The Prayers the Spirit Prays for Us

Text: Romans 8:26-39

The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.

This verse is the scriptural basis for the closing of the prayers of the people, when we rely on the Spirit to pray the secret prayers that are deep in our hearts. We assume with these words that there are longings of our hearts that we cannot express, or perhaps even know in detail.

We are not complete without God. If we are complete without God, would we pray? If we are strong, and clear minded, and self-satisfied, it is hard to know quite what we would pray for. Maybe we could pray in a transactional way, like ordering something from Amazon.com. A prayer could be an order, or a wish list. But this is not what Paul is talking about.

Paul is talking about being separated from God. And things that might separate us from God. Things that get in the way of our being close to God. When you hear that neither death, nor life, not angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor power, no height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus—when you hear these words, you might be moved to tears. How could this be? To be alone from God is scary and disorienting and lonely.

Partly it is like being alone from anyone you long to be with. Your lover, or your parent or your children, or a friend who is far away. Or just being alone. But more deeply, it is that God is part of us, essential to our existence. And to be separated from God is like drowning. Suffocating. We are not built to be without God. Perhaps that’s one of the things we mean when we say we are made in God’s image. You might feel this even if you do not believe it. You might find Paul’s words powerful even if you do not even believe in God. It is not about belief.

In these past few days of hot and humid, people have been feeling crummy and confused. Out of sorts and unable to think clearly. Trying to do useful work in the heat feels like when you read the same paragraph in a book over and over again and just don’t get it because your mind is mush.

But it does not require extreme weather to be distressed and disoriented. We are never as focussed, bright, and strong as we would like to be. It is our creaturely nature. Even though we have deep longings, it is not always clear what we want. Not all that we desire is easily expressed. The Spirit helps us in our weakness, the verse says. The word for weakness means “not strong.” It is not a question of failing or not living up to expectations. No one says you are weak because you cannot lift a mountain. You are just not strong enough. The Spirit helps us because it is our nature to not always know clearly how to ask and what to ask for. Even when we are desperate to. We do not know how to pray as we ought, it says. But again, there is no judgment here, no should. The word translated as “ought” that Paul uses means more like: what we need to say to convey what we mean. We don’t even know it, much less know how to ask for it. Or sometimes we just cannot pray. Out of shame, or anxiety and the press of time, or being tongue-tied. We could use some help.

The Spirit helps us, Paul says. It does not help us like someone we hire to help us. We are not paying the Spirit to do our praying for us. It helps us more like someone who loves us helps us. Someone who knows us intimately and respectfully. Who sometimes knows what we want better than we do. The word that Paul uses to describe what the Spirit does when it helps us is a strange one. It appears only here and in the story of Mary and Martha in the Gospel of Luke. The word implies a generosity plus togetherness, or being with. One Bible says that the spirit joins its help to our weakness.

It seems from this passage that God puts the Spirit into us in order that the Spirit can speak our deepest longings to God. The Spirit intercedes—another strange word that appears only here in all the Bible—intercedes with sighs too deep for words, it says. The Spirit says for us what we cannot seem to express. Our inexpressible groanings, as one Bible puts it. As someone said, we have our own personal groaner. And the job of that groaner is to convey to God our ongoing state and desires.

There are many things that might come between us and God. Things that might separate us from God. Paul makes a partial list of them. They are not cosmic but day to day and ordinary. Hardship: that is, the meeting of daily needs in times of want. Not enough food, no shelter, illness. Distress: that is, being without options, stressed and pressured, feeling stuck in a tight spot, no clear exit. Peril: that is, physical danger, risks and hazards. The sword: that is, war and violence.

Fear and worry and anger and suffering sometimes turn us to God, but just as often they keep us away—drive us away. We become silent as far as God is concerned. We are not interested in praying—either to talk to God or to listen. We feel estranged. Perhaps we want to be separate from God. Perhaps we are looking for reasons not to engage with God. Perhaps we really couldn’t care less about God at the moment. But the Spirit continues to keep the lines open, the channel open.

There is nothing in all creation that can separate us from God. Not even our own silence. It is our destiny, as Paul says, to be connected to God. God makes it happen. Not because of our own efforts or desires, but because of God’s. For better or for worse, we cannot mess this up. God will not leave us alone.

Made from God, when separated from God we feel incomplete and homeless. The Spirit resides in our heart, praying for us, so that we might be drawn home, and made whole.

Saints and Sinners Both

Text: Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

We are going to start today with a little Bible study.

There is a school of thought that says that the closer things are to us, the more influence they have over us, and the more they affect who we will be in the future. Things that are far away in time and space are less important to us day to day than things that are near. One purpose of the Bible, or one thing it has succeeded in doing, is keeping Jesus close to us. Jesus lived and died two thousand years ago, yet his life and teachings remain in us. The institution of the church has done the same, preserving the story of Christ and keeping it near.

The church and the Bible do an OK job of this, but they are not perfect. We are a long way in years and culture from the time of Jesus, and much more from the time of Jacob, the hero of today’s first reading. Our devices—books, tradition, ceremony—do their best. Though the church claims the Bible is inspired (Lutherans of our sort do not officially insist that it is inerrant)—though it may be inspired, no one claims that all interpretations of it are. And even the translations we read are interpretations. It is a twisty road that runs from the words that Jesus spoke in Aramaic to the stories people told about him to the writing down of those stories in Greek by Matthew to the assembling of all the fragments of the Gospel (there is no such thing as the original complete Gospel of Matthew, just little bits), to the translation of the result into English. There are by necessity interpretations all the way, before it even gets to our own thoughts.

Why does this matter? Because everyone in the chain of interpretation has some agenda or other. Everybody has a stake in the meaning of Jesus and his words. Jesus means something, otherwise the people would not even be involved in the program. They cannot help, and they might not want to help, explaining Jesus in a way that makes sense to them in their own time, according to their own circumstances, and in light of their own hopes and fears. We have to remember this because their agenda may not be ours.

Today we look at the agenda of Matthew, the author of today’s reading, in telling this story of Jesus telling a parable. This parable appears only in the Gospel of Matthew, not in the other very similar Gospels of Mark and Luke. It is possible that Matthew made it up, but I’d say that’s not likely. It is likely, though, that Matthew included this parable because it suited his purpose—his agenda—but did not suit the purposes of Mark and Luke. If you want to guess what Matthew’s purpose is, you can refer to the little program guide he includes right after the parable. An interpretation of the parable as an allegory. I suspect this interpretation, even though it is in the Bible, was made up by Matthew. I have doubts that Jesus said what Matthew quotes him as saying.

I say that for two reasons. The first reason is that we know from the rest of Matthew that he was really interested in figuring out why everyone did not immediately turn to follow Jesus. And more to Matthew’s point, why those who did went to a different church than Matthew did and probably disagreed with Matthew. Now, there were not really churches like that in those days, but there were communities of followers of Jesus. And they all had slightly different ideas about what Jesus meant, said, and did. In spite of Jesus command that his followers love one another, by Matthew’s time they probably didn’t.

And the second reason I think Matthew made this up is that in this passage, Jesus interprets the parable. Which he sometimes does elsewhere, but not often. And interprets it as an allegory, which parables were not. Not allegories. Matthew has Jesus saying “this part of the parable stands for this other thing.” But parables are not really told that way. They are intended to be weird little stories that make us think. They are the Christian equivalent of koans. In them, there is usually a shocker of sorts. In today’s parable, the shocker is that the landowner does not weed his crops, but lets a dangerous invasive look-alike plant grow among the beneficial wheat. Why would he do that? That is one of the things that is supposed to make us think.

This does not mean that we can just toss out the allegorical interpretation of the parable. The verses are, after all, still in the Bible. People left them in when they were first assembling and then repeatedly copying this Gospel of Matthew. They could have left them out; they have left out lots of other parts of which we have evidence. But it does mean that we can look at this parable with different eyes than Matthew’s. Which we will do now. (Finally.)

One way to think about parables is that they are like poems. They paint word pictures. They are about deep things in the guise of stories about events. They have points and themes. Matthew picks up these themes in today’s parables, and I’m sure you did, too. (Just because Matthew interprets these themes does not mean they are not in there.) This particular parable is more complex than most, and it has at least three themes. Which are: the existence of evil; the impossibility of human judgment; and a call to action.

[Regarding evil.] Martin Luther promised to spit in the devil’s face. And he wrote that we should share the Lord’s Supper everyday to have the strength to fight evil. In the ceremony in which we welcome new members we all agree to renounce the devil and all his empty promises. What is the cause of bad things, vicious and nasty actions, malevolence? We modern types do not often personify evil. Evil seems mysterious and unexplainable. Often more of a corruption or perversion than an active force, or inherent in creation and life, or sometimes just considered a shortage of goodness.

But in this parable, the sower of the deadly weeds is an enemy, a force for badness, purposely causing harm and sorrow. Evil is not happenstance. There is a battle in the background between two forces, competing for the world, and in this battle we are at the same time the victims, the pawns, and the fighters. It is not that there are good people and bad people, but that that goodness which we all desire fights against the evil which we all deplore. All are on the same side here.

[Regarding judgment]. Though Matthew hopes to punish evildoers, in the telling of the parable Jesus is more gentle. Good wheat exists, and evil weeds exist, but humans are not called to figure out which are which and certainly are not called to eradicate the weeds. We are not called to judge. That does not mean that judgment is not real. There are lots of stories in the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments, about judgment. But the prerogative of judgment and the skill it requires are not ours, do not belong to human beings. Just because we acknowledge evil does not mean we can identify it.

In another story near the end of Matthew, the Son of Man sits on his throne, and separates out the good sheep from the bad goats. But in this scene, first, none of the goats or sheep know which ones they are before they are judged. Which one am I? they all wonder. So people are not able to see very well who is what. And second, it is not clear how many folks end up in the goat pile. If any. Maybe none. Lutherans say that we are all saints and sinners. We are weeds and wheat. It is not even possible to be all wheat, all good. We are not qualified to judge one another.

In the parable, the servants ask it they might pluck out the weeds. But the landowner says “No.” Just “no.” You may not. We are commanded not to judge. It is not just that we are discouraged from making such judgments. We are prohibited from doing so.

[Regarding action]. What, then, are we to do? How shall we behave as human beings in the world. There is a call to action in this story. But not a call to arms. We are guided to be humble, patient, and vigilant. Humble, because we know we are not God’s proxy judges. Patient, because we are not so clever that we can know the future. And vigilant because we are mindful of the devil’s empty promises.

To worry about weeds is not only destructive, it is a waste of time and energy. And it limits our gratitude, joy, and freedom—which seem to me to be good gifts not to be squandered.

Following this guidance, we first of all give God a chance to get a word in edgewise and to do God’s work. And second, we open for ourselves—or maybe better to say we leave open for ourselves—a different way of being than usual, a chance to see things go in an unpredictable and surprising way, to have a larger future.

Like all parables, this one is about something. Many have interpreted this parable as being about the church. (Yet another allegory). But that is a narrow view of things. For this is about the realm of God. Jesus is telling us what the kingdom of heaven is like, he says. This parable is one of a series in Matthew, which all seem to say: there is more to the world right now than you might think, there is a different way to be, and better things are still to come.

Evil and good grow side by side, and it is often hard to tell the two apart. Yet people are called to act with restraint, being mindful of being at the same time saints and sinners, and in the end they trust in God to resolve and reconcile, and are gathered into God.

Depending

Text: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

It may seem odd on this weekend celebration of Independence Day to speak about yokes and burdens. After all, did our forebears not free themselves from the yoke of tyranny and the burden of injustice? Aren’t we the home of the free, not the home of the beasts of burden that work hard for someone else’s benefit? Not home of the servant, the reins of our lives in someone else’s hands.

Yet here is Jesus. As usual, making us think some other way than we’d like to think. Jesus seems clearly to be offering a gift here. A positive good. Come to me, he says, all you who are weary and carrying burdens. Come to me, and I will remove the yoke from your shoulder. Nope. That’s not what he says. Take my yoke upon you, he says, and you will find rest. If you wish to find rest from your burdens and your weariness, put on this yoke, take up this yoke.

You might say—as some have said—that Jesus is offering to join us in bearing the burdens we already bear. A yoke is a device that lets two oxen—or some other animal, or people, even—to pull more efficiently by dynamically balancing the load between them. Two animals can pull more, more easily, yoked together than they could harnessed separately. So, the picture that appears today on the children’s blessing cards that we give at Communion shows Jesus and someone—signifying you or me—yoked together. Jesus is helping us.

But that’s not quite what Jesus says here. He does not say, let me give you a hand. He says, take my yoke upon you. Learn from me.

A yoke is a method for being led, for being guided, a device for those doing the will of another. It is not a device for those who are doing the leading, the guiding, and the directing. A yoke is the answer to the question: who shall guide us and how, not whom shall I guide and how, and not how shall I myself choose the best direction in which to go and how shall I get there. The question to which Jesus supplies the answer is the question we all want to know the answer to. The question is: how shall we live?

How shall we live to most effect our safety and happiness, as the Declaration of Independence puts it? How shall we achieve happiness? How shall we achieve goodness, be good people? How shall we sustain and increase our capacity for love? How shall we increase our ability to have compassion for others who are not like ourselves? How shall we find peace of mind?

The people of this generation, as Jesus calls them, desire to learn, to know, to be shown the answer to these questions. They desire to find a prophetic leader who will guide them and show them the way. They desire this, … and they don’t. They long to be led, … and they don’t. Their wishes are ambiguous and conflicting. They heard John the baptist, who told them how to live. They spurned John, saying that his asceticism was demonic. They heard Jesus, the Son of Man, who told them how to live. They spurned Jesus, too, saying that he was a glutton and a drunkard. They don’t know what they want.

They want to be guided, yet also to refuse guidance. They want to be able to count on others, yet be independent. They want to ask for help, yet reject help. They want to ask for wisdom, yet preserve the right to act in ignorance.

What Jesus offers them—as John before him did—what Jesus offers them is a disciplined way of life. To follow him, which means to be led by him. To put on his yoke. To do what he teaches us to do. To believe in him in the sense that we trust not his existence, or his heredity, but his guidance. Learn from me, Jesus says.

And he says, I am humble of heart. Discipline is by nature a humbling activity. To be humble requires that we acknowledge we are in need of help, that we are uncertain, and that we are not in control. Discipline by nature is a quiet activity. It requires that we listen rather than talk, hear rather than pronounce, that we keep our opinions to ourselves. Discipline by nature is a focused activity. It requires that we put aside distractions, rather than seek them out, and that we strive for a simpler life.

Christianity is religious, not only spiritual, because it embodies practices as well as beliefs. It is a discipline. It requires, among other things, periodic and repeated worship with others, almsgiving to those who have less than we do, regular prayer, and an attempt to love our neighbors and our enemies as we love ourselves and to forgive those who sin against us, and to not worry too much about the future. We gather into communities, churches, both because it is easier to do these things together and because Jesus told us to.

We perhaps have forgotten that the Declaration of Independence was really a declaration of redirected dependence. Not of anarchy or individualism, but a plan to choose how we would be led.

Take my yoke and learn from me. This is an offer of a disciplined life following the guidance of Jesus. This is an offer that, by taking up this way of life, we may find happiness, become good people, have compassion for others. That we will find rest for our souls. That we will know God.

Depending

Text: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

It may seem odd on this weekend celebration of Independence Day to speak about yokes and burdens. After all, did our forebears not free themselves from the yoke of tyranny and the burden of injustice? Aren’t we the home of the free, not the home of the beasts of burden that work hard for someone else’s benefit? Not home of the servant, the reins of our lives in someone else’s hands.

Yet here is Jesus. As usual, making us think some other way than we’d like to think. Jesus seems clearly to be offering a gift here. A positive good. Come to me, he says, all you who are weary and carrying burdens. Come to me, and I will remove the yoke from your shoulder. Nope. That’s not what he says. Take my yoke upon you, he says, and you will find rest. If you wish to find rest from your burdens and your weariness, put on this yoke, take up this yoke.

You might say—as some have said—that Jesus is offering to join us in bearing the burdens we already bear. A yoke is a device that lets two oxen—or some other animal, or people, even—to pull more efficiently by dynamically balancing the load between them. Two animals can pull more, more easily, yoked together than they could harnessed separately. So, the picture that appears today on the children’s blessing cards that we give at Communion shows Jesus and someone—signifying you or me—yoked together. Jesus is helping us.

But that’s not quite what Jesus says here. He does not say, let me give you a hand. He says, take my yoke upon you. Learn from me.

A yoke is a method for being led, for being guided, a device for those doing the will of another. It is not a device for those who are doing the leading, the guiding, and the directing. A yoke is the answer to the question: who shall guide us and how, not whom shall I guide and how, and not how shall I myself choose the best direction in which to go and how shall I get there. The question to which Jesus supplies the answer is the question we all want to know the answer to. The question is: how shall we live?

How shall we live to most effect our safety and happiness, as the Declaration of Independence puts it? How shall we achieve happiness? How shall we achieve goodness, be good people? How shall we sustain and increase our capacity for love? How shall we increase our ability to have compassion for others who are not like ourselves? How shall we find peace of mind?

The people of this generation, as Jesus calls them, desire to learn, to know, to be shown the answer to these questions. They desire to find a prophetic leader who will guide them and show them the way. They desire this, … and they don’t. They long to be led, … and they don’t. Their wishes are ambiguous and conflicting. They heard John the baptist, who told them how to live. They spurned John, saying that his asceticism was demonic. They heard Jesus, the Son of Man, who told them how to live. They spurned Jesus, too, saying that he was a glutton and a drunkard. They don’t know what they want.

They want to be guided, yet also to refuse guidance. They want to be able to count on others, yet be independent. They want to ask for help, yet reject help. They want to ask for wisdom, yet preserve the right to act in ignorance.

What Jesus offers them—as John before him did—what Jesus offers them is a disciplined way of life. To follow him, which means to be led by him. To put on his yoke. To do what he teaches us to do. To believe in him in the sense that we trust not his existence, or his heredity, but his guidance. Learn from me, Jesus says.

And he says, I am humble of heart. Discipline is by nature a humbling activity. To be humble requires that we acknowledge we are in need of help, that we are uncertain, and that we are not in control. Discipline by nature is a quiet activity. It requires that we listen rather than talk, hear rather than pronounce, that we keep our opinions to ourselves. Discipline by nature is a focused activity. It requires that we put aside distractions, rather than seek them out, and that we strive for a simpler life.

Christianity is religious, not only spiritual, because it embodies practices as well as beliefs. It is a discipline. It requires, among other things, periodic and repeated worship with others, almsgiving to those who have less than we do, regular prayer, and an attempt to love our neighbors and our enemies as we love ourselves and to forgive those who sin against us, and to not worry too much about the future. We gather into communities, churches, both because it is easier to do these things together and because Jesus told us to.

We perhaps have forgotten that the Declaration of Independence was really a declaration of redirected dependence. Not of anarchy or individualism, but a plan to choose how we would be led.

Take my yoke and learn from me. This is an offer of a disciplined life following the guidance of Jesus. This is an offer that, by taking up this way of life, we may find happiness, become good people, have compassion for others. That we will find rest for our souls. That we will know God.