Finding Rest, While Having Incredible Self-Agnosticism

4 Pentecost, a p 9, July 6, 2014

Zechariah 9:9-12 Psalm 145:8-15

Romans 7:15-25a Matt. 11:25-30

 Lectionary Link

  We have read the confession of St. Paul from his epistle to the Romans today.  And we usually assume that St. Paul is like a person who is sometimes wrong but never in doubt.  However, we have enough of the writings of St. Paul not to make him into a master of consistency; consistent and certain is with how we like to pigeon-hole him.  But this confident Paul also confesses to be an agnostic; not about God or Jesus but about himself and the motivations of his actions as they pertain to impulse control.  St. Paul was something of a hothead; he acted upon impulse.  He once set out to put to death the followers of Rabbi Jesus.  And you can see why Paul came to be baffled about the motivations behind his own action.  In a rather stark confession, St. Paul wrote: “I do not understand my own actions.”  Perhaps he was thinking, “Why did I stand by as a collaborator in the stoning to death of Stephen?”  “I do not understand my own actions.”

  In many ways life is all about understanding human behavior and actions.  We have the Law of Moses, the New Testament, lots of other Holy Books, we have Plato and Aristotle, countless numbers of saints, theologians, gurus, mystics and the psychoanalytic traditions of Freud and Jung.  We have endless number of self-help books, Dr. Phil and it is all about the agnosticism which we confess about the human motivations of human behavior.  “I do not understand my own actions.”

  St. Paul writes what I call the Twilight Zone passage: “do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do.”  Without significant stylistic variation St. Paul uses, as it appears in English translation, the word “do” seventeen times.  St. Paul is baffled about human behavior; he is baffled about his own behavior; he is baffled about why he has done the things which he has done.

  We, too, are always upon the quest to understand why we and other people do the things that we do.  And there is not one magical formula to understand the motivations for all action.  It requires wisdom to understand all of the differences which pertain to understanding human actions.

  The Gospel lesson which we've read today includes some words of Jesus.  It is sometimes difficult to read the Gospels because of the ways in which they are edited.  In this Gospel passage it is almost like the editor thought, “I’ve got all of these sayings associated with Jesus and I do not have any specific context for each of these sayings, but because I’ve inherited this collection of sayings of Jesus, I am just going to put them here.”  So as baffled readers we wonder how all of these sayings go together to form a coherent theme.  And we have to rely upon our intuition about universal meaning present in the language itself.

  What was the motivation of the actions of John the Baptist?  What was the motivation for the actions of Jesus of Nazareth and Son of Man, Son of the God the Father?  People had different opinions about the behaviors of John the Baptist and Jesus.  All holy people should behave in the same way.  All prophets should behave in the same way.  Well maybe not.  It did not matter how John or Jesus behaved because they had different callings and different styles of ministry and they both had people who disapproved of them.  John the Baptist was an ascetic; wore a camel hair tunic, ate locust and honey and would not be found in the company of notorious sinners.  John did not go to people; they came to him.  People came out to the wilderness to him to repent of their sins.  Jesus, as the Son of Man, did not have place to live but he hung out with almost anyone.  Jesus went out among people.  He was seen at meal and in discussion with Pharisees, Sadducees, fisher-folk,  tax-collectors,   common workers,  soldiers,  foreigners,  prostitutes and with people of bad reputations.  Jesus and John had different styles of ministry; the wisdom about their behaviors and ministry had to do with the results.  Through wisdom one can understand how difference does not necessarily mean conflict or opposition.  With wisdom we can understand differences and respect them.

  These sayings attributed to Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew are what influenced the Jesus Seminar to understand Jesus primarily as a Wisdom teacher.

  Wisdom involves the rather rhetorical and artful use of language to evoke new meanings.  The artful use of language can be shocking and it can confront every day logic with counter-logic.  How can an infant wisdom be equated with the wisdom and knowledge of an adult person?  Jesus was confronting the literal mind of people to shock them into a profounder insight.  “Return to the native joy and wonder of one’s infancy; be born again.  You’ve grown too weary with all of the adult protocols and adult knowledge to the point of losing your zest for life.”  Jesus was saying, “You who are wearied by all of the oppressions of adulthood; come to me for rest.  Get underneath all of that adult layer of memories which have made you forget the joy and wonder of your original birth.  Complement your weary adulthood with the rest of infant aspect of your personhood arising in you through the power of meditation.  Your native infant selfhood can levitate through all of the layers of your adult knowledge that has helped you squelched the original capacity of joy and wonder.  Come back to wonder; yes you still have to pull the difficult loads of adulthood but you are yoked with me, the Christ, who will help you to access rest for your souls even while you bear the burdens of adult life.”

  St. Paul characterized the adult life of sin as a body of death which made him feel wretched.  This perhaps is a metaphor from a method of torture; a prisoner had the body of a corpse tied to him and of course such a torture would drive a person mad.

  St. Paul needed the experience of the higher power of the Spirit of Christ to free him from this torturous experience of a “negative habit” relentlessly clinging to him.  The rest of soul which Christ promises to all is this experience of a higher power within us which does not take us out of life; rather it helps us to access a power and wonder of living to accompany and supplement our adult lives so full of so many things which can sometimes seem to be clinging burdens.

  Let us embrace the insights of wisdom about behaviors and ministry today.  St. Paul found an experience to help deliver him from a torturous state of being internally enslaved to a dreadful habit.  We too can know this interior liberating experience.    The words of Jesus invite us to have wisdom about our ministry today.  Each of us has different ministry and the effective outcomes of ministry is the wisdom of ministry, not the sameness in the style of ministry.  Accept your ministry from Christ; it will be different from the ministries of other people so you need not compare yourselves with others.

  Finally, access your infant aspect of personality, not by being infantile or childish, but by the rousing and powerful memory of the original freshness of coming to life into this world.  This is a place we can access and return to as a new birth.  And this new birth is a yoke that we can have with Christ as we pull the burdens of life.  Let us know how to pull the burdens of life together with Christ and not as tortured individuals.

  Let us hear the voice of Jesus say today: “Come unto me and rest, for my yoke is easy and my burdens are light.”  May Christ help us to find the easing of our burdens today.  Amen.