All Your Works Praise You
Text: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
Other texts: Psalm 145
The oppressed, the outcast, and the disenfranchised are suspicious of prophets, who, they think, offer ineffective diatribes and platitudes and false comfort to those who are suffering. They have no patience with prophecy.
The privileged and the powerful disregard prophets, who, they think, are naive and have no advantage to offer. They find prophecy to be irrelevant.
Most of us are stuck in the middle between thinking that we have no control over anything and thinking we are in firm control over everything. The prophets speak to us.
The prophets tell us that we exist by the grace of God. They tell us about the wonder, vastness, and complexity of the universe. They tell us about the love of God who brought us into being. And they tell us about the chaos kept at bay by that God and by us, whom God has enlisted as partners in this endeavor.
They also tell us about our fellow human beings, and how they suffer, and about our obligations to them—obligations that stem directly from our own creation. They tell us about ourselves, about being afraid and cautious, about being greedy, about wishing to be alone and longing not to be.
The currency of the prophets is keen observation and their message is about change. This is the way we are. We do not have to be the way we are. We should not be the way we are. We can be another way, they say.
Those of us in the middle resist prophets because of this. Because we are of mixed minds—mostly dubious ones—about change. It does not matter who is preaching it. John comes, we are told in this passage from Matthew, an ascetic, a repudiator of luxury. Jesus comes, a lover of good food, good drink, raucous company. Two prophetic voices, speaking in different tones, both rejected in the most definitive way possible: they are executed.
Not because they were abstemious or extravagant, but because they were calling us to see and act differently. The prophets spoke to us of the most dramatic edges of our existence. Dancing for joy. Mourning the dead. Yet we were—and have been—indifferent to their prophecy. Not fickle, as some have said, but stubborn. A stubbornness born of fear. What they said was hard, and scary.
To what shall I compare this generation, Jesus asks rhetorically. They are like children, he answers his own question. But another answer is that this generation—his generation—is like every generation. Our generation, too, and the ones in between. We all want to be wise. We all want to be intelligent, Jesus says. We desire to know everything.
We are captive to this desire. It has seduced us. We want to be in control, thinking that thereby we can be safe. Secure. Thinking that bad things won’t happen and good things will.
Prophets tell us otherwise, that we are not in control, cannot be, and should not—for our own good—should not want to be. We have mixed feelings about this, knowing that they are pretty much right and wishfully thinking they are wrong. Jesus compares the wise to the infants, but it is a comparison between something and nothing. We are all infants. There are no people who know everything, just people who think they do.
Jesus makes us an offer. He offers to free us from this captivity. You who are burdened and tired, come to me. I will give you rest. This is not so much an offer of relaxation on holiday weekends as it is an offer of freedom.
It does not say how this works. We can guess. A yoke makes carrying things much more efficient, leveraging the way our bodies work, spreading the load across our shoulders. Maybe Jesus is offering a better way to live, to carry the existing burdens of life. But a yoke also binds two people (or animals) together, so that each shares the load. Is Jesus offering to share our burdens with him? Or maybe he is offering to share with us the burdens he carries.
But in any case he is not, as people sometimes say, offering us no burden at all. To relieve us from all burdens. A yoke by itself is not easy. It is a tool for hauling things, carrying things, lifting things. It is not a fashion accessory. You would not want to put one on unless you had some work to do. Without a burden to carry, it in itself is just a burden. Jesus is not taking us out of life. Rather, he is giving us a new way to live. A better way.
The psalms are often a concrete expression of theology. Like the hymns they are, they are examples of theology in action. They can guide Christians, and in this case give us a hint of one thing we might do to take up the yoke that Jesus urges us to.
We are designed to praise God. If we have a purpose in life, it is more to praise God than to be like God. Praise is the antidote to thinking that we are wise. Praise is our lighter burden. To be thankful for the gifts of life.
To praise God is both to acknowledge that our existence is the result of the actions and hopes of God and to proclaim that that existence is a blessing. Out of such praise flows an ethic of serving others, of relieving suffering. Out of such praise come decisions about how we work, play, and love.
All your works shall praise you, O Lord, and your people shall bless you, it says in Psalm 145 which we sang today. This psalm introduces the final five psalms in the book of Psalm, all of which begin “Praise the Lord.” Praise is our response to God’s nature, described in the psalm. God’s mercy and patience, and God’s love for creation, and God’s care for those who suffer, and God’s loyalty to humanity. Psalm 145 summarizes the motto heard more often in evangelical churches than in Lutheran ones: God is good, all the time.
We in our world are not very fluent in the language of praise, for it implies a humility that runs counter to our usual worried arrogance. But we can practice. The praise psalms give us a vocabulary and teach us what to say. They show us another way to be, a way of life that is based on neither hopelessness nor hubris. How good it is to sing praises to our God, the psalm says. Praise the Lord.
