Matthew 11: 16-19; 28; Romans 7: 15, 16

What would people think?

Sometimes you’re damned if you and sometimes you’re damned if you don’t.  Sometimes we try to help but our helping is misinterpreted or considered too little, too late.  Sometimes we make choices that aren’t really choices at all, just alternative bad options. The Middle East kind of always seems to feel that way. One moment as a Western leader you’re thinking about supporting one opposition group against a Shiite dictator and next you are supporting Shiites next door against another opposition group.  One moment you enable the Israeli, the next you empower the Palestinians.  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Jesus lays His finger on this when He talks about people complaining about what others do or do not do. “We played the flute for you and you didn’t dance…..John the Baptist came neither eating or drinking, and they say ‘he has a demon;’ the Son of Humanity (i.e. Jesus) came and they say, ‘look a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’”  In others words, these people complain that the ones associated with Jesus, including Jesus Himself, do not do what others do.  They stand out, they don’t follow the rules, they don’t fit it.

In his letter to the Romans Paul again looks deep inside his soul only to find out that he wants to be what God expects of him, but his flaws make him “do the things he doesn’t want to do.”  Part of the things he is doing have to do with society and what people ask of him.  He has to think about what people think and say and we find Paul responding to what people are saying in the different Christian communities he has founded.   Sometimes he seems to go too far in responding to all the talk.  But in the verses of the week he seems to realize, if I read him right, that he shouldn’t follow his insecurity.

So much of our lives, friends, is spent on doing what people expect of us or ask of us.  So much energy is spent on what people are thinking of us.   But we don’t like that about ourselves. We know that if we were to do exactly what we wanted all the time, we might wind up by ourselves most of the time.  And more and more people are.  Some flexibility is needed.  Some give and take is necessary.  But so often we twist ourselves in loops to try to accommodate to some vague or unreasonable expectation. We then, to quote Paul, “do what we do not want to do.”

Now you may think: “ah is telling us to be assertive and put our foot down and let people know we are in charge of our own lives.”  No, not exactly.  What I want to do is point you down a number of verses in today’s lectionary reading in Mathew’s Gospel and soak up the words of Jesus:”Come to me, all you are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” In the next verse He is more specific:”rest for your souls.”  What I want do is draw a connection between the complaints others have about us, real or imagined, and finding rest for our souls.  I think this is crucial you see.  Assertiveness only goes so far, it is really just a technique and in a multicultural society that often just doesn’t work.  No we have to go deeper than that.  Finding rest for our souls, what is that about then?  And how does that help us with the opinions of others?  Well, it has to do with letting go, letting go of the demands.  It has to do with accepting ourselves as flawed, limited individuals who happen to have specific gifts and talents, but perhaps not the ones people expect of us. It has to with loving ourselves, not because we are great, for we are not, but because we are deeply loved by the Creator.  That love is a deep pool of cool clear, clean water, at last in the summer.   In the winter we can use a different metaphor.  But we have trouble really connecting with that love, for it is in our head, but not quite in our guts.  It doesn’t quite radiate down from our heads. “God loves us, yeah ok, I know, say what’s for dinner?”  We must continue trying to connect with that love.  I myself haven’t given up trying. The more we are connected to that love, the less we will need the approval of others, the more we are changed.

Brian Doyle writes of a profound spiritual experience he once had and the consequences it had.   The experience changed him but also kept things in place. This is what he said: “Let it go. I still have a job and kids and my mysterious wife and a bad back and a nasal mutter and too many bills, nothing’s changed outwardly. I didn’t drop everything and hit in the road hunched over and mooing prayer and song, and there are still all sorts of things quietly muddled and loudly screeching in my life…(but) something broke and something healed… But then he talks about how the Divine intimately knows us and he says:” Whatever else you hear today, whatever else you read, whatever else happens in your life, whatever way your heart is bruised and elevated today, remember that.” (Let in go,” in “best Spiritual Writing 2013, p.8/9, Philip Zaleski ed., New York: Penguin, 2012).  The key is understanding that God truly knows us.

Friends,  the road to authentic living that moves us away from the expectations of others about who we should be, that road leads through the keen realization of God’s love for us. Only then will we find rest from the heavy burdens of the mind and the heart.  Thanks be to God.