“Plan B” – Sermon on July 3, 2011

Jesus said, “But to what will I compare this generation? It is like

children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We
played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you
did not mourn.’ For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they
say, ‘He has a demon’; the 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.”
At 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; yes, Father, for such
was your gracious will. All 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. “Come to me, all you that 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. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is
light.”

Have you ever had a plan in mind that was great, really wonderful,
but you somehow just couldn’t get it to work out? Maybe you applied
for, even interviewed for a job that would be just perfect for you, but
you couldn’t get that second interview. Maybe you had a great idea
for a certain ministry for the church, but you just couldn’t get people
to join you, and you couldn’t do it alone. Maybe you’d planned to stay
married, stay in a loving family situation ’til death did you part, but no
matter how hard you both tried to make it work, the marriage just
couldn’t hold and you ended up divorced. Maybe you’d planned to
spend you golden years with your beloved, enjoying each other with
leisure, but he or she passed away much too soon. What do you do
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 then? How do you pick up and move on when what you’d planned for
was so right, so right?
I have a feeling that Jesus was in a place like that in the reading this
morning. It starts out with him saying, “But to what will I compare this
generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling
to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.’” He goes on to say how he and
John the Baptist had different ways of sharing the same message,
but the people he spoke to couldn’t hear it from either of them. He’s
exasperated. He’s been trying so hard to engage people with his
message, and he knows that John, as different as he was from
Jesus, trusted the message and tried to guide people to it. But
people refused to hear it, criticized one, then the other, setting up
barriers to the message.
Jesus’ plan was to save the lost sheep of Israel. He knew that they
had strayed far from right relationships with God, each other, the
world around them, even within themselves. He was concerned that
the temple, the Jewish religion, instead of bringing them closer to
God was putting more obstacles to right living. The laws had not
brought about the freedom they were intended to, but had become
burdensome to the people. Most likely he wanted to get the faith
leaders on board, to change the way they understood and did things,
to purify the faith so that it again worked in people’s lives to reconcile
them to God and to their divine purpose to express God’s glory. But it
was slow going. In the chapter before this one, Jesus sent his
disciples out to proclaim his message because he had observed so
many who were, in his words, harassed and helpless, like sheep
without a shepherd. The harvest is plentiful, he’d said, but the
laborers few. He had no confidence in the so-called laborers for God
among the temple leadership, so he coached his own and sent them
out.
So his plan to reach the religious leaders, to get them back on track
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 to get the people headed in the right direction was not working out.
The religious leaders were looking for any excuse to dismiss him. He
was proclaimed by John the Baptist as the anointed one, but John, to
the religious leaders, was a crazy ascetic, obviously in the spell of a
demon. And Jesus himself was categorized as a glutton and drunk
who kept terrible, sinful company. And Jesus was getting pretty
worked up about it – calling them out on the way they talked from
both sides, the way they refused to engage. There is a part of the
scripture that is not included in the reading, but is a rant of sorts
against the towns he’s preached to but have not repented. “Woe to
you,” he says to them. “You have not repented even after witnessing
my deeds of power.” The judgment on you will be fierce, he says.
Makes me think of how the potential employee might say “woe to
you” employer. You might save a few bucks hiring someone younger
with less experience, but they’ll end up running your company into
the ground. Or “woe to you” ex-spouse. You thought you’d find
peace walking away from this marriage, but everyone is hurting,
finances are tighter, and there is an aching sense of failure that
persists. Woe to you. So easy to get caught up in predicting disaster
when things aren’t going according to your plan. So easy to focus on
the hardship that didn’t have to be there, if only…
But then there is a dramatic shift in Jesus’ tone and action. He stops
his rant, and prays. He says a prayer of gratitude – “I thank you
Father, Lord of heaven and earth.” How many of us do that when
things aren’t going the way we planned – stop and say, “Thank you
God, thank you.” I don’t do it as often as I’d like, but I do stop and
pray when I find myself getting all riled up, or when I feel I’ve hit a
wall. I have figured out that moaning and groaning about how things
aren’t going right doesn’t really get me very far. It makes me feel
more stuck. Is that how Jesus was feeling, like he was painting
himself into a corner with his words? However he got to the point of
prayer, he got there. “Thank you God, thank you.” It was these words
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 of gratitude that opened him up to see what was really there to be
thankful for. In saying thank you, he was thankful. He saw that it was
a gift that he had so many followers. The religious leaders weren’t
listening, but lots of people were, lots of people who had been like
lost sheep.
No matter how bad things get, no matter how much things seem to
fall apart, prayers of thanks can help you see blessings. There is a
story in the magazine Christian Century that tells of a woman who, in
a period of two years went through the death of her husband, the
incarceration of her son for drug possession, and the suicide of her
daughter. She was drowning in grief, despairing of what kind of
future she could possibly have. Somehow her pastor found the nerve
to say something so outrageous to her at the time that she never
forgot it. He told her, “thank God every day, even and especially
when you can scarcely find a reason to do so.” The advice grabbed
her, and though there were many days that she couldn’t manage to
thank God for anything, she gathered her courage enough to try.
Eventually it became a daily practice for her, and then a source of
strength, hope and even joy for her.
So Jesus gives thanks, and sees the blessing, of how it was God’s
grace that opened the eyes of the infants as he calls them – the
innocent, the dependent ones, even while the so-called wise and
intelligent saw nothing of the truth. And so he changes his plan, he
stops spinning his wheels with the wise and intelligent and begins to
focus his work on the harassed and helpless, the sheep without a
shepherd. “Come to me all you who are weary, all who are carrying
heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” The people who have been
worn down by their efforts to meet their religious obligations, who
put their last mites into the collection box, who don’t have the proper
eating utensils, those who are diseased or disfigured, who associate
with someone diseased or disfigured – all those who are shunned
and burdened, to them Jesus promises rest.
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 It is not, however, the kind of rest that is so strictly enforced by the
religious leaders of the time, when work is forbidden on the Sabbath,
the day of rest. Instead Jesus sees rest as work that refreshes,
renews and replenishes. It is the work of re-creation. In the passage
that follows today’s, Jesus defends himself and his followers to the
religious leaders for plucking grain and eating on the Sabbath, and
then restoring a man’s shriveled hand to wholeness. Jesus assigns a
whole different understanding to Sabbath. He reframes it from a
weekly burden of vigilant inactivity to a weekly peak of God’s
delightful project of creation.
When we take the yoke of Jesus upon us, we draw on his gentleness,
his humbleness of heart, and his joy. We yoke ourselves to do the
joyful work of creation and recreation. And indeed it is light work.
Something to give thanks for each and every day. May it be so.
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