Texts: Psalm 46; Luke 19: 1-10

This is how the story goes: One day, specifically July 2, 1505, Martin Luther was on his way to Stotterheim, a small town near Erfurt, Germany, when a violent summer thunderstorm began, and a bolt of lightening struck nearby. The pressure from the bolt was so intense that the horse he was riding threw him onto the ground; convinced this was a sign of God’s judgment on him, he swore he would become a monk. Perhaps I’m being a cynic, but I can’t help but notice how it bears a remarkable resemblance to the historical images of Paul’s conversion experience on the road to Damascus.

The real story of Luther’s struggle is more like the struggles we face in our own lives: No thunderbolts from heaven, no sudden appearance of angels, but a daily search for something that approximates truth, an ever elusive ideal that hides beyond the reality we experience in our lives. The young Luther had first enrolled in law school as his father wished, but found law unsatisfying since it pointed not to eternal verities but to the decisions made by human beings. He went on to study philosophy and theology, hoping to find certainty there. His teachers, influenced by Aristotle and the late scholasticism of William Ockham and Gabriel Biel, taught him to trust his own experience and to simplify the convoluted reasoning of medieval scholastics. However, Luther found this just as unsatisfying as law because there was nothing about God’s love and he increasingly began to rely on Scripture as the source of divine revelation.

Luther went on to become a professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg where he taught for many years. Luther’s famous Ninety-five Theses, nailed on that church door, arose in response to the selling of indulgences by Johann Tetzel, who had been sent from Rome to secure funds for the building of St. Peter’s. Luther originally did not intend to begin the Reformation but a reform within the church. The series of events that followed in some sense took the shape and form of the Reformation out of Luther’s control and into a stew pot consisting of ingredients thrown in by every cook in Europe.

What do the events, what does the process of what we now call the Reformation teach us about looking for truth? First, of course, the search is almost always messy and beyond our illusions of control. And, like Zaccheus, we are always straining to see what might point towards it. The stories of Luther and Zaccheus are more closely related than might first appear.

Being short, I relate to the story of Zaccheus. I have to use a stepstool to see the Scripture at the lectern. But there are other ways that make both Luther’s story and the story of Zaccheus relevant. Tax collectors were people who did not only bow to Rome’s authority but cooperated with it; they were the ancient world’s version of collaborators, hated and feared by the people. They represented, as much as the army, Rome’s conquest and brutal rule. Luke’s Gospel uses the tax collector as a symbol of the ultimate sinner, the person who more than anyone else needs redemption. And in the stories that Luke’s Gospel has, the tax collector knows he needs something more than the life he is leading.

The truth that Zaccheus learns and swears to live is to share his goods with the poor and to restore, not just equally but fourfold, to anyone he has defrauded. What’s intriguing about this story is that nothing is said about whether Zaccheus continues his profession as a tax collector. Redemption here is not just charity but also justice. As David Beckmann, the founder of Bread for the World says, charity and justice are but two legs of the person. You must have both because if you cut one off, you’re just hopping around rather than really moving towards the goal.

The Reformation that we celebrate today resulted not just in changes within our approaches towards faith, trust, belief, but within society as well. As Frederick, Lord North, the British Prime Minister in 1776 said, a society that believes that each person can seek his own salvation and determine whether he has obtained it is not far from a society that believes it has the capacity to determine its own form of government. One of the lessons from this morning’s reading as well as from the Reformation is that in our search for truth, we cannot separate charity and justice. If we want a truly whole society, we must work towards eliminating hunger while feeding the poor. We must work for affordable housing while helping the homeless. The list goes on and on.

Looking for truth is much like Zaccheus climbing the tree. It’s messy and it’s difficult. We get scraped in the process; our clothing gets rumpled; sometimes we even fall down and have to start all over again. It’s a deeply spiritual process in that our assumptions of how the world works are constantly challenged. Luther left the study of law because he felt it did not offer the certainty he believed he would find in theology. But truth is not found in some theological proposition; ever elusive, it seems just beyond our grasp, sometimes much like grace. Zaccheus, through the grace of God, learns the importance of charity and justice. May we learn the same in order to reflect God’s truth.

Let us pray: You, who through your grace have given us windows into your truth to show us how to live, help us to live in both charity and justice. Amen.