JULY 6, 2008 --- EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Someone once asked Mark Twain if he believed in Infant Baptism. “Believe in it?” he said. “Why, I’ve actually seen it.”
We baptize infants in our church for several reasons, one reason being that we believe it to be biblically based. But there is another reason that is not quite so straightforward. And that is, simply put, that children have no ability to know or reason what is being done for them.
It is a public statement that God’s promises, God’s Covenant, and God’s grace go beyond any reason, intellect and understanding that we humans may have.
No doubt reason and intellect are gifts of the Holy Spirit and education is an act of praising God for this reason and intellect. They are however not prerequisites for faith. Some folks in scripture had a hard time understanding this.
The setting of today’s Gospel (Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30) is this: John, the greatest prophet to come to Palestine in many generations is sitting in jail. Jesus and his disciples have faced rejection from the very people who should have accepted them.
The religious authorities, the civil authorities, all those considered wise and learned were responsible for John’s imprisonment, and they rejected the teachings of Jesus.
Could they not see the wisdom in John’s call to the nation for repentance? Could they not see in the justice that Jesus proclaimed the Advent of God’s Kingdom?
It is important to understand that the Jewish people very much saw themselves as a tribe, a family. Their leaders, espeially their leaders of faith, were more than just character figures; they were the parents of the community, the wise and learned sages in which the repository of all the nation’s knowledge and teachings were found.
More than teachers, more than hired hands, they were charged with the responsibility of providing for the family.
And here Jesus sets up a remarkable irony found in Verse 25. Jesus prays “I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth that you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and revealed them to the infants.”
Hidden from the wise and intelligent; that is the leaders, and revealed them to the infants, the children of the family, the common people.
It is with his first sermon, the Sermon on the Mount, that we read a few weeks ago that Jesus first calls these common and poor people “blessed” and promises that the Kingdom of God was to be owned by them, the ones that much like children owned nothing, had little, and hoped for even less.
Much like children, they were powerless and with no political rights and no social rights.
You must admit that if you were going to start a movement, you would seek out wealthy donors first, and not the destitute.
If you were going to restore the magnificence of a free and independent Judea, you would want the powerful on your side. If you were going to take on the power of the Roman government, you would not waste time with riff-raff. You certainly would not choose the children to lead your army.
This Jesus was a dead-end street and his movement was going to do little apart from making the Romans angry. The leaders did not want a vulnerable Messiah. They wanted a strong leader. The adults of the community did not want a messiah that worked from the bottom up. They wanted someone from the top down. The wise could see that this was going nowhere and going nowhere fast.
Quoting Brian Stoffregen, “We also don’t want a vulnerable God who is born, suffers and dies; we want a God of Success. Certainly Sam Walton or Bill Gates are more like the American ideal of success than Jesus or John. Both are executed for their beliefs, words and deeds.” What they wanted was a God in control, a religion by control, a system of control, and position to control.
They had no control over Jesus. In fact what they saw was that they were losing control in a volatile situation.
The wise and learned had no faith in Jesus because his ways did not make sense, nor did they stand to reason, they did not compute. This was a God out of their control. Infants have no control.
The people of Zechariah’s time had lost control of their own freedom, enslaved in Babylon. In the 9th Chapter, he tells them to “rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion.” Why? Because God is in control.
St. Paul in his beautiful letter to the Roman church almost seems to gloat in acknowledging that he has little or no control over his life. That try as he might, he still bothers to mess it up, things still go wrong, and failure is still in his path.
So is he speaking out of both sides of his mouth when he says, “O wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God!” (Romans 7:24-25)
A statement that doesn’t seem to go together. He is in fact acknowledging that in so much of his life he has no control, in fact the parts he thinks he has control over, he does not. But rejoice because God has control.
And this is the key.
We want to do and be in control and many people seek a religion that does just that. By our very culture and upbringing, we are taught to be in control of our lives. It is perhaps why people today and why we have such a hard time trusting God. “This kind of Messiah wouldn’t do a stupid thing like rising from the dead. He would do a smart thing like never dying.” (Robert F. Capon, ‘Hunting the Fox’)
The insatiable desire to accumulate goods and money is an effort to control our environment and our future. And when we seem to be losing control, we go to our old friend Fear to run and hide.
And this is a burden.
And here is the invitation. “Come to me you that are heavy burdened and I will give you rest.” Jesus says take my yoke upon you and learn from me. Some translations say listen to me. “For I am gentle and humble of heart and here you will find rest for your souls.”
We don’t have to carry all of this control around. The word used for burden means literally “cargo.” And what a heavy cargo it is to carry around; all that need to control the future, manipulate the present, and explain away the past. What a heavy burden to have to pretend that we are in control when the future is not in our hands but in God’s. What idolatry and self-worship we choose by not letting go and letting God have the control.
Today is the 6th of July, the end of a weekend that celebrates the beginning of our country. We call it Independence Day. The Gospel declares this day to be Dependence Day; dependence on Christ Jesus, dependence on the God who has conquered all things.we fear, and independence from the burdens of having to be in charge and in control.
Happy Dependence Day.