Like children in the marketplace

Watching for the Morning of July 9, 2017

Year A

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost:
Proper 9 / Lectionary 14

There’s a sweet word coming in the Gospel text for Sunday. Jesus is going to say those familiar and comforting words: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” And God knows, we are weary: Weary of the cacophony in Washington. Weary of the rush of modern life. Weary of the challenges of health. Weary of the press of finances. Weary of the drumbeats of war. Weary of the fear that seems to seep into every corner of our lives.

But before we get to that promise, there is a rebuke: we are like children in the marketplace pouting that we don’t get our way. Maybe Jesus is quoting something like a nursery rhyme. Maybe he is just acknowledging the taunts that get made when people won’t go along with the game. But it is clear Jesus is rebuking those whose excuse for not listening to John the Baptist was that he was too rigorous and demanding. But they won’t listen to Jesus because he isn’t rigorous enough. He laughs. He tells jokes. He teases. He dines with sinners and tax collectors. They mocked John because he lived on locusts and wild honey and Jesus because he didn’t.

Hypocrisy comes pretty naturally to us. Trump makes a career of denying the validity of Obama’s birth certificates and then accuses the media of being “fake news”. McConnell says his highest priority is to deny Obama a second term and then accuses the Democrats of being obstructionists. I tell my children they can only have two cookies but, when they go to bed, I help myself. Jesus did say something about not worrying about the splinter in my neighbor’s eye when I have a log in my own – but we do.

Hypocrisy is pretty natural to us. It allows us to do and say what we want without the work of self-examination or amendment of life. It’s comfortable to make excuses for ourselves but grant no grace to others. So Jesus has blunt words for the self-righteous before offering rest to the weary: If Sodom and Gomorrah had seen what you’ve seen, they would never have been destroyed.

The ‘righteous’ are hard to reach; it is the poor and burdened who can see the joy and freedom of serving Christ.

So Sunday we will hear the prophet Zechariah speak of the coming king who comes humbly on a donkey and sets prisoners free. And we will sing with the psalmist of God’s gracious deeds. And we will struggle to understand the latest section of Paul’s letter to Romans – but resonate to the word of thanks to God for delivering us from the bondages of our human condition. And we will hear Jesus welcome the weary and speak of the yoke of service that is not always simple, but lifts the heart.

The Prayer for July 9, 2017

Gracious God,
in Jesus you invite all people into the path of your teaching and life.
By your Holy Spirit, open our hearts and lives to your message,
that following your Son, we may find true rest for our souls;
through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

The Texts for July 9, 2017

First Reading: Zechariah 9:9-12
“Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” – In the weary years after Babylon has fallen but Judah is a poor backwater of the Persian empire, comes a prophetic message from the book of Zechariah promising a king who shall arrive like the kings of old and “command peace to the nations” and reign “from sea to sea.”

Psalmody: Psalm 145:8-14
“Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and your dominion endures throughout all generations.” – A hymn of praise to God who reigns as earth’s just and faithful king.

Second Reading: Romans 7:14-25
“Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” – Paul uses the image of possession (compelled to act against our own will) to expound his notion that the death of Christ has freed us from our bond-service to sin and made us servants of God.

Gospel: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” – Jesus rebukes the fickle crowd (who criticized John for his asceticism and Jesus for being a libertine) and praises God for opening the eyes of the poor and marginalized to see and take up the yoke of God’s reign of grace and life.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMayan_girls_playing_sack_race_on_the_market_of_Quetzaltenango%2C_Guatemala.JPGright By Erik Albers (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

Keep on

Thursday

Philippians 4:8-9

Rembrandt, Self-portrait as the apostle Paul

⁹Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.

I am fine with this verse until you get to the words “in me”. I want to urge all my folks to keep on doing the things they have “learned and received and heard and seen” – the things they have learned about Christ Jesus, the things they have received from the Holy Spirit, the message of grace and life they have heard, the examples of God’s love and mercy they have seen in others and in their own lives. I want all the people of my parish to keep on doing these things.

It’s the phrase “in me” that gets me.

I don’t want to be an example. I am too aware of my frailties and failings. Too often, those who have put themselves forward as examples have turned out to be hypocrites. Hypocrisy is a charge that sticks easily to the church. I don’t want to go with Paul, here. I want to go with John the Baptist who points to Jesus and says, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” Or maybe the words of Paul when he writes that he is a world class sinner and unfit to be an apostle.

No, I don’t want to point anyone to myself. I want to point them to Christ. And to saints I have known whose lives were worth emulating: the people I discovered in a neighboring church kitchen turning a dozen loaves of bread into sandwiches to take down to the Cass Corridor – that section in downtown Detroit where everyone warns others not to go. Turns out, they did this every week. They took Jesus at his word when he spoke about feeding the hungry and acts of mercy and kindness. Let me point to them, not to myself.

Or to Jim who would drop anything to go to someone’s aid. He offered to drive me from Detroit to Springfield Illinois when he heard that my daughter had been killed there. Or to Gubby who could always be found washing dishes behind the scenes. Or to the elderly woman I found washing the kitchen floor of one of the most selfish and disagreeable people I have ever me. I learned she brought groceries each week and cleaned M’s kitchen because her husband had been a friend of M’s husband.

These are saints. These are holy men and women. These are living examples of God’s love. But me…I am just a sinner trying to live by grace, trying to stay rooted in God’s love and mercy.

And maybe that’s what Paul means when he says, “Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me.” I hope so. For I do know that it is there, when we inhabit the realm of grace, when we live in the light of God’s measureless kindness, that the rest of that sentence makes sense – for there the God of peace is with us.

 

Image: Rembrandt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons