Imagining the Kingdom: Sermon for Proper 12A

Today, I thought it might be fun to start with a little bit of show and tell. In your pews, you will find copies of an illustration on a single sheet of paper. Take a few moments and look at it.

What did you see when you FIRST looked at it? What did you immediately recognize it as?

How many people here saw a duck? How many saw a rabbit?

Who here saw something completely else, like a rock formation or alien spaceship?

Now that I have tipped you off, can you SEE a duck in the picture? Can you SEE a rabbit if you change the focus of your line of sight within the image?

So here’s a mind-blowing question: which is it? Is it a duck, or a rabbit? Or is it both at the same time?

This illustration was used by the early 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who himself borrowed it from the field of psychology. He was trying to demonstrate a fundamental issue about the mind and observation—how two people can objectively view the same thing, but come to wildly different conclusions about what that thing is. It has to do with the way we look at things—that we actually first jump to a recognition of the whole of something before we can see its constitutive parts.

Because here’s another fact: we often only see what we are looking for—we have talked about that previously in sermons this year. Jesus knows this. The world wants us to only see scarcity, and division, and soul-crushing competition to the death. It seeks to keep us anxious, empty, feeling unfulfilled and separated from those around us. If that’s all we look for—and we are programmed to see that way—that is all we will see. Unless--- unless we look for the signs that there is something else out there. Unless we use our imaginations, unless we “open the eyes of our hearts” to see the imprint of God all around us, in each other, in images, in nature, in stories or art or poetry. Or through parables.

That’s an important insight to bring to our life of faith. Unless we know what the point of a Christian life is, and can explain that purpose to others, people will have no idea what we are talking about—they won’t recognize the parts of the Christian life unless they can see the whole.

I walk you through this little experiment today because I want you to understand WHY Jesus is telling us all these parables. He is telling us what the kingdom of heaven is LIKE so that we can learn to look for the parts so that we can see the whole revealed right in front of us. He is telling us what the kingdom of heaven is LIKE because it is too big to just recognize all at once, and it is also too small to recognize all at once.

Our gospel reading hits us with six quick parables in rapid succession, all beginning with the words, “The kingdom of heaven is like…” And all of them are meant to explain what the kingdom of heaven, or life under God’s values, would be like.

To be clear, the kingdom of heaven is NOT about what happens when we die. The kingdom of heaven is about what God’s hopes are for how we live our lives. The kingdom of heaven is made up of faithful people who live by-- and love others and all creation by—God’s values. God’s values, as we are reminded by our reading from 1 Kings and our section of Psalm 119, are guided by the wisdom embedded in God’s commandments to us. And in Christianity, we have a model for how to live out those commandments in Jesus. We are called not just to believe in him, but to follow him and act like him—caring for others, seeking to heal and reconcile wherever we go, being lights of love and hope against the darkness of despair. That’s the kingdom of heaven, right here, right now.

Jesus explains to us what the kingdom of heaven is LIKE—back in your days of studying English, you might remember that such comparisons are known as similes. We use this kind of figurative, imaginative language because God is more than whatever our words can say. God is mystery—but mystery that is all around us; mystery that constantly reached out to us in love, seeking our flourishing by living lives of abundance—especially abundant grace, abundant mercy, abundant hope, abundant love.

And here’s the special feature holding all of today’s parables together: Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven starts with small things. Tiny things. Mustard seeds, yeast, and pearls. And those three things, in particular, start with something that is not valued at all. Mustard was a weed. Yeast is considered necessary, but unclean, which is why Jewish households got rid of the leavened bread during Passover. 

And pearls? You may think of them as luminescent and expensive. But do you know how pearls actually start out? They start by being a grain of sand that gets into an oyster and irritates it. The oyster can’t expel the sand, so it begins to coat it with its saliva, which eventually hardens, layer after layer, day after day, until suddenly it’s a pearl. Yep. A pearl is basically an irritating piece of dirt covered by fossilized oyster spit. Seems like an odd thing to value and wear as jewelry—but then again, some of us also like silk, and that starts out coming from a worm’s butt.

You might be laughing, because my illustrations are outrageous—but memorable. I mean, you may never look at a pearl or a duck, or a rabbit, the same way again. Jesus was doing exactly the same thing. His listeners laughed at the idea of a mustard plant turning into a tree, or a woman knead what is the equivalent of 60 pounds of flour and turning it into bread, or a person selling everything he owned for a single pearl.

Jesus’s hearers would probably wonder why any sane person would deliberately sow a weed in his field—it will take the place of valuable crops. Yet here this weed is commended for providing a home to all kinds of birds. In the Bible, trees are often the symbol of how God provides shelter, protection, and nourishment to us. But it goes deeper in our stories today-- what one person considers useless, God considers valuable. Thus, the kingdom of heaven turns earthly calculations of value and worth on their heads. Just as in the Parable of the Sower, something small (it took over 700 seeds to weigh a gram) produces something substantial.

And here’s something we may not know: mustard was considered to be a curative in the ancient world. It was thought to aid digestion and fight the common cold. In our brief parable, mustard growing into such a large bush means that there was far more of it than one person could use, because just like every good thing, too much of a good thing is toxic. Instead, this medicine is meant to be shared.

Take a step back from all these scattered parables to see the whole. Jesus was illustrating this truth: from the smallest things, once we recognize them, we can see hints and flashes of something valuable beyond price: the kingdom of heaven. The Way of Love for us to live and truly flourish and have full and abundant life, right now, even among the weeds.

Listen to that foundational principle again: God seeks our flourishing by calling us to live lives of abundance—especially abundant grace, abundant mercy, abundant hope, abundant love. Is that the message of how the world tells us to live? NO. The world always tells us there is never enough and that the only way to win is by attempting to crush each other and only think of ourselves. That’s why, even though the kingdom of heaven is right now, it is also incumbent upon us to work toward it, to contribute to sharing this good news of God’s love for us.

To have faith, friends, is to imagine what can be. To be faithful people calls us to open our imaginations—our hearts and our minds—to the presence of God in a world that denies God. It’s a world after all, that tells you that a duck is a rabbit—and a Japanese horror-movie rabbit, at that.

Our parables today remind us that even a little is enough. In the Kingdom of Heaven a tiny bit of faith is enough. A tiny bit of understanding is enough. As we look at church attendance decreasing in the West, we are also assured that the Church started small, like a mustard seed, and yet eventually became big enough to even grant non-Jews a place to live, which is one interpretation for the “birds of the air.”

The birds find their refuge in the branches of this new tree, sprung up through God’s goodness, just as we find our refuge within the kingdom of heaven ourselves (Levine, 166). We do nothing to earn this—God’s love and care is there for us through no merit of our own, but simply as a result of God’s abundant grace and mercy. From an ecological standpoint, we could also say that we find our home in this beautiful world that, of all the planets and stars in the universe, is uniquely suited to support our life.

Close your eyes for a moment: what does the kingdom of heaven look like for you? Is there an image, or a sense, or a feeling that hints at God’s loving presence in your life? Now open your eyes. How can you share that image in the world? Because that’s how the kingdom of heaven grows.

One thing is sure. The kingdom of heaven doesn’t just fit one description, simile, or definition.

Poet Denise Levertov, who converted to Roman Catholicism late in life, wrote this poem that is called to mind with our gospel. You can find it in the back of your bulletins. It’s called “On the Parables of the Mustard Seed:”

Who ever saw the mustard-plant,
wayside weed or tended crop,
grow tall as a shrub, let alone a tree, a treeful
of shade and nests and songs?
Acres of yellow,
not a bird of the air in sight.

No. He who knew
the west wind brings
the rain, the south wind
thunder, who walked the field-paths
running His hand along wheatstems to glean
those intimate milky kernels, good
to break on the tongue,

was talking of miracle, the seed
within us, so small
we take it for worthless, a mustard-seed, dust,
nothing.
               Glib generations mistake
the metaphor, not looking at fields and trees,
not noticing paradox. Mountains
remain unmoved.

Faith is rare, He must have been saying,
prodigious, unique –
one infinitesimal grain divided
like loaves and fishes,

as if from a mustard-seed
a great shade-tree grew. That rare,
that strange: the kingdom

                                            a tree. The soul
a bird. A great concourse of birds
at home there, wings among yellow flowers.

The waiting
kingdom of faith, the seed
waiting to be sown.

The kingdom of heaven is found in the simplest, most commonplace of things: seeds and trees and homebaked bread, in the joy of discovering something you’ve never expected to find. In looking for the good, and the beauty, and the meaning rather than trying to beat down everyone around us.

So what is the kingdom heaven like to you?

Imagine it. Love it. And then tend to that vision to bring it into being, to provide a home for all.

Amen.

--Preached at the 505 on July 29 and at the 10:30 Eucharist on July 30, 2023 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church.

Readings:

1 Kings 3:5-12
Psalm 119:129-136
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33,44-52

Worthy Weeds: Speaking to the Soul, July 20, 2023

Sometimes, the worthiness of a weed is in the eye of the beholder. In the lat few years, some farmers, alive to the extreme stress that many pollinating creatures are under, have begun planting the margins of their fields with clover, ox-eye daisies, sorrel—even vetch on the verge! Queen Anne’s lace, which sounds fancy but is actually wild carrot. Taking up valuable farmland! Sixty years ago, this would have been akin to heresy of the hippy-dippiest sort.

But these “weeds” attract pollinators—which in turn, helps the crop to grow, not just in one particular field, but all around. Maybe this is a modern admonition to do as Jesus advises us, to let the weeds grow up among the wheat in Matthew 13:24-30,36-43.

As conditions in our environment get more and more extreme climatologically, weeds are experiencing a rehabilitation of sorts, which makes the parable of the wheat and the weeds in Matthew’s gospel shine with new possibility. What if this isn’t a story about judgment and flames, but a story of redemption, of allowing time and grace to sort things out where we rush in to condemn?

I remember I was sitting in my car one morning, about ten years ago, reading. In between pages I would watch my daughter's field hockey practice. They played in a desiccated brown field full of crispy grass and weeds—even though every boys’ team was gallivanting on crisply tended fields, the girls were shunted a half mile away, not even on school property, and yet the school claimed equivalency under Title IX. Every time I sat near this field watching these girls practice, I felt a sprout of annoyance break through the drought-fired clay of my heart.

The day before, a man half-heartedly, like a somnambulist, mowed this alleged field, even though the grass had remained in a state of stasis due to the extremely dry conditions of that summer. This field seemed to be in suspended animation, but instead of Sleeping Beauty, it was Sleeping Ugly.

There were tiny oases of green visible here and there across the burnt-ochre and sienna expanse, but those were weeds. It's always that way. When the *stuff* goes down, it's the weeds that thrive. It often seems like that with people, too. I don't know about you, but sometimes that just drives me crazy, especially if I have forgotten the weediness of my own natur, and put on airs that I might be more of a hothouse flower.

As I mused, desultorily, my eyes scanned the thatch patches that prickled, sea-urchin-like, over the ground-- and saw one small, shocking flash of color jump out from the landscape. There was a tiny yelp of purple hanging low among the clumps of fescue and thatch. A fluted flower-- belonging, yes, to some weed.

What could be more unlikely than beauty in such sere surroundings? What could be more stubborn than this small flower determined to bloom just here regardless of its improbability? What else could remind me that even in the most drab and dingy places there is grace and beauty if only we open our eyes?

And suddenly the weed was transformed into a bit of grace, a call for second chances.

In other words, a miracle.

This was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul for July 20, 2023.

Soil, Seeds, and Stories: Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 11A)

Words are powerful things. They get inside us and change us. They combine together and create ideas, and those ideas can inspire us to great things, or to terrible things. Words sprout in our hearts and minds like seeds.

Words can also be used to tell stories, and who doesn’t love a good story? BUT—and there is always a but—sometimes people use words in strange and mysterious ways.

So I’m thinking about starting a new self-help group, and I was wondering if any of you all would like to join. Hello, my name is Leslie, and I live with a Dad-jokester. I live with a punning, groan-inducing person whose gift for banter and word-play when we were dating took a dark turn once we had little children, and who has no shame about using his dark gift. And it’s contagious—you live around a Dad Joker long enough, you start collecting Dad Jokes simply as a matter of self-defense, a kind of humor-based version of building up a nuclear arsenal: you never want to use it, but if you don’t have some on hand as a deterrent, you could be attacked at any time.

Anyone else had this experience? Is there anyone out there who can commiserate, and wants to join me in my new club?

The thing I have learned from living with this kind of a jokester is that there is NO topic about which a Dad Joke cannot be told. For instance:

A dad and his kids were walking through the woods, and the littlest kid picked up an acorn.
“Dad! What’s this?” the kid asked.
“A tree.” The Dad answered.
“Really?” the kid asked. And the Dad answered,
“In a nutshell, yes.”

A friend of mine has chickens, and suddenly they weren’t eating the fancy Purina Chicken Chow they had bought. It’s really weird, because I looked at the seed, and it looked flawless. It was, in fact, impeccable.

Last week, I had to drive to Nashville and back in one day because my car had trouble and had to be repaired over several days, and it was finished. On my way back, I was stuck in construction traffic in the middle of a bunch of newly plowed fields, and a plane came in flying low over a field and turned around and flew back overhead. At first I assumed it was dusting crops, but then it looked like the fields were barren, as the plane dropped the stuff it was carrying onto the field next to me, some of it blew back—and it was seed. Aha! I realized I was looking at a reseeding airline.

As we begin chapter 13 of Matthew’s gospel, let us all be grateful that Jesus’s stories were parables instead of puns. No. really. Let us bow our heads. (Mutters) Amen.

Now then let us think about how important stories are. Matthew’s gospel has five main blocks, called discourses. And all these discourses are meant to help Jesus’s listeners understand the point of Jesus’s life on Earth, which is nothing less than helping us find and grow a new community here on earth that lives according to the values of what Matthew calls “the Kingdom of Heaven.” So what is the kingdom of heaven, a phrase used particularly by the author of Matthew? The kingdom of heaven has to do with the reign of God, and in particular, with the transformation that we set out to work toward when we declare ourselves as members of what Presiding Bishop Michael Curry calls “the Jesus Movement.”

The kingdom of heaven grows when the Word of God is welcomed, received, nurtured in the hearts of people just like you and me who do the incredible thing of committing to make way for God to rule our lives. Talk about counter-cultural, especially in this day and age of self-help, even sometimes self-worship. At Chapter 13 of Matthew’s gospel, we are entering a new discourse, known as the Parabolic Discourse. In this third of five teaching blocks in the gospel, this chapter stands at the heart of Matthew’s message—and the chapter is filled with 7 parables of the kingdom.

It's funny—there’s one feature parables and puns share. Parables arrest the attention of their hearers due to their twists, their strangeness, their often-enigmatic quality, and sometimes their humor. Parables are stories that use symbols and images to make a point. So the character and the setting are often symbols. 

The first parable in this discourse is this one- the Parable of the Sower. There’s even a pun embedded in the title. The definition of a parable is a comparison or extended metaphor, of course. BUT the etymology of the word “parable” comes from the Greek prefix “para”, which means alongside, and the Greek word root “bole” which means to throw or cast. So the first of the stories in the Parabolic Discourse is a “throwing alongside” of a story of someone throwing seed on all sides. I think that’s awesome, even as it might tread dangerously close to an especially nerdy form of Dad Joke-ism.

So let’s look at this parable: Who is the person sowing or scattering the seeds?
What does the seed stand for?
And there’s different kinds of soil, right?

Specifically, Jesus is talking about the response of the world to his teachings in these parables. Jesus is the original Sower in our first pass through this parable. The different soil stands for the different ways people respond to the teachings of Jesus, especially in Jesus’s lifetime, and in the time just after, in which Matthew’s community is living. And from this parable, we learn that being able to see the truth of a story depends on your setting, but it also depends upon your point-of-view.

Some people have hard hearts, like the dirt on a path packed down by trampling feet—maybe they’re angry or afraid of being disappointed. Maybe they’ve been hurt. They can’t hear the story until they let go of their fear or anger.

Some people get really enthusiastic for a new way of life at first, but when they realize how much work it is, or that some people will dislike them for their new beliefs, they give up and go back to their old story.

Some people like what they hear about what God can do for THEM, but they don’t want to change. They may not like Jesus’s call to love your neighbor as much as you love yourself when that neighbor ends up being someone completely different from them. So eventually they, too, dismiss the story of God.

But in some people, those who have the ability to have an open heart and open mind, those who are willing to believe that love can bring us through anything, even troubles or sadness, and is the greatest treasure of all—they’re willing to write a different kind of story with their lives.

It is only those who open their ears, and their hearts, to be receptive to the story revealed by Jesus who will bear good fruit, but they will bear it abundantly. Those of us who hear the story of God and see our own story within it now have the name for that love that maybe before we didn’t have a name for.

But here are some other implications from this parable. We are not only called to be the good soil, and receive the gospel, and let it drop right there. We are called to be disciples. That means that Jesus calls us to share in the sowing right alongside him. That’s what being members of the Body of Christ really means—not just being good soil for ourselves, but spreaders of the good news of God’s redemption in Jesus for others.

And that means not worrying too much about the way the ground looks in our sharing of the Good News. The Sower sows with abandon—he doesn’t check to see if the conditions are perfect, he just starts scattering seed hither and yon with the confidence that some of it will sprout and eventually bear good fruit. This situation alone is a welcome reminder to all of us to never allow “the perfect” to get in the way of the “good” when it comes to sharing the good news. As a billboard at St. Martin’s used to say about kindness, we should be throwing the good news around “like confetti.” Everywhere we go. Everything we do. We ARE Jesus’s face, heart, and seed-scattering hands in the world.

So yes, one lesson from this parable is to work on the soil in our own hearts, and to work on ourselves so that we are as receptive and fertile as we can possibly be. But the other lesson from this parable is that we ourselves are called to help spread the seed of Jesus’s message of God’s love, redemption and care for us as wide and as far as possible, with abandon. And we can do that as simply and as intentionally as the way we live our lives. As self-professed Christians or not, people know us by our words, by our attitude, by our actions. How we walk through the world is the greatest testament to who Jesus is in this time and in this place. God has given us the very best seed—the seed that promises to sprout and grow and nourish and sustain a billion hearts—if only the seed is scattered broadly enough.

This sharing of the good news is part of what we talked about last week—about “pulling for each other” as one of the most important witnesses we can make as Christians.

So as you go into this week, work the soil of your heart, so that you can fully receive the gospel and bear good fruit—absolutely, and especially before you we worry about the soil quality of others. But then go out into the world, flinging the good news around like confetti—embodying the good news, sharing the good news, so that it may produce abundantly, no matter what soil it first lands on.

Preached at the 505 on July 15, and at the 8 and 10:30 Holy Eucharists at St. Martin's Church in Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Isaiah 55:10-13
Psalm 65: (1-8), 9-14
Romans 8:1-11
Matthew 13:1-9,18-23

Sowing Hope: Speaking to the Soul, July 13, 2023

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-25

In the woods a woodpecker has discovered a pine
filled with insects like a pinata,
and has already worked a pattern of holes
like the brogues on a pair of wingtip shoes, hammering
a spiraling, pointillist tale of his search for sustenance,
his drumroll also warning me
that this tree may not be long for this world.
But still, this is the way of things,
and this is where I go to feel
the peace
and the industry
of wild things.

This is where things grow
mostly despite me
rather than because of me.

To be a gardener or a farmer
is to trade in hope,
to refuse to give up
even when the odds for abundant growth seem long.

Nonetheless here’s growth,
and anticipation,
and hope
in each new sprout from the ground.

Sow in hope; reap in care:
the instruction manual
for farming and ministry.

There is more than simply science
or even art
in how hearts, sometimes scarred from abuse or neglect,
can nonetheless be transformed
into the soil for new growth in love.

Sure, some seed may feed the birds--
but doesn’t God provide there as well?
Plant anyway, yes—
open to receive the gospel in faithfulness,
in response to the promise
that the gospel will bear fruit
even in the clayest soil of the healing human heart.

God famously works in clay, too.

This was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on July 13, 2023.

The Wisdom of Love: Sermon for Proper 9A

I am pretty certain that, if you don’t remember hearing them and studying them before, the readings we just heard may have you a bit mystified. Our gospel itself is puzzling—except maybe for the last bit which at least offers some hope. But if you look closer, our readings today are about two things: the wisdom of God, and the love of God. Scratch that—it’s all actually one thing. God’s wisdom IS God’s love- love which ignores human expectations or limits.

Today’s passage from the prophet Zechariah might ring a bell. It predicts that the Messiah will enter Zion, or Jerusalem, riding on a donkey’s colt—and if you think back to Palm Sunday, that is exactly what Jesus did as he triumphantly entered the city to the waving of palm branches and shouts of “Hosanna!” Anyone hearing that in Zachariah’s time would have considered a leader doing such a thing to be incredibly foolish—it’s like someone trying to race in a Formula 1 event while driving a minivan. Great leaders should ride impressive animals—not donkeys.

This detail, though, has an important purpose: the reign of this Messiah will not be based on military strength, one where “might makes right.” Instead, his humility reveals God’s wisdom and values: that prisoners will be set free, and that hopes will be fulfilled rather than lying empty and unfulfilled. This God does not seek dominion but restoration—not overawing people with might, but working to relieve burdens and enabling a culture of shared plenty, of gratitude and rejoicing.

Then there’s the reading from the Song of Solomon, a passage known as “Springtime Rhapsody” a beautiful collection of very frank love poems that most of us hardly ever remember is even IN the Bible. And here’s why it gets skipped over when it comes time for Bible study or preaching: it’s kinda steamy. It’s like Danielle Steele was suddenly invited to turn in a couple of chapters to Holy Writ. Strangely, God is not mentioned anywhere within its verses—instead, we get a conversation between two lovers. This is also unusual because it gives the woman her own voice, and she admits her passion for her beloved—in fact, in a world in which women were often silent, she is the one telling the story. Hers are the opening words in chapter one, imagining the kiss of her sweetheart.

According to our puritanical forebears, this passage isn’t about desire and human passion in all its enthusiasm, bodies bursting to discover each other. Nope. According to our 16th and 17thcentury friends, this passage is about “the Church’s love for Christ” and “Christ’s love for His Church,” with Christ as the bridegroom. This understanding is based upon the idea that the covenant between God and God’s people is similar to the covenant of marriage.

I’m not sure about that. First of all, marriage was much more often NOT about love throughout most of human history than it was about the security of property and inheritance. But there is a second and more obvious problem here: that of faithfulness and passion on the part of the Church.

While I am certain that this passage could be interpreted as Christ’s never-ending, deep, passionate love for the Church, too often the Church seems to fail to return the favor, if you know what I mean. Fallible, distractible, self-deluding, foolish, frightened, wounded humans that we are, too often we are concerned about our own wants, needs, power-madness, and concern about authority to truly love Christ to the depth that we should-- especially if one takes this passage as a guide. But we can do better. We just have to remember that real love puts the Beloved Other ahead of its own selfish satisfaction, and takes delight and finds completion and true bliss in that self-giving love.

Our failure to love stems from a conflict within ourselves- between our worldly concerns versus our spiritual aspirations. What if we were to unite these understanding rather than untie them? For we fail to love each other for the same reason we fail to love God—because we get afraid, because we lose faith in our ability to give of ourselves. Yet the Song of Songs holds out the hope that love CAN be mutual and deep and intimate. Our love for each other can be deep and lasting. Our love for God can fill us completely, and our longing for intimacy is one we need to set free in our relationship with God.

Our failure to love stems from a conflict within ourselves- between our worldly concerns versus our spiritual aspirations. This leads us to our passage in Romans, which then meshes well with our gospel. Paul talks frankly about knowing what he SHOULD do, which is to act lovingly in the world, but being unable to follow through due to his weakness to sin, which leads him to act selfishly.

Paul almost sounds like a member of a twelve-step group here, admitting his powerlessness over his addiction to sin. And that may be a really good analogy to make to describe the power that sin can wield in our lives, especially when we lull ourselves into taking our eyes off the horizon of love that we have to work toward in our lives as children of God. Real love, and true holiness, do not come naturally. Yet there is hope. Paul cries out: “Who will rescue me?” and immediately, he gives the answer: God, through the Incarnate One, our Savior Jesus Christ. He then continues to point out that our intellectual assent to be disciples is often at war with our own weaknesses.

What all our readings are seeking to do is remind us that what is considered wise or clever in the eyes of the world is usually the exact opposite of what God’s wisdom is.

Our gospel passage takes this up especially at the end. And what is absolutely vital is that here. Jesus is speaking, literally, as the Wisdom of God, personified. And there’s an interesting tie to the Song of Solomon here: in the Hebrew scripture, Wisdom was personified as female—possibly because wisdom gets rejected as an authority as much as women did, then, and now.

Jesus is actually paraphrasing a passage from the Book of Ecclesiaticus, known as a wisdom work that appears in some Bibles.

It was allegedly composed about 200-175 BC by a scribe named Ben Sira in Jerusalem, which means Jesus could have known of it. Speaking as Wisdom, a traditionally female character in scripture, we hear Jesus tracing much the same argument as the author of Ecclesiasticus:

51:23 Draw near to me, you who are untaught, and lodge in my school.
51:24 Why do you say you are lacking in these things, and why are your souls very thirsty?
51:25 I opened my mouth and said, Get these things for yourselves without money.
51:26 Put your neck under the yoke, and let your souls receive instruction; it is to be found close by.
51:27 See with your eyes that I have labored little and found myself much rest.

The wisdom that Jesus seeks to give us makes the need for asuffocating load of regulations pointless—those same regulations Jesus’s opponents loved to enforce on others as the self-righteously religious. Jesus’ load is in fact quite light compared with the heavy burdens the scribes and Pharisees place upon others: “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.”

The wisdom of God does not seek to punish but to enlighten. In place of oppression, it offers love and cooperation. And I believe this speaks of a need in our time as much as in the time of Jesus. Just like now, self-identified “religious folk” were especially good at pointing the finger at others and justifying themselves. They would use the 613 commandments in Torah to denigrate and oppress others, laying burdens upon their backs, while overlooking the parts of the Law that would require themselves to be burdened or to sacrifice what they wanted to do.

And boy, does that resonate for today. How many people do you know who justify lying, cheating, violence, misogyny, or turning a blind eye to the suffering or poverty of others in the name of their own comfort—yet who will scream about how “sinners” who act or love differently than they do deserve being cast out, oppressed, dehumanized, and punished? As if being in a marginalized group isn’t hard enough? And they justify it more often than not in the name of “religion.”

Yet Jesus, speaking as Wisdom herself in our gospel verses, identifies with the oppressed and marginalized. Jesus, speaking as the Wisdom of God, invites all to come unto him, especially those who are weary and feeling burdened by the numerous strictures of the religious leaders.

How is Jesus’s yoke “easy?” First, a yoke is meant to be shared—it works by two creatures sharing the burden and pulling side by side. And rather than lay burdens about hundreds of laws on our backs, Jesus offers to get into the yoke alongside us and help us bear the burdens of being a disciple—a burden that is already lighter because it is based on love, not fear. Christ’s yoke is easy because he takes away the yoke of the Law by making us wise in love and generosity.

That is certainly an easier burden in comparison to the way the religious leaders were apply the law to those around them.

Yet the most important thing to remember is that Jesus refers to a yoke, and not just a harness. And a yoke is meant to be shared. Christ’s yoke is the yoke of Love. And sharing burdens with each other—in the name of love—is all we need, as the Beatles sang. All those great songs of our youth insist the same thing: “Lean On Me,” by Bill Withers. “He Ain’t Heavy—He’s My Brother” by the Hollies. “Climb on a Back That’s Strong,” by Shawn Colvin. “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” by Simon and Garfunkle.

What matters is our care and empathy for each other. As we live in Christian community, we are yoked to Jesus and to each other, and we all pull together. We share each others’ burdens. We literally “pull for each other.” As Jane Siberry wrote in her song “The Life is the Red Wagon:”

The life is the red wagon rolling along
The life is the red wagon simple and strong
…oh, it's no big deal
But when the feet are dragging
you pull for me, and I pull for you,
you pull for me, and I pull for you…

Have you ever experienced the grace of someone pulling for you when you feel that you just can’t go on? Have you ever received a random act of kindness? That’s living life under the Wisdom of God.

We have a lot in common with the cultural landscape of Jesus’s time. Believe it or not. Just think: we have those who seek to divide and conquer, and they are not unashamed of using religion to further their schemes, and to oppress and denigrate marginalized groups by pulling little bits of scripture from here and there to justify their hatefulness and sense of superiority.

We see legal systems being used to oppress people—to take away their ability to be redeemed for injury, to allow a small minority to try to impose their wills on others because they have the ability to buy their way into the system.

Jesus would be the first one to object to this scheme. If your faith causes you to hate and judge and hurt others, you are doing it wrong. As Jesus points out, those “others” were exactly the people he hung out with, ate with, and taught among. Even more than that, those are the ones to whom he encouraged to take up his yoke. So that he could pull alongside them and help carry their burdens. Not condemn them.

Throughout the gospels, Jesus consistently points out that the wisdom of God, and the way it orders our lives, turns worldly wisdom upside down. He is very clear to go even further: the “wisdom” of the world is very often absolutely contrary to the wisdom and ways of God, as he himself exemplifies. Jesus, as the Wisdom of God personified, lives and acts in very specific ways to show US how to live and act.

The way of wisdom, the way of welcome into God’s household, is also the way of mercy, grace, and above all, love. It’s the wisdom that is embodied in our baptismal covenant. This is the wisdom of welcome, beloveds, that we are called to commit to as disciples. Wisdom that doesn’t seek advantage or calculation, but, always and everywhere, serving each other in purity, gentleness, and love.

We worship a God whose wisdom is often seen as foolishness in the eyes of that very same world. A God who tells us to love people the world sees as broken, and love them fully.

May we all be so wise.

Preached at the 505 afternoon service on July 7, and the 10:30 am service of Holy Eucharist at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO, on July 8, 2023.

Readings:

Zechariah 9:9-12
Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

After the Fireworks: Speaking to the Soul for July 6, 2023

The moon beams aloft, reclaiming her throne
from the waning of rockets’ red glare; 

Dogs army-crawl, dazed, from under our beds,
still in shock from bombs bursting in air; 

The owl and whip-poor-will renew their song,
vesper hymns lifted God-ward once more, 

That true freedom rings out in sounds of peace--
precious after the echoes of war.

This was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on July 6, 2023.