When Jesus Drives, Life Tastes Better

The Holy Gospel According to St. Matthew, the 11th Chapter

“But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ For John

came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the 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.”

At 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; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All 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. “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

It’s the 4th of July weekend and personally, I can’t think of anything more patriotic than grilling meat and since the Gospel is also all about food and eating, it seems divinely ordained that this sermon focus on grilling!   I love grilling but so often when I find a new grilling recipe it’s so complicated that you need a Master’s Degree in Food Science to pull it off!  Now it just so happens that I HAVE a Master’s Degree in Food Science but when I’m grilling, those super complicated recipes just take the fun out of putting meat and fire together. 

Jesus also had a problem with things getting too complicated.  His problem wasn’t with grilling but with the Pharisees.  One of the things they complicated was the food and eating part of life and so in today’s Gospel lesson, for different reasons, both Jesus and John the Baptist were under fire for their choice of eating habits.  You see, in Jesus’ day social networking meant sitting down and eating a meal together.  That was the way people stayed connected.  By adding extra rules about eating, the Pharisees isolated the Jewish community so they would remain separate from the outside world and that isolation, the theory went, would make it easier to be faithful.  John the Baptist ignored that rule by choosing to eat alone, outside of the community.  Since he didn’t follow the rules by eating with other good Jews, and didn’t act “normal,” the Pharisee’s accused him of having a demon.  John was certainly filled with unusual things like locusts, but not demons.  Jesus got in trouble for breaking the rule in the completely opposite direction.  Unlike John, Jesus did eat with other people, the trouble was that he ate with EVERY single sort of other people!   

To be fair, the Pharisees were trying to help.  They saw the Ten Commandments as life’s steering wheel and steering by the commandments is what kept your life out of the ditches.  The Pharisees, honestly wanting to help, added additional rules so you wouldn’t just stay out of the ditches, but by following these extra rules you wouldn’t even get close to the yellow line!  Unfortunately, even with good intentions, the extra rules made life too complicated and in the end, the people lived for the rules rather than the rules helping them live for God.    

More, it turns out, is not always better.  THAT is why I like The Webber Big Book of Grilling.  This is the one grilling cookbook that cuts through the technical mumbo jumbo and just gets down to what really matters:  Meat, some simple ingredients and fire.  That approach makes it a pleasure to grill and, here’s the key, because it’s not so complicated, it encourages me to grill more... not less.

THAT is what Jesus was doing as well.  He wanted to cut through the technical mumbo jumbo the Pharisees had piled onto God’s Law because all those extra rules weren’t actually helping the people get closer to God; in fact most often, they were distracting people from being faithful and some people just gave up all together.  Jesus offered a different approach.  Instead of worrying about all those extra rules of the road... simply let Jesus drive!  That’s what “take his yoke upon you” really means.  The easiest way to go down the path of life toward the peace and fulfillment God wants for all of us is not by adding complicated rules and doctrines.  The easiest way is to simply allow your life to be steered by Jesus... by living the Jesus Way... by giving instead of getting... by loving God and loving neighbor.

Of course, there are a million other things out there, besides Jesus, that offer to drive our lives for us and promise peace and prosperity in return.  If we follow their plan, buy their product, put on their yoke, get more money, grab more power, buy better gadgets... if we just get MORE… THEN our lives will be so much better!  But, when we yoke ourselves to money, power and stuff, we ironically don’t get more peace even though that’s what we wanted!  We simply get MORE and that MORE becomes an even greater burden to our lives.  Then, feeling less peace, we try to hold on even tighter, get more control, get more stuff, climb higher, step on more people and it all becomes an endless cycle that continues to drain life instead of give it. 

The difference between yoking our lives to Jesus and yoking our lives to all the other things that promise life, but fail to deliver, is that all those other ways always say you need MORE to be at peace, while the Jesus Way teaches that the more completely we give our life away, the more we live for the other, the more we focus on loving our neighbor, the greater the peace... the better the life we will have.   Now, I’ll be the first one to admit - I can preach it… but when it comes to living it, “Yeah, verily, I stinketh at it!”  Like the Apostle Paul, I don’t seem to do what I want to do, but do the exact thing that I hate.  It shouldn’t be that hard, just let Jesus drive!  But the reality of being human is that sometimes it is easy for me to let Jesus drive but at other times I just have to insist on driving myself and invariably I find my life rolled right into one of those ditches and up to my neck in muck.

The Good News is that no matter how well we trust and no matter how well we stay on the road or end up in the ditch... no matter how well we let Jesus drive or insist on driving ourselves, God’s love for us is complete.  Now, God would RATHER that we enjoy the journey of this mortal life and the way to do that is by following the road God, through Christ, has laid out for us - giving of ourselves, loving God and loving neighbor.  God would LIKE for us all to stay out of the ditches… simply because, well, God loves us!  But God isn’t going to heap on extra punishment for falling in the ditches… the muck you find there naturally is it’s own unfortunate reward.  The truth is that God really does LOVE us and created us to live an abundant life, not one spent covered in muck… but whatever way we choose, as we choose day by day, God’s love for us will always be with us.

You see, life is like a beautiful 2” thick Prime Ribeye steak given to us as a gift by God.  It is ours to do with as we would like.  We can choose to take control and cook it ourselves and it will inevitably taste like it was baked in an oven to flavorless leather OR we can give it… all of it… to Jesus and our lives will taste like it was given a perfect dry rub, seared and finished on a hot grill to a perfect medium rare and served with a well aged red wine.  The Jesus Way, it turns out, is simply better… it doesn't need to be any more complicated than that!  Amen.