[Propertalk] Proper 26 c rcl

[Robert P Morrison]

Friends,

Here's what I wrote earlier. Our diocesan convention begins today and runs through Saturday lunch time, so I'll probably not have time to look at the sermon again till late on Saturday.

Bob

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY    THE TWENTIY-THIRD SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
HABBAKKUK 1:1-4; 2:1-4	                 	    	    	PROPER 26 C RCL
2 THESSALONIANS 1:1-4, 11-12		               	        31st OCTOBER, 2010  
LUKE 19:1-10			  	             	                        PSALM 119:137-144

	Do you think Ceal and Ron are unduly worried where your pledge money comes from? Do you think the BAC is too concerned about your job, or your credit history?
	I have to admit that I haven’t grilled too many of you, so don’t know whether the CEO of Halliburton is on our membership list. But would it matter if she or he were? For that matter, I have a good friend who was Interim at Jackson Hole in Wyoming. She enjoyed it. It was a fun congregation, in a beautiful location, and had the added perk that priests from St John’s also served at the Chapel of the Transfiguration, the small log chapel in the Grand Teton National Park. The chapel was sited and built to frame a view of the Cathedral Group in the Tetons in a picture window behind the altar.
	In addition, Vice President Cheney attends St. John’s occasionally. Would THAT make a difference to you? To the congregation at St. John’s it didn’t, really. Except that it certainly made a mess of things when the Secret Service went crawling around the building and hiding behind the altar. Well, maybe not THAT. But Ann said it could get difficult. Some of the security detail, she said, “filled the pews trying to look like they belonged – all decked out in the latest Norm Thompson - Eddie Bauer look.”
	Seriously, do we ever pay a whole lot of attention to who attends Church here? Or who pledges? Or where people get their money? Or where they eat after Church?
	I’d be willing to bet most of us don’t want to delve too far into people’s histories unless invited to do so. It’s enough that we can sit in the same pew, and sing from the same hymn book and use the same prayer book – AND come to the same altar together. So sitting at the same table in the parish hall afterwards is simply icing on the cake, assuming there IS cake today. Maybe someone should go out to check! If you like, I can keep preaching till you come back.
	So what on earth was all that fuss about Zacchaeus? Well, it seems he was the most despised man in Jericho. You remember Jericho, the city whose walls were brought down so that God’s servants could enter and cleanse it, to make it a habitation worthy of God. That was the story, anyway.
	I don’t have the slightest idea who the most despised person in Albany is. Maybe we might get an idea after Tuesday’s election.
	Zacchaeus was an easy person on whom to pick, though. He stole indiscriminately. He gouged without the slightest hesitation. So no one would raise a little finger to do him a favour. THAT’S why he’d to climb that sycamore tree. As small as he was, folk could have let him into the front row of the crowd at Reser Stadium and everyone else would have been able to see over him. But there’s no way on God’s green earth that anyone would do anything for Zacchaeus.
	And he’d brought it upon himself. This wasn’t simply a case of being of the wrong ethnic background in the wrong neighbourhood. Or of having a candidate from THAT OTHER party over for dinner. If Zacchaeus had only listened to his guidance counsellor in his senior year at Jericho High, maybe he wouldn’t have succumbed to the Roman recruiters and gone into the tax collection business. Because, once in, he HAD to get what the Romans wanted, whether it bothered him or destroyed friendships along the way. And if he was to make any sort of a living to keep up his credit card payments and get the mortgage taken care of then he had to add on his own percentage on top of the Romans’ exorbitant charges.
	So, yes, maybe if Zacchaeus were running for the BAC here, maybe he wouldn’t get elected.
	But Jesus, as always, simply stood everything on its head. Not only did Jesus want Zacchaeus to wine and dine Him, He wanted that man so short he couldn’t be picked out in a crowd, he wanted him to be His point man in Jericho.
	No wonder folk grumbled. It’s bad enough in our day and age when someone looks cross-eyed at the children – or adults – who rustle paper during the service, and move around in their seats, or sing off-key. But c’mon Jesus, surely you’re joking about wanting us to include Zacchaeus among our friends here, and to trust him with a key to the building?
	THAT’S the point, though. It’s the biggest Trick or Treat ever. If Zacchaeus can be a child of God, welcome at the altar, even if he can barely look over the rail when he’s kneeling; if Zacchaeus can be brother to Jesus, that makes him OUR brother too – which means that NO ONE can or will be excluded – from worshipping with us, from eating with us, from laughing with us, from 
sharing sadness and pain with us. And that’s a terrifying thought, because some of the folk we wonder about may be out to take advantage of our Christian nature. Some may even – well, let’s not go there!
	Maybe it’s time for a couple of red-neck comments.
	You know you belong, wrote a friend, when you let your 14-year-old daughter smoke at the dinner table in front of her kids.  (This is my favorite, said that friend!)
 	But what about the fact that the Halloween pumpkin on your porch has more teeth than your spouse. 
	Offensive – huh? 
	“Growing up in a mobile home in the Pacific Northwest,” read the newspaper article, this woman found herself drawing on her childhood and youth in her life’s vocation. 1
	“‘My friends’ parents didn’t want me playing with their kids, and I didn’t understand it, because I didn’t think of where I lived as being that big of a deal. I had a roof over my head,’ (this woman) said last week as she bit into a cucumber finger sandwich at Santa Monica’s Tudor House tea room, a world away from her modest childhood home. ‘But their parents would say, “You need to go home now.” At 7 years old, I learned what classism was, growing up poor.’
	“These days, The Poor Girl has become strongly identified with another character type close to her life story: The Bold, Resilient Woman. It's little wonder, considering (Hilary) Swank won two Academy Awards for portraying such characters -- first as a girl struggling with sexual identity crisis in 1999’s ‘Boys Don’t Cry,’ and five years later as a boxer in ‘Million Dollar Baby.’
	“Her latest film, ‘Conviction,’ (just) out … is no exception. She plays Betty Anne Waters, a real-life single mother who put herself through law school in an effort to free her brother from prison because she believed he was wrongly convicted of murder. But instead of rebelling against or despairing over what some might see as pigeonholing, Swank, 36, seems at peace with it. She doesn’t care if she’s typecast, she says, because she likes drama.
	“She knows that winning an Academy Award is an acknowledgment of a great piece of work, and it's a tool to be able to do another piece of work. But it is a big responsibility. Those statues are heavy, figuratively and literally.
	“Swank witnessed that power when she returned home to Washington. Those who used to pick on her, she found, had suddenly become her biggest fans.
	“‘After my movies came out, I would go back to my hometown and everyone was like, “We always knew you were so special!”’ she said, a glimmer of sadness appearing on her face. ‘And I was like, “Oh, you did? Yeah, you always knew it? You always knew it when you took your kids away and wouldn’t let them play with me? Is that when I was special?”’ But her ability to access those painful memories is at the core of Swank’s talent, said Tom Goldwyn, the director Swank’s latest movie.
	“‘One of the reasons she's a great actress is that she grew up under tough circumstances,’ (said Goldwyn.) ‘She didn’t have it easy. We were filming one scene in a trailer park, and she said, “This is very intense for me, being here, because I remember living in a place like this and not knowing if I would ever get out of here.”’
	I wonder if Zacchaeus felt similarly trapped. You know, you CAN be bound up by affluence as much as by poverty. But that physically short tax collector rose out of his constriction, and, like the actress Hilary Swank, probably was able to identify with those who lived with similar burdens. Maybe that’s what makes them able to empathise with others. That must have been what helped enable Zacchaeus to disburse so much of his possessions.
	And all it took was for Jesus to eat with Zacchaeus at his house, to say that he was no longer someone despised and ostracised. Zack now belonged! And the message is, if there’s room for that little squirt at God’s table, then there’s room for us – there’s room for EVERYONE.
	Since there was no longer a need for wealth to buffer Zacchaeus from the rest of society, he was freed to share, to make sure that others were brought into a life that knew a little fewer worries, because now there would be food to eat and clothes to keep the other families warm.
	With every night getting colder now, and long-range forecasts predicting more rain, more snow, more severe weather patterns this winter, it looks as if we need to find a few Zacchaeuses to pitch in at Albany Helping Hands – thank goodness for those Afghans we blessed and sent over a couple of weeks ago! No doubt FISH’s doors will be receiving a lot of people in the coming months. And the programmes of this congregation need funding too. 
	So where does this point us? How can we get up into the closest tree to get a better view of what Jesus wants us to see?
	You may have read about the recent retirement of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He was asked, “Looking back over your career, what have you learned?”
	Archbishop Tutu responded, “As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities. That would be awful if that was the end of the story. But, exhilaratingly, people also have an incredible capacity for good. People who should have been consumed by anger and bitterness and lust for revenge have shown in so many instances a remarkable magnanimity, a nobility of spirit. That's the chief lesson I have learned. That in spite of all the horror of injustice and oppression, and the sense that those who perpetrate evil tend to appear invincible, the texture of our universe is one where there is no question at all but that good and laughter and justice will prevail. In the end, the perpetrators of injustice or oppression, the ones who strut the stage of the world often seemingly unbeatable — there is no doubt at all that they will bite the dust. (Laughs) Wonderful! Wonderful! Wonderful!” 2
	I wonder – if you had your choice, whom would rather have as a member of this congregation? Desmond Tutu – or Zacchaeus? You know, I REALLY haven’t made up my mind on that yet. Either way, we’d be in for a wonderfully wild ride – giving so much to other people, and being incredibly blessed ourselves along the way.
	And you thought Hallowe’en was just for kids, and that it was scary. Surprise!!
	Just don’t forget to pledge!

NOTES

1 	“The Actor’s Craft: Hilary Swank was born to play real-life roles”. In her latest, ‘Conviction’ ,she plays a woman who spends 18 years trying to free her brother from prison. By Amy Kaufman. Los Angeles Times October 10, 2010   http://link.latimes.com/r/UX0Z1O/BUW1E/WBTXVP/WGA4D/4CI3IG/D5/h
2	“Retiring from Public Life, Desmond Tutu Reflects on Good and Evil”. By ALEX PERRY / CAPE TOWN Thursday, Oct. 07, 2010   http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2023562,00.html  


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Robert P. Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban,
P.O. Box 1556,
Albany, Oregon, 97321

541-921-1076 (cell)
541-967-7051 (church)