by Dr. Judy Stack
Click to watch the sermon recording on YouTube.
In the name of the limitless God who, in Jesus Christ, took on our human limitations, that we might be drawn into the limitless freedom of the spirit. Amen.
Getting the opportunity to preach on Fourth of July weekend presents some challenges. The temptation of course, is to set aside the lectionary and to preach about freedom! And I’m actually gonna get to that. But our New Testament texts today start with someone experiencing something very different than freedom, and that is frustration. So today’s sermon is going to be about frustration and freedom, about limitation and consolation.
In these texts, Both Jesus and Paul are expressing deep frustration, at least at the beginning of the passage.
And I personally find this encouraging.
Because I will confess: I spend a lot of time these days feeling frustrated.
Some of my frustrations are petty.
I spend 10 minutes looking for my glasses and then realize they are on the top of my head.
I drive halfway to work and realize I forgot my phone.
I try to get back into an exercise routine and discover my body is just not interested in that program! This is frustrating.
Any of you resonating here?
And this isn’t even counting the frustrations that I experience with fellow drivers on the road or standing in line at the post office or grocery store.
I’m not proud of it, because sometimes my frustration is just a symptom of thinking that I know the way things should be, and other people seem not to have gotten the memo.
So I stand here confessing that I get a little frustrated.
But I also think some frustration is an indication, or even or even an important barometer, of our sense that something is wrong.
And not just that something’s wrong, but that we feel various levels of helplessness in the face of that wrong.
That there are things we just can’t figure out how to fix.
So we feel frustrated.
I think we see this today in the beginning of our reading from Matthew.
Jesus gets frustrated with people who are determined to misunderstand him, who are determined to find fault with anyone who does not fit their imagination of properness and respectability— even people bringing God‘s word and doing what God has called them to do.
(And if you are interested in seeing Jesus give much fuller vent to his frustration, I encourage you to read the middle section of this passage that the lectionary left out.)
So I think Jesus is giving us permission to feel frustrated when we recognize that there are things that are not aligned with God’s good and gracious Will for the world. He didn’t always flip tables, but he also never soft-pedal the truth.
But I wanna dig a little deeper into our own sense of frustration.
Because I think oftentimes we feel frustrated not just with
a seemingly insoluble problem or people and systems that seem inveterately opposed to building a just and flourishing world, but we feel frustrated with ourselves.
Our most consistent and mundane frustration is often with our inability, particularly when we compare it with what we think we ought to be able to do.
I want you to stop for a minute, maybe even close your eyes and think about what you are frustrated about within yourself.
What have you tried over and over to change or improve,
whether it’s a habit or a way you are in a relationship,
or your ability to be the person you want to be.
Where are you frustrated?
There’s perhaps no more quintessential expression of our human frustration with ourselves than the reading today from Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Paul is expressing the deep frustration we have with our own internal landscape when we know the thing we ought to do,
and yet somehow we continue to choose what we know is not in line with the image of God in ourselves.
When we know we need to respond with patience and with love and with generosity, and we continue to respond in ways that are fearful and self-serving and impatient.
When we want to show up with a spirit of peacefulness and joy and trust, and we find ourselves dragged into irritability and the need to control things.
We feel stuck, and frustrated at our limitations.
And we have been told since we were small that, we can be anything we want to be if we just put our mind to it.
At some point, we realize that that’s just not the case.
Yet, we can’t shake the feeling that we are failing when we can’t be all we want to be,
that we ought to be able to just do it, as the old Nike ads used to say.
We are at the beginning of disability awareness and pride month. And I’m gonna make a bold statement: that frustration with our own limitations and inabilities is a symptom of our internalized ableism. It will be easy this month to focus on obvious physical challenges that people face – Vision challenges, mobility challenges, hearing challenges. And We operate in world structured to create frustration for anyone who is not 100% physically fully abled. And some of you have been reading the very helpful and powerful pieces being written by our parishioners for our evangelist newsletters, talking about hidden disabilities— auditory, and sensory processing challenges, chronic pain, neurodivergence, depression, and mental health challenges.
And let’s face it: all of us are facing some kind of dis–ability.
On some level, we are all facing the reality that we can’t “just do it”—whether because of our bodies or our hearts or our minds.
We cannot just power through.
And we are frustrated and we feel like we are failing.
In our most honest moments, deep inside we cry with Paul:
who will deliver me? Who will send me free?
Now , of course the easy Pat answer is: Jesus! And Paul does declare that at the end of our reading.
But any of you who have lived a life of faith for more than a minute know that Jesus is not a quick and easy answer. And Paul certainly doesn’t think this is a quick and easy answer.
If we had more time to explore the full sweep of what Paul is saying in Romans, what we would find out is that the freedom that we are given in Jesus is deeply paradoxical. We are set free from the power of sin and death, and from the need to perform flawlessly all the Commandments prescribed by the law, but we are not set free to do whatever we want.
We are now constrained by the law of Love,
and that very limitation is the space of our freedom,
because it is the space of the Holy Spirit, who is always free.
The picture of freedom that we are usually given in our culture is having the opportunity to do whatever we want, as much as we want, anytime we want.
That is pretty much an exact definition of what Paul would call the flesh, and living that way is being enslaved.
The desire to live without any limits is even a pretty good summary of the temptation in the Garden of Eden. That story paints the archetype of sin as the desire to “be like God,” having no limitations. Not even just one tree.
So what does it mean to live with a holy appreciation of our limitations? How do we reject the internalized ableism that makes us perpetually frustrated with the fact that we are not omnipotent?
I think we look to Jesus.
In the latter part of today’s gospel reading, we hear the beautiful words of comfort and encouragement, where Jesus declares that it is infants— those who are, at that point, mentally and physically limited – those are the ones who get a revelation.
It is not in the place of wisdom and strength that revelation of God comes, but in the place of limitation.
And then Jesus invites us.
Invites us to come, those who are weary and heavy Laden –
I read that as those who are frustrated,
because the yoke of expectation in the life of the spirit of Jesus is not heavy. It is a place of rest.
The burden of Jesus yoke is easy and light not because there is no limitation but because the limitation is Love.
But we can only get to the place of experiencing this as individuals and as a community when through God‘s grace we drop our performance of ableism. When we open ourselves to seeing the places in us where we are limited or feel disabled not as causes for frustration, but as spaces of God’s grace and revelation.
It is an act of profound resistance to show up authentically as limited,
and not to give in to the pressure to present ourselves as perfect, shiny people as if we have unlimited capacity, energy, and resources.
If we wish to be a place that welcomes people no matter where they’re at, friends, that has to start with us.
We have to accept ourselves where we are at,
knowing that God is at work in us, redeeming and renewing and freeing us.
Because when we do that, we can truly extend that to those who come through our door. We can be a place of consolation and hope for folks who don’t have their lives all put together.
We can embrace people who are aware of their limitations, because we don’t see those limitations— in them or in us –
as weaknesses or flaws or brokenness,
but as spaces hallowed by Jesus’ own embrace of limitation.
Then we become a community that can manifest the true freedom of the law of love– a place of rest for the weary and peace for the burdened–both for ourselves and for others.
