Homily | 🐎 The Committee and the Yoke

6th Sunday After Pentecost

Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

Click here for assigned Scripture readings

Jesus might have been great at a lot of things. He was a master of parables. The greatest diagnostician of the soul that ever lived. I mean, he’s the Son of God for crying out loud. But a good comedian? Maybe not so much.

Jesus attempts a joke in this gospel passage and I don’t think anyone laughed.

He looks at the crowd here and says: you’re like children sitting in the marketplace, hollering at each other, “We played the flute for you, and you wouldn’t dance! We sang a funeral song, and you wouldn’t cry!”

You can picture this scene if you try... A pack of kids trying to get a game going, and every time, it fails.

Wedding? Nobody dances.
Funeral? Nobody mourns.

Then Jesus delivers the punchline: John the Baptist showed up fasting in the desert, and everybody said, “He has a demon.”
The Son of Man showed up eating and drinking, and everybody said, “Look at this glutton, this drunk, this friend of tax collectors and sinners.”

You can’t win! Fasting is wrong. Feasting is wrong. Piping is wrong. Wailing is wrong. There’s no move you can make in this marketplace that appeases them.

Now, you might think this is a passage about how judgy people were toward Jesus back in the day. And it is.

But I have to confess where I’ve actually met these marketplace children, and it’s not out there. It’s in here.

I have a committee of them in my head. Maybe you have one too. Mine meets at the most inconvenient time: as soon as my head hits the pillow at night. And lately, with all the goings-on in my life, they’ve been in emergency session around the clock. One of them plays the flute: “Be excited! Big things ahead!” Another sings the dirge: “How dare you feel excited. Worry more. Would it kill you to mourn a little?” And whichever one I listen to, the other one files a complaint.

Hopeful? Wrong. Sad? Also wrong. Hold on tighter? Wrong. Let go? Are you insane?! WRONG.

It turns out Saint Paul sat through the same internal meetings a long, long time ago: “I do not understand my own actions,” he writes. He knows the right song. He just can’t make himself dance to it.

It’s hard being a human.

And notice what Paul does not say. He doesn’t say, “I used to be a mess, but then I got serious about my faith and cleaned it all up.” This is the apostle Paul — planter of churches, writer of half the New Testament — saying, in the present tense: the good I want to do, I don’t do. The thing I hate? Yeah... That’s what I do.

If Paul couldn’t get the committee to adjourn, what hope do the rest of us have?

Here’s the part that snuck up on me, though. When I finally listened closely to my own committee — really listened to all that racket — I noticed something. About half the noise was about me needing to be rescued. Needing X to work out, needing Y or Z to not fall apart, gripping every uncertain thing in my life like a life-preserver in stormy water, white-knuckled, as if my squeezing were the thing keeping me afloat.

But the other half of the noise was different. The other half was me assuming a job for myself.

The Savior job.

I need to save this situation. I need to save that person from disappointment. I need to make sure nobody in my sphere ever has to grieve anything or undergo anything hard. I’ll manage it. I’ll absorb it. I’ll fix it.

Well, I have some news that I learned: that position has been filled. For at least two thousand years now. And the interview process, if you insist on going through it anyway, is brutal. The hours are terrible and the results are always lousy.

Look at what Jesus does with the marketplace. He walks right past it. He skips the argument, skips the counter-performance, skips the whole rigged game; steps outside the entire racket and says what’s probably the most beautiful sentence in the Bible:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

Not: come to me, all you who manage your life perfectly and everyone in it. Not: come to me once the committee in your head (or out there) votes unanimously in your favor.

The invitation is this: Come to me, you tired ones. You heavy-laden ones. You who’ve been auditioning your whole life for a game that was rigged from the start.

Here’s the relief of the Gospel: the audition is over. It was never real to begin with. All that time everyone spent judging the talent show, God was out back throwing a party and your name had been on the guest list since before the foundation of the world.

And then Jesus says, “Take my yoke upon you... for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

So, I learned a yoke is a piece of farm equipment. And it’s built for two. You don’t wear a yoke alone. A yoke joins you to another animal, and when one of them is stronger, the strong one carries the weight. You keep walking. You keep pulling. But you’re never, ever pulling alone.

I need this congregation to hear that. Yes, my time here is short. August 2nd will be my last Sunday with you. But know this: Whatever comes in my eventual absence — whatever changes, whatever uncertainty, whatever the future holds for any of us — you are not alone. You walk shoulder to shoulder with everyone here, and you’re yoked to the One whose faithfulness is unwavering. His grip on you is calm. Steady. You can trust it.

And I have to preach that same sermon to myself. Because I don’t walk into uncertainty alone either. None of us do. That’s the whole point. The committee in your head will tell you that everything depends on you: your grip, your performance, your saving everybody. The committee is loud. But the committee is wrong.

The other day, it was all too much, so I took this desperate need to be saved and the need to be a savior into prayer that went something like this:

“Jesus, YOU are the one who does the saving. Not these ideal circumstances I want to happen. And not me. You are the savior. And your work is complete. It is finished.”

I boiled it down to a mantra: “Jesus, you are the savior here.” That became the whole prayer. You can say it at night as your head hits the pillow. Say it in defiance of the committee that stirs in your head (or in your email inbox). Say it in the car. Say it when the flute plays and when the dirge drones.

Which means the main thing in this congregation has never been a program, or an outreach effort, or a building, or any pastor, past, future, or present. The main thing is the outrageous, un-earnable and un-loseable grace of Jesus Christ, and it always has been.

My advice to you, CLC, is this: Keep the main thing the main thing. And the main thing is Jesus’ radical, active and unwavering love for flawed and fumbling people like you and me. It’s the only thing that ever grew anything here.

So, speaking of the main thing. There’s a table set this morning. Jesus’ table. And in a few minutes we’re going to come to it, right in the middle of all our mess, and our questions and confusion... We’ll look each other in the eye, and eat and drink God’s own life. No auditions at this table. No committee approval required. This is Jesus’ church — it always has been. All you and I do is show up as beggars.

And the good news is that with Jesus, beggars are never, ever turned away.

Come to the table. His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

In this meal, you become what you eat. Amen.