Zacchaeus

September 15, 2020: Zacchaeus

One morning, when I was three or four years old, I was allowed to stay home from preschool because our cat wouldn’t settle down till I sat with her. Then she proceeded to have kittens. A few weeks later, Mama had the unenviable task of trying to find good homes for them, and I suggested my Aunt Nancy might like one. Mama exchanged a bemused look with my grandmother, whose eyes twinkled as she said, “I’ll ring her right now and you can ask.”

Ring ring. “Hey Aunt Nancy. It’s Julie. Great! Hey. Our cat had kittens. Um-hmm. They’re soooo cute! Yes. Would you like a kitten? I think you’d like the one that looks like a little tiger.  Um-hmmm. You would? Okay.  I love you too. Bye-bye.”

I still remember the open-mouthed stares of my mother and grandmother. Aunt Nancy had never owned a pet, was not at all pet friendly. Was a former nurse who ran a clean, tight ship. And from that moment, a dedicated cat lover. Just last week my brothers and I were laughing about hearing Aunt Nancy in Montreat calling for that hell-cat, “Tiiiiii-gah?!?  Tigah!”

A few months after Tiger died, Mama told me that Aunt Nancy had a new kitten.  “She’s looking for a good name. Any suggestions? He’s small and white and likes to climb trees.”

“She should name him Zacchaeus!” I said, and we both laughed.  Aunt Nancy was quiet. When asked the next day, she casually remarked that the new cat answered to Snowball. Snowball turned into a hell-cat, too, and I have other Montreat memories of prying him down from the basement rafters when it was time to leave.

The Montreat house is undergoing a major renovation. It started as a small, square, cinder-block bungalow that Aunt Nancy and Uncle Mike built after the Second World War. Their bedroom was about the size of my office and shared a small bathroom with the closet sized guest room. There was a tiny shotgun kitchen. The small table backed up to the cushioned window seat where the children were wedged for meals and fierce games of Canasta. Up nine tall steps was a big, open loft space under a steep-pitched roof. That’s where my family slept when we visited in the summers. It was exactly what Montreat is supposed to be.

In the 1980s, Uncle Mike and Aunt Nancy added on a true master bedroom and bath. At the same time, my parents renovated the upstairs, raising one side of the steep roof to create two bedrooms and a bathroom. They added horizontal run to the steps so that the same vertical height accommodated 12 regular sized steps instead of the nine that I had to descend on my bottom until I was eight years old. Together they expanded the kitchen to its current configuration. No more window seat. Aunt Nancy was able to spend two glorious weeks in the completed house with Uncle Mike before the cancer caught up to her. It was exactly what Montreat is supposed to be.

In the late 1990s, my parents added a nice deck and a magnificent screen porch. The pitched roof gathers and amplifies the joyful creek’s voice, the skylights let in dappled sun- and moon-light, the we-really-need-to-replace-this sofa coaxes you into napping. The porch has witnessed and honored countless meals, dart games, puzzles, porch parties, philosophical conversations, cigar smoking poker nights and unmentionable amorous activities. It was exactly what Montreat is supposed to be.

And now we are adding on again, accommodating the fifth generation of Montreaters. Changed layout with new front entrance, more living space, new bedrooms, expanded deck and a renovated kitchen. It’s hard to imagine how much it will change the experience. But I trust that it will be exactly what Montreat is supposed to be.

The house has grown beyond our original expectations—becoming more and more what’s right for us in the NOW. If we’d held too tightly to what Aunt Nancy and Uncle Mike wanted from that house, it wouldn’t have worked. Their vision didn’t include this new reality. The structure needing to change to accommodate more people, but, undeterred, the essence of Montreat permeates each version.

Part of what worries me so much about the current world situation is that people are acting out of fear—fear of change, fear of scarcity, fear of the loss of the before-world. As people much more eloquent than I have said, there is no going back to normal. It is up to us to create the thing that will be the new normal, the structure of society that will accommodate the new reality and all of God’s people. It’s an incredible opportunity. But if we fear the unknown, then we recoil and make bad decisions from nostalgia or wishful thinking or cowardice.

Eckhard Tolle’s best-selling Power of Now is slightly convoluted and comes across New Agey, even though it’s ancient wisdom.  Consider these sentences.  “Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.”

That is, we can’t recreate the past (though we do try to reimagine it to be the way, and with the outcomes, that we find most pleasing) because the people making decisions in the past weren’t making decisions in their past. They were making the most of their Now. Similarly, we can’t specify our acts in the future, because when the moment finally comes, it’ll feel exactly like every other uncertain Now. Like this uncharted Now.

As Professor Dumbledore says so poignantly to Harry Potter at the end of the second book: “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”  How shall we choose?

Seth Godin’s recent blog addressed this.

“If made freely, a choice feels like the right thing at the time. But we realize it was a mistake later, once the moment passes. We don’t know now what we learned in the future.

Bad choices can be caused by:

Poor information, Shoddy analysis (including cognitive glitches and reliance on sunk costs), Peer pressure, Manipulation, Hustle, Power imbalance, Focus on the short run, Indoctrination, Superstition, Unexamined biases

Take a look: each of these is the product of outside forces and can be unlearned and insulated against. The good news is that we can get better at our choices.”

I would add that most of those choices are fueled by fear—of change or of loss or of difference.

I worry about our world because people are unwilling to be wrong. To admit having made a mistake or having learned something that gave a new perspective. Perhaps even more worrisome, we are unwilling to let other people be wrong or learn from new experiences.  It’s as though all of a sudden, I have to be ‘woke’ with no pain, no sacrifice, no learning curve. But that doesn’t honor the very pain, sacrifice and learning curve of the person who got there ahead of me but is now judging me so harshly. It creates absolutely no incentive for me to try to honor someone else’s truth.

Because here’s the truth. It’s not that some beliefs and actions used to be okay but now they’re not okay. They were never okay.

What’s changed is that the people wounded by those beliefs and actions are finally being heard and seen and believed. Those people can protest and march and share videos and vote. Even better, there are more of us that believe them now that we’ve committed to listening to their truth, to watching videos of their truth, to joining the march for their truth to be honored. More of us are deciding that this Now is the moment, and we are the very people, that we have been waiting for.

To rise to this moment, though, we all have some work to do and some grace to extend. If watching a video of George Floyd’s murder opens someone’s eyes to the police brutality that they’d previously denied, we can’t then excoriate them for being wrong before. We celebrate that they’ve seen what we asked them, in good faith, to see. We might also, together, explore how to honor all communities *and* the police we ask to serve them.

If listening to a friend’s experience of clients not seeking work while receiving a $600/week unemployment benefit opens someone’s eyes to the flawed policy, we can’t then sneer at them or call them gullible. We celebrate that they’ve acknowledged the truth of our experience. We might also, together, explore both how that policy was flawed *and* how we can create more living-wage jobs.

It’s put me in mind of Zacchaeus.

Why did a White cat in a tree seem a perfect fit for a Mediterranean Biblical character? Why didn’t it even cross my mind at the time? Because you don’t know what you don’t know. And I’ve been so lucky to live with and love Black and Brown friends who didn’t shame me for not knowing. In fact, they celebrated me for being willing to be wrong—to learn from their truth.

Which puts me in mind of the other Zacchaeus. He lives in Jericho. He’s short. He’s a tax collector—Chief Tax Collector. For Rome.

One bright day, Jesus comes through Jericho on his way towards that famous donkey ride into Jerusalem. There’s a big crowd gathering. Zacchaeus, being short, can’t see, so he climbs a tree. Jesus notices him up there and tells him to come down. Tells him to go home and prepare to have Jesus for a supper guest. The crowd is horrified. Zacchaeus is shocked. Everyone wondering why Jesus would acknowledge this sinner, this tax collector in bed with Rome? This impure man who’s cheated the faithful and grown rich on the backs of the regular people? He was so easy to despise. It must have felt good to have such an easy target. Still, Jesus invites himself to supper and Zacchaeus is “happy to welcome him.”

I’ve always wondered about that. Is he thumbing his nose at the crowd, “See, Jesus accepts me”?

I prefer to think he’s grateful. I like to think God’s been working on him in secret for awhile. Maybe he was starting to feel bad about cheating people. Meaning to turn over a new leaf but not sure how. Maybe he’s too beholden to the favors of Rome, has burned too many bridges in Jericho. Maybe he’s tried to change before but was mocked. Everybody needs a villain.

Or maybe meeting Jesus touches something in him he didn’t know needed redeeming. Something that made him brave.

When Jesus opened the door to repentance, Zacchaeus rushed through it. Jesus, had he been lining up the perfect rebuke, doesn’t even get a chance. Before even offering Jesus a cocktail, Zacchaeus blurts out, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor.” Then he says, (I love this part!) “and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” That’s like a temple money-changer saying, “if I ever overcharged anyone…” or King Herod saying oops, he accidentally murdered all those babies that time in Nazareth. But Zacchaeus is serious. And get this: Jesus believes him! Holds him up as the poster boy of repentance: “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”  And then, presumably, they have a wonderful meal.

What’s held out as miraculous about the story is Zacchaeus’ swift and total repentance. But what I find amazing is Jesus’ swift and total acceptance.

Jesus didn’t have a come-to-Jesus talk with Zacchaeus; He invited himself to supper. Jesus didn’t rebuke him and argue him into submission; He immediately accepted Zacchaeus’ change of heart. Jesus didn’t mock him for being gullible or shame him for being wrong before; He celebrated his new friend’s determination to repair the damage he’d done. Jesus never even officially forgives Zacchaeus. No guilt, no penance, no purgatory, no earn your way into my good favor. Boom. My calling is to this man and, by extension, any of you who has a change of heart.

One interesting tidbit. Guess what ‘Zacchaeus’ means in Hebrew? You’ll never guess.  It means innocent. Pure. Jesus loved this lost man into innocence.

May we all go and do likewise. Create the Beloved Community that is exactly what it’s supposed to be. Right Now.