When I was 17 years old I spent a great deal of time in a local music store trying out guitars that I knew I could never afford. This store even had a sound booth with a variety of amplifiers inside where I could, on a slow day when the sales staff didn’t mind too much, sit and play as long as I wanted. Well, as it turns out, one day I strolled into the store and there hanging up for the first time was the guitar of my dreams!

 

It was a solid-body electric with a hard-rock maple core overlaid with Canadian ash and finished in mahogany! The neck was glued to the body so the action was great across the entire fret-board. It had a brass nut at the head-stock and a brass bridge for a very bright tone with dual hum-bucking pickups with a splitter switch so I could play in single or double coil mode! Those of you who know guitars will know what I’m talking about and for the rest.. well, trust me, this guitar was way cool!

 

But the coolest part was that it had on-board effects in the form of little modules that could be inserted into a little door on the back of the guitar! I really wanted that guitar! I had to have it! I even greatly desired it! So, I asked the sales clerk to set it aside for me using the trade value of the guitar I already owned as a down payment. I then raided my savings account and even bummed some money from my best friend – a fellow guitarist – and I took that beautiful instrument home confident that it would be my ticket to super stardom as a rock musician!

 

Well, it didn’t turn out that way. I actually went on to play bass guitar mostly in the bands I later joined while this guitar of my dreams sat unused in my closet. But this experience did teach me something very important about the nature of desire.

 

Desire! The very word itself has a kind of magnetic attraction as it conjures up a blur of emotion and recent news reports! We might say that we’d like a hamburger for lunch today, that we really like the new Corvette, or that we’re great fans of the Broncos or Nuggets. But when we use the word desire we’re in a completely new realm.

 

For the sake of unrestrained desire we have seen governors and golfers, preachers and pundits, bishops and bankers, teachers and starlets throw everything for which they worked so hard all of their lives all for a moment (or in the case of the golfer) several moments of hot burning desire! That this is the case should surprise no one since Solomon wrote long ago; Proverbs 18:1 He who willfully separates and estranges himself [from God and man] seeks his own desire and a pretext to break out against all wise and sound judgment.

 

We live in a land of desire where multi-trillion dollar industries craft ad campaigns and messages designed to inflame our desires for a particular product or brand and we, lemming-like, run headlong off the cliff they’ve led us to into a chasm of dashed expectations and smoking heap of consumer debt.

 

But we’ve also seen what desire can bring about if properly focused not on base, sexual escapades but on loftier goals and lifelong ambitions. The winter Olympics next month will showcase the athletic skills of those whose desire and drive for excellence has led them to the very pinnacle of performance in their given events. And how many of us sitting here this morning can look back over our lives at challenges met and conquered because we wanted it - whatever it was - badly enough to push past the barriers in our way to victory?

 

Desire has been part of the human experience from the very beginning, all the way back to Eden! It was because of desire that Eve fell into the trap laid for her by the serpent in the garden who inflamed her desires for the forbidden fruit; Genesis 3:6And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

And as Adam and Eve were being excused from the garden, having rendered themselves unfit to live there any longer, God, in order to constrain the desires that led to this shameful fall said to Eve; Genesis 3:16 To the woman He said, I will greatly multiply your grief and your suffering in pregnancy and the pangs of childbearing; with spasms of distress you will bring forth children. Yet your desire and craving will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.

 

And a further warning is given to Cain, one of the sons of Adam and Eve who would slay his brother Abel in a fit of jealousy. For when Cain was angry that the Lord accepted his brother’s offering to God but not his own, the Lord warned him; Genesis 4:6-7 And the Lord said to Cain, Why are you angry? And why do you look sad and depressed and dejected? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin crouches at your door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.

 

And so mankind’s long struggle with sin and desire continued right down to our day! But this morning’s Gospel reading teaches us that desire can be harnessed and set to better and more productive uses if we are wise! Zacchaeus was a tax collector living side-by-side with the oppressed people he defrauded of their hard-won wages! Life in 1st century Palestine was hard enough under the boot of the Roman oppressors but the tax collectors made it worse and that for profit! The authorities looked the other way of the citizens were overcharged so long as they got their cut!

 

And on top of that Zacchaeus was short! So here is this short little thief of a tax collector defrauding his neighbors for personal gain among an oppressed people in an occupied land. And along comes this Jesus of Nazareth through Jericho one day and all the town-folk begin to line the streets to get a glimpse of this prophet, this messiah, this miracle-worker! Good for them but bad for Zacchaeus whose short stature (and my 6’8” dad and 6’4” brother and I used to tell short jokes all the time!) kept him from getting a glimpse unless he resorted to drastic measures!

 

And the rest you know, or at least you would know if you sang the same little tune I grew up singing in Sunday School; “Zacchaeus was a wee little man and a wee little man was he; he climbed up in a sycamore tree for the Lord he wanted to see; and as the Savior passed that way he looked up in the tree; (and this was the fun part where we boys got the chance to yell in Sunday School and not get punished for it! And He said; ‘Zacchaeus, you come down!’ for I’m going to your house today!”

 

Why does this 15th Sunday of St. Luke’s Gospel always occur this time of year? Because, ready or not, we are being prepared for Great Lent which is now just a month away! And our mother the Church understands that our desire for the rigor ahead will need to be kindled as we are to complete the course of the fast as we should! Zachaeus would have been considered the one least likely to receive an invitation from Jesus for dinner but his desire to see the Lord put him literally and figuratively above the crowd!

 

How much do we desire salvation? When we speak about the love of God for us, His sacrificial offering of His life on the cross, of His harrowing of Hades and his triumph over death and the grave how moved are we to holy desire to press forward along the path of salvation? Do we consider the life that awaits us and the beauty of the heavenly kingdom prepared for us with holy longing and with a deep unquenchable desire to one day cross over the Jordan to be with our Lord or do we instead respond with only a casual and dismissive interest?

 

It doesn’t take a genius to look around today and answer this question! Holy desire for God, for the things of God, to stand in His presence, and to separate ourselves from all that might come between us and the object of our holy desire (which we refer to as zeal) seems to be at an all-time low! Desire in its basest manifestations we know very well but the notion of marshalling the creative energy of it and directing it toward the things of God never seems to cross the mind of modern man.

 

So, estranged as we are from paradise, we direct our unbridled desires toward those things that St. Paul referred to as the “beggarly elements” of the world; sex, food, money, power, drugs, entertainments, cars, houses, clothes.. you name it! And St. Paul describes this corrupt and debased state of being to the Ephesians which in the Amplified Bible reads as follows; Ephesians 2:2-3 In which at one time you walked [habitually]. You were following the course and fashion of this world [were under the sway of the tendency of this present age], following the prince of the power of the air. [You were obedient to and under the control of] the [demon] spirit that still constantly works in the sons of disobedience [the careless, the rebellious, and the unbelieving, who go against the purposes of God]. Among these we as well as you once lived and conducted ourselves in the passions of our flesh [our behavior governed by our corrupt and sensual nature], obeying the impulses of the flesh and the thoughts of the mind [our cravings dictated by our senses and our dark imaginings]. We were then by nature children of [God's] wrath and heirs of [His] indignation, like the rest of mankind.

 

The question then becomes for us; how can we rehabilitate our craven and sinful desires into a holy zeal for the Kingdom of God and His righteousness? How can we redirect our desires away from the cheap and tawdry trappings of sin toward the eternal life offered to us in Jesus Christ?

There is a song we used to sing when I was growing up; Turn your eyes upon Jesus look full in His marvelous face and the things of this earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace. We need to redirect our gaze and that means first turning our back on the world.

 

Have you ever had a conversation with someone, perhaps at a party, who kept looking over your shoulder at someone behind you with whom they pretty obviously would rather be speaking? This is what we do with Jesus most of the time! While we have God’s undivided attention all the time he seldom has ours and that’s the first thing that must change if holy desire is to be sparked within us.

 

How badly do we want salvation? Do we really want it more than we want other things? If not, we are still very far from the kingdom of God. But if so, it is time to begin overcoming the obstacles in our way like Zacchaeus did when he climbed the sycamore tree to get a glimpse of Jesus above the crowds. And like him, we too must get above the noisy crowds of the merely curious onlookers.

 

Do we want salvation badly enough to make it to divine services regularly and on time? Do we desire union with Christ enough to support the ministries of the Church and the needs of the poor with our tithes and offerings? Do we yearn for our heavenly home deeply enough to see through the transient nature of this world to catch a glimpse of the next?

 

The Psalmist writes; Psalm 37:4 Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. As we begin to prepare ourselves for the Great Fast which comes a bit early this year I pray that our delight will be in the Lord and that our desires, the deepest yearning within us, that unquenchable and aching longing, will be to see Jesus!

In Christ,