Zechariah 9:9-10 | Romans 8:9, 11-13 | Matthew 11:25-30

 Oh God, who in the abasement of your Son, who raised up a fallen world, fill your faithful with holy joy, for on those you have rescued from slavery to sin you bestowed eternal gladness.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The opening prayer is always a fascinating way to begin to work on the scriptures that I have before me.  This opening prayer is really interesting, because it says, “For those who I have rescued.”  Jesus’ role is to rescue us from the slavery to sin and bestow on us gladness.  What does it mean to be rescued from the slavery to sin?  In my earliest years of learning about the God who I have grown, over these last many years, to begin to really know personally — the way he was presented to me was so much of a caricature of who he is, because one of the motives, it would seem to me as I look back on my early days in the church with my family, what seemed to be the challenge of a young boy or girl was to be obedient, obedient to their parents, obedient to God.  Obedience was the big thing, and any time you were not obedient, that was called a sin.  So what happened when you sinned is — and this is the part that is, in a way, very sad for a lot of us that grew up in that kind of environment where we were told then we lost God’s favor, and he was angry and even so angry that, if we didn’t go to confession and get the help of a church person, a priest, to talk God into forgiving us, we would go to hell if we died.  So it was a really interesting way to begin this relationship with God, to whom I have a very, I think, wonderful, wonderful relationship with him, because to me he is the antithesis of that.  He is an absolute, unconditional lover.  Nothing, nothing can change his desire to bring life to you and to me.  He is so deeply connected, personally involved, engaged in our life.  That’s the whole message of scripture.  The God who is in the law, the God who is in these systems is finally revealing himself in the New Testament as a God of intimacy, a God who enters into us, a God whose Spirit dwells in us.  

So when I was in that old system, the biggest mistake I made was I had to get rid of sin.  I’ve got to get rid of sin.  That was my seven-year-old brain saying, “Okay, this is not that hard,” because to be honest, you make your bed, keep your room clean, say thank you.  It wasn’t hard.  So I took it on as, “Okay, this doesn’t seem to be difficult.  I’ll do it.  I’ll be the best little boy.”  That lasted for a little while, until I began to have all these other feelings inside where there was something in me that seemed to be not in sync with what God wanted, and it was mostly around my, as you grow into this, it’s around your sexuality.  It’s around your drive.  It’s called sometimes the flesh, and we see Paul warning us in the second reading about beware of the flesh, the flesh, the flesh.  What’s interesting about that image of the flesh in scripture is it’s often almost directly related to sexual sins, and that makes sense, because flesh — come on, that’s what — we’re attracted to someone else’s flesh.  What’s interesting about what Jesus is trying to say is that, “I have come into the world to invite you into a world that is not,” what he would call living in the flesh but living in the spirit.  So what does that mean?  Well, living in the flesh means living solely out of the most basic human drive we have, self-preservation.  It’s a tremendous power inside of us, this thing we call our ego, our will.  When it sees something it wants, it goes after it.  It really wants that and can disregard all kinds of rules and laws and disobey rules and laws in order to satisfy the flesh.  All right, so it’s the self-centered part of every human being, and that is, yes, partly exposed, I guess you’d say, by our sexual drive, but it’s much bigger than that.  It’s more about the fundamental, human dilemma of feeling we’re supposed to be in charge.  We’re supposed to be the source of everything.  We’re supposed to be the one who accomplishes things.  

It was the sin of Adam and Eve.  I’m always irritated when I listen to people talk about the sin of Adam and Eve, and they made it sound like, well, God sat there and thought about, “Well, here are the laws of God.”  And they really didn’t know — they only had one.  It’s almost like, “Don’t eat the cookie that’s on the counter.”  But their human nature was such that they were in innocence, and they were, in a way, primitive when it comes to evolution of their understanding of who they are.  But what they really wanted more than anything else, which seems very normal for a human being, like an adolescent who said, “I want to make my mark on the world.  I want to accomplish something.  I want to do something.”  And so what the devil was doing was just awakening in them this natural drive in human beings called the flesh, where they would like to be basically the source of most everything.  So you look at that, and you say, “Okay, well, that’s then.  Somehow that’s the nature of sin, to be wanting to be in charge.”  And another thing about the sin of Adam and Eve is they were really looking at the world with a kind of primitive consciousness, a lot of ego, and basically what they were looking at is they wanted somehow to be the ones that could determine what was right and what was wrong, a binary world.  That’s what I was taught.  There’s a binary world out there.  “Little Donny, there’s a bad thing, and there’s a good thing you can do.  They’re two different things.  Now, what you’ve got to do is never do the bad thing and always do the good thing.”  Well, how are you going to do that?  Well, you’ve got to be in charge.  You’ve got to control.  

Now, if you’re given a job that you can’t accomplish, or at least if you do try to accomplish it, it’s never going to be successful, I would call that slavery.  You can work yourself into a relationship with sin, which the opening prayer say, “Please God, free us from this,” where your work all through your life is, “How can I stop sinning?”  Now, one of the easiest ways to stop sinning is to attack the part of you that wants to sin.  So you can be violent toward your human nature, your body, your natural inclinations, and you can do tremendous violence to yourself and self-hatred and shame and anger that I can’t get past this.  Think of it.  That is being a slave to something, because you’ll never accomplish it.  You’re just caught in this constant work of trying to do something that you can’t do, and there’s a master there saying, “It doesn’t matter whether you can do it or not.  Keep trying.” 

I want you to listen to these readings as a way of trying to answer that — how would I call it — that really unhealthy way of trying to figure out what God wants us to do in this world.  He doesn’t want us to stop sinning as a direct thing that we work for.  He wants us to do something else, and it’s so radically different.  The one is a lot of effort, a lot of energy.  It’s giving in to it.  You’ve got to push, push, push, force, force, force, and it’s a burden.  It’s really a burden, and you just run out of energy.  So when you hear in the gospel Jesus saying, “Look, if you just come to me and understand who I am and just know me and know what I’m there to teach you, this thing I’m asking you to do is not really difficult.  It’s easy, and the burden is light.”  So how can you say fighting sin is going to be easy, or it’s not going to be something heavy?  Well, it would have to mean that you’re not the one in charge of getting rid of the sin.  It’s got to be done for you.  In other words, what you’re invited to do is not change yourself but invite into you, or better word, receive from God this gift of his Spirit.  It’s the whole thing of the New Testament.  Jesus entered into the world to show us what it means to be human, to struggle with all the things he struggled with, to have an ego that didn’t want to surrender to the way the ministry was unfolding.  He resisted God’s plan initially in the Garden of Gethsemane.  All those things, those are all parts of his flesh, but somehow he was able to witness for us the fact that the Father did live inside of him.  He would give — Jesus would always give the credit for anything he was able to do that was beyond human nature in its more basic form, he would always give the credit to God.  So what he’s trying to say is, “Look, you have to understand that the whole thing that I’ve come to teach is not about you being in control of the weaknesses of your flesh and demanding and forcing yourself to do what’s right.  No, I’m saying you can’t do that.  You’re not going to be successful in that.  What you’ve got to do is allow something to happen to you.  Let me come into you, and something is going to radically change.”  Well, how would it change?  Well, it’s because, as Paul says, there is a spirit that’s given to your mortal bodies, and it dwells inside of you, and we’re no longer going to be under the power of the flesh and be slaves to the flesh.  We’re going to live according to something else.  It’s the Spirit of God living inside of us.    

So when Jesus is talking in the gospel and he’s saying, “Father,” and it’s rarely we have a quote in scripture of Jesus talking to the Father, but this is interesting.  All right, he’s come to change everything for us.  He’s come to change the whole way in which we focus on ourselves and God.  He took away from us the burden of a law that we have to follow and the punishment that is due to that law if we fail.  He took that all away and gave us something else, a gift, Spirit dwelling in us, God living in us, and the most interesting thing about that dynamic, when God comes into us, it doesn’t change us radically.  It doesn’t all of a sudden; we don’t have any more sin.  No, the sin remains, and we still find ourselves overcoming it, and the way we overcome it is not through our own effort but through the gift of the Spirit.  But here’s the genius of God.  Does he take away the sin?  Does he take away the flesh, the desires of the flesh when he heals us of its power over us?  No.  No, he leaves it.  We deal with it constantly.  It just — it evolves.  At one time my flesh was demanding attention from people.  Now my flesh demands something else that’s a little more sophisticated maybe.  Like I’d really like to be good at what I do, and I’d really like to be effective and not so much because I want people’s attention, which was the beginning, but I just want to know that I’m really, really spectacular.  That’s ego.  So what he’s saying is, “If you’ll let me enter in you and let your humanity remain there, you will always be patient and kind to other people that are struggling.”  You don’t get rid of the struggle.  You get rid of the failure of giving in over and over and over again.  Being slave to a sin means sin is more powerful than you are.  Yes, that’s true, but not any longer, not since redemption.  No, the Spirit enters into you, and the Spirit can see through sin in ten seconds.  It never produces what it promises.  It never ever is what we really think it will be, and that’s called wisdom.  And Jesus says so clearly to his Father, “The only people that can get this are the people that are teachable, the people that don’t have a focused interest in their ego being the thing that makes them into who you want them to be.  They’re open.  They’re receptive.  They’re needy.”  

Children are the easiest people to teach, because they don’t have any sense of their own autonomy on their own.  They need someone outside of them to help them.  Unfortunately we grow out of that, but spiritually we never grow out of it.  Spiritually we’re always in this disposition of needing and longing for someone inside of us who gives us the strength and the wisdom and the ability to make the right decision.  We change, but we never become perfect.  I think perfection was the greatest mistake that, no, the greatest lie that I was given, that I am supposed to get rid of my humanity.  No, I’m supposed to welcome it, accept it, forgive it for what it is, be patient with it, but know there’s something given to me that enables me to transform it in the moment and be a life-giving force to someone around me. 

Father, our faith has been formed by those around us, and so often they haven’t given us the full picture.  They haven’t really opened us to the fullness of who you are and what you plan on doing within us and how close you are to us.  Bless all of us with trusting in the direction you can give to each of us if we open our heart to who you are, just listen, meditate on who you revealed yourself to be so we can feel the joy and the freedom and the peace that is our inheritance.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.