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Rez is a community where Jesus welcomes, shapes, and sends disciples for the good of our neighborhood. No matter where you are in life, this is a place for you.
Life Together In The Goodness Of God
worshiping with us at Rez. Have you ever walked into a situation and you could feel, you could kind of sense that you've already been sized up? Like people already have an opinion about you, right? They don't even know anything about you but somehow they think they know everything or at least enough about you to judge you. Anybody relate to that feeling? I know we all have. I tend to get it a lot when I'm walking around in my priest collar and I just want to tell people at the store like an HEB, like you don't know me, all right? Don't look at me like that. I'm a nice guy. I'm not, I'm not pretentious, well maybe a little bit pretentious but I don't mean to be, I mean well. I'm sure all of us have felt this way maybe with friend groups, new friends that you make, maybe at a job interview when you sit down and they sort of have an assessment because they've read your resume already, they know who you are or even with family roles. I get this even sometimes too. You fall into these family roles with yourself or with others and people sort of judge and sort of got you figured out. I hate that feeling. Before you've even had a chance, you've been sized up. Jesus saw this in his own time and he handles it obviously way better than I would have ever handled something like this. He looks at the crowd and asks, what will I compare this generation to? And by the way, Jesus is insulting sometimes. It's kind of like brilliant and poetic and people don't know they're getting slapped but it's a little bit of a slap. And I love how he prays in front of people complaining to them to father like, why? You know? So anyways, he has a sense of humor I think as well. He turns the crowd and says, to what will I compare this generation? And then he offers an image that sounds like a lament. It says, it's kind of poetic but I want to explain this. We played the flute for you and you would not dance. We wailed and you would not mourn. Who's the we here? I think this is actually a really an interesting moment in scripture. The we here is Jesus and John the Baptist. They kept showing up with a message from God, something to offer them, a revelation. John came fasting and austere, right? Camel hair, wilderness, honey, wild, you know, locusts and all that business. Eating and drinking. John was what I would describe as sort of funeral mode, like judgment is at hand sort of mode. This is how John came. And the generation's verdict of John he has a demon. Can't be trusted. This isn't from God. Who is this guy? Jesus comes eating and drinking, celebrating alongside tax collectors and sinners in more of a celebratory mode I think. I would call it like a wedding sort of mode, right? If John is funeral, Jesus is wedding, and the generation's verdict on him, they have, we've got you sized up already. We already know this whole business. You're a glutton and a drunkard, they said of Jesus. Two completely opposite approaches, but the generation rejected both John and both Jesus. There is something I think exasperating in Jesus's teachings from this point. We tried, we tried the austere prophet. You found a reason to dismiss him. We tried the feasting friend of sinners, and you found a reason to reject that too. What more can we give? What more do you need, right? It's sort of that exasperation. These folks had already made up their minds before anyone had arrived, before God had come present and speaking and revealing God's self and the kingdom of God, they had already decided. The complaint came before the evidence was really looked at, right? And yet, again, pull up to mind what it feels like to be prejudged and sort of categorized and sort of sized up, right? And in an unfair way. And yet, despite all that prejudgment and rejection, Jesus still makes an offer to these people, to us. The Lord turns to us and says, come to me. These words that so many of us forever have found so relieving, we forget they have come on the heels of rejection and still to this day offered to us even despite rejection. Come to me, the Lord says, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give your souls rest. Doesn't that even just sound like, oh, let's take a nap. This sounds wonderful. Amen. I just want to sit in that for a moment. Come to me, Jesus says. I think the invitation sounds beautiful and wonderful and relieving, but I think what makes that invitation so powerful is the one giving it. So many things in our world promise us rest, right? And relief. So many voices. There's so much noise in our world on your social media feeds, on the TVs or whatever, that promise you happiness and rest and being unburdened. And yet so many can't deliver. So many are not worth our trust. So what makes this me? When Jesus says, come to me, what makes him any different than all of the rest of these voices? Simply the identity of the one who's making this invitation actually changes everything about the invitation, doesn't it? It comes from someone who's already been misjudged and rejected even by us. And one who is still yet with great mercy and humility and gentleness and full of love. Centuries before Zachariah, the prophet told Jerusalem that there would be one coming, describes who this one would be. Your king would come to you triumphant and victorious, yet unlike other kings, humble and riding on a donkey. We read this at Palm Sunday. We remember this prophetic voice as well on that day. Your king doesn't come to you on a war horse. Not like the rest of those insecure powers that have to prove that they've got machismo, like they got this under control when they really don't. And this king will come to dismantle actually those instruments of power and command peace on the earth. And then Zachariah offers this really remarkable phrase. Maybe you've not heard this before. It says, return to your stronghold, oh prisoners of hope. Isn't that rich? Today I will restore to you double, the Lord says. Prisoners of hope. That makes me uncomfortable and comfortable at the same time. I don't know. I don't know what to do with that one. Not prisoners of despair, not prisoners of the rhetoric and the imagination and the sort of forms our world impresses upon us to take on to ourselves, to see the world a certain way, to live and feel and be dictated by these forces coursing through our bodies and in our society. Not prisoners of any of that, but prisoners of hope. People who are genuinely held by something and yet still held by something that not only maybe they don't have, but something that will hold on to them even when they can't hold on to it. Hope like that. This one who offers us this kind of hope, this gentle, meek, humble, trustworthy king, he's the one who is giving the invitation, come to me. Not the one who arrives with power and demands compliance. If you have a view of Jesus or of God and the Holy Trinity as one is so full of power but expresses it by demanding compliance or coercion, that's not true. That God actually doesn't exist. Good news. The one that does exist is actually gentle and humble. He comes writing in a donkey. Paul is a prisoner of that hope that Jesus offers us. And I really can relate to Paul, even though his prison writings at least at this point is like really, Paul I think you could have simple, I don't know, it was a little bit of a knot it feels like all the time, right? I don't understand my actions, he writes. I don't know, I don't do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. Oh, I can relate to that. Who will rescue me from this body of death? Oh wretched man that I am. Paul I feel like has our number on this one, at least for me. It's a cry of someone who's tried everything themselves and yet still can't break free, right? They're still a prisoner in other words of something else. Not of hope, not of freedom, not of righteousness, but a prisoner of their own sin, that war within. Being held captive by that, not by an enemy outside of us or someone else's fault, but really that war that wages within us. Can you all relate to that? Being a prisoner to that. It's to this kind of person, this person who's held captive by those patterns of sin that they even despise, they can't stand, they want to leave behind. That Paul's crying out and it's to that person that Jesus of Nazareth says, you come to me, you. Not the ones who are super religious and have it all figured out. They have that sort of spiritual, you know, coding that, but actually we know inside that there's a mess in there, right? But not the ones that sort of put on a show or tell themselves everything's fine, I'm fine, I've got this on lock, I'm sorted out. Not to those people, but to the ones who are tormented or captive, who are burdened by sin that Jesus says, you, you, come to me. I will show you a good rest. Come to me. Take my yoke upon you, Jesus says. Now, you might have heard this before, but a yoke is the farming tool. It's that big bar that they put across cattle to steer and direct them. And the religious leaders of this time would pile impossible burdens on God's people, adding to the quite burdensome actually. And they would keep these burdens on the little ones that they would call them, or really the folks that were, didn't really have a choice, the more simple, maybe the poor, of course, the marginalized, the pushed out, folks who are desiring to have a life with God. And when they come to worship God and have a life with God and be with God's people, they're just given burdens. This is the experience. And all the while the religious leaders, while heaping burdens, don't lift a finger to relieve those who are suffering, the poor, the oppressed, the excluded. And I love that Jesus takes issue with this. Amen. That's a wonderful thing. Jesus says, my yoke is not like that yoke that oppresses and burdens you. My yoke is actually easy. My burden is light. Not because it demands nothing of us, but simply because what it demands flows from love and not the law. It flows from mercy and grace and not judgment and exclusion. The word for easy here that Jesus uses, it means good or kind or well-fitting, like when you wear a shirt that's like, oh, that's perfect, like that. It works. It works with the grain of our lives. It doesn't try to force us into compliance or overwrite who we are, but it's actually working with who God has made us to be. Where we could breathe with both lungs, that's what Jesus' yoke feels like, working with us, not against us, guiding and gently leading us. This yoke, friends, is something that we are offered daily from the Lord. It's not one that we take on, I think, as regular. At least for me, it's a yoke that I desire, but I can relate to I keep returning to the things that I hate, that hurt me, that hurt others. Things that are just not me and Jesus has shone again and again, come to me. You should try my yoke again. It's really nice. It'll work with you. It'll transform your life. It'll turn you from sin and bring you into the kingdom of God again and again. And what I love about the Lord and what I love about this that is good news, I think particularly, is even in the midst of our struggles, Jesus still invites us, acknowledging that we are weary and that we are burdened and that actually we can't pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and find God. But we worship a God who has come to us in humility and in gentleness. And still, even despite our misjudgments of God or our rejection of God and God's ways again and again, this God keeps coming to us and offering us rest and hope. And friends, when we say yes to this, when we open our hearts and say, yes, Lord, we find ourselves full of life, restored, healed, deeply, deeply loved. And we all know what it's like to be loved and the work that that does below the surface in our lives that we can't even tell you what it's doing, but we know that it's doing some amazing things. And we know what it's like when the Holy Spirit is poured into our lives in the moments of our lives that are troubled or complicated or tired or burdened. We know what it feels like to receive the Holy Spirit, that gift of grace, and to be filled with strength and courage and hope and life. And in that place, when the Lord comes to us in those ways, and will come to you now, we are given everything we need to take those next steps, to make those next decisions, to face that new day or those hard things. And we don't have to have it all together before God approaches us and leads us like this. We don't have to have it figured out. And we don't have to be perfectly faithful. We can't, actually. And yet, God still comes to us, carrying our burdens with us, speaking love and peace into our lives and giving us the strength that we need. So friends, this is the one who's making an invitation, a promise to you, not one who is not proven to be trustworthy, but one who, in fact, has overcome death and the grave and loosed every bond and broke every chain. There is not a thing in the universe that Christ has not overcome. I think he might be trustworthy for this. We might be able to trust. I think Jesus knows what he's doing. When we are in his care, we truly live. So let us respond. Not just hear that invitation once again from the Lord, but may we daily return to the Lord. May we hear him say, come, calling our name and saying, yes, Lord, I'll come. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen. Let's take a moment of silence, and I want