Everyone Wins!

All that we are and all that we have is a GIFT from God. 

What are they doing?  
Well, they don’t know how a race works.  

I was sitting in the stands of the Special Olympics many years ago when I overheard this conversation behind me.   

The athletes were running and one of them stumbled, fell and started to cry.  

One of the racers, the one clearly in the lead stopped to look back and when he did, another one stopped and then another until everyone had stopped running.  The coaches on the sidelines were encouraging the athletes to continue running toward the finish line. 

And then it happened. 

The boy who had initially stopped started to run in the wrong direction: the direction of the fallen athlete.  Everyone in the race followed suit.  All of the athletes were running in the wrong direction until they reached the fallen one.  

The first racer to get there, reached out his arm to help her up and then linking arms, all of the athletes, all of them ran together ran to the finish line where they began to jump up and down and celebrate.  

Everyone had won.   That’s the kingdom of God beloved. 

Our Collect for today invites us to run without stumbling to obtain heavenly promises.   The heavenly promise beloved was demonstrated by those amazing athletes: everyone wins.  Everyone.  

There’s an interesting conversation going on between our collect run without stumbling and our Gospel.  Zaccheus wow—did he ever stumble in life—a tax collector.  Was there anything more despised in Jesus’ time than a tax collector?   Think beyond the IRS: think gangster, crook, or drug dealer.   That was the realm of tax collectors.  Zaccheus has stumbled time and time again and Jesus stops, turns round and runs the wrong direction.  

What on earth are you doing Jesus—don’t you know how it works?  

Beloved—we don’t get it.  
Everyone wins.  Everyone.  That’s the radical grace filled message of our Lord Jesus Christ. In the Kingdom of God, everyone wins, in God’s economy, there is more than enough. 

And the reality is we ALL stumble all the time because we don’t live in that realm of the Kingdom nearly enough.  We live in this realm—a realm where the ubiquitous message that’s  constantly in our face is  There’s never enough!  There’s never enough! There’s never enough!   

The economy of our world is scarcity.  The economy of God says my well-being is bound up in your well-being.  

In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s stunningly beautiful essay, Serviceberry, she eloquently names the reality of Gift Economy which is God’s economy.  Those who live in developing nations or in indigenous cultures get it the way those athletes at the Special Olympics got it.  

In Kimmerer’s essay she tells the story of a linguist studying a tribal people in the rainforest.  A hunter went out and had a spectacular kill—more meat than his family could eat in one meal.  So, to celebrate, the hunter came home and threw a massive party with all his neighbors: every last morsel of precious meat was consumed.  

The linguist puzzled over this with the victorious hunter—why not store and preserve the meat for his own family to eat in lean times?   The hunter was even more perplexed by this question: store the meat?   Why would I do that?   

I store my meat in my brother’s belly.  The hunter replied.   

Let us run without stumbling to obtain the heavenly promises: everyone wins.  Salvation belongs to all.   Beloved our mandate to love our neighbor is not a geographic commandment or nicety: it is a moral concept.  Loving neighbor means we store our treasure in our neighbor’s bellies and homes and well-being.    We run the wrong way to win so that everyone wins.  

Everyone. 

That’s what Stewardship is all about, beloved.  That’s why pledging matters: God’s economy.   We are giving over a portion of our power and control to something more than ourselves.  We are putting a big toe into the water of God’s economy— gift economy.  We are putting our money where our beliefs are and saying there’s enough and I refuse to believe the lie of scarcity and shame: There’s enough and everyone wins.  

In his book Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein states: “Gifts cement the mystical realization of participation in something greater than oneself which, yet, is not separate from oneself.

 We are like Zaccheus too small to see it and live it so we climb and search, compelled yearning to see Jesus who runs the wrong way to save us ALL.   

All means ALL, beloved.  All means all.  Everyone wins!  

It’s your lucky day Zaccheus.  Come down from that tree.  I’m staying with you.  I’m running the wrong way to save you because that’s what the Kingdom looks like.  

Amen. 
Amen.