Luke 19:1-10
Jeremy Richards
Audio recording: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/11-03-19-taking-the-costume-off-jeremy-richards/id1479727299?i=1000455947994
Every year, when Halloween rolls around, I fail miserably. Every year I fail to come up with a costume, and every year I’m disappointed in myself. But there’s a reason that Halloween is so difficult for me, and it’s this scruffy thing on my face. When you have a beard, it severely limits what you can be for Halloween. For example, Esther was a pumpkin this year, and Brie and I wanted to be Peanuts characters and Esther could be the Great Pumpkin from the Peanut’s Halloween episode. But of course, all of the Peanuts characters are children. None of them have beards. So I either have to fully commit and shave my beard, which I never do, or I have to give up the dream, which is what I always do.
For me, who I am gets in the way of who I want to be. Who I am gets in the way of who I want to be. I want to be Linus or Charlie Brown or Pigpen, but I’m a bearded, 33 year old man, and that gets in the way. That’s the case for me almost every Halloween, who I am gets in the way of who I want to be.
But Halloween is the reversal of normal life. It’s the one Holiday where we intentionally pretend to be something we’re not. Halloween is like opposite day. We pretend monsters and vampires and wicked witches are not evil but good, not scary but fun. We give our kids boatloads of the very same candy we’ve been trying to keep them from eating the other 364 days of the year. Halloween is not normal – it’s the reversal of normal.
And so, also, is my problem of who I am getting in the way of who I want to be. That’s not the norm. It’s the reversal of the norm. Because most of the time who we are doesn’t get in the way of who we want to be, but who we want to be gets in the way of who we actually are. Who we want to be, or who we want others to think we are, or who we’ve come to believe we are, gets in the way of who we actually are.
I’m a millennial and I’m a Christian, so I was basically predestined since the foundation of the world to become obsessed with the Enneagram at some point in my life. And that point of my life is now. I will refrain from geeking out on the Enneagram, but for those of you who don’t know what it is, it’s kind of like an in-depth, spiritual personality test, though that doesn’t really do it justice. Coupled with the work I’m doing at the Living School, I’ve been reading a lot about the true self and the false self, about who we really are vs. who we and others have come to believe we are.
A Christian way of describing the true self might be to say who we are in Christ – who God created us to be. The false self, on the other hand, is based on all kinds of exterior stuff. Henri Nouwen once said there are three primary lies we believe about ourselves – lies that bolster our false self and further estrange us from our true self. They are: I am what I have (this can refer to non-material things, like knowledge or titles or power, though we’ll mainly focus on material possessions today), I am what I do, and I am what other people say about me. Probably we can all relate to all of these, but probably there’s one “we hang our coat on,” one that we especially identify with.
I don’t think Zaccheus knew much about the Enneagram, and I’m not sure what number he would be, but it seems to me, based on our reading, that he believed the lie I am what I have. I can make this assumption because Luke says blatantly: Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector and was rich. If Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector, we know he wasn’t concerned with what other people said about him. There was hardly anyone hated more by Jewish society than tax collectors. We see this in the passage: when Jesus tells Zacchaeus that he’s going to stay at his house, everyone in the crowd starts grumbling.
We don’t like the IRS, but at least, in theory, our taxes are going to our public good. The taxes that the Jews paid went to their Roman overlords. Tax collectors were those who took the hard earned money of their already poor, oppressed kin, and handed it over to their oppressors. So we know that Zacchaeus wasn’t overly concerned about what people said about him, because if he was, he wouldn’t have been able to stand being a tax collector.
Similarly, he probably wasn’t basing his identity on the lie I am what I do. While he may have liked numbers and been an accounting-type, he probably didn’t think of his primary identity coming from his despised job.
That leaves the third lie, I am what I have, which seems to fit, since Luke says he was rich. If Henri Nouwen is right, and we’re all prone to lean into one of these lies as our primary identifier, I think we can guess that Zacchaeus identified with the lie that he was what he had, and that believing this lie would make it possible to withstand the rejection he no doubt experienced from his neighbors.
But, of course, Zacchaeus knew on some level that this was a lie. He wasn’t simply what he owned. Just as all of us know that there is more to us than whatever lie we’ve come to believe about ourselves, whether, like Zacchaeus, it’s what we have, or it’s what we do, or what other people say about us. Or maybe we should say that there’s less to us, because those three lies are ways that we try to add to ourselves, we accumulate possessions or successes or admiration, and who we really are gets buried underneath it all.
Zacchaeus knew, somewhere deep down, that he was estranged from himself, that he didn’t know himself. Just as we so often feel the loss of our true selves deep within us. We feel fractured, separate, and distant from ourselves. But Zacchaeus wasn’t sure how to get back to himself, just as we aren’t sure how to get back to ourselves. He needed help, just as we need help.
So he went to see this traveling prophet everyone was talking about, Jesus, who spoke of God and for God and sometimes as if he were God, because Zacchaeus knew deep down that the way back to ourselves and the way to God are one and the same, that our true selves are, in the words of Colossians, “hidden with Christ in God.”
When Zacchaeus gets to the place in Jericho where Jesus is passing by, he has a problem that I’m very accustomed to: he’s short, and can’t see over everyone else’s heads. As he stood on his tippy-toes and hopped up and down while still trying to seem somewhat dignified, his curiosity turned to determination. He had to see Jesus. So “he climbed up in a sycamore tree for the Lord he wanted to see.”
And Jesus saw him.
Jesus. saw. him.
Jesus really saw him, the real Zacchaeus, suffocating under all that wealth and all those possessions, under the lie that he was what he owned. Jesus says at the end of the passage, “…the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” Zacchaeus was lost, like so many in the world today, perhaps the way some of us feel this morning, certainly the way I’ve felt at times, and Jesus sought him out, and invited himself over to Zacchaeus’ house, and Zacchaeus came down and something happened.
Somehow Jesus saved this lost man. He freed Zacchaeus from the lie that he was what he had and Zacchaeus unburdened himself from this false identity. “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.”
Zacchaeus wasn’t granted salvation because he got rid of his stuff – like some kind of reward. Getting rid of his stuff was his salvation, because in getting rid of his stuff, he got rid of the lie he had believed about who he was. He found his true self – a son of Abraham, a child of God – in Christ.
We should also note that in finding himself his community was blessed. By letting go of the possessions that were suffocating him, he was able to bless the poor and those he had defrauded. We so often see our personal spirituality as somehow in competition with or contrary to social action, but our good works – if they’re really done in love – flow out of who we are. This is what 1 Corinthians 13 tells us.
Many people – and, if we’re honest, this probably includes us – live each day as if it were Halloween. We, like Zacchaeus, have piled up our possessions, our accolades, and our accomplishments like costumes, projecting who we think we are while our true self suffocates underneath. These costumes have become our second skin, so familiar – though certainly not comfortable – that we don’t know how to take them off, don’t know what we look like underneath it all.
And faith, religion, church, whatever you want to call it, has become something like trick-or-treat. We show up with our masks on, and want a quick jolt of something sweet and sugary, though it never satisfies. We want God to drop that little treat in our basket before we run off to other homes where we can get more candy. More, more, always more. More possessions, more achievements, more praise.
We knock on the door, and before we even see Jesus’ face, we cry “trick-or-treat!” our bodies already twisting toward the street, toward the next house, toward more, when, instead of the clunk of candy dropping in our bucket, we hear only silence. We turn to see Jesus, with compassion in his eyes, beckon us to come inside. Inside there’s table spread, not with candy but with a feast. I’m talking Southern comfort food. Food that fills you, that warms you, that sustains you.
But before he’ll let us sit down, Jesus starts to remove our costumes, to take off the capes and the leggings and the masks that we’ve worn to protect the vulnerable child underneath. The one we are, but we’re scared to be. We recoil at his touch, because we don’t know what we look like underneath. Maybe we’re ugly, worthless. Maybe we’re unlovable. How could anyone love us without the things we have, or the prestige we’ve won, or the successes we’ve collected? Who are we without them?
But perhaps the better questions is, who are we with them? Certainly not ourselves. Only a projection of the person we want to be, or the person we think others want us to be. Only a skeleton upon which to hang the possessions, accomplishments, or praise we think define us.
But letting Jesus reveal the real us that longs to be freed underneath all the pressure to appear successful – whatever success may mean to us – is scary and vulnerable and takes time. It isn’t a quick “trick-or-treat” exchange, but an intentional decision – a series of intentional decisions. It’s a life-long process. It means taking the time to enter the house, to let Jesus free us from misguided assumptions that we are what we have, or we are what others say about us, or we are what we do.
This is essentially what prayer is, what worship is, hopefully – at least a little bit – what Sunday mornings at Grant Park Church are: intentional times we set aside to let go of the costumes we’ve been wearing for so long, to stand before Christ and ask that he remove all the lies we’ve come to believe about ourselves. And in these moments we get a taste of the heavenly feast Jesus so often spoke of. Surely this is what the feast at Zacchaeus’ house was: a taste of that heavenly banquet, where everyone – Zacchaeus, at least – was able to be his true self, freed from the trappings of wealth that had quite literally been trapping him.
These moments are, of course, only that – moments. We can only stay at the feast for so long, only commit so much time to these moments of authenticity and vulnerability. We must move back into the world, the world that places such ultimate value on what we own, and what we do, and what other people say about us. But the hope is that, over time, we wear less and less of our costumes. That slowly but surely, through regular moments spent with the one who came to seek and save the lost (us), we’ll become more and more our true selves, and what we do, and what people say about us, and what we own will weigh us down less and less, until we are like Zacchaeus, and we can give it all away, only to hear Jesus exclaim, “Today salvation has come to this house!” On that day we will see ourselves for who we truly are already, who we’ve always been but just couldn’t see it for ourselves – children of God.
Amen.