Restoration

 

What does it mean to be restored?

It was the focus of my heart this week. Does God restore us?

This idea is a very important part of our faith, and especially our Wesleyan faith. I refer, of course to John Wesley, the founder of what became the Wesleyan movement. Wesley had profoundly deep faith in Jesus’ prevenient, justifying, and sanctifying grace (more on that in a future sermon, I promise!). Wesley taught that we are always striving on toward perfection. He believed it didn’t happen in one day, or in one action, and that our striving wasn’t a straight line. We’d get closer and closer to the inner holiness, to perfect communion in Christ, then we’d screw up, and fall away again. We’d repent and begin our walk back to Christ. We’d never be perfect in this life. But, at the End Times, God intended to make of us a New Creation, a New Heaven and a New Earth, that the Kingdom of God would be a reality, and all beings would know God’s love.

There, I just saved you at least a semester of seminary. Seriously speaking though, taking a look at this incredibly broken world, a world torn asunder by hate crimes, by police brutality, by racial injustice, by patriarchy, by colonialism and by capitalist greed; a world where the average life expectancy for a white cisgender American woman is 80 years but where the average life expectancy for a black transgender American woman is only 35 years; a world where 1% of the global population controls 50% of the world’s wealth; a world where more than 150,000 lives in our country alone have been lost to the coronavirus pandemic, yet so many of our neighbors still won’t wear a mask to Target—is there something better out there for us? We’ve messed this up so badly we have no ability to help our own selves. Does God have a plan? Can God make any of this right again?

Difficult as it may be for some of us to believe on our worst days, the answer is yes. I refer us first to today’s Hebrew Bible passage from Isaiah. I’ve read these words many, many times. They’re a fresh pint of Ben and Jerry’s on a day when you just want to eat your feelings, but without the calories. I’ve shared these marvelous words most frequently at memorial services, because it’s such a balm to the grieving soul to hear as you send your loved one on from this life to life eternal that God wants you to have, more than anything else, the comfort of forgiveness. God has already erased every debt we ever owed to the Divine, to our Savior, and to one another. God is prepared to start anew. A wonderful future awaits us in God’s arms. That whatever damage we did today, last year, last decade, this entire lifetime is like the grass that you clean out of the bag in your lawn mower. It’s green one day and mulch the next. The pain we inflicted on our neighbors once stood like bright yellow sunflowers in a summer field, and a second later has wilted down to nothing. But God’s Word, like the very air we breathe, is here forever. With God, everything broken can be made whole again. Our world can be restored, over and over, from the tragic place we see on the news to the Kingdom God created, meant for us to inherit, and called Good.

Know that God shared these words of hope via the prophet Isaiah at a time when the people Israel both expected them the least and deserved them the least. Prophet after prophet warned Israel that their reckless disregard for God, their spiritual and physical violence, and their idolatry would deliver them into the hand of their enemy. But they refused to listen. Then came the Babylonian Empire, which sacked their cities, demolished their Temple, murdered their most vulnerable people and sent many of the survivors into exile as prisoners of war. When they finally came home, broken in every way they could imagine and many ways they never wanted to, when they had stopped trying to talk to God a long time ago, God spoke again through Isaiah and rather than voicing anger said…Comfort my people. All that ugliness is nothing more than last spring’s dead plants. The Word is still here, and it lasts forever. And the Word tells us God is love.

Taking this to today’s Gospel, Luke shares a different yet very similar story of a man who met Jesus when he both expected to and deserved to the least. Zacchaeus, who so many of us drew as a short guy in pictures when we were in Sunday school. Indeed, the text calls him “short”, but it’s up for debate whether he was really all that vertically challenged or whether he was more diminished in stature and taken down many notches on the social totem pole. The social totem pole of Palestine, as it were, was already a vicious thing. So many were cast aside right and left for not checking the right boxes: native born, male, young but not too young, able bodied, rich, educated, with elite parentage and in good standing with the synagogue. Zacchaeus checked several of those boxes himself and helped the occupying Roman government brutally oppress those who were already very vulnerable. He was a tax collector. He shook you by your ankles to catch whatever fell from your pockets, and anything he could fleece from you that you didn’t owe Caesar he got to keep. He betrayed his friends and neighbors. He aided the enemy.

It says a lot about the wounded, justice-seeking hearts of the Judahites that they hated a man who participated in such cruelty. It challenges us to look in the mirror and admit that we, too, so often claim an elevated social status based on our perception that we have the moral high ground. Jesus certainly cares about our morals, but the thing that Zacchaeus’ neighbors got wrong that we so often misunderstand ourselves is that Divine justice does not make a high ground. It levels the terrain so we can all look one another in the eye.

This leveling is exactly what Jesus invites Zacchaeus to initiate. Because of his “short stature”, Zacchaeus decided his best chance at seeing Jesus would come from climbing a tree so the crowds wouldn’t block his view. Of course, he could have just ducked and weaved his way to the front…but then everyone would see him. Hiding in a tree, Zacchaeus could catch a glimpse of Jesus, and then sneak away unnoticed.

But Jesus isn’t into sneaking around. He knows that true, restorative healing comes from confronting exactly that which wounded us. So he calls Zacchaeus out in front of everyone, and invites himself over to Zacchaeus’ house. He knew something important about Zacchaeus: he was ready to face Christ. Zacchaeus publicly declares he will make quadruple restitution to those whom he defrauded and commits himself to the way of Jesus.

Where does this leave us, friends? Where do we find ourselves in this picture, as Jesus comes through town? Are we hiding in trees today? Are we judging our neighbor for climbing the Sycamore? Have we, in wanton disregard for Mother Earth, cut down all the Sycamore trees so there’s nowhere left to hide?

Wherever we are today, we stand in the midst of unfathomable destruction that, one way or another, we had a hand in. The prevenient grace comes in that God already knew that. If we want God to help us restore this world to the Kingdom the Holy would prepare for us, we know exactly what we have to do. And that first step is ours to take. We need to come out of hiding and confess that we were indifferent when we needed to care. We need to confess that we were violent when we should have sought peace, we exploited one another for our personal gain, and we were more interested in the temporary reward of the beautiful flower than in the everlasting assurances of God’s Word. This is the justifying grace. When we’re done confessing, we need to grab shovels and clear away all the dead plants. Then we need to get on our knees in the soil and start helping God cultivate a New Creation. It takes root in our hearts, then spreads through our sincere compassion to every life we touch. We have let the bitterness of the world steal the hearts from inside of us, but this does not define us. God knows our names. This is the sanctifying grace.

May it be so.

Amen.