Atmosphere of Gratitude

Alright Church here we are at our fourth week of a deep dive into gratitude. As a church family we have written thank you notes, looked at our lives as if we are living out a story with God as the hero and looked at our relationships with the world around us to see who needs an invitation to come and be a part of this church community. The common refrain throughout this whole journey has been a desire for all of us to grow deeper in awareness that the world around us is a gift from a God that loves us.

I don’t know about you, but since we started this series, I am finding gratitude in unexpected places. I see it in conversations and interactions with friends. I see it in frustrations and difficult projects. When I feel too tired I am reminded of all the ways that gratitude can sneak into our day to day lives.

This week we want to move into the ethics of gratitude that we hold as a community. You’ll remember two weeks ago we talked about how our ethics were just the viewpoints that we hold with shoes on. These ethics are the ways that we show what we believe and why it actually matters. And so when we talk about ethics in our communal sense we are looking at how we put what we believe into action. What we believe as a community and how we can allow those beliefs to influence our neighborhood.

There are many ways to talk about ethics as a community. In the old days, we would call this politics--how we ordered ourselves as a community. But frankly, the word politics is so divisive and destructive nowadays, I think I am going to the thesaurus instead and find a better way to describe it so no one misses out on what God has to teach us. Two words I think work for this, and one needs a caveat.

I think that when we talk about group ethics, we are talking about economics. This is not the economics that I failed in high school. Instead it is the word I would use to describe how our culture, our society apportions, shares, and uses the gifts we receive from God. This is not just financial. We can use the word economics because it is something beyond the actions of one person. The economics of gratitude is what leads to my next word and the one that i want you to take home with you-- that is an atmosphere.

If the economics of gratitude are the decisions we make as individuals in this world, the atmosphere is the result. The atmosphere is the intangible air with which we all exist and the world will sometimes try to make us feel as if we cannot affect. Generation Z might call this “the vibe.” It’s the water we all swim in, it’s the culture we are a part of.

But as the church we are called to be not only a part of the atmosphere, we are called to be actors determining what that atmosphere might look like. It’s like that old adage-- we are not called to be thermometers, simply being moved by the temperature around us. We are instead called to be thermostats--changing everything around us.

And so my main message I want you leaving with today is this-- we are called to help create an atmosphere of gratitude.

Last week we talked about resonance patterns and our passage gets me into one of those resonance patterns very easily. Resonance patterns are those community practice that tie us to memory and help us feel connected to our community. Our passage is about Zacchaeus, a fairly famous biblical character. Zacchaeus was a what? Yes, a wee little man.

Poor guy. He was also a very rich man who gave away all of his money and then some, but how do we know him? He’s the short guy. There are a few things I want to pull from our story today.

First is that Zacchaeus is a rich character for only having a few lines dedicated to him. First, he was a tax collector. If this is your first time hearing about this story just remember-- tax collectors were the bad guys of the new testament. These people served the occupying power, Rome. These tax collectors were normally non-Jewish people who were in charge of collecting taxes in order to fund the oppression of the local population.

Beyond that, they didn’t necessarily use a 1099 or W-4s. The tax collectors of this time were more like the enforcers ones sees in films about the mafia. “That’s an awfully nice camel dealership here, it would be a horrible thing if it… I don’t know… burned down in the middle of the night.”

So these tax collectors weren’t just trying to pay for new roads or schools. They were also trying to line their own pockets.

Zacchaeus was even worse than a tax collector because he was also a Jeiwsh man-- he was a son of Abraham. Not only was he cheating and stealing in the name of Rome, he was doing it to his own people. It is bad enough to be cheated out of your hard earned income-- it’s worse when someone who is supposed to be on your side.

And so the atmosphere made Zacchaeus- a rich man of Jericho universally despised by the folks around him. So much so that when a crowd forms to see Jesus, he doesn’t know one friend he can ask to scoot over for him to get in closer. Instead, he is sent into a sycamore tree to see Jesus pass by.

So this grown man climbs into a tree, hoping to gawk at the Lord as he passes by. As Jesus passes by, we can imagine his eyes darting from the throng of folks trying to get close to him right to the spot in the tree where Zacchaeus sits.

We serve a God who sees the folks on the outside, don’t we? Jesus was in an atmosphere of separation. Everyone had an identity and it was deeply connected to whether or not you were on the inside or the outside. Zacchaeus had chosen to be on the outside even though he had a ton of money. He knew what he was doing was wrong and yet he chose affluent isolation over being in community with his neighbors.

Jesus looks into the tree and not only does he decide to no longer participate in an atmosphere of separation, he decides to break that atmosphere with reckless abandon. Going to someone’s home was not just a social call during the time of Jesus-- it was a statement. It was an implied endorsement of the person you were with. So not only was Jesus being kind to Zacchaeus, he was telling the whole neighborhood-- I love this guy. 

Now, Jesus was not telling everyone, “I think it’s great that this guy has been scamming all of you for his own personal gain.” Instead he was ensuring that everyone knew that as much as Jesus could help it, there would be an atmosphere of connection and gratitude around him.

And look at what happens-- Zacchaeus sees Jesus’ treatment of him and begins to believe that he could live a better life. He begins to see that his life of treachery and theft has left him empty and alone. He gives half of all he has to those he has helped to make poor. Beyond that, he is going to pay everyone back, 4 times more than he has taken.

Salvation comes to the house of Zacchaeus because of his act of gratitude to being seen by Jesus. Now this salvation is not necessarily salvation from the afterlife, but more so it is a salvation from a previous life isolation and an atmosphere of separation. How popular is Zacchaeus going to be when starts making these payments? All of his neighbors are going to start to get really excited when Zacchaeus comes around.

Zacchaeus was a thermostat-changing the environment around him.

Something I want us to really park on and really think about is the paradigm through which Zacchaeus collected taxes. The Roman Empire had something called a benefactor society. This means that all of the land, all of the money, all of the food was seen as coming straight from the generosity of the Emperor. The individual man who was seated in Rome was legally the source of all good things in the empire. The payment for this was total and complete devotion to the emperor, up to and including literal sacrifices made to the emperor as 

This bled down into every other interaction within society. Nothing was a gift. Everything was something that was given with reciprocation in mind. 

Quid pro quo means something for something. We use this phrase in common parlance and it came from this Roman idea that everything we have is because of something that we will do in return. For Zacchaeus, everyone around him was paying taxes because the emperor was the one giving them life. Of course this flies in the face of everything we know of the God we serve. God tells us that all of life is a gift to all of us. We could never repay all of the things that have been given to us.

Of course that doesn’t stop us from trying, right? During my time in youth ministry, I also spent a summer as a hospital chaplain. I was the chaplain in charge of the mother/baby unit as well as the Emergency Department. I got to see people and share time with people at their most joyous moments as well as their most vulnerable moments. Fear was the common thread between both. In those moments, I would often hear about how these persons lived virtuous lives, how they prayed and read the bible. I sometimes felt as if patients saw me as the Spiritual life inspector general. Like I was taking a report for management. All acts of piety would be reported.

But Zaccaheus didn’t receive salvation because of his repayment of debts. He received salvation because Jesus noticed him. Friends, Jesus notices all of us. 

The work of Jesus is not quid pro quo-- it is pro bono. This work is not done so that we can repay God. This work is done for the benefit of all of creation. All of what God has made is redeemed.

All of creation is a never ending cycle of gifts. If we truly believe in grace, we see that everything we have is a result of that grace. When we acknowledge that what we have been given has been given with the sort of Divine and reckless abandon that God gives gifts, we begin to find ourselves in an atmosphere of gratitude. When we are held captive by the false sense that we are on the hook for our own lives, our own righteousness we see the world as quid pro quo. When we realize that we serve a Divine gift-giver, we see that all has been given. Pro bono.

Zacchaeus couldn’t earn the favor of Christ, neither can we. As a church community, it is our job to show the world that the old way of thinking we need to earn the love of God is not from God. We need to teach, through our actions, that the love of God is a free gift.

We do this through the way we do life as a church. The uncommon welcome we offer anyone who comes through this door is how we show the world that God has no second favorite kids-- we are all tied for first. When we serve the world around us, it is not because we are good or because it is a worthy cause, it is because of what God has done for us. Let us all strive to create an atmosphere of gratitude in our communities and interactions.

We show that the world of quid pro quo is over by the celebration of this table. All are welcome. All.