Advent Lutheran Church

"A Perfect Fit (Pentecost 3)"

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            Throughout the Gospels there is only one reference to the occupation of Jesus.  There is a brief reference in Mark that states that Jesus was a carpenter.  But that brief reference, coupled with this lesson from the gospel of Matthew, gave rise to an interesting legend about Jesus of Nazareth.  According to this legend, Jesus the carpenter had a specialty within the craft of carpentry, and his specialty was the making of yokes.

            Farmers would come from miles around Nazareth to have their oxen fitted with yokes from the hand of Jesus, because everyone knew that there was no finer, custom-made yokes to be had.  You can envision the scene.  The farmer approaches Jesus’ shop with his team of oxen, and Jesus emerges from his workplace to take a look.  He approaches the team carefully, quietly; there’s no need to hurry.  It’s important that they feel at ease around him, trust him.  Jesus takes his time as he studies them because he wants to understand their capabilities, what they can carry, what they can haul, where they might be vulnerable.  He measures their height, their width.  Finally, he sets to work on their yoke. 

In time he approaches the team with his handiwork.  He gently sets it on their shoulders, taking note of where it might rub or chafe.  He removes the yoke and smoothes down the rough places, continues to shape the yoke until at last it fits perfectly.

It’s an interesting legend, but as we see from our Gospel lesson this morning, even a yoke that’s perfectly shaped was not always accepted.  The Bible is filled with stories about Jesus having a tremendously positive effect on people: at his very touch the blind could see, the deaf could suddenly hear, the lame could walk, the lepers were cleansed and could rejoin their families and communities, the poor for the first time had good news brought to them.  Miracles like those are never routine, but Jesus performed them routinely, and they usually led to conversion, or at least to the beginning of faith in those who experienced them. 

Usually, but not always.  Sometimes Jesus was not convincing; some people, faced with all the evidence you could ask for, were not persuaded.  That’s the case with our Gospel lesson as Jesus laments people’s lack of faith.  He compares them to a bunch of spoiled kids who say they want to play with each other but in reality do not.  They simply won’t be satisfied.  And what doesn’t satisfy them is the announcement of the Kingdom of God.

John the Baptist and Jesus were about as different in style as you could imagine.  John, with his weird clothing (camel’s hair!) and his weird diet (bugs and honey!) and his stark message (“Repent or face the fires of hell!”), was just too conservative.  Jesus, whom they said was a drunkard and a glutton and associated with all the wrong people, was just too liberal.  The crowds dismissed them both because neither lived up to or down to their expectations.

But Jesus won’t be defined by the crowds’ expectations; in fact, he seems downright uninterested in them.  He has, instead, come to do the Father’s will.  When he makes that curious comment, “Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds,” he is connecting himself to an ancient religious tradition that personified the wisdom of God as a female.  He’s saying that as he lives out the wisdom of God in concrete acts, he is revealing his true identity for those who are open to seeing it.

Jesus’ identity is not a mystery to everyone, however.  As Jesus lets us in on his prayer to his heavenly Father, he makes clear that God has allowed those who are so-called wise and intelligent to be so caught up in their own wisdom and intelligence, so caught up in themselves, that they miss the Christ who is in their midst.  You might know people like that.  I know I do; people who are so full of their own importance and success that they’ve abandoned any sense of humility in the presence of God.  Jesus says that God allows that to happen.  But Jesus also speaks of people whom he calls “infants,” people of any chronological age and level of earthly success who are characterized by a sort of innocent trust in God, people who are open to being shaped by this God, willing to be led by God.

As we apply this to ourselves, it might be tempting to envision two distinct groups – the “wise and intelligent” – the people who just don’t get it – in one group; and the “infants” – the pure in heart – in another.  And where are we?  Well, we’d like to sit with the pure in heart, if you don’t mind.  But we know it’s not as simple as that.  We know that, spiritually, each one of us is a mixed bag.  Martin Luther had us all pegged pretty accurately back in the 1500s when he said that the Christian is both saint and sinner at the same time.  The apostle Paul knew that centuries before Luther.  It was his self-awareness, and his understanding of the human condition, that led to the anguished cry that we heard in the second lesson: “I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

Paul was considerably harder on himself than we are on ourselves.  We tend to excuse our actions by pointing to our intentions.  “Well,” we say, “that didn’t exactly turn out the way I wanted, but at least my intentions were good.”  For Paul, though, his good intentions made his poor follow-through even more frustrating and harder to take because it pointed up the tremendous gap between his motive and his performance.  (Isn’t it interesting, by the way, that we tend to judge ourselves by our intentions, while we tend to judge others by their actions?)

We don’t know what specific situation caused Paul to make such a statement, but I certainly know what he means.  For example, I remember that when I was the father of a teenager about to go into high school, I had every intention of being a wonderful parent – loving, supportive, understanding, challenging when need be.  And I wanted to be wise; not just wise in the advice I gave, but wise in knowing when to give that advice.  That was important to me because I remembered so many times in my own youth when my father was so generous in giving advice.  Often, though, I was not prepared to hear it.  It was good advice; I just wasn’t ready for it.

So I wanted to avoid the same experience in my own parenting.  That was my intention.  But on so many occasions the words were out of my mouth before I knew it; it was like they had a mind of their own and simply wouldn’t stop.  “I can will what is right,” Paul said, “but I cannot do it.”  Paul and I know each other pretty well.  Parents, can you relate?

But Paul was talking about more than bad timing in the giving of advice; he seemed to be saying that we are simply hard-wired in a particular direction.  “I do not do the good that I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”  Paul saw this not as an unfortunate blip on the screen of otherwise flawless behavior but as a “law,” something that we simply cannot avoid because the brokenness of human sin inevitably invades our daily actions with each other.  He’s saying that there is something that is broken in us, something that we cannot fix. 

If this is the final reality with which we are left, it would be easy to slide into despair.  But in truth we are not defined by the gap between our intentions and our actions.  It’s important to remember that; important to keep our eye on just who and what does define us.

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, and it should be an absolutely wonderful celebration.  We go into that celebration with eyes wide open, aware of the gap that sometimes exists between our values as a nation and our behavior.  We are involved in two wars overseas with the goal of bringing democracy and freedom to nations that know neither democracy or freedom.  That’s the goal.  And over time as we’ve pursued that goal we’ve learned that we have at times acted in ways that do not reflect our values.  Yes, we are not consistent, and sometimes we’ve acted in ways that are downright evil.  But acknowledging that fact should make tomorrow’s celebration even more meaningful, because we are not defined as a nation by our faults but by the overriding values and virtues on which we were founded, and which continue to shape us even now.  We are always being called to higher ground as Americans, called to become who our founders intended us to be.  And as we strive for that goal, we find that we live into that grand vision.

The even more-important good news for us as Christian believers is that we too are ultimately defined not by our behavior but by our Creator.  That’s good news not only in terms of eternal life, but powerfully good news in terms of this life.  Here at Advent we have a series of four mission directions that guide our ministries; one of them is “Challenging our faith community to grow in discipleship.”  We’re very intentional about the use of that word, “discipleship” and its root, “disciple.”  The literal translation of the word is “learner”: a disciple is a learner.  The idea is to encourage one another to learn increasingly more about the Christian faith and to employ that learning in our living.

In the ancient world of the rabbis, though, the word “disciple” carries a much more expansive meaning.  In Jesus’ day, the disciple does not want simply to know what the rabbi knows; he wants to be like the rabbi.  So he wants to learn what the rabbi know so that he can do what the rabbi does so that he can be like the rabbi himself.  Rabbis differed one from another in the ways that they interpreted the Torah, or the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, the law of God.  Some rabbis were liberal, some were conservative; and within those two camps there were various layers of liberal and conservative. 

Each rabbi had his own unique set of interpretations of the law, his own way of understanding the scriptures and living them out.  The rabbi called his particular set of interpretations of the scriptures his “yoke,” so that when a would-be disciple approached a rabbi with the request to be taken on as his student, he was really asking for the privilege of taking on himself that rabbi’s yoke.

That was only a small part of the process, however.  The most important part of the process was in the hands of the rabbi, who then had to decide if the would-be disciple was likely to be a successful student.  So if you went to a rabbi and asked to study under him, he would probably say, “Well, let’s see your transcript, your GPA, your SAT, your ACT; let’s see if you have what it takes.”  The approval process was not automatic, and it was not guaranteed; many a would-be disciple was turned away because, in the estimation of the rabbi, he couldn’t make the grade.  The rabbi had his standards.

The rabbi Jesus also had his standards, and we just heard them a minute ago.  “Come to me, all who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”  There, that’s Jesus’ admission standard: “all.”

A yoke fits two, of course, and the miracle is that on the other side of Jesus’ yoke is none other than the Savior himself.  As you come to the table this morning to take into yourself the body and blood of Jesus, consider the yoke of Christ.  Welcome that yoke.  Feel how smooth, how natural, how perfect the fit.  It’s made especially for you.  Take that yoke upon yourself, and allow it to set you truly free.

Amen.