November 3, 2019

C49: The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost, Year C (2019)

Barbara Lundblad

If you attended Sunday School as a child, you probably know today’s story well. “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.” Barbara Lundblad, the Joe R. Engle Professor of Preaching Emerita at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and a retired minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, preaches on this familiar passage from Luke 19:1-10. As a child we don’t think about the economics of the passage. We don’t think much about Zacchaeus being a tax collector and what that meant. Lundblad says, “Zacchaeus knew that making a living wasn’t the same as making a life,” He’d heard that Jesus was a friend of tax collectors and sinners…what if that were true?”

Manuscript available: click HERE