The Everybody Place

The Rev. Alissa Newton

The 24th Sunday After Pentecost

text: Luke 19:1-10

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I want to start this sermon with confession and a disclaimer. First, the confession: I love television. There, I said it. TV entertains me and also I find it interesting as an art form. So, sometimes I talk about TV, or movies, or other popular culture things in my sermons. Disclaimer part two is this: the mention of a television show or movie as part of a sermon does not constitute an endorsement or official recommendation of said show for anyone, nor does it represent the official views of the Episcopal church in general or St. Columba’s specifically. All that being said, one of my favorite new shows this fall is a 30 minute comedy called The Good Place. Here’s the premise: a woman named Eleanor opens her eyes and discovers that she has died. “Don’t worry,” says the silver haired, suit and bow tie wearing man who greets her. “You’re in the good place.” And we the viewer explore with Eleanor all the aspects of this “good place” afterlife – everyone has a soul mate, for example, and a perfect house made just for them. At one point Michael – the greeter and overseer of the Good Place (played by Ted Dansen) gives a presentation on how people qualify for The Good Place. It works like this: everything we do racks up either negative or positive points and only people who live lives that are extremely good get to come to the Good Place. Everyone else goes to the Bad Place. Here is the twist - in the first episode we discover that there has been a mistake. Eleanor is not supposed to be in the Good Place. She has been mixed up with another Eleanor who has the same name and actually did do many good things and is a “good” person. So the show is about whether or not Eleanor can ever fit in, and how she can find help, and how she come to terms with the reality that she really wasn’t that good of a person while she was alive.

This week’s episode (spoiler alert) was especially interesting, because at this point everybody knows that Eleanor isn’t supposed to be there and they are about to send her to the place where she belongs – the Bad Place. And the other characters – the ethics professor who was supposed to be her soulmate, their neighbors, and Michael – they find they don’t really want to send Eleanor to the Bad Place. Even though she’s been a huge trial for them, and caused a lot of trouble in paradise, and undoubtedly life in the Good Place would have been easier and happier without her, they have a hard time sending her away. So they come and pull her off the train to the Bad Place because they care about her. And the question in the show changes from whether or not Eleanor can hide that she doesn’t belong in the Good Place to whether or not she can actually belong in the Good Place. And whether it’s fair for her to try – because she’s taking up a spot that someone who is really good could have had.

What The Good Place is doing, in a funny and lighthearted way, is poking fun at this idea in our culture that the reward for living well is an eternity free of all the complications of life with bad people. Heaven, as the ultimate gated community. What I think is happening, what the show might be trying to say, is that the perfect people in The Good Place are discovering that life is actually better with some less good people in it.

Our gospel this morning features one of these less good people. His name is Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector, a man who most certainly would not qualify for The Good Place. He doesn’t even qualify for the medium place, or the “eh not so horrible” place. Zacchaeus is extreme in every way – he’s not just a tax collector he’s the chief tax collector. He’s not just well off – he’s rich. And he’s not average height – he’s short in stature. He is like a caricature of the guy you don’t want at your parties, or in your neighborhood, or at your church, or even in your religion at all because everything about him looks bad. We’ve heard a lot about tax collectors lately in the gospel of Luke – how the Roman Empire would appoint men to collect its tax and these men would not be paid by Empire. Instead they were given permission to use whatever means necessary to get money for their livelihood, so they would cheat and extort money from people that was far above the taxes owed. Zacchaeus is a rich, chief tax collector. And he gets shut out of the crowd around Jesus. Maybe he has some sway in certain areas of life in the city of Jericho, but no one is willing to let him by so he can see the teacher that has been making such a splash, Jesus of Nazareth. So he climbs a tree.

Scholars make much of this tree climbing – some say that Zacchaeus is willing to look foolish, to act like a child, to get a glimpse of Jesus, and many interpret this as a symptom of his desperation to see Christ. This is probably part of it. But also, I wonder, if he doesn’t just want a break from being himself – the short, hated chief tax collector shut out of the religious life of his community because of what he does for a living. I picture him up in that tree taking a deep breath, out of the spotlight and away from his life on the ground, looking for Jesus. And Jesus sees him. Not just that, Jesus appears to be urgently searching for Zacchaeus, too.

So Zacchaeus doesn’t get to just stay in the tree and watch – he is called right back down by the man he was so eager to catch a glimpse of, and right back into the middle of his grounded life where people don’t like him very much. And this time instead of being shoved out at the edges, he is in the middle of things. Jesus invites himself over for dinner, putting Zacchaeus right in the middle of the community that up until that moment had been standing between him and Jesus, shutting him out.

This is where it gets really interesting. Think about all the different ways things could have gone when Zacchaeus comes out of the tree. He could have slowly backed away from Jesus and the angry crowd and said "no thanks, Jesus. There must be a better place to host you for dinner." Or, he could have responded to the grouchy, grumpy people who complained about Jesus eating with him by threatening them with higher taxes, or by puffing himself up and claiming he wasn't sinning because obviously Jesus wouldn't be with him for dinner, if he was.

But none of these things happen. Zacchaeus is glad, joyful to welcome Jesus to his home for food. And when he hears the people criticize him, he makes amends. He offers to exceed the demands of the religious law in order to do so. Zacchaeus accepts the path that Jesus puts in front of him to return to his community of faith. And as he does this, Jesus names him a member once again, telling him that "salvation" has come to his house, and that he is a "Son of Abraham." And then Zacchaeus becomes the object lesson for one of Jesus' big mission statements, a revelation of what Jesus is ultimately about: “For the Son of man came to seek out the lost." Zacchaeus was lost, he was separate, he was the one sheep of the ninety-nine and the one coin that had rolled away. And what we see in this story is that Jesus was looking for him and when Jesus saw Zacchaeus he immediately called him back to the center of the flock.

I wonder how to feel about this. I wonder, because while it can be easy for us to put certain kinds of marginalized people on pedestals, and feel big feelings about their plight, it's harder with someone like Zacchaeus. He's not separated from the community by circumstances like illness or poverty or luck. He's separated because he cheated and his cheating has made him wealthy. He's not a "good" person. He makes his living violating the laws and values of his people. And still, Jesus was looking for him. Jesus was looking to eat at his house.

I see two kinds of good news for us in this passage. First, the Zacchaeus good news. Because while we might not be quite as bad as Zacchaeus, all of us have cheated the system. We've all made choices in our own self-interest that separate us from the people we should be connected to, and that separate us from God. And I know that I have felt shut out, on the edges, like I needed to climb a tree and get above and away from it all before I could get a see Jesus in this world. So the Zacchaeus good news is that when we are overwhelmed, when we mess up, when we come to a place where we just don't belong with the "good people" in the "good place" anymore, well that is when God is searching the hardest for us. God seeks us out in our treehouse hideaways, in the places we go to get up and away from the muck on the ground, and then God calls us right back into it. Because Jesus wants to eat with you today, and every day, whether or not you think you deserve it.

And then there is the "crowd" good news. This one might be harder. But we may be less like Zacchaeus, and more like the people who crowded him out, who grumbled about him. We don't want tax collectors to see Jesus, sometimes, because then we come face to face with the reality that God isn't just looking for you and me, but also for the people we don't want to belong to and don't want to belong with. Not just people who are marginalized because they are poor or sick or victimized in some way, but people who we don't like because we don't think they're "good" people. This is good news, though, because we aren't complete unless everyone can come to our table. Jesus isn't just healing and accepting Zacchaeus. He's also offering salvation to the crowd of people who are incomplete without Zacchaeus, who are missing their brother, and don't know it yet.

So here is what our gospel lesson this morning has to say to, or with the television show "The Good Place." Heaven is not a place where only the people who have lived extraordinarily good lives go. God's vision for humanity is not to separate the good ones from the bad ones, so the bad suffer and the good aren't bothered by those weirdos anymore. God's vision for humanity is that we seek and find each other, that God's people in the church take on Jesus' work of seeking and finding the lost, and bringing them into community with God and with each other. This is God's banquet, here where we gather each week. Jesus eats here – and it's not a real meal unless there's a tax collector or two at the table.