Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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*Luke 19:1-10*
*Liturgical Date: Pentecost 24 Year C*
*An Evangelism Message - August 7, 2005*
*“Found!”*
* *
*Goal: *That the hearer believe Jesus comes today to save them.
A boy I’ll call Sammy was doing well in school and was on his way to a college scholarship.
Then disaster struck.
His parents announced they were going to get a divorce.
His home turned into a battleground.
He wondered if his parents cared about what they were doing to him and his brother.
He had been an honor student, but now he was angry and started getting into all kinds of trouble.
Summer camp came and he was passed over when the calls were issued on call night.
He was lost and didn’t know it.
I, myself, had many times when I was growing up that I wondered if I was lost.
I went to church every Sunday.
Still, I wondered where God was and who he was.
Did he really care what happens to me? Zacchaeus was another man who was lost and didn’t know it.
Zacchaeus means “innocent”.
However, Zacchaeus was anything but innocent.
He was someone everybody would call “a bad guy”.
He was the head of a gang of sorts.
His gang of tax collectors collected taxes from the Israelites for the hated Romans.
The problem was they didn’t only collect the required taxes; they included a healthy cut for themselves.
Most of the tax collectors were Romans.
However, the Israelites especially hated Zacchaeus because he was an Israelite himself.
He stole money from his neighbors.
Zacchaeus was rich because he was chief tax collector.
He got the biggest cut of all from the other tax collectors that worked for him.
Obviously, he didn’t have many friends.
He kept from feeling lonely by keeping busy.
He had his whole life ahead of him to grow richer and richer.
For Zacchaeus life seemed good.
He was on the road to success.
Still, he was lost.
One day, Zacchaeus heard there was a celebrity in town passing by the street where he was hanging out.
Zacchaeus decided he wanted to see the young rabbi everyone was talking about, Jesus of Nazareth.
So, when a crowd gathered along the street, Zacchaeus went to look.
Nobody liked Zacchaeus, so they crowded him out to the back of crowd.
He couldn’t see a thing because he was so short.
“Let me in, I want to see!” he shouted.
Now, the people in the crowd knew what a crook this little man was, so they just pushed him away.
There was no way they were going to let him see Jesus.
Zacchaeus must have felt as if he didn’t have a friend in the world.
I imagine the only friends Zacchaeus did have were the tax collectors who worked for him, but how could he have even trusted them?
It’s a miserable life when you feel like no one wants to know you.
He had an idea.
He could run a half mile down the road, climb one of the sycamore trees, and see Jesus from the tree.
He didn’t really care to meet Jesus, he was just curious.
He would grab a quick look and get back to work.
He could make more money in the crowd back there.
What Zacchaeus didn’t know was someone was looking for him that day.
That someone was Jesus.
In what ways are we like Zacchaeus?
Most of us are busy in our lives.
We think life seems good most of the time.
We go back and forth to work and school during the week, and, on the weekends, we are busy with hobbies, sports or just hanging out with our friends.
We probably aren’t as bad as Zacchaeus, but then we know we’re no angels either.
Like Zacchaeus, most of us have heard of a guy named Jesus.
We know a little about him, and if he were going through town in a parade, a lot of us would turn out to see if we could get a look at him.
Maybe we would even wave at him as he goes by and he would smile and kind of wave back.
(gesture) Then the parade would be over and we’d get back to our lives.
It is almost like going to see a movie star in a parade.
We wonder if someone important like Jesus would be interested in meeting us.
Even if he were, would we be too embarrassed to meet him?
Besides, things are going well in our lives.
Why would we need to complicate them with someone like Jesus?
We have problems, but we figure we can deal with them without him.
We might not know it yet, but we have wandered off the trail and gotten lost.
However, that doesn’t mean we won’t find out we are lost soon.
Sometime we will all feel a little lost.
Things seem to be going along fine.
Then we hit a snag and don’t know where to go.
Maybe we can’t seem to get along with our friends anymore and find ourselves in quite a few fights.
Maybe we’ve been treating the people we work with unfairly.
Maybe we can’t get along with our parents or brothers and sisters.
We can have all these types of problems because something in life doesn’t feel right.
Like Zacchaeus, we just can’t seem to see through the crowd.
We are lost and we don’t know it.
On the other hand, maybe we do have a problem and don’t know it yet.
We might be experimenting with drinking and drugs.
Maybe we find it’s easier to spend the evening at the office instead of with our families, and the kids are acting out.
Perhaps we are just hanging with the wrong crowd and we’re starting to get in to all kinds of trouble.
We are lost and we don’t know it.
Sometimes we don’t think we’re having any trouble but we instinctively know there is something missing from life.
We try to fill that need by joining the football team, finding a new job, a new girlfriend, maybe a new car or video game.
We fill our lives with new people and new things.
We wonder why /these/ new things don’t work.
We’re lost and we don’t know it.
So what is missing?
How will we ever find our way?
Zacchaeus found out that very day.
By now, Zacchaeus was safely perched in the sycamore tree and Jesus was just starting to walk by.
Then the amazing happened.
Jesus stopped the crowd and they grew hushed.
Would Jesus show them a miracle?
Jesus parted the crowd and walked right over to Zacchaeus’ tree.
I imagine Zacchaeus’ heart must have been pounding and he wanted to run.
What could he do, he was stuck in the tree?
Jesus looked up and smiled at Zacchaeus.
“Zacchaeus!”
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