What is so great about NORMAL?

Today's reflection which could be called "Late and Long" which it is, but it is titled "What's so great about NORMAL or Jesus said take my normal upon you."

Matthew 11:25-30 NRSV
25 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; 26 yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. 27 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.
28 ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29 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. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’

These words of Jesus feel some how infuriating at times like this. Or at least they might for those of us who are in the position of leadership in the church.

In the Methodist Church we have just spent part of the last week in our Methodist Conference (normally held in person but for the first time via ZOOM), what it felt as though we were doing was just trying to keep the wheels on the Church. To find a way of just keeping going until we come out the other side and we can get back to normal.

What is so great about “normal” anyway? It feels as though we are flogging ourselves to death trying to stay alive! Keep services going, keep bible studies going, get the buildings open for prayer, make sure the jobs in the church are filled, ensure we are having the right meetings at the right times. It seems never ending and never changing.

And then we hear the voice of Jesus from the Bible telling us that his yoke is “Light!” That we are to come to him when we are weighed down.

What do we do when we are weighed down with the burden of being CHURCH? Is this the Normal which we are so desperate to get back to?

We have a word for NORMAL in the Church and that word is Tradition. The way in which we have always done things. It does not mean it is the right way, it means it is simply the familiar way, the known way, the way which has worked before. Even if we see diminishing returns from the old way it is the way of lower risk.

Here we are trying to keep tradition going, worrying about declining membership, declining offerings and buildings which were falling apart even before we left them empty for months on end.

How dare Jesus say;
“Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

I feel more weighed down now than before I started going to Church! How dare he call his burden light and his yoke easy? Loaded down like a pack mule with a yoke steering me the Church’s way and all the additional responsibilities as a Christian and Church member piled on top of paying bills, housekeeping, taxiing children to this club or that event, mowing the lawn, cooking tea and loading the dishwasher. And now a pandemic virus on top of all that and radical social change sweeping the world.

People with problems don’t want to come to church for fear of being given more worries than they had before they walk through the door.

The Christian Comedian Milton Jones says that Church is like a Helicopter, “people don’t want to get to close for fear of getting sucked up into the rotas.”

Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

It can feel more like here, hold this, and this, and these things too!

The thing is though, this is NOT the yoke which Jesus wanted to give us.

These burdens which weigh us down, the worries of am I good enough, blessed enough, do I give enough, am I working hard enough, am I volunteering enough. These do not come from Christ, these are not his burden and they are not his yoke.

The Message version of these words of Christ runs like this; It helps if you read it in an “info-mercial” voice in your head.
Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

I think what Jesus was doing was trying to tell people that their tradition, their NORMAL, their way of doing things, their way of being, was what was crippling them. The Message version of the reading gives something of the “sense” which I think Jesus was trying to get at.

Matthew, the writer of this Gospel, was writing for a very Jewish audience, so he used language that they understand so that they could read his book and understand the references which pointed Jesus out for who he was.
It was like a language within a language. It’s like when you hear young people talking to each other on the bus and, while you are positive that it is English that they are speaking in, you still have no idea what they are actually talking about. It comes to us all and it has even come to someone as hip and funky and down with the youth as myself.

Okay so Matthew’s Gospel is using a Jewish way of speaking. And as I have said before, Jesus doesn’t waste words, so when he says to take his yoke on you and that his yoke is easy, what is he saying?

What’s a yoke? No it is not the yellow bit of an egg. Y O K E. A yoke is what was and still is in many places used to place over the head of one or more oxen or horses or something and connecting them to some farming equipment like a plough or something.

It is something which is used for two purposes, one it is necessary for the animal to do its work. Without it the animal would just walk off and leave the plough behind.

The second is that it controls the animal, it guides it and steers it. It makes sure it does not stray off the path that it’s master has set it on.

What’s this got to do with Jesus? Well this time it was more than just Jesus drawing an example which people would be familiar with from their lives. This had a known spiritual meaning.

A yoke was a familiar image from the Bible to those listening to Jesus. It was a symbol of a burden, sometimes one of oppression such as the Yoke of iron which the Jewish people were told by God that they would end up with in slavery to their enemies if they did not stick with God in joy and gladness. And sometimes it was a burden of duty and responsibility as is the Yoke of the Jewish Law.
It was the tradition, it was the normal.

Every Rabbi, had their Yoke. The Yoke of a Rabbi, who was a Jewish religious teacher, was that Rabbi’s on interpretation of the Law (and by the Law we are talking about the 10 Commandments and the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy).

Normally a Rabbi’s teaching on the law was to emphasise all the duties and sacrifice the law demanded and how difficult it was.

Jesus had this to say of such teachers;
“The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. They do all their deeds to be seen by others. For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, and they love the place of honour at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi[b] by others.

Now wait a minute, this sounds painfully familiar.
It is like a mirror held up to the world of today. Jesus criticised these actions of the religious then and here we are doing it all over again.

The religious leaders of the day would take the law and add pages of supplements, about how you should keep it and what it all meant. So, the Ten Commandments became hundreds.
1, then 1a, 1b, 1c and so on……

Not for Jesus though, he took all the law and the commandments and instead of piling on extra instruction he said;
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.’ This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: ‘Love others as well as you love yourself.’ These two commands are pegs; everything in God’s Law and the Prophets hangs from them.”
That’s it, not the 613 laws of Moses plus all the commentary of the Talmud. Two commandments, Love God, Love others and the rest will follow.

Jesus was speaking then, not to people weighed down by sin, but to people weighed down by the narrow and burdensome definitions of the law.

Jesus was telling people that if you spend your lives working your socks off trying to keep the letter of the law you will wear yourselves out and never manage to keep it. However, what Jesus was offering was a different yoke, an easy yoke, actually let me teach you a new quick and easy Greek word that you can use to impress your friends and wow at parties. Where it says Easy the word is Chretos which has many meanings, like good and kind and easy but in relation to a yoke it meant fitting. Jesus teachings about how to live would fit peoples lives, they would not chafe or rub or bruise, they would enable them to do the work they were called to without being weighed down and like a yoke on an Ox they would guide the believer the way that master wanted.

We have built for ourselves an ill-fitting yoke, a tradition which worked but became less effective so we built a new tradition on to that one, we changed, we tinkered and we added. It is like a website which needed to grow and adapt to a new world, new apps and new devices and instead of building a new site the designers patched things on to it. Or, to use Biblical language, it is like a wine skin which developed holes and was patched up instead of just getting a new one. The trouble is when you add a lively new wine which is still fermenting to a skin like that it will leak everywhere.

In the Methodist Church, which our community is part of, we have tool known as the Methodist Quadrilateral which we use to help us navigate the world and faith. Well, I say use but fear it may be gathering dust on a shelf these days.

The idea is that it is made of 4 parts which talk to each other and help us to understand who we are, where we are and where God is leading us.

The Parts are; Scripture, Reason, Tradition and Experience. I think that sometimes we act as if all of these parts are static and unchanging when really only one is and it is NOT Tradition, it is not our NORMAL.

Scripture, as in the written word of the Bible is what it is, we might get better at reading it, we may find better translations but the original words on the fragments we have and the fragments we may find in the future, were written a long time ago and the ink marks do not change.

The point I am making is that if our Reason and our Experience tells us that we can read scripture differently to how it was read before it is Tradition which needs to change to balance the equation.

Tradition, normal, the yoke we wear can change. When it stops fitting right, we can and we should take it off. Take off the yoke we have made and put on the yoke of Jesus.
To paraphrase Jesus.

‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, take them off your shoulders and take this. Take my NORMAL upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my NORMAL is easy, and my burden is light.’

How would it be if, after we lay down our normal we simply let only those two commandments measure and guide our life and work as followers of Christ. Asking ourselves the questions; Is this about Loving God? Is this Loving others?
The Church of Christ was never supposed to be a monolithic organisation but a dynamic movement concerned with Loving God with everything that it had and loving its neighbours with extravagance.

What if we just act as Christ acted. Loving the unlovable, cleaning the filthy, healing the sick, speaking truth to power, challenging injustice, welcoming the stranger whether they are like us or not?

What if we stop thinking about “getting back to NORMAL” and instead thought about being a people carrying the yoke of Jesus?

A People not concerned with if the flowers have been changed for Sunday morning but concerned if people have enough food.

A People not concerned with how much money we have kept for a rainy day but concerned that there are people who cannot pay their bills.

A People not concerned with membership numbers but concerned that there are people on our very doorsteps who feel that they could never belong.

A People not concerned with how good or bad the preacher is on a Sunday but concerned that there are people who have not heard the message that God loves them.

A People not concerned with the coffee rota but concerned with showing true hospitality to the drunks, prostitutes, drug addicts, poor, lost, damaged and hurting.

A People not concerned with what people think of it but concerned only with what God thinks of it!
After all, what is so great about NORMAL?