I'm trying something different today. The following is the manuscript for a sermon I recently preached at my church based on Luke 19:1-10 and Matthew 5:46-48. An audio version can be found here.
I really seem to get the fun topics to preach on. When we
first started this series on what is the church, the preaching team sat down
and had a planning meeting about what we wanted to talk about and I suggested
that we end the series with a sermon on when church goes wrong and hurts
people. In my tiredness I forgot the old piece of advice “don’t suggest
something unless you’re prepared to volunteer to do it”. After all, nobody
wants to be the bearer of bad news. Although the great thing is that because I’m
no longer an employee of the church you can’t fire me if you don’t like what I
say. But as I told people what I was planning to preach on I noticed something
interesting: a lot of people responded with “I have a friend/neighbour/etc.
that was hurt by the church”. Don’t get me wrong. Churches do many wonderful
things. I wouldn’t go to church if I didn’t believe in it. But sometimes we can
be oblivious to the way we hurt people. Or we don’t want to believe that we do.
In 2014 the Irish musician Hozier released a hit song called “Take Me To
Church”. Based on his experience growing up in a Christian family and seeing
the hypocrisy of the church, he sings “Take me to church/I’ll worship like a
dog at the shrine of your lies/I’ll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your
knife”. I was having a conversation with someone last year who called it a
horrible song. And I found myself explaining that although it may feel like a
horrible song it’s actually a very honest reflection on the experience that
many people have had with church. And being treated poorly by religious people
goes all the way back to biblical times.
In our Luke reading we come across a man named Zacchaeus.
Zacchaeus is the chief tax collector for the city of Jericho. Tax collectors were utterly despised in Jewish
society. For one, they were agents of the oppressive occupying force. One of
the hot political topics of the day was “how are we, the descendants of Israel,
going to retake the land from the Romans and become a great nation again?” As a
result they had a particular dislike of the tax collectors and Roman soldiers.
Secondly, tax collectors were often greedy and corrupt. The system of tax
collection in first century Palestine operated like this: You would have a
chief tax collector who would hire other tax collectors to collect taxes on his
behalf. If it was a large area these tax collectors would then hire more tax
collectors to work for them. It ended up as essentially a first century pyramid
scheme in which everybody in the chain took their own cut of the profits. This
led to taxes being an exorbitantly high. What’s more, tax collectors were not
above harassing citizens. Sometimes tax collectors would stop travellers on the
road and demand a bribe or they would charge them with smuggling. We might
think of these tax collectors as being similar to corrupt cops. They were well
within their authority to extort ordinary civilians and because they were
agents of the state you couldn’t really do anything about it.
To be a Jewish tax collector was especially bad. Your
collusion with the Romans meant that you were regarded as a traitor to your
people. You were banned from the Temple and the synagogues and your people
shunned you. The rabbis taught that you were beyond God’s help and they encouraged
the people to lie and deceive you whenever possible.
And Zacchaeus was one of the most notorious tax collectors.
And Zacchaeus was one of the most notorious tax collectors.
