JESUS IN DRAG: The Cycle of Death & Resurrection (Matt. 11:16-19, 25-30)

"Christ-Sophia" (c) Stacy Boorn

This sermon was originally preached on July 9, 2023 at Redeemer Lutheran Church  in North Minneapolis, MN . The recorded service may be  viewed here.

Lectionary Texts: Psalm 145:8-14 | Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

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Good morning, church. Once again and as ever, I am grateful to be with you today and really glad I finally get to lead worship with Pastor Jen! I’ve filled in for her in the past when she’s been gone, but this week we are here together because I asked for the opportunity to preach and she said yes. Woo hoo! Not only that, but it happens to be good timing for me to take up this burden while Pastor Jen takes a deep, much deserved breath.

I’m also excited to be here preaching when Pastor Alissa is here, since she was one of the first people to welcome me back in 2016, and offer me a place of ease and rest at a moment in my life when I was ground down to dust and wanted nothing to do with church. She is also the one who invited me in the summer of 2017 to apply for the admin position. The rest, as they say, is history we are living, in this very moment.

Lest you think I’m going on for no good reason, trust me for a moment and let’s go to today’s text, which is, at its end, all about the collaborative laying down and taking up of burdens. 

Our gospel begins at the end of a conversation between Jesus and the followers of currently-incarcerated John the Baptist who sent them to ask if the man who’s been healing people and calling his own disciples is still the One Who is To Come, or if they should look and wait for another. John, it seems, is weary and doubting if all his ministry had come to naught or if maybe he’d heralded the wrong guy.. .

And his doubt made sense because there’s this inescapable dissonance between John’s and Jesus’s personalities and ministry styles. We glimpse a little of it in our text: On the one hand John is a desert-preaching teetotaling outsider proclaiming a message of mourning and coming judgment and the end of the oppressor’s reign; and on the other is Jesus, a friend of outcasts proclaiming and embodying a message of healing, hope, comfort, and peace amidst imperial occupation and oppression. And so, Jesus sent them back to John with the reminder of John’s calling as The Messenger, and the promise that both of their messages were very much needed, and both would be received in kind by those with ears to hear - that’s verse 15.

Now, at the same time -- and this is where we get into today’s text -- verses 16-19 invoke a different generation of people who have missed the points of both their ministries, and have, like children, reduced and rejected them: One for being a demon possessed desert dweller whose message of coming judgment they could not abide; the other for being glutton who cavorts among sinners, too drunk and corrupt to offer wisdom. And Jesus caps that invocation saying that: Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.
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He goes on to say that judgment and woe await those who witness his works and still reject him, but since our lectionary, for unknown reasons, skips over those woes, I’ll leave verses 20-24 to your own meditation, and redirect us back to Wisdom -- Sophia, that playful, tricksy woman who, in the person and works of Jesus, is vindicated by her deeds.

So let’s ponder for a moment who Sophia is throughout the Scriptures: In Proverbs 8, she introduces herself as “From the Beginning, before creation, Possessed by the Creator, taking delight in every breath and birth of creation, and rejoicing in The Presence (with a capital P). In the 23rd Sirach, she “covers the earth like mist,” she is over and around and resting within earth. As theologian Marcus Borg describes her, she is “from eternity and fills all that is.” According to the 7th chapter of The Wisdom of Solomon, she is “the fashion of all things -- indwelt by a spirit who is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, beneficent, humane, steadfast, free from anxiety, all powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent, pure, and altogether subtle.” She is, in a word, ALL. Whew! 

Sophia, or Wisdom, is who brackets the woeful text removed from today’s lesson; So when Jesus says in verse 19 that “Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds” and goes on in verse 25 to thank the Father for their inviolable Oneness which holds and hides all wisdom, he is likening himself to the one who possesses Sophia in Proverbs 8.

Not only that, but in verses 25-27, Jesus situates himself in the same kind of relationship to God as Sophia has in those Scriptures we just talked about: Jesus, like Sophia, knows the hidden things of the Father because there are no secrets or separation between them; The Father has given him all things just as the Father gave Her all things at the Beginning. Jesus knows the Father like no other, except Sophia, and can reveal the Father to anyone He chooses -- such is their closeness and intimacy. 

All of this sounds to me, friends, like a subtle but clear declaration, a revelation of who he is: “I’m not saying I am God, but I definitely am.” Right? “Let anyone with ears listen!” 

This declaration -- or revelation -- is the springboard from which Jesus offers that blessed invitation at the last: “Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble, like Sophia, and you will find REST for your souls. For my yoke is easy, my burden is light.” 

Now, this may look like one invitation to one group of people -- namely all those Jesus has been so focused on recently, like the sick, and lame, oppressed and outcast. And for them it surely is an invitation to rest in the comfort of the softest, squishiest belly of motherly Sophia love. 

But there is also an invitation to take on a yoke, a burden of learning, which feels like a separate invitation altogether: One that an audience of Jews would recognize as “the Rabbinic metaphor for the difficult but joyous task of obedience to God.” 

When I consider all of this, what immediately comes to mind is an image I learned about in Seminary, of the Cycle of Death and Resurrection between the marginalized and the privileged. Imagine for a moment a circle that turns like a ferris wheel halfway above ground and half below: At the top at 12 oclock with the very best views and the comfort of breath, you have a person of privilege who is accustomed to the comforts their privilege affords. Directly below them, underground, at the bottom of the circle at 6 o’clock, is a person who’s long been buried under the soil of racism, sexism, poverty, or homophobia. 

In this metaphor, it is the person already in the grave who is ready to be raised to new life. They desperately need and deserve that invitation to comfort and rest, of divine release from the burdensome weight and airlessness of all that dirt, right? 
But the person of privilege isn’t there right now. Resurrection rest is always preceded by a death -- to self, to wealth -- because nothing can be raised to new life that has not first died to the old. And that is what this second invitation is all about. It is a call to drop the cloak of wealth, power, and privilege; and to turn away from the comforts and company of empire and choose solidarity with the rising. 

The invitation to take on the yoke of Christ and learn presumes a lack of understanding and implies there is space for Sophia, Wisdom, to fill. 

One is an invitation to rise and rest; the other an invitation to bury what is withering and dead. One is an invitation to receive the comfort of Sophia; the other an invitation to be filled by Her. 

But these are not simply two separate invitations. Just like John and Jesus’s ministries, both are needed and go together. See, this invitation is the culmination of three chapters of Jesus’s ministry in which we’ve seen him heal and restore those in need; and call and send out his 12 disciples to partner with him. All 13 of them are now spreading His Message both to the Jewish peasants of Roman-occupied Palestine who’ve been colonized by empire, and the elite who’ve ignored and pathologized them in order to seek parity with Empire. Jesus knows that both those sets of people -- the colonized and the elite -- are among his audience now. 

So he speaks to them both and offers invitations to them both because their outcomes are bound up together! The weary will not be free of their heavy burdens unless and until the privileged and powerful take up a different yoke and learn the way of Wisdom rather than wealth! 

Our poor and houseless neighbors will not have true rest from the heavy burden of poverty until landlords and homeowners subject their wealth and property values to the Wisdom of the Homeless Christ.

Our Disabled siblings will not be free of the weary burden of exclusion unless and until we who meet that unwritten standard of “ability” divest from our ease, take up the yoke of the Christ whose miracles were an indictment of ableism, and be filled with Wisdom whose presence compels us to create more inclusive and accessible spaces.

Our Black, Indigenous, and Trans siblings will not be free of the weary burden of marginalization and sociopolitical degradation unless and until our christian white nationalist neighbors separate from the toxic lies of white power and take up the yoke of Brown Jesus who identifies here with the divine femininity of Ancient and Ageless Sophia. It is Jesus preaching in Drag, and I am here for it! Let those with ears, HEAR! 

I could go on, but the point is this: The ease and rest of the weary is directly tied to the understanding and sharing of their burdens by the privileged. And the word Jesus chooses here -- yoke, or zugus in Greek-- is literally a set of balanced scales, or a wooden beam set across two sets of shoulders in order to ease the burden of one by bearing and pulling the weight together. 

As he so often does for us, Jesus offers different invitations to different people in different social locations for the sake and sanctity of all who have the ears to hear: Those who need rest from their burdens receive it in Christ, through their neighbors who take up the yoke of learning and become filled with Christ -- Sophia. Wisdom which is proven in and by their wholly redirected, or resurrected lives. 

Friends, I cannot possibly know where each of us is now, though I suspect that like I was all those years ago and like I am today, most of us are in various ways and to varying degrees in need of both leisure AND learning, inertia AND instruction. Each of us and our community as a whole is in this perpetual cycle of death and resurrection, oftentimes both at once. Just as John’s message of judgment and mourning is better understood when yoked with Jesus’s message of hope and healing, so too is the burden of each and every death given meaning when yoked to the promise of resurrection. Sophia is in and over and with us all. 

So wherever you are, Beloved of God, let your holy ears hear this now: 

To all of us Jesus offers his Sophia self, in all her gentleness and humility. His rest is complete, his yoke is good and kind, and the promise of Their Presence in the balance is Sure. Amen.