The Easiness of Christianity

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The Easiness of Christianity

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
July 3, 2011

16“But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in
the marketplaces and calling to one another, 17‘We played the flute for you,
and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ 18For John
came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; 19the
Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a
drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by
her deeds.”

25At that time Jesus said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and
have revealed them to infants; 26yes, Father, for such was your gracious
will. 27All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one
knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the
Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. 28“Come to me,
all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you
rest. 29Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and
humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30For my yoke is
easy, and my burden is light.”

Andre Gide, the twentieth century French novelist, playwright, essayist,
diarist, wrote in 1919 a short meditation on Christianity entitled "The Pastoral
Symphony," which was later adapted into a three-act play and motion
picture. It revolves around the relational dynamic between a beautiful young
woman named Gertrude, blind from birth, and a devout Swiss minister, who
rescues her from a hovel and guides her from darkness into light. This
minister paints a world that is not real, a perfect world, for this young blind
woman, including a painting a portrait of himself that is not real. When
surgery suddenly enables her to see, two things awaken her soul with
crushing pain: one is that "my eyes opened on a world more beautiful than I
had ever dreamt it could be;...the daylight so bright, the air so brilliant, the
sky so vast." The other thing that struck her powerfully, and that
precipitated her death, was the way people's faces were "so full of care," pain
and emptiness. She almost wishes that her eyes had never been opened by
the miracle, wishes she could have lived in the world the minister made up for
her, and she even tries to commit suicide because her despair.. -Gide, Two
Symphonies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), 243. (Homiletics Online,
adapated)   The minister in this story forgets that it is important to paint a
true picture, both of the beauty of this world, but also its shadow, the
burdens that humans being carry in this life, in this world, as seen in the
faces this young woman sees for the first time. The portrait the minister had
painted for young woman couldn’t live up to reality, the expectations she had
in her head didn’t match up with actual world around her, something I
suspect many of us have experienced in our own lives.

Certainly, you find that in our Scriptural text, in the first few verses of it,
because here Jesus is complaining that the disciples of John the Baptist have
expectations that of who and what a Messiah looks like that are simply not
rooted in reality, in the world that is. John’s disciples had come to Jesus,
asking him whether or not he was the Messiah, and Jesus calmly points out
that he has indeed done what a Messiah is supposed to do, which to help the
blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, and to proclaim that God is indeed on
the side of the nobodies of this world. And still, they and others wonder: is
this one from Nazareth really the Messiah? Somehow, and in someway, this
Jesus hadn’t lived up to their expectations, hadn’t danced when they wanted
him to dance, hadn’t cried when they wanted him to cry, and then they
complained that John the Baptist doesn’t eat enough and thus they declare
him demon possessed, and then they complain that he, Jesus, eats too
much and he is a glutton. Folks, it is the old adage over and over again—you
can’t please everyone most of time, and in this case, you can’t please anyone
any of the time!

But the point here is rich, isn’t it? This idea that our expectations of what
God does and doesn’t do is never really met, and we find ourselves
wondering, sometimes, whether or not there is a God, and if there is a God,
what real difference does it really make? We especially do this when God fails
to meet our expectations, fails to be the God whom we’ve painted in our
head as the real God. John disappoints the crowds, Jesus disappoints the
crowd, and certainly God so often disappoints us because God won’t do what
God is supposed to do, at least in our mind. In the life of faith, we also do
that with others, with our fellow travelers on this way of the Christ—they
disappoint us, they do not live up to our expectations of who they should be
and how they should live their faith in relationship to me, to us—they did not
dance when I played my flute, they did not we wail in grief, did not shed a
tear when I thought they should; they ate too little, or they ate too much;
they did not send that condolence card, they did not ask me first, they went
too far, they didn’t go far enough. Whatever painting is in my head, our
heads, isn’t replicated by them and their actions, and, like Gide’s protagonist,
like Jesus’ hearers, they feel betrayed by God, by others, by themselves,
even, and thus will not believe, will not dance, will not stick around, at all.
Eventually they too will grow despairing or cynical, all because God or others,
or even themselves, could not live up the expectations they had set in their
heads, or even expectations others had told them to set and hold.

Yet, underneath of all those assumptions is an irony here, an incredible
spiritual irony, and that is the expectations we have of ourselves, that we
have others, that we have of the Divine, are so much more than the
expectations that God has of us. Now, that should make you prick your ears
up just a bit, because it might seem to be implying that perhaps God has no
expectations of us, which is not what I said, and not what I mean. What I
am trying to say is that God expects so much less of us than we expect of
others, and even expect of ourselves. While we’re playing religious games,
God is done with religion, at least with religion has it always been practiced.
Here is the rules, we’ve been told, here are the expectations God and we
have of you if you’re going to be one of us, us Christians.   Years ago, I
think I told you the story about being spotted in a bar with a beer in my
hand by a young man in one of my congregations who had grown up in a
conservative religious tradition, and he was scandalized by seeing me in that
bar to such a extent that I never saw him again in worship. And, no, it wasn’
t the 7th beer of the night, and I was upright when he saw me.    Now, this
young man also had a beer in his hand, but I, as a minister, hadn’t lived up
to the picture, the painting he had in his head about what a minister should
look like, should do—and the irony is that he never questioned whether or
not the picture in his head was the right picture, the true one, the picture
that actually matched reality and the reality of what it means to be a minister
who doesn’t share his portrait of what a minister should or shouldn’t be. I
wasn’t buying what he had already bought into years earlier, and it
distressed him so, my failure to live up to his expectations of what a minister
should and should not drink.

You see, the good news here is that the God that Jesus gives witness to in
his words and his life is not ever really what we expect—this God will always
fail to meet our expectations because this God will usually exceed them, or
this God will simply rebel against the prescribed box we want to put the
Divine in. And, again, the irony spiritual irony is that so often what God
expects of us is far less than we expect of others, of ourselves, of the
Divine. In another part of the Gospel story, when Jesus distills all of the
Jewish law down to these simple commands of love of God and love of
neighbor, something he follows many of the great Jewish rabbis in doing, he
is making the yoke easy for us, telling us what really matters to God, which is
love—love of God and love each other. It’s not the picture you and I have in
our heads about what religious people, faithful people, serious disciples, look
like—it’s not about not being seen in a bar with a beer in your hand, or
always using lots of religious language, or saying “Praise Jesus” every five
seconds, or even, dare I say this, dare I say this—it’s not even about going
to church every Sunday, because one has to in order to be considered a
faithful Christian. God didn’t give us Christ to save the pious, the
teetotalers, the righteous and the self-righteous—those people who are the
wise and intelligent people that miss the obvious, the simple, the simple
nature of what it means to love God and be loved by God, what it means to
love other human beings, and be loved by other human beings.    .

And what I mean by “simple” is what I think Christ means—“let go of rules,
he says, “and pay attention to only the two commandments I give you, the
ones I just told you, the ones about love, and who to love in this world.”
And what he says next in our text here, what he utters next is meant to tell
us that he will be with us as we try and follow these two simple commands:
Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will
give you rest. 29Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle
and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30For my yoke is
easy, and my burden is light.” Now, remember, of course that a yoke in
biblical times was a smoothly crafted piece of wood to harness work animals
together so that the task would be shared and lightened, and so what you
have is an image of the Christ beside you, making even these simple
commands to love more than doable, more than possible, but something
that can be done easily because of who is beside you and me. G.K.
Chesterton once said something that I don’t quite agree with—he used to
say that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting: it has been found
difficult and not tried. It’s clever, what he says, but I don’t know if it really
true. And I think that what I mean by that is that actually, the other
direction, the way of hate is a far heavier burden than the way of love, that
way that Christ gives us. I mean, have you ever met someone consumed by
hate, and then ever thought that such hatred was a painless, trouble-free,
uncomplicated, effortless, easy thing—if you did, you weren’t looking hard
enough.   I somehow doubt that you and I have ever done that, because we
know that, in our deepest bones, that love is easier than hate, that what
Martin Luther King said years ago really was true: he said, I have decided to
stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

And so, yes, the expectation we are asked to live up to is love, and I know, I
know that my saying that such an expectation is no big deal, is easy
compared to its opposite, hate, sounds a bit disingenuous.   And maybe it
would be if we were doing it all by ourselves, if we were trying to love like
Christ loved all by ourselves—but we aren’t, are we? We are yoked, set
beside, tethered to this Christ, who will carry the burden of such a command
to love with us, even though the burden is always lighter than the one so
often chosen by us—the burden of hate, bitterness, hurt, and revenge.
There's a Latin proverb, quoted by Cicero (De Amicitia, 19, 67) that goes,
"Before you trust a man, eat a peck of salt with him." This led to the
definition of a friend as someone who will "eat salt" with us, as in this poem
by Rudyard Kipling: I have eaten your bread and salt. I have drunk your
water and wine. The deaths ye died I have watched beside. And the lives ye
led were mine.--Kipling, Departmental Ditties (1886), Prelude St.1. Eating
salt has become a metaphor for sharing struggle with another human being,
and, in this Christ, we have One who will eat salt with us, who will share his
yoke, and thus make our burden, our lives, our work of love in this world,
more than just doable.

I want to conclude today’s sermon with a long quote from the theologian
Paul Tillich, from one of his collections of sermons. Tillich was a prominent
theologian of the heyday of mainline Protestantism, the forty and fifties, and
he was also one of us, part of the one the predecessor denominations that
eventually came to make up the United Church of Christ. Here these words
that speak of the yoke of our Lord:

We would turn down His call with hatred if He [Christ] called us to the
Christian religion or to the Christian doctrines or to the Christian morals.
We would not accept His claim to be meek and humble and to give rest to
our souls, if He gave us new commands for thinking and acting. Jesus is not
the creator of another religion, but the victor over religion; He is not the
maker of another law, but the conqueror of law. We, the ministers and
teachers of Christianity, do not call you to Christianity but rather to the New
Being to which Christianity should be a witness and nothing else, not
confusing itself with that New Being. Forget all Christian doctrines; forget
your own certainties and your own doubts, when you hear the call of Jesus.
Forget all Christian morals, your achievements and your failures, when you
come to Him. Nothing is demanded of you, no idea of God, and no
goodness in yourselves, not your being religious, not your being Christian,
not your being wise, and not your being moral. But what is demanded is
only your being open and willing to accept what is given to you, the New
Being, the being of love and justice and truth, as it is manifest in Him
Whose yoke is easy and Whose burden is light. The Shaking of the
Foundations, “The Yoke of Religion”