Our You Version Plans are based on our weekly lectionary reflections called Word from Below.

As we enter the 21st Sunday after Pentecost, we see in this week’s reading how Jesus affects the life of Zacchaeus, a wealthy tax collector whom the community despises. We also see how this encounter impacts that same community in tangible ways.

In the early days of my faith journey, I heard songs about Zacchaeus and his encounter with Jesus. We sang, “Zacchaeus was a very little man, and a very little man was he; he climbed up into a sycamore tree for the saviour he wanted to see. But when the saviour passed that way, he looked into the tree – and said, ‘Now Zacchaeus, you come down, coz I’m coming to your house for tea.’”

Here we are, once again, in Luke’s gospel, where the writer places those that have little political power or religious clout – social outsiders – at the center of the story. This usually happens to the dismay of those that consider themselves righteous and worthy of being at the center…

I have a dear lifetime friend, gifted and brilliant. The headwinds of life have resulted in her employment being menial at best, and degradingly exploitative at worst. After a stretch of sex work that dangerously devolved into coercion and trafficking, a few of us who loved her hatched a plot. Her escape involved a ransom, so that she would not be hunted and harmed by her employer due to lost income. In the frantic fray of flight, she grabbed for her Bible, which was hidden under her negligee. It’s a small image that will always be with us from that night – an image that inspired the poem below that I wrote for her. From her, and from others, this congenital rule-follower has learned to faithfully transgress…