Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
“Burdens” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Zechariah 9:9-12/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30/NRSVUE)
I was a teenager living in a largely secular household in New Jersey during the 1980s, so it’s fair to say I knew a lot more lyrics to Bruce Springsteen songs than I did Bible stories — though that scale is a bit more balanced these days than it was back then given what I do for a living.
I went to my first Springsteen concert — which happened to be my first rock concert of any kind — in August of 1984 on the fourth of ten dates in a row that he played at the Meadowlands on the “Born in the U.S.A.” tour that summer.
To call it an incredible evening would be a gross understatement: It was Bruce — arguably at the height of his powers — performing in his native New Jersey, at a show where he was on stage for four hours. For this sixteen year old in that place and time, that would have been a tough one to top.
The title song of that tour and the album it was supporting (which, incidentally, remains the highest selling album of Springsteen’s long career) was not only a big hit at the time (it rose as high as number eight on the Billboard Top 100 chart in January of 1985) but also has attained permanent significance in the pantheon of American pop culture (it was cited by Rolling Stone on its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time).
“Born In the U.S.A.’s” catchy chorus, taken on it’s own, could arguably be a viable replacement for our current national anthem (which, as songs go, isn’t all that great of a song) but there’s way more to “Born In the U.S.A.” than the chorus. From a lyrical standpoint, that jingoistic refrain contrasts with sad and desperate verses that speak in the first person about the alienation and disillusionment of a Vietnam War veteran. In their totality, the song’s words combine to present a complicated and ambivalent view of the American experience — one that resonated with a whole lot of other people of that era who’d had similar experiences.
About a month after I’d gone to that concert and heard the song live, something really weird happened. The conservative columnist George Will apparently went to see a Springsteen show about the same time I did and heard the song too, which led him to write a now-infamous column called “A Yankee Doodle Springsteen” in which he actually praised the Boss for lifting up American values in his music. I know it was really loud in that arena, so who knows? Maybe he didn’t hear all of the words.
If that weren’t bad enough, the campaign of Ronald Reagan, who was in the homestretch of his presidential reelection campaign, latched onto Will’s commentary, leading Reagan’s staff to include this line in a speech that he delivered at a event in the Garden State less than a week later: “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in the songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen.” More recently, “Born In the U.S.A.” has been heard at political rallies supporting our current President and outside the hospital in which he was being treated for COVID-19 back in 2020. Who knows? Maybe none of them heard the words either.
When I saw the things some people were doing with and saying that Springsteen song — both back in the 80s and almost forty years later — I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, talk about completely missing the point.” Like I said, maybe they didn’t hear the words. But I think it’s more likely that people only hear what they want to hear.
“But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn,’” is what Jesus says to the crowd that has assembled to listen him speak at the beginning of today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel.
The words probably sound a little strange to our modern ears — I mean, people in our place and time don’t generally hang out in the marketplace playing the flute or wailing — but, when you cut through all of the strangeness, Jesus is essentially telling us that this whole “people completely missing the point” thing has been going on for a while now.
He compares himself — and John the Baptist, the one who came to pave the way for him — to musical children whose songs aren’t ever quite understood by the people. When they played a somber song, no one cried; when they played a happy song, no once danced. They just don’t seem to be responding as they should to songs whose meaning should be perfectly clear, if they only had ears to hear them.
In fairness, John, who sat out there in the wilderness mostly by himself wearing clothing made of camel’s hair (which was probably rather itchy and uncomfortable), and eating a diet of locusts and wild honey (which was probably every bit as awful as it sounds), was a little rough around the edges and tough to listen to sometimes. He likely didn’t win the hearts and minds of the Pharisees and Sadducees, the leaders of the religious establishment, who came to him to be baptized when he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee the wrath to come?”
But John was pretty much spot-on when he told them to “Bear fruit worthy of repentance” — to change their orientation towards everyone and everything, to begin a new relationship with God and with one another, to live as God was calling them to live (as God is still calling us to live). At some level, though, I get why John wasn’t really a big hit with the powers that be.
But then Jesus then showed up on the scene, saying more or less the same thing that John was saying, although he had a much different way of going about his business. Jesus didn’t live by himself out in the middle of the desert eating bugs; he didn’t go around yelling at people all the time. He did nice things like curing diseases; blessing the peacemakers and the meek and a lot of other folks society tended to overlook; lifting people up by reminding them that they were the salt of the earth and the light of the world; telling people to love their enemies. It’s kind of hard to see why anyone would have a problem with any of that.
But Jesus also enjoyed a good meal; he was known to share a bottle of wine with his friends every now and again; he dined with tax collectors and sinners of various sorts; and he healed people (many of whom were either living on margins or complete social outcasts) — on the Sabbath no less. And the Pharisees and Sadducees didn’t appreciate any of that behavior very much.
So, as was the case with John, these members of the religious establishment dismissed Jesus out of hand and tried to get others to do the same; they sought to render the message irrelevant by discrediting the messenger, but it didn’t work — the crowds just kept coming to hear what Jesus had to say and to see what they were doing. Suffice to say, those leaders felt their power being more threatened with every passing day.
On top of all that, both John and Jesus said a lot of stuff — much of it seemingly directed towards no one particular, but clearly meant for those Pharisees and Sadducees to hear — about how they were supposed to behave (the implication being that they weren’t actually behaving how they were supposed to behave), and about not being hypocrites by acting all pious when people were looking and then acting much differently when they weren’t (which was exactly what they were doing), and these things, while true, couldn’t have been easy for them to listen to (or to have other people listen to).
And when they saw the momentum in this movement that John had started and that Jesus then picked up and ran with growing and growing, they locked John away in prison and they followed Jesus around trying to snare him in various traps they’d set in order to discredit him and put an end to this once and for all. And when none of that worked, they decided to lop off John’s head and nail Jesus to a cross. And clearly that didn’t work either because we’re still talking about what they said and did two thousand years later.
The authorities saw John and Jesus as unsavory types who weren’t worthy of being the prophets they claimed to be, but make no mistake about it: this whole conflict was really more about the message than it was about the messengers. And the source of the disagreement was that, when it came to the hearing and understanding the message — how God was calling us to live and what God was calling us towards — Jesus and John were listening to the whole song, while the religious authorities were only listening to the chorus.
You see, those Pharisees and Scribes knew the law of Moses really well — they could tell you off the tops of their heads about all the things thou shalt and shalt not do (though Jesus, it’s worth noting, knew all of this at least as well as they did — which is why he quoted scripture to them all the time).
The law, this gift from God, was really important to the people because it came from God and because it’s myriad rules regarding how to live together enabled this society that lived on the run and in exile and under the thumbs of various oppressors to find common ground and hold itself together for centuries.
By the time of Jesus, though, the powers that be also realized that the law — untethered from it’s original God-intended purpose — was an effective means of keeping the population in line and under control for their own purposes. Let’s face it, if you can convince people that your understanding of God’s word is the right one — the only one — it’s not all that hard to get them to say and think and do what you’re telling them to say and think and do because they believe it’s really God who’s telling them what to say and think and do (it seems that some things never change).
But then John and Jesus came along and screwed everything up — and they did this not by renouncing the law but by simply locating it in it’s broader scriptural context. Like I said earlier, they listened to the whole song, not just the chorus.
The religious authorities definitely had the letter of the law down-pat, but what they missed was the spirit of the law — the reason it came to be in the first place. In their journey through the scriptures, they latched on to all of the rules and regulations (well, at least the ones that suited their purposes anyway) but mostly overlooked the rest — you know, all that stuff about caring for the poor and welcoming the stranger and showing mercy and loving your neighbor; all that stuff about doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with God.
And so the real quarrel that those in power had with John and Jesus arose from the fact that those two not only didn’t overlook all that stuff, but also were going to hold them accountable for overlooking it. Perhaps our call today is pretty much the same.
And so, on this Fourth of July weekend, when “Born in the U.S.A.” is going to be playing on some radio station on the dial at all times for a few days, maybe those folks who are so quick to pick parts of it to use for their own purposes should listen to the chorus and the lyrics and figure out what the song as a whole is really about before claiming it as their own.
And then maybe, right after they’ve done that, those very same folks could actually pick up the Bible and read it — the whole thing, and not just the parts that, when taken out of context, seem to support what they want to believe — before they try to tell the rest of us what it means.