2010   Trinity 18.  Guilsborough :   Evening Prayer

The  journalistic silly season this summer, which I always enjoy  had,  pardon the pun,  a bit of a bite in it,  in that story about Winston Churchill's dentures coming up for sale.  According to one version,  the teeth had played a vital part in the defence of the realm by enabling the Prime Minister to make his wartime broadcasts without a speech impediment.  The alternative  version, however,  had it  that before broadcasting Churchill actually removed his dental plate and put it beside him on the table  and so it  played no part in the proceedings.  Either way the teeth sold for  Pound15,000, three times the estimated price .  So presumably someone thought that relic worth having.  
Mankind has always seems to have  had a fascination with relics.  Winston  Churchill's  orthodontic apparatus belonging as it did  to a national hero, has now joined St. Francis Xavier's humerus,  preserved in the cathedral in Macao, the cloak of Mohamed in Kandahar, and the Buddha's tooth in Kandy,  Sri Lanka, the Turin Shroud and many pieces of the True Cross. There were so many of the latter indeed that the reformer  John Calvin said there were enough around to build a ship.   In our school library  - and I was fascinated by it -  we had  the bullet proof hat of  John Bradshaw the man who presided over the trial of King Charles I and  Oliver Cromwell's death mask.  
 The excessive veneration of relics,  however, along with the sale of so called indulgences,  was one of  the most criticised aspects of the Roman Catholic Church before the Reformation.   It accounts largely for the appearance of this church today.  For the result was, of course, iconoclasm  by Protestants carried to extremes in this country under the Puritans when statues of saints and the Virgin Mary etc.  murals and decoration were destroyed as idolatrous and contrary to the 4[th] Commandment  " Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image" .  
This fascination with relics is still, however,  very much part of our lives,  even as Protestants today.  We love to be associated with someone famous, even if it's only through their autograph.  There are collectors of every kind of memorabilia: footballers shirts, warriors medals, writers manuscripts.  Why should this be ?   Sometimes, to be sure, it's because the object in question will probably gain in value over the years, perhaps part of our pension.   But in most cases it's a  desire to be associated in some small,  even egotistical,  way with celebrity, with greatness or even with notoriety. Or simply with our family's ancestors.    It seems to be an  ingrained part of human nature.
Holy and unholy relics all over the place.  But  even in these secular times,  many  people,  non Christians,  look  upon saints for help and protection or just want to be generally associated with them.  St. Christopher is in our cars; St. George's flag flies from church towers and when England are playing football a red cross flutters proudly from cars.  I know men wearing crucifixes who have probably not crossed the threshold of a church.    
Through those associations, however,  many people are recognising virtues or seeking protection or good  fortune , I would argue,  even if they may not realise it.  Saints then over the centuries have been our Christian role models. 
And we have a new  British one on the horizon, the Victorian cleric  John Henry Newman who was beatified on his way to sainthood by Pope Benedict  two weeks ago today.  Among Anglicans, I suppose  he's best known for two hymns  " Lead Kindly Light"  and  "Praise to the Holiest in the Height".  But he left the Anglican Church  very controversially half way through his life to become a Roman Catholic.    By putting him on the road to Sainthood,  the first English saint I heard since the 17[th] century, the Pope is confirming that Newman is unquestionably with God in Heaven and  commending his life  -   as an example to us all. 
Somehow, however, sainthood sits  rather uneasily with intimate knowledge of people closer to our own time.   We are at a safe distance from St. Augustine or St. Benedict, for example,  whose faults are less well known than their greatness.   But we know a lot about Newman:  he wrote a great deal and his correspondence  I discovered runs to 34 volumes. And his contemporaries wrote extensively about him because he was a controversial figure.  The upshot of that is that his faults,  his quarrels,  are quite as apparent to us as his virtues .  But, as a catholic,  Newman stood up against excessive devotion to relics and saints,  irrational authoritarianism and an unwillingness on the part of the Church hierarchy to acknowledge the role that the laity might play or its significance.    He left behind him a store of wisdom about how to lead the best kind of life.  And for those best results follow the  Maker's instructions.
Our lesson this evening is about a man who did just that.   The story of Zacchaeus  is one of the most appealing in the New Testament.  
A despised tax collector for the Romans: corrupt, short and regarded by all with contempt.  His name I discover ironically meant  Clean or Pure. 
Yet this pretty wretched little man,  at least in other peoples eyes,  was clearly very keen to see Jesus, running ahead looking for a better view probably braving a certain amount of ridicule on account of his reputation  and short stature.   
Z.  wasn't expecting Jesus to say anything to him: but he was ready to receive his message. 
And the message for us is that if we are ready, Jesus will notice us too. 
In fact it was Jesus who invited himself to Zacchaeus, not the other way around.
And when he met Jesus,  Z. confessed his sins and promised restitution to those he had defrauded and  to give half his good to the poor.   This came naturally from a change of heart, and not from any instruction by Jesus.  
Unlike the ruler in the previous chapter of  Luke's gospel who is told  by Jesus to sell all and give to the poor and follow him.  That proves a bridge too far.  
And after Z. confession of sin and restitution,  Jesus reaches out to Z. 
Reminding us that, as St. John's gospel  says,  that God  " is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to save us from all unrighteousness "
Eighteen hundred years later,  story emerges in a very different context:
"Some people laughed to see the alteration in him but he let them laugh, and little heeded them;  for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter at the outset.............His own heart laughed : and that was quite enough for him".  
And that man of course was Ebeneezer Scrooge. 
I'll end by going back to John Henry Newman and that well known verse from Longfellow hung on the wall of Hollowell Church:
" Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime and departing leave behind us footprints in the sands of time."  
But to do that we also need to take a leaf out of Zacchaeus book, come down from our respective sycamore trees and let Jesus, and what he stands for, stay with us this night and ever after in our hearts. 


"Teach is good lord to serve Thee was thou deserves: to give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds to toil and to ask for no reward save that knowing that we do thy will. " 






 



