Today’s sermon, even in the shadow of the Blue Jays' disappointment, pretty much needs to start with baseball. A two-time all star, winner of a silver slugger award as the top hitting catcher, Alejandro Kirk had a terrific season in 2025. He’s a excellent defensive catcher, communicates well with the pitching staff, has terrific bat control and occasional home run power.
Thing is, in addition to all
these baseball superlatives, he isn’t built like your average ballplayer. While
the average MLB player is about 6’2” and 200 lbs., Alejandro is 5’8”, 245
lbs. With that being the case, the
mean-spirited world of social media says very little about what a great player he
is (and that’s not going to get better after his making the final out of the World
Series). No, the armchair sports experts
are more interested in body shaming, focusing on his height and weight and his
slow running speed rather than the maximum effort and strong decision making he
shows on the basepaths.
Over the years, I’ve been
astonished at how much permission society gives to making fun of people who
aren’t very tall. My mom wasn’t real
tall, neither was Shannon’s dad, and other than our son there’s not a lot of
height in our family. But beyond this,
at staff meetings, public gatherings, or even at Church, how many times have we
heard “no, stand up!” when a shorter person has stood to make a point, followed
by laughter, and it’s only once in a blue moon that the room gets told how
cheap and hurtful that is.
Apparently, this denigration
has a long history, for our scripture reading today is about a tax collector
named Zacchaeus, whose most memorable attribute was that he wasn’t very
tall. Christian commentator Nancy
Rockwell outlines his story and significance very well:
“’Zacchaeus was a wee little
man’. We sang that loud and proud in
Sunday school when I was young. We had
no idea who Zacchaeus was, but we loved getting to sing a song that made fun of
a short guy. Jesus may have been his
friend, but we still got to call him Shorty.
“We weren’t bullying anyone
exactly, and we were children, so we were all short. But the lesson, for those who didn’t grow
tall and for the rest of us, was there.
Bullying, which is such a social problem in our time and in our schools,
begins with something simple like that.
And gets taken to extremes by some who feed on the pleasure of putting
someone else down.
“Zacchaeus must have been
remarkably short, for Luke to have written down that detail about him. It seems he was a first century scapegoat,
the guy everyone got to pick on. And that
may be why he became a tax collector for the Roman Empire. As Caesar’s tax collector, he finally got
some respect, even if it was the grudging kind….So when Jesus came to Zacchaeus’
house for lunch that day [it was] hard for the townspeople to watch Jesus do
[that].”
In one way, this is an
extraordinary story to be included in the Bible. As Nancy Rockwell stated, Zacchaeus was very
much a first century scapegoat, both for his lack of height and his collusion
with the Roman oppressor, so for him to function as the central character in
this story, to share table with Jesus and be welcomed into right relationship
with Jesus, is most unusual. Zacchaeus, as a “wee little man” literally did not
measure up to the leadership expectations of his day and, like it or not, that
bias still exists. In his 2005 bestselling book Blink, Malcolm
Gladwell noted that “in the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are
six feet or taller. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58
percent. Even more striking, in the general American population, [just under 4
percent] of adult men are six foot two or taller. Among my CEO sample, almost a
third were six foot two or taller.”
But Jesus isn’t hoodwinked by
such things. Jesus, sizing things up
through the very eyes of God, sees not the height (nor the unsavoury
occupation) of this potential disciple, but he most definitely sees the
potential. Jesus notices Zacchaeus up in
the sycamore tree, hails him to come down, and insists on dining with him. He ignores social convention, doesn’t worry
that being friendly with “this kind of person” might lessen the number of
people drawn to his religious renewal movement, and sees past the externals to
understand who this person was at heart.
Zacchaeus is forthright in admitting his past misdeeds and specifically
promises to clean up his act, and Jesus graciously accepts that at face value.
In this story, Jesus did what
God repeatedly does in our sacred text, the God who chose Moses with all his
shortfalls to be the guide from bondage to freedom, the God who selected young
David as King over his older siblings, the God who chose a not-quite-married
teenager to be the mother of the Messiah; Jesus chose the least likely, and
drew out the best they had to offer. And
to be perfectly honest, if we were to look around the table with Jesus, the
inner circle of twelve disciples along with the other women and men who
supported his mission, we are hardly looking at a who’s who of middle eastern
elites.
On this weekend of All
Hallows, All Saints and All Souls, we consider the God who calls even the
least likely to discipleship, and we give thanks for those who have presented
themselves for service. At All Saints (yesterday)
we remembered those canonized as Saints, and today, at All Souls, we remember
the faithful departed, people from our life’s story and from the life story of
this faith community whose lives of service exhibited an embodiment of the
invitational, uplifting love of Jesus. I
particularly want to note the lives of those who followed in the pattern of
Jesus in seeing and encouraging the gifts and callings of others, who
recognized the divine spark in others and found ways to bring those embers to
fuller flame, regardless of whatever limiting factors stood in the way. In a world where opportunity is yet again
getting withdrawn from those who were finally getting a fair chance, to be
concentrated once more into the hands of those who have always held power, we
celebrate the exact opposite of this, namely, God’s agenda of fair, powerful
love. We give thanks for those who see beyond the limitations of the now, and
live as encouragers in the name of Jesus.
And there is one more thing
for us to consider in today’s gospel reading – something a bit dangerous, tiptoeing
along the lines of being heretical, and, for those directly impacted, possibly
a bit thrilling. You may have noticed
that there is some ambiguity in today’s gospel reading, which began in the
Greek and was picked up in the old King James Version and persists in most
translations. In verses 2 and 3 (of the
NRSV-UE) we read, “Zacchaeus…was a chief tax collector and was rich. 3 He
was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because
he was short in stature”. In
our “wee little man” song and in the sermon thus far, we assume that the “he”
who was short in stature was Zacchaeus, but the way the sentence is structured
it could just as easily have been Jesus who wasn’t very tall. Going up in a tree to see better makes sense
for Zacchaeus if he was small but it also makes sense if Jesus was small, and
hard to see through the crowd without getting a better vantage point.
At the end of the day, as I
read through the story, I think it makes more sense for Zacchaeus to be the
person who is short in stature, but Bible translators through the ages have
conceded that there is an ambiguity here, and I for one am happy for its
presence. For when we think of the message and character of Jesus, the way that
he consistently lifts up and empowers those who have been judged and
marginalized by society, the abuse he absorbed all the way to crucifixion,
wouldn’t it be a powerful statement if he also knew what it was like to be
casually mocked in his life, fully identifying with the type of unrelenting,
wearying bullying that vertically challenged people have to put up with every
single day of their lives. For me, to
think about Jesus rather than Zacchaeus being the short fella in this gospel is
the opposite of sacrilegious; such thinking draws me even closer to Jesus, my
Saviour, the person of the Trinity who fully understands all of the challenges
of human life.
Regardless of how we see
ourselves, regardless of how others see us, Christ Jesus actually sees us and
calls us. On this day of communion we,
like Zacchaeus, are invited to dine with Jesus.
On this All Souls Day, we recall those who overcame all manner of
obstacles to come into contact with Jesus, and embrace Christ’s ways of love as
their ways. As Christians, as Canadians,
we hear this story with a casual and unchallenged prejudice woven directly into
its narrative, and seek awareness of all the little way that such thinking
worms its way into our relationships.
And once again, we give thanks for the way that scripture, and our
ongoing connection with the risen Christ, steps across the centuries to
illumine our path today. Amen.
References cited:
Adler, David. https://www.mlb.com/news/featured/aaron-judge-is-a-baseball-giant-but-how-does-he-compare-outside-mlb
Baseball Reference. “Kirk,
Alejandro.” https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/k/kirkal01.shtml
Gladwell, Malcolm, Blink
(2005), accessed via Coles, Tammi L. https://globalnetwork.io/perspectives/2020/10/luck-bluff
Rockwell, Nancy. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/biteintheapple/a-short-story-about-saints-and-bullies/
Wikipedia. “Zacchaeus” (song)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zacchaeus_(song)
© 2025 Rev Greg Wooley,
Osoyoos-Oliver United Church Pastoral Charge.
No comments:
Post a Comment