For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.

We know the story of Zacchaeus, don’t we?

When we were children we sang of Zacchaeus, the wee little man who climbed up in a sycamore tree, only to be summoned down by Jesus who then invited himself to dinner.

And I have heard, and probably preached, many sermons about how you and I have to look after the wee little people of the world, the weak and small and defenseless.

And when we grew older we heard the sounds of repentance and salvation in the story, we learned that tax collectors were legally able to add on a service charge, of their own choosing, to the taxes they collected and so, the wee little man Zaccheaus, was a big, big man in the town of Jericho. Then, when Jesus called him down from the tree, he was so grateful that he pledged to give 5 times a tithe, 50% of his possessions and to repay, 4 times over, anything that he took fraudulently.

And I have heard, and probably preached, sermons about how you and I respond so weakly to God’s love and presence and our own salvation. Rather than 5 times a tithe, we settle for about 1/5 of a tithe!

And yet, I have always thought that we were missing something in the sermons that I heard, and especially in the ones that I preached. Somehow we reduced the story to a tale of perseverance by a vertically challenged individual, or an example of a single conversion experience by an ethically challenged individual.

And the story is so much more than that, so much bigger than that, it is nothing less than a description of the work that Jesus intended to do, and therefore it is not, primarily, a story about little people or about wealthy people, it is a story of the work that the Church is created to do.

For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.

We celebrate Church membership today and we do it on Reformation Day, the day when Martin Luther, a Roman Catholic priest in Whittenberg, Germany, in 1517, opened a conversation that became dissention, that became an ecclesiastical civil war, that became the foundation for who we are as God’s people.

So let me suggest an alternate theme, on this Reformation Sunday, a more important theme than lack of height or excess of wealth, a theme that emerge from the Zaccaeus story.

It is an understanding of the Church – as grotesque and hurtful as we can be at times - as God’s chosen tool for working in the world.

Now that may sound unusually bleak for someone like me is normally enchanted and enthralled with the beauty and glory and wonder and grace that I have seen and identified and tried, as hard as I can, to point out to you and to others.

But I live, every day, with what one writer called a “sacred discontent”, a vision of the Church, and our role in it, that is realistic but not paralyzing, a vision of the Church that frees us to enter into a slow, messy and holy community, a vision of the Church that provides us with a duel acceptance of both the reality of sin and the inevitable glory of God’s Kingdom.

This is how God views the Church, isn’t it?

Shouldn’t we be working to see us, as we are, in the way that God sees us as well?

Eugene Peterson, a wonderful preacher and writer and one of the great observers and lovers of congregational life, expressed it in these words:

“I don’t deny there are moments of splendor in congregations. There are. Many and frequent. But there are also conditions of squalor. Why deny it? We hear tales of glitzy, enthusiastic churches . . . On close examination, though, there are no wonderful congregations. Hang around long enough and sure enough there are gossips who won’t shut up, disciples that quit – and worse! Every congregation is a congregation of sinners. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they all have sinners for pastors.”

You see, the Church was designed for people like Zacchaeus and me and you, we’re not the glitzy, glamorous Chrystal Cathedral sort of Christians – although that’s not working out so well either. This is why I don’t worry too much – not the way that I used to - about our future as a congregation. We have almost always known who we are and who we are not, and we have trusted God even when the smart business practices of the world would tell us we were wrong, and it has always turned out right. Not always the right that we wanted or planned, but the right that God had in mind for us.

There are times when people will talk to me about our Church struggling to survive, and I tend to ignore them because our challenge is not to merely survive, if that’s all we’re supposed to do I would vote for joining with the Chrystal Cathedral in declaring bankruptcy and closing the doors tomorrow.

We’re not here to survive, we are here to continue to flourish and to prosper, as we have for 176 years, in all the things that the Church was created to do and to be. To continue to worship God with our best efforts; to continue to teach the children how to know and cherish the presence of God in their lives; to continue to encourage and support our mission partners; to continue to provide ways for individuals to establish relationships with one another so that we can draw strength from one another. I don’t have time to talk about struggling to survive around here, I’m too busy trying to keep up with all of the wondrous opportunities that God given us.

That’s what Jesus saw in Zacchaeus that day. The rest of the people of Jericho, were just as lost and sinful, trusting in themselves, trusting in their wealth, willing to see Jesus, but only from a safe distance. Zacchaeus risked a climb up a tree and then heard the call of Christ.

And not only were the rest of the people of Jericho lost and sinful, but they were self-centered and critical of others. Jesus calls Zacchaeus down out of the tree by saying “I must stay at your house today” and immediately the crowd, not just some of them according to Luke, but all who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.”

It is always a little surprising, and a lot disappointing, when I hear criticisms of the Church and the things that are or are not happening from people who have chosen not to enter into, or to withdraw from, the messiness of relationships with God and the sinners who have been gathered here.

John Calvin wrote of this at one point with these words: The world forsakes the grace of God, and yet is unwilling that it should be bestowed upon others.

God’s grace was being bestowed on Zacchaeus and the whole town of Jericho didn’t like it, not one bit. And I have always found that people who don’t believe in Grace, people who don’t believe that God loves us despite what we do, not because of it, those people are most critical of the people who have received grace and rejoice in it.

For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.

Maybe it’s because Grace brings freedom and our vision of freedom is so small and limited that we can’t even imagine full freedom.

The whole point of the Reformation was freedom.

The Reformation invited Christians into a new understanding of their relationship with God, an understanding that was not defined by Church officials. They were free from that!

The Reformation gave Christians a promise of forgiveness that was not built upon what they had done or failed to do, but upon what Christ has done, and was not controled by church regulation or bureaucracy. They were free from that!

In a culture that defines freedom as merely independence – from responsibility, rules, taxes, and relationships – what we really need is a broader sense of freedom as a choice to enter into relationships that provide mutual dependence and support.

Christian freedom is freedom for life in relationship with God and each other because we believe we have been created for just such relationships and we cannot be whole, or free, without them.??

For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.

That was his job, that’s our job.

The lost are the people whose jobs are disappearing.

The lost are the people whose marriages are crumbling.

The lost are the people whose medical reports are frightening.

The lost are the people who won’t worship because they are suffering, and somehow think that Churches are museums for saints rather than hospitals for sinners.

The lost includes the man or woman, who stares back at you from your morning mirror, wondering if all of your efforts and all of your promises and all of the stuff of your life has been worth it.

You know who they are, seek them out, save them from their lostness.

And you don’t seek them out by grabbing them by the ear and dragging them to worship, Jesus didn’t do that.

You seek them out by recognizing them, acknowledging them and inviting them into life, into relationship, with you. Isn’t that what Jesus did with Zaccheaus?

Habakkuk presented God with a vision of the world of sorrow and pain and misery as he saw it and God presented Habakkuk with the reminder that we are created to live by faith, quietly confident that God is doing things that we would not believe even if we were told, quietly confident that God’s vision will surely come and not delay.

And both Habakkuk and God were right.

I came across these words recently:

“Many of those who criticize the church do so on the basis of an ideal. They set up . . . an abstract picture of the church, and then criticize the real church when it fails to resemble the fantasy. We are humans, and our communities invariably reflect our humanity at its best and its worst.”

For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.

Christ is looking for you and me.

Here on Sundays, yes, but out there the other 167 hours of each week, Christ is looking for us and using us to search and rescue each other.

It is, in the words the prophets Lennon and McCartney, a “long and winding road” that we are traveling. It winds from Eden to Egypt to Canaan to Babylon to Bethlehem to Jerusalem to Rome to Wittenberg to Niew Amsterdam and right up Amwell Road to us this morning.

It is on the “long and winding road” that we find our freedom, not freedom from things, that’s the least of it, Christ brings us freedom for things, freedom to keep walking and singing and praying and serving and crying and laughing, knowing that we walk together, knowing that we walk with Christ who has sought us and saved us.

For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.