Giving Flows From Grace (Luke 18:9-14, Luke 19:1-10)

Giving Flows From Grace

October 26, 2025

Luke 18:9-14 & Luke 19:1-10

By: Pastor Mike Conner

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Today is the beginning of our annual stewardship season and pledge drive. Every fall, our church leaders consider our needs and dreams for the upcoming year as they craft a budget. But to do that work responsibly, they need some indication of how we all plan to financially support our life together. So, we make commitments, or pledges, naming the amount of money we intend to give next year. You’ll be receiving a Commitment Card in the mail in the upcoming weeks for that very purpose, and we’re going to offer those as an act of worship on Sunday, November 23rd. Between now and then, to help each of us invite God’s Spirit into our decision making, I’ll be preaching a series of sermons on generosity and exploring some of the ways that giving is essential to Jesus’ way of loving God and loving neighbor.

Let’s start with the story Jesus told about a Pharisee and a tax collector: “He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt” (18:9). Okay, so we know right away that a nasty comparison game was playing our around Jesus. I’m holier than you, because… I’m closer to God than you, because… (We’ve never experienced anything like that in churches, have we?)

“Because,” the Pharisee says, “I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all my income. So thank you, God, that I’m not like other people; especially not like that guy over there.” That guy, of course, being one of those deplorable tax collectors. Meanwhile, that evil sinner was having a moment of real authentic connection with God. He’s recognizing that something isn’t right in his life, and he’s not thinking about anyone else at all. He’s pleading with God for mercy. He’s having a moment of humility and remorse.

The first and obvious lesson here is that a spirit of judgmental comparison does not belong in God’s house. That’s where they were: in God’s house, the Jerusalem Temple. As members of the Body of Christ, we are God’s house, and a spirit of judgmental comparison doesn’t belong here among us, either. We especially have to guard against that spirit when we engage in spiritual practices, disciplines, or habits -- things like fasting, tithing, reading the Bible, serving, or contemplation -- which help us grow in our faith but sometimes become performative and rigid and an insidious source of pride.

Obviously that judgmental spirit could creep into a time of communal discernment about giving. How does my giving compare to everyone else’s? Am I giving more than my fair share? Am I going to be judged because I can only give right now and a modest amount? That whole comparison game is a pitfall that we want to avoid.

But here’s the trap of Jesus’ parable! The deeper reinforcement of its message. The minute we say to ourselves, Wow, I’m not like that Pharisee at all! I would never judge anyone like that. Thank you, God, that I’m one of the nonjudgemental ones -- well, you see.

Jesus shows us that we can never really know what someone else’s inner disposition or motivation is when they come to worship, so we shouldn’t try to guess it or judge it. Instead, like the tax collector beating his chest, we should focus on having an authentic encounter with the living God and responding faithfully to that encounter.

A comparative spirit does not belong in God’s house. But what matters a lot is how each of us responds when Jesus comes to be a guest in our house. That’s what the story of Zaccheaus drives home for us:

Giving is a natural response to the presence of Jesus and his community in our lives.

Jesus was passing through the town of Jericho on his way to Jerusalem. A wealthy chief tax collector named Zacchaeus heard that Jesus was coming and wanted to see him. But he was a short man and didn’t want to jostle for space in the crowd, so he ran ahead of everyone else and clambered up a tree to get a sightline.

Zaccheaus was fundamentally separated from his community. His ‘short stature’ was both a literal description and a metaphorical acknowledgment of how people thought about him. He wasn’t ‘highly regarded,’ we might say, by his neighbors in Jericho. Tax collectors typically weren’t. They were often seen as betrayers of their Jewish communities, since they often worked with or for Rome’s occupying forces. It was also assumed that they were dishonest, keeping back some of what they collected for themselves. If that was true of an ordinary tax collector, how much more for a chief tax collector!

Zacchaeus wants to be near Jesus. That’s good! But he holds himself apart from his community, sets himself above them so that they can’t touch him, and that means he can only get so close to Jesus. For Zacchaeus, the issues at the heart of this separateness and distance are financial. His books are shut tight to these people. He can’t be one of them.

A lot of times, what we withhold from our community and what we withhold from God are related. And that means that when we are keeping a distance from our community on some axis of our lives, we are likely limiting what are we are able to experience of God’s joy, freedom, and power in that very same area. I’ll engage with my faith community over here, but not when it comes to my marriage, or my career, or my leisure, or my addictions. I really do want to be close to Jesus. It’s a sincere desire. But up a tree I go in order to see without being seen.

Ah, but Jesus is so kind.

Jesus always wants to overcome the distance between us and himself and put us in right relationship to our communities. He does not allow Zaccheus to remain stuck in his separation. The crowd has eyes on Jesus. Jesus has eyes on Zaccheus. He stops right at the base of that tree, looks up, and says, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today” (19:5). Your house. The doors of this house, a place of material abundance but spiritual secrecy and staleness, get thrown open to welcome Jesus!

Jesus taps into Zacchaeus’s true longing, not just to see him but to know him. And to act in that deep desire means climbing down the tree and getting back on the same level as everyone else. Jesus gives Zacchaeus the opportunity to do that, and Zacchaeus takes it.

This moment triggers two reactions. The crowd starts complaining: “Hey, Jesus has gone to stay with a sinful man!” We’ve already seen this prejudice against tax collectors, but maybe there’s some truth to it here. Zacchaeus was holding himself apart, after all. He knew something wasn’t right. But for that very reason Jesus singled him out. The people of Jericho have a legitimate grievance against their neighbor. Let’s deal with it!

Then came Zaccheus’s reaction. He hurried down, happily welcomed Jesus, and changed his posture toward his community: “Look, I’ll give half of my possessions to the poor, Lord. And if I have extorted anything from anyone, I’ll pay back four times as much.” He is immediately and profoundly transformed. He commits to repairing relationships broken by money. He even opens himself up for accusation. The guy who had climbed up a tree to get away from people who would never in a million years get a look at his tax logs now welcomes them to come knock on his door and say, Hey, I think you wronged me somewhere along the line.

Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”

This is salvation for Zaccheus. Not welcoming Jesus into his heart but into his home. Not a confession of faith, not signing on to a doctrinal system, but returning to an authentic encounter with his community through a transformed relationship with his possessions and his money. Jesus found him tucked up there among the foliage of the tree, hiding away from his neighbors. I love this story because it demonstrates in the most concrete terms what salvation really means: coming down and coming near; opening up and welcoming in; being responsive to God and accountable to the people around us.

When Jesus comes into our homes, our lives, our stories, we are drawn toward community, and our hands loosen on our stuff. It just happens. I’ve experienced it, and I’ve seen it over and over again in many of you. When Jesus decides to stay with us, when he says today is the day I’m coming to your place, we become aware of the ways that our posture toward our resources can either divide us from him and others or unite us with him and others. This is part of the thrill and the pain of Christianity. It’s never only How are my resources related to my faith? Never only How are my resources related to my community? Both questions must be lived at the same time.

Friends today is the day of salvation. Jesus wants to stay with you and with me today. And he takes the initiative; he knows us by name; he stops right where we are and fixes us in his loving gaze. He takes us and our desires seriously: come down, I want to be with you! And all the rest unfolds from that.

Jesus never said to Zaccheus, Give away half your estate.

He doesn’t say to us, Tithe 10% of your take-home pay.

He never mailed out a commitment card.

These things are good and wise and helpful, but they are ways of responding to a more fundamental shift at the level of the heart. They are happy responses we make in and for God’s house, because God has first entered into ours. And with him comes the congregation, the crowd, the poor and poor in spirit.

At the heart of generosity is God’s being near to us in Jesus Christ, the free and unearned encounter with unconditional love that the Church calls grace. Grace releases, grace repairs, grace reconciles. And to experience its full power in our lives, we have to -- I hope we want to -- come down to where everyone else is and open our lives to each other.

So let’s agree right now. Let’s agree that we are not going to fill God’s house with a comparative spirit. It would’ve been great if, in Jesus’ parable, the Pharisee and the tax collector had talked to each other the way that Jesus and Zaccheus talked to each other, because the Pharisee could have probably helped the tax collector think through what to do with those feelings of remorse, and the tax collector could have challenged the Pharisee’s binary thinking about who’s worthy and good and unworthy and bad.

But as it happened one was locked in his pride, and one was stuck in his sorrow. And while Jesus does say that the tax collector “went home justified rather than the other” because his prayer was genuine and humble, it does seem like some potential for building community got left on the table.

Community. That’s what this is about. The kind of community Jesus can make among those who are grateful for his love. A place of abundance, of sharing, of sacrifice, of humble and living faith. As we enter into this season of financial discernment, may we each ask God to show us how to make space for him in our house, for the sake of all who enter his house.

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit: Amen.