Morning Prayer: Shannon Cook Choral Amen Hymn of Comfort *Come to Me, O Weary Traveler* Witness of Scripture: Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30 Anthem *Jesus, I Adore Thee* Stephen Caracciolo. FCC Chancel Choir Sermon *Who Knew* David Spain
Recorded on July 9, 2023
Last week, while walking down Main Street in Breckenridge, Colorado, a man suddenly started talking to me in a bit of a loud voice. “Great show, wonderful show” he said as he pointed to the t-shirt I was wearing. The shirt was navy blue with orange lettering that said, “Be a goldfish” around the outline of a goldfish, and including the name Ted Lasso, who is a character on the show by the same name. If you aren’t familiar with the phrase or the show, Lasso is an erstwhile football coach from America hired to coach a soccer team in England, bringing his homespun wisdom and way to the team. The goldfish, taught Lasso, has the shortest memory, so when the players would make a mistake, ‘be a goldfish’ was meant to encourage them not to let their mistake bother them so much that they made another mistake. This stranger on the street was obviously a fan of the show, and we enjoyed a brief discussion about how cleverly written and well-acted it was, concluding our conversation by saying Ted Lasso is a story about redemption, a story about broken people getting well and becoming the best they were created to be. If you know nothing about soccer or the show, at least that theme might sound familiar.
After our brief conversation on the street, I started wondering what the reaction might have been if another t-shirt had been worn, maybe a tan-colored shirt with red lettering that said, “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light,” with an outline of a yoke and the name Jesus Christ under it. A shirt like that might not have generated any comment; or it could have evoked a few confused stares; or someone from a choir who had sung Handel’s Messiah might have responded by saying, “his yoke may be easy and his burden may be light, but that chorus is a real bear to sing!” Ironically the choral observation about the music is not far afield from the gospel observations as told by Matthew.
If we are willing to venture beyond Handel’s Messiah to Matthew’s Messiah, we see an ages long and important question at play—it is the question of Messiah which was not a settled matter then and perhaps remains unsettled now.That is okay, because when it comes to faith, hard questions are far more enlivening than easy answers. Prior to this story in Matthew, some had wondered if John was Messiah—with his camel coat and coarse calling, his odd diet and loud voice imploring people to repent, and for a while many went into the wilderness to listen to him. Even though John never claimed to be Messiah, there were some who became his disciples because John had struck a chord—sometimes we need to lay down some things to get on with life. It wasn’t exactly “be a goldfish,” but it was the opportunity to own up and move on.That was John’s message and people saw its value until he dared criticize Herod, and we all know tyrants won’t accept anything but adoration; and furthermore, will find some way to silence their critics. John is in jail, and now he is wondering if Jesus is Messiah. So, he asks, “Are you the one to come or are we to wait for another?”Jesus responds, “Look at all the good that is happening —people are being cured, getting well, finding new life, the poor are not only getting fed but are realizing they have value.” And then, there is an ominous little foreshadowing as Jesus concludes by saying, “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”
We know the story—incredulous as it sounds—some do take offense at Jesus.All that healing; all that inclusion; all that lowering of some idolized boundaries; all that company Jesus kept with some not too respectable characters; not to mention Jesus and his disciples played a little loose with Sabbath observance, especially when someone was in need. Provocative, powerful teacher who helped people get well, but there was unease about Jesus because he could not be co-opted. As we hear Matthew’s story today, perhaps Jesus is a little bit fed up. We can believe Jesus got frustrated, perhaps broken-hearted at times. Are his words irony, sarcasm, humor in the service of truth? We know Jesus was not being anti-Jewish here as he spoke to this generation. The global rise in anti-Semitism is all the caution we need to be reminded how grievously the gospel has been used in the service of bigotry and hate, and we will not add one more voice of fury. Jesus addressed that generation and addresses this generation (which is to say all kinds of people in all kinds of places) with a hard question—we like hard questions.“John was a tough talking preacher with a strange diet and an odd wardrobe, and you said he has a demon; I came with grace and healing, taught forgiveness and love, reveled in a good banquet with all kinds of people and you say I am a lush. We played happy music and you didn’t dance; we played sad music and you didn’t mourn. What do you people want? What are your expectations of God’s Good News?” Even when irritated, Jesus still asked great questions!
In a Junior High Sunday School Class from 50 years ago, the teacher loved to tell us that “In the beginning God created people in God’s own image and ever since then people have been returning the favor.” It happens with Jesus also, for through the years people have been recreating Jesus in their own image. Perhaps there is no way around that, which is why Jesus’ question is so important.Samuel Wells summarized, “up through the 19th century preachers attempted to lure people to Jesus by claiming he was reasonable…come to Jesus his gospel makes good sense if you think about it in the right way. In the 20th century, preachers jettisoned the idea that Jesus was reasonable in favor of Jesus being useful.” That notion has carried into the 21st century, as Jesus gets taken off the self-help shelf as technique for getting whatever we want to make our life better however we define what better might be. Jesus as ally or talisman is not a recent invention —he has been claimed as advocate for holy war or good business, reducing the person Christ into the adjective Christian used to modify…whatever. We remember that Christian is not an adjective; instead, it is the embodiment of Christ.
This is the focus of the second part of the story Matthew tells—the embodied Messiah.The tone feels different as Jesus moves from critique to invitation. Jesus reminds us that faith is not a technique to get what we want from God or from Christ, but a way in which we are shaped into who God in Christ calls us to be. Jesus says he will tell us that, show us that, embody that and the invitation is for all to learn from him and not just a select few. “Come to me, all who are weary and burdened and rest in me.” Then in an odd and perhaps unexpected turn Jesus says, “I have a yoke for you to take on, to learn, to embody.” A yoke is a harness that holds animals in line to plow a straight furrow, and since Jesus does not literally mean we will be collared by him, what he is saying is that his teachings and his actions will be our guide and our way to plow the fields wherever we might be, teachings that come from someone who is gentle and humble and in whom you can rest, which is to say someone you can trust.
It is not lost on us that if we are to take up something from Jesus, then it most likely means we will need to put down something that might have yoked and stoked us far too long. We can only carry so much, and Jesus has something different for us to carry along.We all carry things from our living, we all feel divided or disintegrated at points along life’s way—so it is to be human. To be sure we each carry burdens to lay down, but if we share a common burden, perhaps we all carry regret in some form. A friend shared this wise observation from Dr. Dan Allender who wrote, “regret returns us to the burned down remains of the past with sorrow that has no end or point…regret will often prompt a replay of all that happened with the illusion that only one small thing needed to happen to have kept the tragedy from occurring…regret makes no attempt to learn from the past, or even to replay it with an eye to understand what processes were involved in order to address those same recurrent issues.” Regret can be needlessly burdensome. Maybe for some the yoke to lay down is a narrowly defined image or parochial understanding of God—that God is for us but not for them. Jonathan Martin says it provocatively when he writes, “The truth is that a faith system that loses touch with God’s heart for ‘all the families of the earth’ and actively stirs people to be over against their neighbors rather than to join the Son of love in sacrifice for them is not a faith that needs to be tweaked but a faith that needs to die.’”(The Road Away from God, p. 87) Exclusivity is a wearisome burden and Jesus invites us to lay that to rest that he might give us something else to carry. Maybe the burden to lay down is the unrelenting images and information that come electronically, messages of inadequacy, insufficiency, imperfection.Our children, our youth, now really all of us are bombarded by images and impressions that simply are not true, and it hurts and it diminishes and it is so easy to access. Lay it down.
Jesus invites us to come to him because he wants us to carry something of himself wherever we happen to be. Jesus lays onto us what he has come to embody for the world—gentleness in the face of vengeance, humility as the counter to selfishness, justice in response to inequity, grace as a way to transform rage, forgiveness to reform error, responsibility that transcends indifference, kindness in the act of critique, mercy as a healing balm to pain, honesty calling out deception, love that never ends.Jesus says come to him because he embodies the way the world has been designed to be and can still be, for Christ’s ways (call them burdens if you like), are the ways that lighten the load and enlighten the world that God still so loves.
I will never understand why the faith tradition in which I grew up prohibited dancing. I know the jokes, but Jesus said a long time ago as a critique, “we played the music for you, and you would not dance.” Today, Matthew’s Messiah story gives us the rhythm, the movement of being in step with Jesus. We don’t really need a shirt to display that when we are walking down Main Street in Breckenridge or even Main Street in Norman. All we need to do is practice it. Huh, who knew? Well, you knew!