“When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.’ So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly. All the people saw this and began to mutter, ‘He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.’…Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.’” (Luke 19:5-10)
In Jewish history, the tax collectors were known for lying, stealing, and cheating the people they collected taxes from for their own personal financial benefit. They were categorized as sinners and outcast by anyone who cared about maintaining a good reputation. Throughout history, every society around the world has created groups of outcasts like these. In many modern day countries, those outcasts are the poor, the homeless, the disabled, the physically or mentally sick, and the orphans.
Do we create the same cultural stigmas in the United States? Let me ask you a few questions to consider. Have you ever invited a homeless man into your house for the night to provide him shelter from the rain or cold? When you see a poor person begging for food or money on the streets of some bustling city-do you look them in the eye and pause to give them a word of encouragement or listen to their story, much less provide a few dollars for a meal? Have you considered, before judging his or her as a trouble-maker, that a child’s lack of respect for authority and poor decision-making are just results of not having a stable parent-figure in their life to guide and love them?
I believe that, yes, almost all of us have, at least for parts of our lives, tried to separate these ‘less-desirables’ out of the context of our lives. It is easier not to deal with them. It is easier to forget they are in that position partially because we have put them there, or at least kept them from getting out of it with our judgmental attitudes. We have rejected them because of the unfortunate circumstances they are in, or because they have messy lives that we’d really rather not have to help to straighten out, or because we don’t believe they deserve another chance.
Many of you reading this may be thinking I have crossed the line and that you are an exception to this mentality and do not see anyone as being unequal. After all, America is the land of equality, right? Perhaps you are the exception. In that case, I rejoice with you because I know you have found an indescribable joy through just loving on these people. But if you’re finding any bit of truth in these attitudes I am describing, consider the example of Jesus in the story of Zacchaeus, the tax collector. This is not a picture of Jesus simply tolerating the outcasts who happened to be begging in the streets where he was teaching, or accepting the sinners that had already turned their lives around and made a nice clean name for themselves, but rather he invited himself to their houses and invested his time in communing with them. The scripture says he sought Zacchaeus out, and that he purposefully went to his house as a demonstration of seeking out a lost soul and showing him the way to salvation.
This story became so much more valuable to me this week as my team continued serving at an outreach of Zion’s Gate in a housing area by the city trash dump. The people who live there are the undesirables of the nation. They are extremely poor. They were born or have babies out of wedlock and at young ages. They are addicted to drugs. They have permanently injured their brains from sniffing paint thinner. But we are not dragging the people out of their homes to attend church with us. We’re not throwing bible school programs for the children living there or listing off to them all the bad things they’re doing in their lives that they need to change to be happy.
Today, after getting permission from them to head down the steep dirt slope pathway to their houses, the 7 members of my team and a few staff from Zion’s Gate spent two hours just hanging out with them in their homes. We reached out open hands and offered hugs and greetings in spite of the fact that most of society won’t touch them. We smiled and laughed with them as we tried to get around the language barrier to talk about things like tattoos, soccer, hair dye, favorite foods, and learning English. We danced like silly children to music my parents probably listened to in the 70’s and 80’s that someone turned on. We kicked a soccer ball around while stray dogs and neighborhood chickens and kittens ran across in front of us. And the whole time we kept in mind that these are God’s children- created in His image and worthy of our love and respect. I stopped noticing their dirty faces and hands, their ragged clothes, & the smell of paint thinner they had been sniffing moments before, and saw these ‘untouchables’ with eyes of compassion that can only be attributed to the Lord’s doing. And it was a beautiful thing to be the guest of sinners.
