Fighting Against the Noise, Social Climbing, & a Hoarding Heart.

Sometimes the world is just loud. Trampling on you like a thousand stead ridding furiously across the sunset.  Yet, sometimes the lights don’t fade.  The pollution of a world filled with greed ever trickles from societies ways…

And we lose our way. But we are not still enough to know it.

I get the tweets, feel the pressure to buy more, do more, be more…when Jesus really came for those who admitted their bankruptcy, got lower not higher, and those who sought love more than any earthly treasure.

The morning wakes.  “Speak to me, oh God”, I breath in the fresh air as the sun overtakes the horizon. I digest the quiet of a morning without noise.

Still, sometimes the loudest arenas are not cell phones, t.v.’s, kids, or the people chattering in our face.  Sometimes the noisiest of places takes place in the endless evaluations, calculating, wonderings in your very own head.

I open the black book blanketing the top of my lap. Zacchaeus resurrects. And the childhood song, “…he climbed up in a sycamore tree” dances through my head.

The Word, like water, is allowed to refresh, clean out my past presumptions, restoring new life like no wonderings ever can.

And why do we like to point fingers at Zacchaeus?  He loved money, He climbed wildly in a tree, He loved approval and praise, and likely lived a life trying to deny continually, the reality that he was small, needy, broken…just like the rest of us.

Yet, Luke tells us, Zaccheous simply had to get in the sight line of Jesus.  So he climbed the Sycamore tree to see Him. 

And I wonder in the wealthy world He lived in, did he hear the sandals shuffling in the dirt, embrace the open space outside the gates entering Jericho?  Did he long for a chance to grip the edge of the cities banterings….escaping the noise, the chatter, the smells…the lifestyle of “one up”, “more” and “greedy climbing” he had probably been raised with since childhood?

So, he climbed.  And yet, how often do we climb the social ladders to get higher…when all God wants us to do is get lower?

What I love about Zaccheous is that scripture doesn’t tell us what radically transformed him, when Jesus came to his house that day.

• Was it his teaching?  
• The fullness of God incarnate and the presence He felt of peace and grace?  
• What it the words, “I forgive you”, even before Zaccheous had known he had sinned?  
• Was it an infirmity, Jesus touched and healed in him?  
• Or like the woman at the well, did Jesus tell Zaccheous everything he had ever done, prophetically revealing he was the son of God?

We don’t know.  All we know is, when joy filled Zaccheous, he didn’t just respond, “O.k….I guess I’ll try going to church and be a ‘good’ person now”….

No, Zaccheous was filled with abundant joy.  After encountering time alone with Jesus…He offered to give half of all He had willingly to the poor.  

And yet, I sit in my noisy head, too often lost organizing shoes I don’t need, hanging clothes I have never worn, bursting along my walk-in closet that is bigger than some people’s houses.  We have rooms we don’t use, and a field that just sits there, unused, I look at even now as I write this….

But oh how Zaccheous learned that this life is not about climbing higher to get to Jesus, but about offering all, encountering His presence and then responding with acts of love, living a life of obedience and willing generosity.

Yes, a true life of Christianity requires climbing down from everything that elevates us; in mind, in heart, in the social ranks and positioning that keeps us in the gates of the cities of our worldly understandings.

The faces still plague my mind. Starving children. I can barely gasp as my lungs crush inside me. Seeing their faces. Ribs bursting. There. In Africa from soccer camps I’ve seen.

And yet, I put distance in my head…pretending suffering really can’t exist.  Filling my head with “easy
to digest things”…so I don’t have to acknowledge the places God has called us to go. 

And in reality today, we will likely throw food away.  Yet, children starve every moment.  Even now…as I write this.

And don’t we all like to disconnect when we see suffering or read gentle corrections from the Bible?  Doesn’t distance justify our not responding, our hearts not acting on why we didn’t rise up and do something when Jesus came into our home, our hearts?  

And isn’t emotional distance filled with noise and materialism, just a futile attempt at filling the void,”shutting the door” on helping the poor, or giving abundantly.  When, didn’t God redeem our lives to silence the noise, for us to climb lower, embracing the fullness of humble generosity, trusting treasures of spiritual significance…instead of hoarding all we see?

I shut my Bible.  Sit quietly, though the house is stirring and I really must run and take care of the little one calling, “Mommy. Mommy”….

But, this morning, I commit to not looking at Zaccheaus ever again like someone I don’t know.  I refuse to “stick my nose up at him”…calling Him the “greedy sinner”…when unless I invite Jesus to my table of plenty, unless I welcome Him behind the walls of all my resurrected fortresses….Zaccheous is no more than a reflection of me.

And yet, despite our falling short, He turns His face towards us and calls us each, one at a time…by name.  Beckoning us down from every high place, offering us food that will not only fill our bodies, but transform us completely.

Calling us not to judgement, or condemnation, or to shame or to punish us…but to the fullness of glory that awaits us when we lay it all down and trust Him.  Completely.

For Jesus asks to come near and eat with you today.  Will you climb a little lower and greet Him?  Welcoming Him in the home of your heart…so you too will go out, joy-filled, and forever changed?


(Linking with Barbie)