What can we say October 30? Reformation Sunday?

   If we observe Reformation Sunday, it's wise not to get nostalgic about Luther, who after all was creating the biggest division in church history! It's the way he and all reformers know how to look forward, as on a watchtower, for the new thing God is about to do, which is in continuity with the old thing, as old as Habakkuk and from creation's first sunrise, God has been doing. We have a weight upon us. And in the texts to come, it's about being / becoming "worthy" of the call - which will never happen if we don't grasp, as Zaccheus did, that there are economic and lifestyle implications to welcoming this Lord into our homes.

   When I arrived as pastor at my 2nd church, they had organized small groups all over the parish for me to go and listen to them share "What's wrong with the church?" Such a bad idea. Yet there's so much wrong with the church, always. And ironically, some of what people find to be wrong with the church is precisely where our strength lies. Examples abound. I'm reminded of T.S. Eliot's words: "Why should men love the church? Why should they love her laws? She tells them of life and death, and of all that they would forget. She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft. She tells them of evil and sin, and other unpleasant facts."

   And for denominations that divide into traditional vs. progressive? Thomas Merton's wisdom is spot on: "The biggest paradox about the church is that she is at the same time essentially traditional and essentially revolutionary. But that is not as much of a paradox as it seems, because Christian tradition, unlike all others, is a living and perpetual revolution."

   Near the end of Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson’s best (maybe? my opinion?) novel, we find this reflection on memory and death: “But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting so long.” On God we wait, using the time to learn, be exposed, grow, change our minds.

    Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4. Habakkuk is just fun to say out loud. When the apostle Paul, and then the Talmud replied to the question posed to Jesus, “What’s the great verse in the Bible?” both zoomed to Habakkuk 2:4. The image and setting are compelling in every age. The decline of one empire, Assyria, only yields another brutal, oppressive power, Babylon, signaled by the battle of Carchemish in 605 BCE. Nothing new under the sun – and yet heightened anxiety and terror.

   God calls Habakkuk and lays on him a massa, translated innocuously as “oracle,” when it literally means “burden, weight.” God’s message is heavy, something to be pondered (pondus is something heavy you carry). He’s not in a comfortable chair bearing this burden, but on a watchtower, like a sentinel, scanning the horizon for – more disaster? Or the coming of the Lord? I think of “On the Watchtower,” maybe preferring Jimi Hendrix to Bob Dylan.

   Habakkuk names the distortion of “justice,” mishpat, that marvelous Hebrew word that doesn’t mean fairness but rather a justice where the marginalized, those left out are included and cared for: this is the just society and people! That much-quoted verse, 2:4 (the primary text for Romans, cited in 1:17, then also showing up in Galatians 3:11 and Hebrews 10:38) fascinates: “The righteous shall live by faith.” Habakkuk and the Israelites heard “the righteous” as those who doggedly adhere to God’s Torah. They “live,” that is, carrying on day by day. Their “faith” is their faithfulness to community and Torah-living.

   Paul morphs all of this in an eschatological and salvific direction. The “righteous” are those right-wised, put into a right relationship with and by God. They live – now, but will live eternally. Their faith is the gift of belief, trust – and Karl Barth is wise to remind us that it is Christ’s faith, his faithfulness that saves, not our faith or faithfulness.

   Indeed, in commenting on Paul’s reference to Habakkuk in The Epistle to the Romans, Barth’s words catch fire as we read them a century later: “The Gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question-mark against all truths.” The Church’s activity “is no more than a crater formed by the explosion of a shell and seeks to be no more than a void in which the Gospel reveals itself. The people of Christ know that no sacred word or work exists in its own right: they know only those words and works and things which by their negation are sign-posts to the Holy One.”

   Habakkuk would shout down an Amen from his watchtower. Our Habakkuk text is deeply suggestive of what the righteous person is not: he is not puffed up, she does not rely on herself. Habakkuk can help us not mis-read Paul. Faith for him clearly is not a one-time decision, but a constant walking, renewal regularly, a lifestyle, an attitude, practical.

   2 Thessalonians 2:1-4, 11-12. Not sure I’ll preach on this among the lections – but so intriguing to notice how, as is often the case, Paul’s prayers aren’t for some ailment, or for his friends to get a better job or find a spouse. No, he prays “that our God may make you worthy of his call, and may fulfill every resolve to do good and work of faith in power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you.”

   Luke 19:1-10. “A wee little man was he.” The song tempts us to trivialize this remarkable encounter Jesus has with a rich tax collector in Jericho. The ruins of Herodian Jericho are eloquent if tragic witnesses to the grandeur that once was that city. Zaccheus, the small one, illustrating how Jesus welcomes the little ones, how “They are weak, but he is strong,” even the marvelous hobbits Tolkien created from the shire as the hope and future of Middle Earth.

   This man’s name: Zaccheus. The Hebrew, zakkai, “the righteous one,” suggests his parents had this dream of goodness for him. If he wound up (as Christian tradition suggested) as the first bishop of Caesarea, he did prove to be that zakkai. Did his parents live long enough to know? Was his life as a rapacious tax collector a lunge toward compensation for his being short? “Little ones to him belong.”

   Zaccheus’s climb up that tree: he was, we can be sure, a climber. I think of Danny DeVito when casting calls are made for him! As a climber, was he in the tree merely so he could see? So he could be seen? Was he late to the party? Short people could see if they arrived early enough to be in the front. After his transformative meal with Jesus, did he then follow up the steep highway to Jerusalem with the throng to join in Palm Sunday? Was he one in that crowd? I love sermons, and try to preach them, that simply dangle such possibilities.

   Luke’s punch line zooms in on what matters: “The Son of man came to seek and save the lost,” not the clever or well-placed or even the church members, Bible readers and believers. Jesus and Zaccheus broke bread together, in the home of what to Jesus was a stranger – and nothing was ever the same. There most clearly are economic implications to meeting up with this Jesus! Did Jesus order him to make outlandish reparations? Had Zaccheus, on meeting Jesus, hung his eyes in shame? Or was he motivated by the giddy joy of connecting with this Lord who was eager to “eat with tax collectors and sinners” (Luke 15:1)?

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  In my book on saints and heroes of the church (Servants, Misfits & Martyrs: Saints and their Stories), I have a good bit on Martin Luther and other reformers. My gratitude soared when my church history professor, David Steinmetz, told me he gave this book to his mother so she'd understand what he'd spent his life doing. Lots and lots of illustrative stuff in here for preachers, I am sure.