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Luke 19:1-10
A Sermon for the end of the Pentecost Season
Last weekend the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series. Two great teams, extra innings. It was quite a game.
Leading up to Game 7, there was some talk about good luck charms and rituals that various players on both teams had.
For example, the Dodger’s Japanese pitcher, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, has an interpreter with an unusual good luck charm. Keep in mind, we’re talking about the pitcher’s interpreter, not the pitcher himself. On the days when Yamamoto pitches for the Dodgers, his interpreter always wears special boxers featuring a rabbit shooting lasers from his eyes.
A lot of sports figures have good luck charms.
The famous Wade Boggs, long time third baseman for the Boston Red Socks, nicknamed “Chicken Man,” ate chicken before every game and wrote the Hebrew word “Chai” (meaning life) in the dirt before batting.
Some players have luck socks or special jewelry they wear.
To be sure, pre-game rituals and good luck charms aren’t just superstition. They can help athletes feel more in control, reduce anxiety, and boost confidence. It’s about having the right mindset, as well as tipping the scales of the universe in one’s favor.
And then there are jinxes, too.
There’s the famous Curse of the Bambino, which began in 1919 when the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. After that, the Red Sox failed to win a World Series for 86 years, finally breaking the curse in 2004.
There’s the jinx of being on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Athletes or teams featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated have sometimes suffered poor performance or injury afterward and that’s led to thinking it’s a jinx to be on the cover.
It’s not just players who engage in these rituals and charms; it’s sports fans, too.
There was an avid baseball fan who thought he was a jinx to his favorite team. He said: “The only way they win is if I don’t watch.”
Good luck charms and jinxes. We think there must be some way we can influence what happens, something we can do to get a leg up in the universe.
Carry a lucky coin. Tie your shoes in a certain way. Don’t walk under a ladder. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. We’re tempted to see if there’s some way of having things work out the way we want them to.
You know the famous magician Houdini. His mother died in 1913. They had been very close. After her death he tried to contact her through several mediums. But he quickly realized that mediums were using tricks he recognized from his own life in magic.
Feeling betrayed, he spent the last ten years of his life exposing the scams of fortune tellers, clairvoyants, spiritualists, and mediums. He called them “ghost racketeers.” He even testified for four days before the US Congress. He set up demonstrations for the congressmen, showing how mediums used tricks to deceive grieving families.
A lot of people are tempted by psychics and other such phenomena, like mental telepathy and mind reading. At Rhine Research Center in North Carolina scientists set out to prove that mental telepathy is real and that it works, but their experiments trying to show this failed.
If there were only some way to manipulate the universe!
As we approach the end of the church year, we think of all the ways that people try to get a leg up in the universe, to figure things out.
We remember, too, how the Seventh Day Adventists came to be. Back in 1844 William Miller, a Baptist preacher, gained tens of thousands of followers by preaching about the end times. Based on his reading of the Books of Daniel and Revelation, he predicted that the end of the world would come in October 1844. Thousands of people put on white robes, gathered in open fields and on hilltops, singing hymns and looking at the sky, waiting for the Second Coming of Jesus, but nothing happened. It became what they called The Great Disappointment. Their leaders said: God has changed his mind.
When you study the Book of Revelation, at first it may seem fascinating, but it soon becomes boring. All those symbols and numbers have lost their significance over the centuries, and it’s been shown that those symbols and numbers are also found in the ancient Hindu writings called the Vedas.
The human being, both ancient and modern, is bent toward superstition, trying to know and control the way things go.
But Mark 13:32 says: “But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
The same is true with prayer.
So much of prayer is: “If I use the right words, or more words, or if I spend more time in prayer, or if I join a prayer chain and get more people with me, if I pray more seriously and earnestly, then prayer will work.”
Today we are reminded about that little man, Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector and very rich. Because he wasn’t tall, he had to climb high in a sycamore tree to see Jesus when he passed that way. And when Jesus came to that place, he looked up and saw Zacchaeus and said to him: “Come down, Zacchaeus, for I’m coming to your house today.”
And Zacchaeus answered: “Half of what I have I give to the poor; and if I have defrauded any one of anything, I’ll pay it back fourfold.”
Note that it wasn’t that Zacchaeus had shouted down to Jesus and said, “Lord, if you come to my house, then I’ll give half of what I have to the poor and pay back fourfold anyone whom have defrauded.”
It isn’t that Zacchaeus persuaded the Lord to come to his house, and then he would do this. Rather, the Lord simply said to him: “Zacchaeus, I’m coming to your house today.”
Some years ago, a layman said to his pastor: “I have prayed to the Lord that such and such would happen, and if it does, I’m going to give a big gift to the congregation.”
A couple of weeks later the pastor got a large check from this fellow. The pastor sighed and said: “This isn’t right; this is trying to bribe the Lord.”
Sometimes the bribe comes first: “Lord, I’ve been good. It wasn’t easy, but I have been. Now, please Lord, please make this other thing work out for me.”
And sometimes the bribe comes second: “Lord, if you get me out of this jam, then I’ll change my ways.”
How does the Lord work?
It says in Matt 5:45: “He makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” That’s not our way of running the universe.
But it also says in Isaiah 55:8-9: “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ says the Lord.”
We think we could do it better.
Job lost everything, yet said: “I know that my Redeemer lives.” (Job 19:25).
In Matthew 6:26, it says: “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
Or Romans 8:32: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all [good] things with him?”
He is Lord. You can rest in “the everlasting arms” (Deuteronomy 33:27). He’s taking care of things far beyond all that we ask or think. His judgments are true.
The whole point of it is we can trust the Lord. We can let God be God. And all the talk about good luck and jinxes and whatever else we do to manipulate the universe is a temptation to get away from letting him be Lord. He is Lord, and beside him there is no other. He is our hope and confidence. Amen.