Looking Like Jesus

Matthew 11:28-30

January 7, 2024 • Mount Pleasant UMC

We live in unprecedented times, and not just because it’s a new year. We are experiencing what has been called “the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country” (Davis & Graham, The Great De-Churching, pg. 3). Today, there are about 40 million adults in our nation who used to be part of a church but who no longer attend any religious services. That’s about 16 percent of the adult population. The polling firm Gallup, which has tracked American religious participation for eighty years, found that now for the first time more American adults stay home on Sunday mornings than attend worship. They also found that only slightly more than a third of people in the United States have confidence in the church. “Americans are most confident in the military and in small businesses” (Hunter, What Jesus Intended, pg. 17). “This is not a gradual shift; it is a jolting one” (Davis & Graham 3).

We’ve experienced that here. If you’ve been here for a while, you can probably look to the left or the right and notice that there are people who used to sit in your pew but are not sitting there any longer. Some people became “casually dechurched,” mostly during the Covid-19 pandemic. When churches were closed, some people developed other Sunday morning rhythms and when we opened back up again, they stayed with those new rhythms, rhythms that did not include corporate worship. Many of the casually dechurched still believe everything they believed before and some even worship online occasionally, but they have found other things to fill the time that corporate worship used to take. But do you know what the researchers found? Those new activities have not met the needs that corporate worship used to meet. They don’t meet the needs we have to belong to something great and to connect with others. Researchers found that 51% of those who are casually dechurched were “willing or very willing” to come back if someone asked them. Fifty-one percent. So look to the left or the right again, and think about how you might invite that person who used to sit there to join you again (cf. Davis & Graham 24, 28-29).

But then there are others who have left the church for, well, a lot of different reasons, but the underlying theme is that they have become disillusioned by religion or hurt by the church. When we were on our cruise in November, we met some folks like that. One night at dinner, the truth came out that I was a pastor, which always inspires interesting conversations. But these folks shared that some hard things had happened in the churches they grew up in, some devastating things, and they just stopped going. I’ve seen it happen over and over. It has led to many people today saying they are “spiritual but not religious.” I get what people mean by that statement, that they are rejecting the institutional aspects of faith. Some people don’t want to use the word “religion” to describe the Christian faith, but the fact is, by every definition, Christianity is a religion. We have actions and practices and customs and traditions and beliefs and ethics, things which are the very definition of religion. If there are not those things, if there are not the boundaries that come with “religion,” then we end up in real danger and often in a place where you can believe anything and do anything and still call yourself a Christian. Do we see any of that today? The issue is not really with what we call this faith of ours. The issue is that sometimes things go wrong in church life, and when that happens, the very things that are supposed to bring life and hope and joy instead are abused and bring pain and sadness and sorrow, along with a profound sense of loss. Church hurts hurt more than a lot of life’s others hurts. They are personal, deeply internal, on par with divorce or death (Hunter 8). And when those hurts happen, however they happen, we end up with people like we have today deconstructing their faith and wondering if they can ever reconnect with a God they once loved.

I want to say this morning and through the next month that you can survive church hurt, that there is hope in the midst of the rubble caused by bad religion. What we’re going to do here at the start of the year is to look at some of the things—not all by any means—but some of the things that cause people to struggle with the church today, and my prayer is that we’ll begin to provide some hope or at least a new perspective. So to begin that journey, this morning, we need to have a clear picture of what this faith is about. It’s said that law enforcement officers don’t learn to spot counterfeit money by studying the fakes; they learn what the real looks like and then the counterfeit is obvious. I think the same thing is true of faith. I believe the struggles a lot of people have today is not with genuine, Jesus-centered religion; it’s with a fake they have encountered, a fake they believed to be real. And so to begin this morning, we’re going to consider what genuine Christian faith looks like, and not surprisingly, it looks like Jesus.

Well, I say “not surprisingly,” but for a lot of us, for a lot of people, though we may give lip service to that truth, it’s not how we live. We most often live as if the Christian faith is about doing everything we can to make an angry God happy with us, and we also live as if that’s an impossible task. We live like God will always be angry with us, disappointed in us, and as if we can never do enough to change that. That may sound harsh. It feels harsh saying it! But if we believe that the only thing Jesus came to do was to die to pay the price for our sin, that’s pretty much what we’re saying. If all Jesus came to do was to go to the cross so that the Father could not be angry with us over our sin anymore, then it’s an angry God that we’re living under. I’m not saying that Jesus dying on the cross is not important; it’s critically important. It provides us the way to eternal life. Jesus did give his life so that we might live. But what about the other 30+ years? Surely it wasn’t all just prelude to the cross. Jesus lived, walked on this earth, and continues to live by the way, but while he was on earth, teaching, healing, ministering and making disciples, he had aims, goals. He had things to accomplish, things to set in motion. The Christian faith isn’t just about going to heaven when we die. The Christian faith is about living the way Jesus would have us live now. The Christian faith looks like Jesus.

So what were the aims of Jesus? What did he set out to do through his healing and teaching? I want to suggest three things, though there certainly may be more than these of course, but I think these will get us started on the right track. And, because I’m a preacher, all three of them start with the same letter (cf. Hunter 183). The first “aim” was restoration. Jesus came to bring people back to God, to restore the relationship that had gotten lost. When the people of Israel came back from their exile, from the time when they had been forcibly deported from the land, they began to ask the question of why. Why did God allow us to be exiled? They decided that it was because of their sin, which is correct, but the way they chose to remedy the problem was not correct. Rather than find ways to draw closer to God, they began to set up barriers to protect themselves from breaking the law. Let’s visualize “breaking the law” as a cliff over which you might fall, so in order to keep you from doing that, they set up a sign, another law, that would stop you before you even got close to breaking the real law. Suppose the law is, “Do not eat chocolate chip cookies.” So in order to protect yourself, you set up a law that says, “Do not make chocolate chip cookies.” If you don’t make them, you can’t eat them, right? That’s what the religious leaders did. If the law is, “Don’t commit adultery,” the law to protect the law might be, “Don’t look at a woman who is not your wife.” And over time their faith began to be put in the laws, the barriers, rather than in God. Jesus came to restore the people to a real relationship with God.

The second aim follows from that, and I’m using the word “rule.” The original design was that God would be the king, the absolute monarch, over the people’s lives. It was never intended that Israel would have a human king, but that their allegiance would be to God first and foremost. He would rule. But the people demanded a king, which got them into all sorts of messes. Jesus set out to remind us that, though we may have a human government under which we live, we are first and foremost citizens of another kingdom. Do you remember his first sermon? “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matthew 4:17). Nine words in English, and no sermon has ever been more to the point before or since. We live in a kingdom and we belong to a king and his authority takes precedence over everything else in our lives. So if there’s a discrepancy between what the king wants and what everyone around you wants, guess which one is supposed to win? Guess which one will win in the end? Jesus came proclaiming God’s rule; that was his main message and proclaiming it was one of his aims.

Thirdly, Jesus aimed at reconciliation. When humankind sinned, way back in the beginning, there was a break in the relationship between God and humanity, a break God never intended to be there. Trust was broken and fear entered the picture. All of us know what a broken relationship is like, whether in a romantic sense or in a friendship. There is a lot of pain and hurt that comes, and one or both sides feel rejection and loss. Imagine that on a God scale, when humanity continually and repeatedly says, “We don’t want you. We will go our own way, thank you very much. We like our way of doing things.” Jesus came to undo that rejection. He lived a perfect life and died a sacrificial death to show that love always triumphs. The evil in the world does not and will not have the final word. Jesus has defeated it, or as I remind you every Christmas Eve, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

So how does and how did Jesus do all these things—restore, rule and reconcile? The answer is found in our text for this morning. He called people to himself. “Come to me” (11:28), he said, in what N. T. Wright calls “the most welcoming and encouraging invitation ever offered” (Matthew for Everyone—Part One, pg. 137). “Take my yoke upon you,” Jesus invited (11:29). The religious leaders of Jesus’ day would sometimes talk about taking on a “yoke” of the law. A yoke is a wooden piece that was used to keep two oxen together when they worked in the field; it could be used to direct them in particular ways and was also used when two animals were tied together to pull a wagon or a cart (Davis, Come Alive: Matthew, pg. 85; Hunter 37), but the most important thing a yoke did was bind two together. When the religious leaders talked about the law as a “yoke,” it was a heavy burden because it meant following all 613 commands that were found in the law of Moses (Wright 137; Card, Matthew: The Gospel of Identity, pgs. 111-112). 613! But Jesus says his yoke, or being bound to him, is not heavy. It’s not hard. It’s “easy” and “light” (11:30) because it’s based on his character. And he is, he tells us, “gentle and humble in heart” (11:29).

The two words there combined have the meaning of “lowly” or “mild,” “not puffed up” or “not high and mighty,” which is ironic of course because if anyone has the right to be “high and mighty,” it’s Jesus. He is God, after all. But he says that those who come to him will not get treated the way they maybe expected to be treated by religious leaders or by God. You didn’t have to tell the people who came to Jesus that they were sinful; most if not all of them already knew it. They knew it deep down inside and they had been told so repeatedly by the leaders of their day. But their experience with Jesus was so very different. He interacted with people kindly. He answered their questions. He didn’t condemn them for their doubts. And he didn’t expect them to have it all right when they came to him. He was okay with their questions because he knew, as one author has more recently put it, “We do not grow by knowing all the answers, but rather by living with the questions” (Max DePree, qtd. in Nelson, The Flourishing Pastor, pg. 184). I think of the father who came to Jesus with his son who was possessed by a demon. He asked Jesus to heal him, “if he could.” When Jesus said, “Everything is possible for one who believes,” the father immediately cried out, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:17-29). And what did Jesus do? Did he tell the man, “Come back when you don’t have doubts anymore”? Did he send him to school to get all of his doctrinal questions answered? Did he look down on him and walk away because of the man’s confessed unbelief? No, of course not. He healed the boy. He met the man where he was. It reminds me again of the description of Jesus I shared a few weeks ago, the one from the prophet Isaiah: “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out” (Isaiah 42:3). He is gentle and humble in heart, and that’s why the key to this faith, he says, is to come to him (cf. Hunter 36-37).

If we’re going to reach a world that seems hell-bent on turning its back on the church, it’s not going to be through a new program or a spectacular event. It’s going to be with the same invitation Jesus reached people with. It’s going to be inviting people to come to him. Yes, the church can hurt you. The church is made up of people, human beings, and we are not perfect. But Jesus is. We don’t get everything right. But Jesus does. And he knows, of all people, the hurt and the pain that can come from people who think they are doing the faith-filled thing. It was those sorts of folks who called for his crucifixion. And yet, even on the cross, Jesus remained gentle and humble in heart. When another crucified man next to him asked to be remembered, Jesus didn’t condemn him. He said, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). So I want you to hear his invitation again, only this time, we’re going to hear it from The Message version. This is one of my favorite passages from The Message because in my mind, Eugene Peterson has captured the gentle and humble spirit of Jesus more clearly than anyone else. Here it is: “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.” That’s the Jesus people long to see today, and they are only going to see it through you and me. So we’re going to explore what that might look like in the weeks to come.

But before we get there, we need to kneel here. On the last night Jesus spent with his closest friends, he wasn’t done teaching. He wasn’t done modeling the way of life he was calling them (and us) to. Luke (22:24) tells us the twelve were still arguing over which one of them was the greatest, the best, the most useful to Jesus. And in response, John (13:1-11) tells us, Jesus gets up from the table and proceeds to wash their feet. Because he is gentle and humble in heart. Then, after they are quiet again (and he has put an end to their argument), he reimagines the Passover meal that was before them. He tells them the bread is his body, broken for each one of them. And the wine is his blood, poured out for the forgiveness of sin—theirs and every single sin yet to come. And though they didn’t get it that night, they undoubtedly did hours later when they saw him nailed to a Roman cross. “He was led like a lamb to the slaughter…so he did not open his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7). Because he is gentle and humble in heart. His example is ours. As we come to him this day, as we receive the bread and the cup we call Holy Communion, as we take into our being these symbols of Jesus, may we be changed, transformed, made more like him so that his church in this day, in this community, ends up looking like Jesus. Will you pray with me as we prepare to receive Holy Communion?