Short people got no reason to live// They got little hands// And little eyes// And they walk around// Tellin’ great big lies// They got little noses// And tiny little teeth// They wear platform shoes// On their nasty little feet// Well, I don’t want no short people// Don’t want no short people// Don’t want no short people ‘Round here…

From the song “Short People” by Randy Newman, 1977

Short people – short on tolerance; short on humility; short in sight; short on love of neighbor. Bigotry, racism, hateful ignorance. Randy Newman’s ironic poke at racism and bigotry reminded me of another person persecuted for difference. I want to peek inside a story from Luke 19, verses 1-10 that most probably first heard about in a Sunday school song:

Zacchaeus was a wee, little man // And a wee, little man was he.// He climbed up in a sycamore tree // For the Lord he wanted to see.

Jesus is on the road at Jericho, a wealthy city in the foothills leading to Jerusalem – it is the last leg of his journey to the temple, when he encounters Zacchaeus, the lead tax collector, a man universally despised, short in stature, which may very well be referring to his communal status as well as his height. Poor guy – he’s the one in the room everyone hates and he knows it. He has to run along the parade route behind the crowds in front of him – crowds that tighten their positions to keep him out. And there is little Zacchaeus, jumping up and down, trying to get a glimpse of Jesus, when he comes to the sycamore tree: a tree with low branches that made climbing easy and a tree loaded with large leaves that would hinder his presence from being detected by the crowd. A wealthy, grown man, clambering up a tree. What made him throw embarrassment, shame, and ridicule aside, not caring what people thought and what they might possibly see of his more private affairs?

He simply wanted to get a look at Jesus. After all, Jesus was a man that welcomed people like Zacchaeus. Jesus even has one of the guys from the Brotherhood of Tax Collectors local 106 in Galilee as one of his disciples. He must be an okay guy.

But Jesus spots him instead and tells him to come down.

The marginalized, the people on the wrong side of the crowds, the ones pushed off to the shoulder of the road, the ones blocked from participating in the community, the ones forced to climb a tree, are the ones who see most clearly. The blind beggar at the end of Luke 18 sees without eyes and Zacchaeus sees with his heart. And yet, the insiders, the disciples, the good white, evangelicals lining the roads telling others to go away, are the real blind ones. They don’t want those short people hanging around. The light of salvation is standing right in front of them and all they can see are their earthly expectations; all they can see is their own self-worth; all they can see are those who think and act like they do; all that they can see are their self-serving restrictions on who is in and who is out; all they see is a riddle; all they see is that they want to remain blind. It’s more comfortable and they grumble at anything that challenges them otherwise. Fake news.

The irony in all of this is that this is our story as well. This passage is not just some far removed happenstance on a dusty road in Palestine 2,000 years ago. It’s a story we continue to enact in varying degrees today, day after day. Zacchaeus was stereotyped and stigmatized by the blindness of the crowds much the same way we do grumbling about all of them: the opposite political party, immigrants, Muslims and their burquas, Jews and their yarmulkes, Hindus and their bindis, atheists, straight, the ‘nones’, the gay couple that just moved into the neighborhood, the transgender boy that wants to join the scouts and those Asian, black, and Hispanic people that seem to be everywhere and now the neighborhood just isn’t the same. We whisper about the couple getting divorced, the family dealing with an addicted member. We condemn the poor as lazy and self-seeking in their charity or the felon who must check a box for the rest of his or her life, condemning far too many to underemployment and marginality. Worse yet, we proclaim prisons as houses of correction where there is no effort to do so, insuring the condemnation of many to an endless cycle of poverty and prison. After all, I’m not like you: I must deserve it.

We stereotype and stigmatize all day long. The disciples did it when they failed to understand the plain language of Jesus, remaining in their stereotyped expectations of messianic deliverance, not bothering to lift the veils from their eyes to truly see what scripture and Jesus had been saying all along. And when we revel in our attitudes of exclusion and self-righteousness, we, like the disciples, miss the message of Jesus and the cross. The kingdoms of our making, the kingdoms of racial division, white privilege, political tribalism, violence, materialistic greed are antithetical to the kingdom of God, but we continue to build them because we are just too willingly blind to accept the hard truth of Christ and the cross.

Jesus emphatically states: “Zacchaeus, today salvation has come to your house, and I am coming over for dinner.” This is the nub of the scandal of Zacchaeus’s story: Jesus was coming over for dinner. It’s at the heart of the problem the crowds are having as they grumble – he eats with sinners and tax collectors! Dinner parties in the Greco-Roman era were the society balls and political fund raising dinners of their time. It was the place to see and be seen, to affirm at the very least, to promote at its best, or to diminish at its worst, the social standing of anyone. To be invited to a dinner party means you are part of the ‘in’ crowd, you are part of the family.

Yet, here’s the beautiful thing. You don’t go looking for Jesus, Jesus comes looking for you. And that’s the good news for you and I, the blind and the lost. The good news is that today salvation has come to all of us because the Human One has come to seek us out. Jesus says to all who believe in him, that today, he is coming into our houses, coming to we who are what we stereotype and stigmatize, we who are “them” – he is coming to have dinner with us. Jesus call us to the table – all of us – the sinner and tax collectors, the blind and the broken, to affirm our place as children of the living God, spared certain destruction by the unmerited gift of the cross, to sit as one family gathered around the gifts of God for the people of God.

Late in his song, Newman sings: Short People are just the same as you and I. All men are brothers until the day they die. Imago dei – we are all made in the image of God. Go into the world today and every day with unyielding gratitude and the overflowing joy of a people found with sight restored – one family –  not white, black, brown yellow, red, not Republican or Democrat, straight, gay or in-between, – one blessed family that has room for all: a family invited to the greatest dinner party of all time. Thanks be to God – Amen.

Masthead Artwork: By Niels Larsen Stevns – Own work (photo: Gunnar Bach Pedersen) (Randers Museum of Art, Randers, Denmark), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1428023