Almighty and eternal God, so draw
our hearts to you, so guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, so control our
wills, that we may be wholly yours, utterly dedicated unto you; and then use
us, we pray, as you will, and always to your glory and the welfare of your
people; through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Today
we celebrate the Feast of St. Francis, our patron saint. We all know the
stories of Francis. He lived from 1181-1226, spending most of his time in
Assisi. He is remembered for his great care of the earth and animals. Francis
was born into a wealthy family, but rejected his birthright in favor of living
more freely for God. We also remember him for developing the usage of crèches
or nativity sets. He also founded the order of the Franciscans and received the
stigmata during prayer. And we remember him in our community for his ideals of
simplicity, compassion, and hope. Today, I want to focus on reading these
lessons through the lens of Franciscan spirituality.
Our
readings today center on what some scholars call the Great Invitation,
referring to Jesus inviting his audience to “come to me, all of you who are
weary and carrying heavy burdens.” Often it is used to give comfort to those in
a tough situation, but it’s a rather ironic passage.
Jesus
says that those who are weary should take his yoke upon them, because it is
easy and light. The way this saying is often applied, you’d think Jesus was
talking about some sort of relaxing massage technique for your shoulders. But
yokes are used for work animals, for hard labor, or to detain prisoners. It is
ironic that Jesus uses an instrument of hard work as a metaphor for getting
rest. Yokes are about submission and labor, no one hearing Jesus would have
thought a yoke was restful. But yet Jesus suggests that his yoke is about liberation,
freedom, and rest.
Francis
understood this irony. He said that true joy comes not from success, but from
rejection and suffering, which causes us to think of Jesus’ suffering. He
wasn’t saying that suffering is good, but rather is that it is natural and God
is present in all situations, the good and the bad. And it is often in those
tough situations that we come closest to God. And for that, Francis embraced
suffering. Francis lived this irony of finding rest in the yoke of service.
We’ll start
with the yoke as a burden before turning to its rest. It is interesting that
Jesus speaks about his yoke being easy just a few weeks before his crucifixion.
Many of the disciples will also be crucified for following Jesus. That doesn’t
seem very light to me. This yoke isn’t a free pass. Francis certainly
understood this when he chose to leave his wealthy family for the poverty of
serving others.
The work of
Francis was about simplicity- working with a single-minded focus on loving and
serving those in need. He focused on what was important. He didn’t concern
himself with wealth, or prestige, or power because he understood that those are
distractions. As we are in the midst of a financial stewardship campaign, this
is a good reminder for us to focus on simplicity. Deciding what matters most in
life, and aligning our budgets to match accordingly.
Francis also
lived compassionately. A quick word study will remind us that compassion is a
compound word which literally means to suffer with. Francis certainly bore this
yoke of suffering with people and animals. There are stories of him reaching
out to lepers and other outcasts. And by serving them, he too became an
outcast. Francis often reflected on the suffering of Christ on the cross and
strove to compassionately suffer with all those in need for the sake of
building the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.
And Francis had
hope. We often think of hope as a nice, uplifting feeling. And that’s not a
completely inaccurate view of hope. But hope is hard work. In the prayer of St.
Francis, we see that he really had to work to find light, joy, faith, and
pardon where there was darkness, sadness, doubt, and injury. As a bishop once
remarked “we Christians are called to be a people of miraculous expectation;
our ministry is the miracle of our hope.” Hope is what allows us to take on the
burden of Jesus’ yoke, even though we know that the cross is on the horizon.
These
virtues of simplicity, compassion, and hope seem wonderful, and they are, but
they are also full of hard work. Francis put a lot of emphasis on Creation,
because he saw it as the labor of God. I’ve always been partial to the theology
of continuing creation- the idea that God didn’t just create everything and
then took a leave of absence, but rather that Creation is ongoing. And this
makes sense. If the story of Genesis is based on the idea of a week, it only
makes sense that the next week starts after the first. Creation is continually
being recreated by God. It is not that God was the Creator, but that God is the
Creator. God’s work continues today.
Even in the
wording of Creation, “let there be…” there is a sense of growing into being. In
the Hebrew, the verb for “let there be” is in the imperfect tense, giving a
nuance of an uncompleted or ongoing action. God created the light, but he
didn’t flip the light switch. Think of it more as a dimmer switch; the light is
continually growing brighter. Francis saw his work in Creation as working to
continue the Creation to more fully reflect the love and majesty of God.
As we’ve seen
in the life of Francis, there is a lot of work to do in taking Jesus’ yoke upon
us. So how is it that all of this work
of being yoked to Jesus leads to rest, a rest which we so desperately need?
When Jesus says “take my yoke upon you and learn from me” he was likely referring
to a double-yoke. This was a common technique where two animals would have been
linked together to do harder labor, but to split it evenly to make it possible.
There are some tasks that we simply can’t do alone- the task of discipleship is
a two-person job. But, ironically, in working with Jesus, we are given a sense
of rest, despite our labors.
This
rest comes from the idea of Sabbath found in Genesis. To understand this
passage, we must take a critical look at it. I hope this doesn’t come as a
surprise to anyone, but this story from Genesis is not a literal one, but it is
very theological. This Creation story was very likely written in the 6th
century BC, during the time of the Exile in Babylon. The Hebrew people were
facing an identity crisis; their world no longer made sense. And so this story
began to circulate: that the God of Israel was the Creator of the world. This
was an important story for them to tell, because their Babylonian captors
claimed that it was Marduk, a Babylonia god, who created the world. But this
story insists that it was Yahweh that did the creating, and continues to do so.
The
story was a reminder that God can be trusted, even against the contemporary
data of being in Exile. And the same is true for us. Though we might live in
the exiles of disease, poverty, doubt, abandonment, unemployment, or war, this
Creation story proclaims that God is present and in charge of all that is.
Genesis was
never intended to explain how the world was created, but rather the method of
its creation, and this was through the words and will of God. The Hebrews would
have been comforted by this story of God creating out of chaos, because they
lived in chaos. At its core, this is a story of hope.
It
is with this background that we can understand the idea of Sabbath rest. The
Sabbath rest was a radical act of faith against the Babylonians. Jews would
have been identifiable by their not-working on the Sabbath, by their Sabbath
prayers. To be Jewish was to practice the Sabbath. And this is something that
we’ve really lost sight of. As a people of faith, we need to reclaim the
Sabbath. And I say this not only because we need some downtime, because we do;
but I say this because part of being faithful disciples is in our ability to
partake in God’s work and God’s rest.
The
reason why the Sabbath was so radical is because God rested. The God of Israel
had the ability to rest from creating, not because it was so tiring and God
needed a break, but because God was satisfied with Creation, calling it very
good. God was confident enough to rest. Unlike the gods of Babylonia, our God
spent an entire day in serenity and peace.
In
practicing Sabbath, we, like God, realize that life doesn’t depend on our feverish
activity of trying to do it all, but knowing that there can be a pause where
life is simply a gift. To practice to Sabbath is to practice confidence and
hope. There is no such thing as a life without stress or tasks. We can work our
fingers to the bone and still have more work to do. We’re fooling ourselves if
we think that not observing Sabbath will actually get us any closer to our
goals.
To practice
Sabbath is to say “I trust God enough to get out of the rat race and take a few
moments to enjoy life.” Sabbath reminds us that the world is in God’s hands,
not ours. If we take a day off, believe it or not, the world will keep on
going. After we die, Creation will continue. We can stop and take a break
because the world isn’t dependent on us. Instead, the world is dependent on
God. So Sabbath rest is a bold declaration of this faith. And in being freed
from being over burdened, we are free to be yoked with Jesus.
I’m
not necessarily saying that this means that we need to stay away from the
grocery store and soccer fields on Sundays, though that would be a good place
to start. If you’re stressed on the Sabbath, then you’re not keeping the
Sabbath. If our Sunday activities preclude us from worshipping God in community,
then we’ve lost sight of the very reason for the Sabbath. For the Hebrews,
taking a day off made them stick out like a thumb in Babylonian culture, and
that was just the point. Let’s make the Sabbath radical in our lives. Let’s
make sure we take a day to enjoy Creation, to rest from the labors of the week,
to abound in God’s providence.
And
it is with this understanding of Sabbath rest that we can begin to understand
what Jesus meant by the irony of saying that his yoke is easy and his burden is
light. There is a certain freedom that we are granted in practicing Sabbath, in
trusting God as our yoke-mate. In being able to rest, we are able take up Jesus’
yoke. The saying is that the hardest burden to carry is having no burden to
carry, and Jesus gives us a yoke to carry which blesses us with purpose and
meaning.
Jesus’
yoke is built upon our confidence of God’s providence and continuing care for
all of Creation. It is easy to take Jesus’ yoke upon us because it is easier to
love than to hate, because forgiveness is a lighter load than carrying around
vengeance, compassion is lighter to carry than anger. The word that Jesus uses
for “easy” might be better translated as “having a good fit.” Walking the way
of Jesus and practicing the radical act of Sabbath is not easy in the sense
that we can do it with little effort, but that it will give us harmony by being
a good fit for living the life of faith.
Though
it is ironic, the work of being yoked with Jesus leads to our Sabbath rest. St.
Francis lived this reality by submitting himself to the work of God, and in
doing so, was given rest and the freedom to live simply, compassionately, and
hopefully. He lived in the spirit of the wisdom of this creation story from
Genesis, knowing that the Sabbath is a radical act of faith that testifies to
our confidence in God. We, too, can be confident that God is delighted in
Creation, and we are invited to take some time each week to rest in this
delight. By spending time in Sabbath rest, we are free to carry the burden of
Jesus’ yoke.
I’d
like to close with the fourfold blessing of Francis, which speaks of this
ironic relationship between rest and work:
May God bless
you with a restless discomfort about easy answers, half truths and superficial
relationships, so that you may seek truth boldly and love deep within your
heart.
May God bless
you with holy anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so
that you may tirelessly work for justice, freedom, and peace among all people.
May God bless
you with the gift of tears to shed with those who suffer from pain, rejection,
starvation, or the loss of all that they cherish, so that you may reach out
your hand to comfort them and transform their pain into joy.
May God bless
you with enough foolishness to believe that you really can make a difference in
this world, so that you are able, with God's grace, to do what others claim
cannot be done.
Amen.
