenacious remembering, performance of duty, a holy calling, and holding fast to sound teaching.

We begin with two accounts of the faith of the Jews in Exile- first in Lamentations, where in vivid images we are presented with a desolate and destroyed city of Zion, her temple torn stone from stone, her streets empty. For the tribe of Israel, this city was the earthly incarnation of God’s love for them, Jerusalem was the tangible proof of the covenant God made with Moses. Now, in their collective mind, she is like a princess who has been turned into a slave; all who once loved her have turned against her, her friends have become her enemies. The city of God is described as a widow, weeping inconsolably over the loss of all who loved her. Yet her children, from exile, love her still- their faith in God is what sustains them, and keeps them certain that they will one day return to the streets they once walked, the place they called home, that they will rebuild the Temple that was destroyed, even if it is only their children’s children who survive to see that union with God re-established.

In the psalm, one of the most beautiful of the Psalter, I think, but also one in which grief, loss, is most palpable, we hear the displaced people of Zion crying out to God beside the rivers of their land of exile, with the plaintive cry- “by the Babylonian rivers we sat down and wept.”

Their captors, not content with destroying their homeland and moving an entire people to a strange land, now demand that they sing the songs of their faith in this unhappy and brutal place. Despondent, they beg of God to give them the strength of faith and heart to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land.

I think of all the readings for today, this is the one that resonates most with the modern reader. We are living in a season of loss, both in our personal lives and in our corporate life as a nation, and much like the exiled Jews, taunted by their captors to sing their hymns in a strange land, it is easy to feel abandoned, outcast, as people of faith in a secular world. We are surrounded by messages that run counter to our Gospel, values are emphasized in our television programs and films and media that are not really our values, we have to work twice as hard to instill our faith in our children, and often find ourselves divided even within our own churches.

Those who do not share our faith in God can sometimes seem aggressive, even combative. Those who claim to speak on behalf of our God can be more so. It is not an easy time in our history to be a Christian of faith and integrity.

But we carry on, we rely on our faith to carry us through the most difficult times, and in times when our faith is perhaps not so strong, we rely on our communities, on our rituals of prayer, our rhythm of worship, to sustain us until we find our footing in God once again.

And so it is up to us. Just as it was for the exiled Jews, to keep strong in our faith, to keep kindness and love in our hearts, even in the face of those who would mock or torment us. It is up to us to kindle the fires of our faith- a faith that is honest sadness, a tenacious remembering, faith that is a performance of duty, a holy calling, faith that holds fast to sound teaching- but in this faith we are never alone, we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, but those who have come before us, and by our children’s children, yet to come.

AMEN+