Overcoming Obstacles
By Rev. Julie Yarborough
November 4, 2007
Luke 19: 1-10 and Jeremiah 29: 11-14
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I were casting a movie about Zacchaeus, I would want Danny DeVito to play the lead role. Can you see it? Zacchaeus – let's call him Zach – is a short man, but rich and powerful - one that is used to getting his own way, regardless of the cost. You know the type - he's not used to hearing “no” for an answer, and will always find a way to get what he needs or wants, even if he has to take it by force. In fact, that's how he makes his living: by cheating others out of their money. He's a Jewish man who collects taxes from his own people for the Roman occupation force, and that in and of itself makes him unpopular, but he skims off the top, charging a little extra so that he can grease his own pockets before paying the Romans. He's resourceful, persistent, and shall we say, not very popular among his peers.
On this particular
day, our man Zach is determined (one version of scripture says “desperate”) to
see this man Jesus, whom he's heard a lot about. He can't see over the crowd, so he does the
first thing he thinks of: he climbs a tree and perches on a branch to get a
better look at this teacher, whose reputation has preceded him. Zach is delighted with the view – he can see even
better than he imagined. He can hardly believe his luck. And then, the man whom he has never met
before but has come to see, stops under the very tree that he is in. This man,
Jesus, motions for Zach to come down, and says “I'm coming to your house for
lunch!” And in that moment, Zach is a
changed man. All of a sudden, in the presence of Jesus, Zacchaeus wants to make
amends for all that he has done wrong. He wants to repay all those whom he has
cheated. He wants to be a better man.
The story about
this short, disreputable man has something to teach us. Actually, it has more than one thing to teach
us, but there's one thing that jumps out at me as I read this story again: When
we overcome the obstacles that keep us from getting close to Jesus, our lives
are changed. (And let me be clear - in
this case, I'm talking about Jesus as the embodiment of God, the presence of
the Holy in human form.)
There are many
obstacles that get in the way of our forming an intimate relationship with the
Holy. Some of us have old tapes that
we're hearing – tapes that say that we are unworthy or impossible to love. Some of us have been wounded by prior
religious experiences that have been abusive or destructive. Some of us are too cool and too self-reliant
– too used to going it alone to need help from any other source. Some of us lead lives that are so full and busy,
we don't have time for God. And, dare I
say it, for some of us, the love of money and material items keeps us from
forming a closer relationship with the Spirit.
For Anne Lamott,
addictions and self-loathing were the obstacles. Lamott tells her story in her bestselling
book, Traveling Mercies. An
addict and alcoholic, and having affairs with one married man after another, she
did not believe that God could possibly love her. Still, she wandered into a
church one Sunday morning, lured by the beautiful music she heard coming
through the windows. Moved by that music, she would go every once in a while on
a Sunday morning, but would never stay for the sermon. Drinking heavily, Lamott
hit bottom when she discovered that she was pregnant and went for an
abortion. She went back to her
houseboat, where she drank and got high for a week, until she noticed some very
heavy bleeding. Too scared and ashamed to get help, Lamott lit a cigarette,
turned of the light and got in bed.
“After a while, as
I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in a corner, and
I just assumed it was my father, whose presence I had felt over the years when
I was frightened and alone. The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on
the light for a moment to make sure that no one was there – of course, there
wasn't. But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond a doubt that it was
Jesus. I felt him as surely as I feel my dog lying nearby as I write this.
And I was
appalled. I thought about my life and my brilliant, hilarious, progressive
friends, I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a
Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be
allowed to happen. I turned to the wall and said out loud, “I would rather
die.”
I felt him sitting
there on his hunches in the corner of my sleeping loft, watching me with
patience and love, and I squinched my eyes shut, but that didn't help because
that's not what I was seeing him with.[1]
She finally went
to sleep and in the morning when she woke up, he was gone. She thought that
would be the end of it, but she kept having the feeling that someone or
something was following her, like a little cat, “…wanting me to open the door
and let it in.”
A week later she
went to church and sitting in the pew, listening to the music, she had the
overwhelming feeling wash over her that she was being held. She began to cry.
She left the service early and ran home, and there, standing in the doorway of
her houseboat, she hung her head and said, “All right, you can come in.”
Anne Lamott's
conversion experience didn't change her life overnight. It was another two
years before she got sober and a year after that before she decided to get
baptized. But slowly, as she opened up to the presence of the Spirit in her
life, she began the journey toward wholeness.
Our stories may
not be so dramatic, but many of us still have obstacles that keep us from
getting close to the presence of God. And we may share the same belief that God
can't possibly love us, because we have done things for which we feel great
shame and guilt. Yet as a favorite quote of mine says, “God knows us through
and through and loves us still and all.”[2]
Robert Fulghum
tells a story about watching a group of kids playing hide-and-seek outside his
window one day. As the game progressed,
one kid hid so well that his friends gave up and went on to play something
else. Fulghum couldn't stand it – he got up, raised the window and yelled, “Get
found, kid!”
Sometimes I think
that God is like that, watching and waiting and yelling to us, “Get found kid!”
The promise of God
to us, in the passage of Jeremiah that Bob read to us this morning, is that God
has our best interests at heart, and when we call upon God and seek with all
our hearts, we will find God. As Howard Thurman has written,
These are not idle
words of the prophet: ‘If with all your heart you
truly seek me, you
shall surely find me.' To the persistent
knock at
the door there is
an answer. We live in a universe that is
responsive
to an ultimate
urgency. The secret is to be able to want one thing, to
seek one thing, to
organize the resources of one's life around a single
end; and slowly,
surely, the life becomes one with that end.[3]
God is waiting to be found, and
yet, God does not force herself upon us. Like a loving mother, or a patient father, God is waiting until we
approach - waiting for us to say, ‘come on in' – waiting for us to open the
door and make space available in our hearts. To illustrate this point, there are several famous paintings of Jesus
standing in a garden, knocking on a wooden door. Upon closer look, the viewer realizes that
there is no handle on the door on Jesus' side. The door handle is only on the other side of the door – Jesus (the human
face of God) cannot enter unless the door is opened for him.
What obstacles
keep you from getting closer to God? What puts distance between you and a
loving presence that welcomes you in? One obstacle that I think many of us
share is our reluctance to encounter the Jesus of the Gospels because of our
very ability to think critically. In
this case, I think our intellectual blessing can be a curse.
Marcus Borg
suggests that, “… we need to develop the ability to hear the Gospels (and the
rest of the Bible) in a state of postcritical
naiveté. It is a state beyond the
childhood stage of precritical naiveté
and the adolescent and adult stage of critical
thinking.”[4] To illustrate these three stages of
understanding, Borg suggests that we take any Bible story with a fantastic
event, such as the creation story, Noah and the flood, the parting of the red
sea, or Jesus walking on water. When we
were young children, if we heard these stories, we believed them to be
literally true. We believed that they happened exactly as they were
written. It didn't occur to us to ask,
“Did Noah really build a big boat and load it with two of every animal? Did God
really flood the entire earth? Or is this story a metaphorical narrative?” We just accepted the story as truth.
As we grew older,
and entered into the stage of critical thinking, we began to question what we
were taught and what we read. If we grew
up with the Bible, we begin to wonder if things in the Bible really happened
the way that they were written. We may have
even become convinced that they didn't happen at all and we were no longer able
to hear these stories as true. Some
people stop reading the Bible all together and stop going to church at this
point, thinking, if what I've been taught didn't really happen, then how can I
believe any of it anymore? This stage of critical thinking is complicated by
confusion in our society over the difference between factuality and truth: the
idea that if something didn't happen it can't be true, and is therefore
unbelievable. Many people get stuck in
this stage of understanding and never progress to the next level: that of postcritical naiveté, in which one knows
that the stories are not factually accurate, but realizes that the truth, and
therefore faith, does not depend upon historical factuality. As Borg explains, “It
is the ability to hear the …stories once again as we did when we were children,
even as we know that they are almost certainly not historical narratives.”
Reading
through the lens of post-critical naiveté,
(called second naiveté by Paul
Ricouer, and second innocence by
William Blake) allows us to read the Gospels in a new way, enabling us to claim
what is true for our lives without worrying about what actually happened. In
this manner, Jesus can become accessible to our lives in a whole new
transformative way. Borg describes Jesus
as a “thin place,” one in which the boundary between this world and the
spiritual world becomes permeable: “Jesus was a ‘thin place,' as are the
stories and practices of the tradition that remembers and celebrates him. Through these ways and more, the Living
Christ comes to us and transforms our lives, even today.”[5]
It
is clear that encounters with God change our lives. When Zacchaeus encountered the living God
through the person of Jesus, he changed on the spot. Jesus didn't tell Zacchaeus to change – he
just invited himself to lunch at Zach's house. But Jesus did recognize the authentic change that took place in the
short man standing before him. “Today
salvation has come to this house… for the Son of Man came to seek out and save
the lost.” Here he is! He's no longer
lost! Today is salvation day, for Zacchaeus is restored to himself. The kid who
was lost got himself found.
This love that calls out to us to
get found is so strong that it invites us to change our lives, to live to our
higher selves, to be better people. What
are we waiting for?
[1] Traveling
Mercies, by Anne Lamott, (New York:
Random House,) 1999, pp. 49-50.
[2] Quote
that I carried around for a long time, but I can't remember the person who
wrote it. (Meister Eckhart?)
[3]
Disciplines of the Spirit, by Howard Thurman, --------------- p. 26.
[4] The
Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, by Marcus Borg and N. T. Wright, (New
York: HarperCollins), 1999, p. 247.
[5] Ibid, p.
250.
© 2007
Julie Yarborough.
All rights reserved.
