Proper 9 Year A July 6, 2008

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Jesus said to the crowd, "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."

Sermon

The image of a yoke is often used in the Bible to indicate servitude and bondage. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus talks about his yoke being easy and his burden light. In contrast with the pharisaical law, what Jesus offered must have seemed very light indeed.

The Pharisees had developed a system of 613 different laws, including 365 negative commands and 248 positive laws. To follow all of these laws to the letter was a very heavy burden indeed.

By contrast, Jesus offered two laws: love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself. This must have seemed like being free indeed to the law-burdened Jewish people.

So why do we make such a heavy burden out of following Christ?

One of the most dangerous fallacies that followers of Christ fall into is legalism, that is, the tendency to focus on the mechanism of faith rather than the substance.

Throughout the history of our faith, certain beliefs and practices have drawn criticism as being too legalistic, including:

• Fasting
• Keeping the Sabbath
• Not dancing, playing cards or drinking
• Belief that the King James Version of the Bible is the only valid version
• The use of statuary in the church
• The belief that the only way to pray is in tongues and only those that do are true believers

Yet this has been going on since the very beginning of Christianity. Christian schools in the 2^nd century commonly instructed the believer to wear only white clothing, sell their musical instruments, to stop sleeping on a soft pillow and to not eat white bread, shave their beards or to take warm baths. The list has had additions and subtractions over the years.

All of these restrictions observed by various denominations all focus on the mechanism of faith rather than the substance. They turn what was meant to be freedom from observing a suppressive law into yet a new suppressive law. We lose our freedom in Christ and our yoke is no longer easy or light.

We may be patting ourselves on the back at this point, saying, “We don’t do any of this.” I hate to tell you, but being an Episcopalian can bring its own special brand of legalism.

For instance, when I was first attending this church, I read a book called Introduction to the Episcopal Church. In it, there were some rules about how to take communion, including the fact that you should not eat anything before taking communion, which would be rather a burden for someone with problems with their blood sugar who happened to enjoy attending a later morning service. In addition, the book instructed that you should never let the host touch your teeth after it was placed in your mouth…it was supposed to dissolve slowly on the tongue. I find that rule impossible to keep when singing in the choir: I simply cannot wait for the host to dissolve on my tongue because I have to return to the choir and sing the anthem before that could possibly happen. I have to chew and swallow. There seems to be no good reasons for these rules, but I imagine at some point someone thought there was a good reason. And that is the true mark of legalism: following a rule because it is there, even if it no longer makes sense, much as that often repeated story about the woman who cut the end off the ham, because her mother always had done it, only to find when her mother was asked why she cut it off, it was because her mother had always done it. And when grandma was asked why she cut off the end of the ham, she said it was because her roasting pan was too small to fit the ham unless she cut off the end.

We also have a tendency to cling fairly rigidly to our liturgy. Some of our churches insist that the 1928 prayer book is the only valid prayer book. Part of the reason is that liturgy that is familiar can be very comforting in a world of rapidly changing technology, morals and values. But that very familiarity can become dull and uninspiring, leading our thoughts not to God, but to mental listing of what is needed to buy at the grocery store or if it’s time to change the oil in our cars.

But apart from the unique legalism of being an Episcopalian, we also create our own private legalism. We wonder how long we should pray, how much we should pray, what words we should use when we pray.

Should we read the Bible every day? How much of it should we read? Should we attend church every Sunday, or can we miss some Sundays? Should we take communion every Sunday, or is it okay not to have a Eucharist every Sunday? By focusing on such questions, it’s very easy to forget why we are in church to begin with.

Charles Spurgeon, that most famous of 19^th century preachers, wrote:

“I have found, in my own spiritual life, that the more rules I lay down for myself, the more sins I commit. The habit of regular morning and evening prayer is one which is indispensable to a believer’s life, but the prescribing of the length of prayer, and the constrained remembrance of so many persons and subjects, may gender unto bondage, and strangle prayer rather than assist it.”

We want to do the right thing, so we try to conform ourselves to some sort of discipline. Yet in conforming to that discipline, we often lose the very reason why we are doing what we are doing in the first place. Bible study and prayer are both wonderful and essential to the believer who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God. But when we force ourselves to study and pray when we can’t give all your attention to it, we lose the joy of study and prayer, it becomes burdensome. We feel guilty when we can’t follow the rigid course we laid down for ourselves. We can tell ourselves we aren’t “good Christians” so it becomes easier, as Charles Spurgeon noted, to sin since we are already convinced we are not that good at being Christians anyway.

The flip side of the legalism coin can cause us to place too much emphasis on what we do to please God in comparison to what others do.

In searching out articles on legalism online, I came across an interesting blog called The Shepherd’s Scrapbook. One of the posters on this blog, who goes by the user name of Spurgeon, said this about legalism:

“Legalism is the damning lie that says God’s pleasure and joy in me is dependent upon my obedience.

It is legalism that causes the Pharisee to look proudly into the sky in the presence of a tax collector. It is legalism that causes a missionary in Africa to think God is more pleased with him than the Christian businessman in America. And it is legalism that causes the preacher behind the pulpit to think God is more pleased with him than the tatooed Christian teenager sitting in the back row.”

We need to be aware of our tendency to fall into legalism as we try to live our lives as Christ would have us live them. Our focus should be not what we (or others) do in church or the world, but why we do what we do. Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” By putting our focus on Christ and listening to the direction of the Holy Spirit, we can prevent ourselves from placing too much emphasis on the mechanisms of our faith and can rediscover the joy that awaits us as we discover the abundant life that Christ promises us. F. F. Bruce, one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century, said that “Doing the will of God is not a matter of conformity to outward rules but of giving expression to inward love, such as the Spirit begets.” By listening to the Holy Spirit, we can discern what God’s will is for our life, rather than relying on rules and regulations.