Sermon, July 6, 2008 -- Matthew 11:16-30

“Light Yokes” (Matthew 11:16-30)
Rick Olson, July 6, 2008

Have you ever met somebody who just wasn’t happy, no matter what you did, no matter how you tried to please him? I know I have, and I suspect you have too . . . business-people see them all the time . . . they’re called “customers” . . . and I know, not all customers are like that, but if you spend any time at all talking to businessmen and women – especially folks in the customer service end of things – you’ll realize that they’re distressingly common. The sitcom “Frasier” took dead aim at people like this in its mythical – but aptly named – coffee-house, Café Nervosa. Radio Psychologist Frasier Crane is one of the fussiest characters ever written for TV, and in one episode he sends his coffee back three times. The first time it’s “Oh, excuse me, did I say decaf?” and when she says no, he makes her take it back anyway . . . when she brings the decaf, he says: “Is that non-fat milk?,” and when she says no it’s “I hate to be a bother, it's just that I'm watching my fat intake.” and when she brings that he says “Oh dear, is that cinnamon on that foam?” Finally, she brings his brother Nile’s second order, but not his, and when he asks about it, she says “We’ve got a team of specialists working on it . . .”

That’s kind of how the religious authorities strike me in our passage . . . “John came neither eating nor drinking,” Jesus says “and they say, 'He has a demon';” On the other hand, “the Son of Man” – that’s Jesus himself – “came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!'” It’s as if they are never happy . . . John doesn’t eat, and they accuse him of being demon-possessed . . . Jesus eats and drinks, and they say he’s a drunkard and friend of tax collectors and sinners . . . and we mustn’t underestimate the severity of the accusation . . . these aren’t fussy Seattle shrinks Jesus is dealing with here, they’re powerful figures, and what they charge him with puts him squarely on the outside, squarely on the side of the outcasts and scum of the earth – tax-collectors and sinners – those who are unclean, anathema, and might even face death . . .

They’re like children, sitting in the marketplace, calling back and forth to one another, throwing accusations back and forth . . . we played the flute, and you didn’t dance, we wailed and you did not mourn . . . these law-bound religious authorities, these children, whine when they don’t get their way, when their rules aren’t followed, when they play the flute and Jesus did not dance to their tune . . . Their accusations embody the different characters – and different functions – of John the Baptist and Jesus . . . John is an ascetic, he lives a rigid, controlled, sparse life, waiting for the Messiah’s coming . . . by contrast, Jesus – who is that promised one – leads a joyous, delight-filled existence, marked by hospitality and table-fellowship with his disciples and those very outcasts the authorities ignore. John lives a life dedicated to the observance of the Torah, the Jewish law, and you’d think he’d be well-regarded by the authorities, but he isn’t . . . Jesus flouts the law, eating and consorting with the unclean, and he’s marked, eventually for death.

It’s no accident that Matthew follows this story up with the one about keeping the Sabbath . . . Jesus and his disciples are trucking through a corn field on the Sabbath, and the authorities – who conveniently seem to be following Jesus around – accuse them of working, and Jesus replies by saying that the Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath . . . and that’s kind of what the accusers of John and Jesus are doing in our story . . . they’re insisting on a narrow, strict interpretation of the rules and regulations, and moreover, it’s undoubtedly their interpretation . . . We played the flute, and you did not dance . . . we wailed and you did not mourn . . . we wanted a decaf Zimbabwe latte, and you brought us one that was caffeinated.

Wisdom, Jesus says, is vindicated by her deeds . . . wisdom – the feminine Sofia, in Greek – is often personified as a woman in Scripture, and here Jesus says that she’s shown to be righteous by her deeds . . . and Jesus’ wisdom – expressed by hanging out with tax-collectors and sinners, by picking corn on the Sabbath, by eating and drinking any old time he wanted – Jesus’ wisdom is justified by its deeds, its fruit . . . and what is the fruit? Deeds of compassion, of healing, of feeding thousands with only five loaves of bread. And in the cities, where Jesus had done most of these deeds, they did not repent, they did not believe, they only whined about his loose living and association with riff-raff. And so Jesus, like his predecessor prophets of the Old Testament, pronounces God’s judgement on these places . . . “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! . . . on the day of judgement, it will be better for Tyre and Sidon than for you.” The cities, where the authorities complain about Jesus not being pious enough, are under the judgement of God.

Frasier Crane and his brother Niles orbit around each other like little, self-absorbed planets . . . and much of the humor derives from making fun of that self-important shallowness. But the genius of the show lies in the fact that they know they’re like that, or at least Frasier does . . . but here we’re given no indication that there is any self-enlightened awareness on the part of the accusers of Jesus and John. They have seen the miracles of Jesus, his deeds of power and healing and compassion, and remained unmoved.

The summer before I came here, the summer of Katrina, I went down to Mexico to help mind a group of a hundred kids – including my son Mike – as they built houses for extremely poor Mexican families . . . the week after that, I was at a preaching conference at Princeton Theological Seminary, ground zero for uppity Presbyterians . . . and the contrast between the two couldn’t have been more profound. The area where we were building houses was about an hour South of the border . . . just outside of Tijuana, and the difference between the way they live and the way we live is huge. Mike and I were working for a family of four who lived in a house that was about the size of this chancel area here. They were fortunate in that they didn’t have to carry water – they had water to the house, from a line shared by all the families on their hillside – but it wasn’t potable water, that is, they couldn’t drink it. And the house we built for them – by our standards, no more than a shack – the house we built for them close to doubled their living space.

Princeton, New Jersey, on the other hand, is Chorazin, it’s Capernaum, teeming with power and wealth. Houses start at half a million dollars, and the only way the pastor of Nassau Presbyterian church – membership fifteen hundred – can afford to have a house is if the church owns 40 percent of it. One Friday night I cut across the Princeton University Campus, past the location where A Beautiful Mind was shot, past that Nassau church, and into the trendy shopping district, where it’s difficult to find a good meal for under thirty dollars and the streets are lined in discreetly leafy elegance . . . and as I looked for a restaurant that wouldn’t break the bank, the casually-chic, overwhelmingly white denizens of Princeton were out in full force . . . Jags and Porsches gliding silently past shops with names like Benetton and Chanel and Louis Vuiton. It’s difficult to imagine, looking at that tanned, toned, buffed-up crowd, that there are any outsiders, any tax-collectors or sinners around at all.

And yet . . . if you know where to look, if you have eyes to see and ears to hear, as somebody once said, you can begin to see the them . . . they surely don’t live in Princeton, but they serve the people who do . . . they’re the Chicano cleaning ladies in the dorms, the weary-footed waitresses in the tony restaurants, and the minority serving staff at Princeton Theological Seminary They’re the almost – but not quite – hidden, minimum-wage underbelly of Princeton, and I wonder what would happen if deeds of power began to be worked among them? What would happen if a woman who hangs out with the Latino janitors, hob-nobs with the sky-caps at Newark Airport, lives in a back alley or a door-way in the Princeton boutique district began healing folks? What would happen if miraculous healings, over-abundant feedings, and plain old grace-flowing-over broke out among the outcasts of Princeton, New Jersey . . . or Seattle, Washington . . . or for that matter, Tuscaloosa, Alabama? Let’s bring it home: what would happen if some highway vagabond camping down by the Black Warrior, regularly harassed for the amusement of the Tuscaloosa police, what would happen if she began healing broken bones, curing inoperable tumors, or conjuring up five-course meals out of beach-grass and fire ants? Would the people of Tuscaloosa – or Princeton or Seattle – welcome such a person? Would they praise God for her? Would they believe her deeds of power? Or would she be nabbed for practicing medicine without a license? Would the health department or the business-licensing board shut her down . . . Would she be locked up as a menace, maybe thrown into some dark asylum to rot away and never get out, a living sacrifice to our need for control?

Just because we’re not in a big city doesn’t mean we can get all smug about these things, to get all self-righteous and say "Right on, Jesus, preach it, brother! Those cities are a mess . . . thank God we don’t live there . . ." Jesus is railing against them because of their legalism, because of the laws that exist to prop up the status quo, to keep the elite at a safe remove from the riff raff, to keep the cast outs, if you will, cast out. And every community has them, every community has children that call to each other . . . we played the flute, but you didn’t dance to our tune . . . we created a bureaucracy, but you didn’t follow the rules. And you know you can’t keep ‘em happy . . . John didn’t eat or drink and they told him he was crazy, Jesus ate and drank, and look what happened to him.

But there is grace in this passage, there is good news . . . because no matter how it looks, the ultimate victory is Christ’s. All things have been handed over to him by God the Father, Jesus tells us, it’s not all up to you and me, either in Princeton or here in Tuscaloosa . . . it’s not all in our hands . . . Christ is in charge, and no one else . . . and get this: No one knows God except the Son . . . and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal God. And the Good News here, the truly amazing grace of it all is that that’s us! That’s us Christians! We have been chosen, even though we are scared, even though we don’t always see Christ among the tax-collectors and the sinners, even though we sometimes hide behind all our privilege and rules. Jesus say, come to me all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, all you who feel the crushing need to circle the wagons, to ratchet up the rules and laws so the terrorists won’t get you, come to me, follow me, Jesus says, and I will give you rest.

And following Jesus, taking up his yoke, learning from Jesus – who is, in contrast to those religious authorities, gentle and humble in heart – because following Jesus, taking up his yoke means this: that we give up our fears and worries and need to control everything around us. And in doing this, we will quite simply find rest for our souls. Amen.