On Travailing

Here's the text of the sermon I preached at St. Ignatius of Antioch, New York City, today.

Pentecost 3, Proper 9A
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

One of my earliest church memories is of the reredos of St. James Church in Pullman, Washington. My father was vicar there in the 1950s. It was wood, vaguely gothic, painted in red, blue and gold, and running across the top were the words “Come unto me all ye that travail”. In 1957 the reredos was moved from the older church and set up in the new contemporary building. That was perhaps my first introduction to the wonderful Anglican way of holding on to an Older Way. My father, of course, explained that travail meant work. Clearly, though, travail wasn’t just any kind of work. I always wondered what sort of work would qualify as travail, so that the Lord might refresh me. I sometimes still do.

That wonderful, encouraging passage comes at the end of a string of sayings that seem deceptively simple . The cute chorus of village urchins taunting passersby. The saying about John the Baptist. Then, after some town cursings, mercifully omitted from our Gospel reading today, another evocation of children, this time as the bearers of revelation, then an involved christological statement, and finally the word of comfort for the weary worker. The sequence seems random, and a common theme hard at first to discern.

And so it would be taken out of context. But, our passage today is actually an answer to the question John the Baptist asks from prison at the beginning of the chapter: "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?" In other words, Who is Jesus?

Jesus begins the answer by pointing to the works his ministry are accomplishing: "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” This is the prophetic description of the inbreaking messianic kingdom, and by indirection Jesus is saying, I am the Messiah. John, says Jesus, is the prophet Elijah returned to Israel, in all his desert asperity. And this is the lead in to the taunting urchin chorus: "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.'” The question, Who is Jesus entails a second question: Who are we? Are we the people who so disappointed the children of the street? If Jesus is the Messiah, are we prepared to welcome him, or will we be put off by our expectations?

If the answer to the question, Who is Jesus, is answered first by applying the prophetic description of the Messiah, the second part of the answer, our Gospel today, contains a more developed answer. John came fasting, and they said he had a demon. Jesus comes feasting, and they say, he keeps company with the wrong people. “Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds." This short saying, dropped into the middle of this discourse as a sort of aphorism, is in fact the key to the question, Who is he?

What are the deeds of wisdom here? The deeds referenced in this section may refer to the ministry styles of John and Jesus, but more likely they refer to the salvation brought to the blind, the lame, the lepers, the deaf, the dead and the poor. In other words, the works of Jesus are the works of wisdom, the works by which she is justified in the face of those who doubt or deny her. In other words, Jesus is wisdom. Jesus is the wisdom of God.

And what is that wisdom? And to whom is it given? It is to children to whom God’s secrets are revealed, even to street urchins, who in their playful rudeness discern the truth. It is to the simple, the little ones, the least, that God opens his infinite heart and discloses his mysterious purposes. The wisdom of God is not bound by human wisdom. The wisdom of God is in fact that Word come into the world, so long expected by the students and scribes and sages of Israel, so movingly described in the wisdom tradition of Scripture. And it is precisely to those who are undervalued by the power of the world that the secret of God’s real power is disclosed: “All things have been handed over to me by my Father.” And it is precisely to these little ones that God reveals his true being: ”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.” God’s Word and Wisdom are disclosed in Jesus of Nazareth. But this disclosure requires humility if it is to be grasped and understood. One must become as a little child to enter the Kingdom of God. And even more radically, “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.”

If Jesus is disclosed as the wisdom of God, then who are we? Are we seekers after God, disciples of John the Baptist, come here today to find the one we have been looking for? Or are we perhaps the ones who can’t see what is before our eyes, like those who rejected both John and Jesus because they did not fit our preconceptions, our expectations or our pretensions, because perhaps the dance we are invited to join is with street urchins instead of the ballet? Or are we perhaps the overworked, the underpaid, the not appreciated, the ignored, the blind, the lame, the lepers, the deaf, the dead and the poor of our own time and place?

The trajectory of today’s gospel suggests that those to whom the Word of Wisdom is addressed are the little ones of the world, the ones who don’t matter, the children of the street, those whose lives are scarred by poverty and oppressed by disability, hopelessness, despair and death. This discourse is exaggerated, perhaps in the way of Middle Eastern rhetoric through the ages. But what do we have in common with them? What part of our lives shares their life? If those disastrous qualities disqualify us from the great race of the world, they are precisely the qualities which gain us entrance into the Kingdom. For it is only when we live in the truth of our limitations, and not just in our glories, that we can stand before God, when we can mourn when it is time to mourn, and dance when it is time to dance, and dance in the street with the children if that is where God gives it to us to dance, it is only when we live in our whole truth that we can recognize the Son of God when He comes among us and know that He, even He who keeps company with gluttons, drunkards, tax collectors and sinners, and perhaps with us, is the one who reveals the truth of God to us.

For most of us, the reality of our life is work. Work to make a living. Work to make a family. Work to make a home. Work to make a community, a city, a nation, a world worth living in. Work to share what we can with others. Work to build a church and work to share the good news of Jesus Christ with those the Holy Spirit brings to us. Work to create what is noble, beautiful and inspiring. Work. Work. It seems sometimes that our work never stops, that every waking moment is given over. I think that is what travail must be. Not just eight hours given for a paycheck, but a lifetime of obligations, faithfully and caringly attended to, even when we would rather not. No wonder our Lord calls it a yoke.

But his yoke is easy, and his burden is light. So join the urchins in their dance. “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.”