O God, grant us the serenity to accept the
things we cannot change, courage to change the things that we can, and the
wisdom to know the difference ☩
in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Who among us is not burdened these days?
With
Tyler working in health care, I’ve been home with the girls for nearly 4
months. And while the time with them has mostly been wonderful, we’re all
craving some sense of normalcy. We’re disconnected from our friends and family.
We’re troubled by this pandemic in which we’re right back where we were at the
beginning with cases rising out of control – and many fear that we squandered
our chance to get ahead of this virus. That’s a burden and a half to be
carrying. And this pandemic has disrupted our economy and lives. The social
fabric of our nation is coming apart at the seams as we’re having necessary,
but very difficult, conversations about race, as we’re fighting with those who
refuse to wear masks, and as we’re gearing up for a major election season.
These really are heavy burdens.
Personally,
I’ll tell you all that this is a hard time for me. Though I’m an introvert, I’m
ready for some social events. More than that though, something they tell you in
seminary is that one of the most important jobs that a priest has is to love
their congregation. And I do – I really do love you all – both as the
collective St. Luke’s and also as individuals. I care deeply about each of you
because I believe, at my core, that the love of God in Jesus Christ has the power
to lead us all into God’s peace and joy. And, more than anything, I want you to
know that love. It’s a vocation that I take very seriously.
And so it hurts
that I haven’t seen many of you in months. We so often say that Church is a
family, a beloved community, and it is; so our separation is hard. One of the
burdens that I’m carrying is that we are disconnected, I don’t know how you all
are doing in the same way that I used to. And, to be completely honest, I know
that some of the sermons in June offered some hard truths. Being socially
separated leads to the burden of a lot more anxiety for clergy wondering how
their congregations may have shifted in such a tumultuous time.
So the question
this morning is, what do we do with all of these burdens that we are carrying? The
obvious wrong answer is that we carry those burdens ourselves. For one, that’s
not God’s intention. St. Paul writes in Galatians, “Bear one another’s burdens,
and in this way, you will fulfill the law of Christ.” And in the beginning,
Adam and Eve are created to be helpers to one another. We are a community and
so carrying our burdens alone ignores who we were created to be and robs the
Body of functioning as it should.
And, secondly, we
simply can’t carry our burdens alone. Yes, we just celebrated Independence Day
yesterday, but we are not meant to be independent because God has made us to be
inter-dependent. As Martin Luther King wrote, “All life is inter-related. We
are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied together in a
single garment of destiny.” This is what underlies the theology championed by
Archbishop Desmond Tutu – ubuntu: the
idea that “I am because you are.” I can never be what I ought to be until you are
what God intends for you to be. Or as the English priest and poet John Donne
put it, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of a
continent, a part of the main.” St. Paul says, “You are the Body of Christ and
individually members of it.” And Jesus prayed that we might all be one as he
and the Father are one.
The problem stems
from a largely Western misunderstanding of what freedom means. As we’re seeing
in our society as people question what impinges on their freedom and what does
not, the standard American understanding freedom is being able to do whatever
you want to do. In that sense of freedom, words like obedience, accountability,
and mutuality are dismissed as tyrannical and antithetical to freedom. But that
sort of understanding of freedom is actually slavery. As St. Paul writes in a
well-known passage, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I
want, but I do the very thing I hate… I can will what is right, but I cannot do
it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.
Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that
dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good,
evil lies close at hand.” Freedom is nothing more than being captive to those sinful
and selfish desires.
And the reason why
none of us are truly free is that we are always accountable to God, and by
extension, to one another. We can reject those relationships, but that doesn’t
make us free, just negligent. One of the foundational sins of our society is
the emphasis on the individual. From the marriage liturgy, we hear that “Those
whom God has joined together let no one put asunder.” That’s true for a married
couple, but it’s also true for all of us. God has joined us together and any
ideologies or philosophies that separate us are ungodly.
One of the reasons
why this emphasis on freedom is so unhealthy is that it makes us take
everything so personally. As a people, we are so easily offended and yet it
seems that matters which affect the whole of us, issues like poverty, almost
don’t even register. And what we do with this anger is often dangerous. In Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard
Thurman writes about the dangers of rage. While there is such a thing as “holy
anger,” it’s a very, very dangerous thing. He notes that anger easily turns to
hatred. And hatred dries up our imaginations, it focuses us on the negative, it
consumes everything around it. Anger rarely stays with its intended target and
it spills over into our marriages, our jobs, our friendships, even our faith.
And isn’t this what we’re seeing all around us – anger that is spilling over as
we focus on how things make us feel or as we run into points of view that we
disagree with?
Again, anger can
be a holy emotion, but it is very rarely a holy motivation. Our focus on
freedom and the individual leads us to take ourselves more seriously than we
ought to. Jesus was speaking of his generation, but it applies to ours as well:
“We are 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.’” In other words, we don’t respond to the call of the Gospel because it
doesn’t suit us.
So instead of
attempting to carry our burdens alone, which only leads to frustration,
weariness, and isolation from one another, what might we do with those burdens
that we are carrying? Jesus tells us to take his yoke upon us and learn from
him. His yoke is gentle, easy, and light and it will give us rest. Or, using a
phrase that I often use, being yoked to Jesus is about going with the grain of
the universe. A yoke is a collar of sorts that two animals wear so that as they
pull a wagon or plow, they do it together and thus share the weight. In this
yoke, Jesus is going to do the heavy lifting. And being yoked to Jesus, he will
lead us into abundant life where we can experience the true freedom of God’s
grace. And, more than anything, this is what I long to do as a priest, to help
people in getting yoked to Jesus so that all might know of his love and mercy.
When it comes to
understanding what the Christian notion of freedom is, it’s rooted in being
yoked to Jesus. Actually, today’s Collect gives us an insight into Christian
freedom: “O God, you have taught us to keep all your commandments by loving you
and our neighbor.” Freedom isn’t doing whatever we want. Again, even if we
could do whatever we wanted, as Romans reminds us, we’d end up messing that up
because the good that we want isn’t what we end up doing. Instead, freedom is
about being freed from the shackles of sin, of worrying if we are good enough,
of the finality of death. Freedom is about being free to be who we were created
to be – the beloved of children of God who find their meaning and purpose when
we love God and love our neighbor as ourselves. We were created out of love and
we are destined for love. Freedom is about being released from whatever holds
us back from flourishing in that love. And sometimes what we need to be freed
from is ourselves or our inwardly focused perversions of freedom.
And in thinking
about what freedom means as a people who just celebrated the Fourth of July –
the Collect for the Nation in the Prayer Book prays, “Give to the people of our
country a zeal for justice and the strength of forbearance, that we may use our
liberty in accordance with your gracious will.” Freedom, or liberty, is about
being able to be obedient to God’s will for justice and peace.
So how do we yoke
ourselves to Jesus? It really does come down to how we view ourselves. Do we
put up barriers to God and others as we strive to be the best versions of
ourselves or do we leave ourselves open to deep relationships with others? Some
would say that our society is divided right now between liberal and conservatives.
But I don’t think that analysis is right. It’s so easy to point out the
hypocrisy on both sides, which just means that liberals aren’t always liberal
and conservatives aren’t always conservative. Those distinctions aren’t really
at the heart of our debates and disagreements.
Instead, what most
divides us really comes down to how we understand ourselves in relationship to
others. Or, in the language of freedom – is our freedom for ourselves or for
love? See, our divisions aren’t between conservatives and liberals or Democrats
and Republicans. No, our divisions are rooted in the divide between
individualists and corporatists; between those who think freedom is about them
and those who know that freedom is about love.
And I use that
word, “corporatists” very intentionally. I hope it’s clear, that’s the side
that I strive to follow as I do my best to be yoked to Jesus and the Body of
Christ. But, of course, the good that I want to do is not always what I do, and
so I rely on God’s grace and infinite mercy. Being a corporatist is what it
means to be a Christian. As you might know, the root of the word “corporate”
(and I’m not talking about corporations or businesses here) is corpus, which means “Body.” Christians
are members of the Body of Christ, corporatists. So by seeing ourselves as
members of one another, as united in Christ, as all held together in the
limitless love of God, we find the yoke of Christ which gives rest to our
souls. In a well-known passage, St. Paul describes what it looks like to be unburdened
in Christ: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or
arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or
resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It
bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
And this is most clearly seen in the at the act which is at the very center of the Church’s mission and identity: the Holy Eucharist. It is where the hungry are fed, the sinful find forgiveness, and the joyful celebrate. And at the center of the Eucharist is the corpus, the bread, which is for us, the sacramental presence of Christ’s Body. And what that corpus reminds us of is the Body of Christ that hung on the Cross given for the life of the world out of love for the world. That is where true freedom comes from as sins are forgiven, death is defeated, and all-surpassing love is proclaimed. I know we can’t all gather in the flesh to receive this Eucharist – but Christ’s invitation is just as valid – Come, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens. Take the Lord’s yoke of love upon you, and find rest for your souls.
