An Open Table where Love knows no borders

The Problem of Being Little

A sermon on Luke 19: 1-10 by Ian Cook

We all dream of being giants or someone very special.
It may have started with Superman comics. And Batman. And if we couldn’t be Batman, then certainly we could be his sidekick, Robin – a kind of protégé Batman in waiting. Or perhaps even Biggles.
In my dreams – my real ones – I could leap a house in a single stride, probably a whole street if I really tried. The world was my oyster and there was nothing I couldn’t achieve if I actually wanted to .
This is how it tends to be for boys. I am not quite as sure how it is for girls – the nurturing ones. I doubt that Wonder Woman quite cuts it – but maybe for some.
For some of us who grew up in the church the dream may have even been to be a bit like Jesus – but without the Calvary bit attached.

How was it for you – did you dream dreams as a child or adolescent of what you might become? Perhaps you saw yourself as the image of a real personal hero or heroine, rather than a comic book one. Do you – or can you – still dream dreams today?
Dreams are a good thing without them little would be built or created. From dreaming we set goals and begin something new.
The problem is the way we go about fulfilling these dreams: too often we use the shoulders of a less than willing victim to reach our new heights, or crush others in an uncaring pursuit of our personal goals.
In the pre-Christian Vedic religion its practitioners attempted to be gods by drinking a fermented hallucinogenic concoction called Soma. For a time its practitioners indeed felt like gods and perhaps acted like gods, but always ended up with a terrible hangover. Today the equivalents of Soma are perhaps some of our hard drugs, usually taken without the religious overtones, but with the same catastrophic results . Under the spell of such drugs we can all have our dreams – and much more beyond, yet with nothing to show for it other than a headache or much, much worse. More of Soma later.

For others of us there are dreams that are shattered before they are fully
formed: where the dream is, of necessity, limited to dealing with the pain that living has thrust on us – a dream of the absence of pain –of just getting to the start line undamaged. We have products for this also. Mostly they only dull the pain and still leave us less than whole people.

Perhaps you have the impossible dream of starting again – being again a child like Alex or Maxy or Nancy – largely untouched by the corruptions of this world that surrounds them – still protected and nurtured.
………….
Let’s build an image around Zacchaeus – it could be wrong, but most likely on the right path We know that he was small of stature and a tax collector in the Jericho region. At the least he had become a Jewish collaborator in the service of his Roman masters. Probably the lowest form of collaborator – one of those who do it entirely for personal gain with no mitigating motive. He would have been wealthy and it would have shown in the way he dressed, the look of his home, even his designer thongs. He had wealth and the status that wealth brings. The problem is that how much wealth he had depended on how far he was prepared to rip off his fellow countrymen and women. The Romans didn’t really care how far he ripped those Jews off as long as he delivered the taxes they demanded. And he could do just that and more under the protection of the Roman garrison. So Zaccheaus had the respect that wealth brought, but lived with the opprobrium that extortion and collaboration endow. A fine Faustian pact. He had everything and yet perhaps he had nothing. The Roman Satan had taken Zacchaeus up on top of a hill overlooking Jericho (are there any hills there?) and said “All this can be yours if you will serve me” and Zaccheus said to the Roman Satan: “Yes, please”, and so it came about.

When I went to the football (to watch Essendon, of course), standing in the outer at Windy Hill my kids couldn’t see, so they would push their way down to the front – other supporters would let them through, and even compromise their own space a little so that everyone including the kids and even opposition supporters, could see. No such accommodation for
Zacchaeus however. For a collaborator, and extortionist there was no place in the crowd, and so he climbed a tree, the only location from which he could see Jesus.

If you see nothing of yourself in Zacchaeus, have you never wanted to improve yourself at the expense of someone else?
You can do it by an action:
“I will support the most corrupt Government we have known, as long as I get what I want”.
You can do it by a word:
“you know that girl …? Do you know
that she…… Of course, I wouldn’t do something like that!!”
You can do it by staying silent:
“I would have said something, but I have a family and position to protect.”

When the Satan takes you to the top of a hill and says “all this can be yours”, are you not just a little bit tempted? Surely a little bit of collaboration can’t do much harm?
So we support corrupt structures because those structures supports us. At an international level we support the governments of corrupt dictators by turning a blind eye to their failings, because those despots lends support to our military/political ambitions. It is the way these things are done, and we stay silent.

So like Zacchaeus you may also climb a tree in order to see Jesus. Zacchaeus knew who he was. Do you? The tree offers a certain degree of safety. From its vantage point you can see Jesus without actually being part of the Jesus crowd. The tree also offers more than one form of safety – it is the security of non-involvement, and perhaps even a certain degree of camouflage.

And then Jesus looks up into the tree. I only wanted to see Jesus, I didn’t want to know him, and when you are seen you are known. When Jesus looked up I am undone.
……………
John Greenleaf Whittier was an American Quaker idealist. Born in 1807, he became in his early twenties editor of a couple of thought provoking magazines and dreamed of becoming a Southern Congressman. His problem was that his Quaker upbringing led him to a deep rooted belief in the equality of all people; the abolition of slavery was the logical extension of that belief, and no abolitionist could be elected to Congress in the 1830s. His choice was between the principles of his belief and the expediency of compromise. So he wrote a few anti slavery articles and poems under a pseudonym in order to protect his political ambitions, but then came to see that compromise as a futile act and devoted his next thirty years to the cause of the abolition of slavery. He became Americas most effective anti slavery advocate and penned the words of the hymn:

O brother man fold to thy heart thy brother,
Where pity dwells the peace of God is there……..

That we sing this hymn mostly on Anzac Day is a tad ironic, it being the product of a pacifist Quaker.
My reference to Whittier is however not primarily about his humanitarianism, it his poem “The brewing of Soma”, penned around the theme of how God is to be known and indeed some of the many ways he is not to be known. You may not yet realise it but many of you probably know the second half of this poem almost by heart.

By John Greenleaf Whittier

The fagots blazed, the caldron’s smoke
Up through the green wood curled;
“Bring honey from the hollow oak,
Bring milky sap,” the brewers spoke,
In the childhood of the world.

And brewed they well or brewed they ill,
The priests thrust in their rods,
First tasted, and then drank their fill,
And shouted, with one voice and will,
“Behold the drink of gods!”

They drank, and lo! in heart and brain
A new, glad life began;
The gray of hair grew young again,
The sick man laughed away his pain,
The cripple leaped and ran.

“Drink, mortals, what the gods have sent,
Forget your long annoy.”
So sang the priests. From tent to tent
The Soma’s sacred madness went,
A storm of drunken joy.

Then knew each rapt inebriate
A winged and glorious birth,
Soared upward, with strange joy elate,
Beat, with dazed head, Varuna’s gate,
And, sobered, sank to earth.

The land with Soma’s praises rang;
On Gihon’s banks of shade
Its hymns the dusky maidens sang;
In joy of life or mortal pang
All men to Soma prayed.

The morning twilight of the race
Sends down these matin psalms;
And still with wondering eyes we trace
The simple prayers to Soma’s grace,
That Vedic verse embalms.

As in that child-world’s early year,
Each after age has striven
By music, incense, vigils drear,
And trance, to bring the skies more near,
Or lift men up to heaven!

Some fever of the blood and brain,
Some self-exalting spell,
The scourger’s keen delight of pain,
The Dervish dance, the Orphic strain,
The wild-haired Bacchant’s yell,–

The desert’s hair-grown hermit sunk
The saner brute below;
The naked Santon, hashish-drunk,
The cloister madness of the monk,
The fakir’s torture-show!

And yet the past comes round again,
And new doth old fulfil;
In sensual transports wild as vain
We brew in many a Christian fane
The heathen Soma still!

Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
Forgive our foolish ways!
Reclothe us in our rightful mind,
In purer lives Thy service find,
In deeper reverence, praise.

In simple trust like theirs who heard
Beside the Syrian sea
The gracious calling of the Lord,
Let us, like them, without a word,
Rise up and follow Thee.

O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
O calm of hills above,
Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee
The silence of eternity
Interpreted by love!

With that deep hush subduing all
Our words and works that drown
The tender whisper of Thy call,
As noiseless let Thy blessing fall
As fell Thy manna down.

Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm!

For Whittier, God is not to be found in the extreme, nor through our exertions of religious excess or even in our elaborate expressions of piety. God is in the still small voice when all other has failed.

To know Jesus, Zacchaeus had to come down out of his tree and have his life reborn.
From the safety of our tree we can see Jesus, but to know Jesus is in the living of our lives, as Jesus, (as with Zacchaeus) invites himself to dinner at our place.

When Jesus invites us from our tree, he is not looking for a giant. He is looking for a small person, a damaged and fragile person, even a shattered person; a collaborator or an extortioner, who is able to hear the still small voice and know that in God’s view of the world, and in the company of Jesus, we have become the giant we always dreamed of.

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