Göttinger Predigten
Göttinger Predigten im Internet hg. von U. Nembach
Pentecost Five , 07/09/2017
Sermon on Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30 , by Luke Bouman
Matthew 11:16“But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, 17‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ 18For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; 19the 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.”
25At 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; 26yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. 27All 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. 28“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Meeting or Exceeding Expectations
Geoff walked out of the office puzzled and distressed. He had just been through an “evaluation” with a person from the Human Relations department of his large company. It was his first evaluation and it surprised him. He did not know ahead of time that “all of his co-workers” had been surveyed and that their responses would be used in this evaluation. It was hard enough working in a company with many levels of bosses. But it seemed that the impossible standard against which he had just been judged was the expectations of every worker in the company with whom he came in contact. These expectations would have been unrealistic, even if he had known what they would be. But the fact that he was not privy to these expectations made them impossible.
On the subject of cleanliness, for example, he was judged poorly by two co-workers, one of whom said he was too messy, obviously disorganized and unable to work efficiently, and the other of whom said he was too neat, obviously not working very hard if at all. On the subject of teamwork, one co-worker lamented the fact that he didn’t share everything he was doing with him, while another praised him for his ability to contribute to the team by working on his portion of the project efficiently and effectively. It seemed there was no pleasing anyone. He was so discouraged that he didn’t seem to notice that most of the praise came from his own team, and especially his boss. Most of the criticism came from people who had only marginal working relationships with him in the company.
As he walked by his boss’ office, he stopped in to let her know he was back and getting back to work, but his downcast demeanor attracted her attention and she invited him to come in and sit.
“Just finished your evaluation?” she asked.
“That obvious, huh? Why do they even bother to do things like that? Don’t they know how demoralizing it is to have people you don’t really know impact your performance review?” Geoff realized he was more upset than he was willing to admit.
“HR doesn’t know it, but there are plenty of us who do,” answered his boss. “We are working on some changes. Just remember that I have given you clear expectations and you are meeting or exceeding all of them. Your work as part of this team is judged on things other than those HR surveys. Your work is judged by how we all do as a team in my eyes. And on my team, we hold each other up, something I hope you didn’t miss. I think you are doing well, fitting into the team nicely, and we are doing some great work with everyone else. As far as your job with the company is concerned, that is the thing that matters the most. Take a moment to breathe and get all that other stuff out of your head. Then let’s look at where you are in your progress today. I’m excited about some of the things you are accomplishing. You don’t have to be superman. Who you are is more than enough.”
Expectations can be difficult things. That is especially true as we live and work in community with one another, which everyone but a hermit must do at least some of the time. Unarticulated expectations are some of the most exhausting. Of the many times that I was called upon to mediate between families in dispute, the majority, maybe even all of them have been about unarticulated expectations. One spouse will expect the other to do something without letting them know what they expect. A parent or a child will expect that the other will do something that they haven’t actually ever asked them to do. And these unmet expectations, no matter how unrealistic, lead to disappointment, resentment, even anger or despair.
Even Jesus dealt with expectations like this. His people expected certain kinds of things from any person worthy of the title, “Messiah.” The problem is that each person’s expectations were different, and there were so many opportunities for disappointment. In today’s text, we hear Jesus talk about Messianic expectations in an unusual way. John the Bapitizer is criticized for his ascetic way of life, whereas Jesus is criticized for his alleged propensity to eat and drink with sinners. I suppose what is wrong in each instance is that John and Jesus weren’t living like the people who were criticizing them. I suspect that all of this could very well have been exhausting. Trying to be something other people expect you to be is hard enough. Dealing with failed expectations, constantly, is even harder. And Jesus rarely lived up to the expectations of the people of his day concerning what a “Messiah” was supposed to be like.
Interestingly, Jesus seems unconcerned. He calls what they are doing akin to what children do when they use callous judgment to try to influence one another. This type of manipulation, Jesus rightly says, is not going to work. He claims that the wisdom of what God is up to is reveled, rather, to infants and hidden from the “wise.” At first, it may seem puzzling just what this wisdom might be. What is it that children understand that adults, especially wise adults, do not? I suggest that this may have everything to do with identity and trust.
First, infants’ identities are not something that they have worked for or achieved. They are, out of necessity, something that is given at birth. They are born, to put it plainly, into a family and it is as a child of that family that they are known, and from which they derive their worth. They are loved by their parents and cherished by other members of the family. They are not worth anything because of what they do, but instead are worthy of love simply because of who they are and whose they are. They need not worry about fulfilling anyone’s expectations. They simply live in the love they are given and that love allows them to grow and thrive. That isn’t to say that as they get older they do not have the expectations of love placed on them: to respond in love and to live responsibly into the future as part of the family. But these are not unreasonable expectations, but rather are a part of living and growing.
Second, trusting in the love of their family is actually what allows them to grow. Infants in particular, and children in general, grow by moving between the security of the love in which they find themselves and the risky freedom they enjoy as they begin to explore the world around them. Children who are held too closely, do not develop without freedom. Children who are have freedom to explore, do not grow without the security of love to which they can return when they fail (and thus, do not learn that failure is normal and good!). This dialectic between security and exploration, between love and risk, is itself a kind of wisdom. It is the wisdom of infants. It is also the wisdom of the children of God.
Each of us is reborn into God’s family, a family in which we live in the security of love and are encouraged to go out into the world where learning and growing require risks, freedom and above all, trust in the one who has claimed us as children. If we live in fear of judgment, we never grow. If we never make mistakes we do not learn and become more than infants. God’s love, especially God’s forgiveness, offers us the ability not to go out and do whatever we like, but to grow responsibly within the family. God’s forgiveness is the freedom to make mistakes and at the same time learn from them and become more adept. In the end, it is not expectations that shape who we are, it is love and forgiveness. There, life with all of its twists and turns, is not one long series of unmet expectations in an exhausting cycle of judgment. It is so much more than that.
What Jesus says in today’s reading likely bears repeated to all of us. “Come to me you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” Jesus promises us rest. Jesus promises that the disappointments of the world, whether they be expectations projected on us by other people or whether they be ways in which we go out to live only to be cut short by our own limitations, these disappointments do not have the last word. Even death does not get the last word. Life, love, and the embrace of God await us at the end of each pathway.
Geoff’s job certainly had its ups and downs. Negotiating the, sometimes frustrating, vagaries of corporate life can be exhausting. But knowing that he worked for a team and a boss that valued him and his work and allowed him the freedom to fail gave him the ability to see himself and the company as more than just a job. He thrived with his team and they all thrived with one another. If only all of life could work that way for all of us.
In the midst of everything that is exhausting about our own lives, Jesus stands as a beacon. He is the very embodiment of God’s love, embracing us and offering us the secure place of rest AND the challenging call to be more that go hand in hand with our baptismal vocation. God’s expectation is that we live as God’s children. God expects that we will explore, and sometimes get it and sometimes crash and burn in the process of learning day by day what it means to be God’s child. But in the end, God’s expectations are life and rest for our weary minds and bones. In them we are granted rest from the expectations of the world, unarticulated and unmet. In the end, what God has promised is all we need. He has given us a clear identity, children of God. Trusting in that, and in God’s promise of forgiveness and new life in God’s family, the Body of Christ, allows us to leave behind the exhausting attempts to meet every expectation in a super human way, and to get down to the real business of being truly and authentically human again.