Sermon: "Horses!"

Were you surprised to hear this Palm Sunday reading from the prophet Zechariah on the 4^th July weekend?  Whatever the season we hear about our humble, donkey-riding messiah, we modern people have a hard time really grasping the image, I think.  In America today, people rarely use animals with yokes for hauling or plowing.  And whatever the season, I suspect most of us find it kind of sickening to hear the “lightning” of God’s “terrible swift sword” called upon to help us slaughter our foes and drink their blood.  But both of these texts, I think, raise questions worth asking.  For instance:

·        What does it mean for us, as people Zechariah calls “prisoners of hope,” to be led by a gentle messiah? 

·        And if we are called to obey this Jesus, taking his advice from Matthew’s Gospel, how many of us would willingly submit to what he calls the “easy yoke” of his teaching?

We give thanks as Americans for our hard-won freedoms, especially on this Independence Day weekend.  We are grateful that today we are free to follow the commandments of our faith, or not – we are free from the superstitions that made ancient peoples obey gods who threw thunderbolts and wielded swords.  We Americans today are free to pray and worship, or not to pray or worship.  We Americans today are free to accept God’s amazing grace, or not, and to respond, or not, to the call of discipleship.  It was not always so, of course.  You may remember that there was once a time here in these colonies when it was against the law to miss a church service – a person could be fined, or worse, for working or playing on the Sabbath.  The very rights of citizenship – even the right to vote – were tied to being a church member in good standing, and that “good standing” was closely monitored by stern Congregational pastors and Deacons.  They would gladly remove unrepentant sinners from the communion of the saints for failing to live up to their baptismal promises or the church’s high expectations of its members.

Today, things are a little different.  We are grateful to our own Deacons for assisting in worship services – for serving us communion today, for example.  We are grateful to them for reaching out to our families with letters, calls, and visits – especially when we have a baptism or other celebration, or when we suffer from some crisis or grief and need help or comfort.  But we don’t expect to be disciplined by them for either sinful misbehavior or poor church attendance – and for that, many of us I’m sure are even more grateful!  But we do pay a price for our lighter, more joyful approach to the Christian life.  When we don’t take the Lordship of Christ seriously, we lose the very great blessing it is to be cared for and trained by a kind and generous Master. 

We can thank Confirmand Cassi Ronan for her suggestion of this sermon title, “Horses!” because horses have much to teach us as Christians.  Unfortunately, those lessons may be lost on us today – both because fewer and fewer of us live and work with farm animals and because, unlike our own nation in the days of the War for Independence or the people of Israel under Roman rule, we are no longer a subject people deprived of freedom and struggling to survive.  We’ve been spoiled by the affluence of the times and the freedom of the nation in which we live.  Whether we are faced with the challenges of Zechariah’s age, or Jesus’s, or our own – we are still subject to the temptation to put our faith in our own strength, in warhorses and horsepower, and to ourselves behave more like proud and rebellious horses than meek and obedient donkeys. 

I think we can learn a lot from these two animals – the horse and the donkey.  But, as positive as the images of the donkey are in Scripture, I want to reassure you brothers and sisters who are Republicans, that this part is not an advertisement for the Democratic Party!  Donkeys are stubborn, of course – that we know.  But horses can be equally stubborn.  They are both herding and grazing animals, but neither one is easily led by a shepherd to pasture.  They require halters to be led and bridles to be ridden and yokes if they are to pull a cart or plow or do hard labor for us.  The main difference between them – and this was true in the ancient world, as it is today – is that the donkey is the humble servant of the humble man.  It is a beast of burden for peasant farmers around the world.  Warriors and rulers prefer the horse, but because of its larger size, it costs more to maintain. It is a swift and magnificent animal, but is not as sure-footed as the steady but drab donkey.  And yet, people who know both horses and donkeys will tell you that both animals are also capable of great gentleness, obedience, and self-control — if the master’s hand is firm and loving and consistent.  This is the lesson I see in both of today’s texts – we can trust the hand of the Lord Jesus, our Master, to be firm and loving and consistent.

Over and over our Holy Scriptures call for us to submit ourselves to the yoke of the Lord.  The great prophets, like Zechariah, call us to submit to God’s law – to follow the commandments and see to the welcome of foreigners and care of the “widows and orphans” and other outcasts of our society.  Those righteous and well-meaning Pharisees – the fundamentalists of Jesus’s day – were doing their best to preach and teach and follow the exact letter of the purity and holiness codes of Judaism, but Jesus believed the strictness of their rules was a yoke too heavy to bear.  Jesus called his people to the freedom of new life living under the blessing of God’s grace.  His more generalized “law of love” was in many ways less demanding on religious people – that is, it was no longer so concerned with minor infractions of personal morality.  But, in other ways, his “new covenant” of relationship with God – in the spirit of the law – required much more of disciples.  It required “wise and intelligent” adult men to surrender their lives completely to God’s mercy, as an “infant” would do, or as a donkey submits to the yoke of its master – rather than to earn salvation by doing the hard work of observing all of God’s law.

This call to surrender to God’s grace is still before us today – except today those of us who are “weary and carrying heavy burdens” may not be so much physically exhausted from grueling farm labor as stressed from enduring the fast-paced world in which we live, the threat of terrorism, and the downturn of our economy.  But today, as then, we may be tempted to place our faith in our own strength and self-discipline – not to mention military alliances and weaponry, or financial idols like high-paying jobs and investment portfolios.  Jesus calls us to reclaim the innocence of childhood, when we really believed all our needs would be met – as we return to the Lord as our Good Master we can trust in him to care for us. 

Some of you, I know, may resist the idea of submitting to any Lord – whether a proud and powerful one who commands from horseback or a meek and peaceful one who leads on a donkey.  If so, you’re in good company.  Our Revolutionary ancestors felt so strongly about it that during the earliest years of the United States, Congregationalists often prayed “The Lord’s Prayer” without the words, “Thy Kingdom come.”  They prayed “Thy Republic come” instead, because they believed so strongly in the “priesthood of all believers,” where each member of the body of Christ was called to exercise the wisdom and intelligence needed for self-governance – both of the church and of our nation.  And yet, scripture reminds us over and over that it is the Lord who is our sure salvation – not we ourselves.  It is the Lord to whom we owe our obedience – who trains us and teaches us the way we should go.  It’s important, I think, that both the Greek word for “Lord,” Kurios, and the English word “curator” come from the same root.  The Lord who created us is also the one who cares for us (as a curator cares for the crown jewels) – and it is this Lord to whom we are called to pledge allegiance and in whom we are to place our faith.

So as we celebrate our freedom of religion today, I close with these words from the great German-American theologian Paul Tillich – who said the greatest gift of God’s grace was not freedom OF religion but freedom FROM religion:

“Jesus is not the creator of another religion, but the victor over religion; He is not the maker of another law, but the conqueror of law. …Forget all Christian doctrines; forget your own certainties and your own doubts, when you hear the call of Jesus. ... what is demanded is only your being open and willing to accept ... Him Whose yoke is easy and Whose burden is light.”[1]

When we accept the yoke of Jesus Christ we are led to a new and more joyful life in which we are lovingly fed and cared for and can flourish again like the young men and women of Zechariah’s vision. 

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.