Sermon

I Will Give You Rest

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

Come to me all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Sounds mighty fine, doesn’t it? This gospel reading comes around every 3 years and always around the 4th of July weekend. So by this time of the year it is usually tempting for me, at least, to want to equate "rest" with "time off." The hammock beckons, the mundane woes of our workaday lives get temporarily put on hold while we relax and chill out. If that image resonates with you all, as much as it does with me right about now, welcome to middle class America in 2011. I hardly need to rehearse for any of us here what sorts of exhausting burdens we carry: anxieties about the economy, the job market, a polarized congress, the ever-rising Missouri River, and so on. And that doesn’t even include the burdens that we bear in our own lives or in the lives of our families. And Jesus says, come to me and I will give you rest. Sweet words indeed, like a cool breeze at the end of a scorching summer day in Missouri.

But there’s a catch and in this case, the catch is the context for these words. In the verses immediately preceding our gospel reading, Jesus reflects on the ministry of John the Baptist who, by this time, is imprisoned. In today’s reading, Jesus notes with heavy irony that those who are in the best position to hear and respond to the Kingdom of God through the message of John or himself, instead get hung up on nonessentials. Seems there’s simply no pleasing the movers and shakers who couldn’t get past the scandal of either John the Baptist or Jesus in order to embrace God’s summons to right relationship. The wise and intelligent ones ironically were unable to recognize this; nor could they recognize their burdens for what they actually were: wasted energy and misdirected focus that gave the form of piety without the actual substance.

So given the context and the audience, the “rest” that Jesus speaks of is probably not cessation of labor. Much as we’d like this to be about taking a break and kicking back, it isn’t. When we hear the word, “rest,” we are to hear images of Sabbath in his words; Sabbath in the broadest sense of the word, as a time of entering into the wholeness and completeness of creation with God; Sabbath, such as God ordained on the 7th day of creation and toward which salvation points.  Jesus is talking about living our lives in a way in which God is at the center not just one day out of seven, but every day.

Which is why, in his very next breath, Jesus steps away from “rest” and counsels his hearers to labor, by taking his yoke upon them.

Now as we know, Scripture is loaded with ambivalent symbols, and the image of a yoke is one of them. Old Testament scripture contains many references to the yoke as a metaphor for subjugation, slavery, bondage. Conquering nations literally put their vanquished enemies into yokes. At the very least, yokes were associated with heavy labor, such as a yoke of oxen laboring to plow the stony fields of Israel. But the yoke also carried the positive sense of being harnessed to God in lives of righteousness. Rabbis spoke of reciting the Shema and of performing God's commands as taking on the yoke of God, the yoke of the Torah.

And of course, what agrarian people would have seen that we perhaps don’t is that while a yoke brings discipline to an otherwise stubborn farm animal, it does so for a very specific reason. And that reason is to empower meaningful labor for broader benefit. Like the old fashioned horse harnesses with which our ancestors would have been familiar, a yoke re-distributes the load. It enables, say, oxen, to push with the strongest part of their body – their shoulders – rather than pull with the weakest part of the body – their necks. And it is not solitary labor which a yoke empowers either. Oxen typically were yoked in pairs, if not in greater number, which is why the yoke is also a symbol of partnership.

So not only are we being called to meaningful labor, we are called to do it in partnership. For us contemporary Christians, that image of working together in community heightens the scandal in our reading today. We Americans are such individualists, and as Americans we have so individualized our expressions of faith and our belief in how we respond to God that we forget that we are called to practice our faith together. No where do we see this disconnect more clearly than in our insane belief that we can somehow engage our Christian faith without fully engaging the demands of discipleship in the context of a community in which that faith is lived together.

Jesus calls us to live a Sabbath life, which is to say, a God-centered life in which burdens we are invited to carry are not the empty burdens of contemporary life alone, but rather the weighty blessing of the Good News of Christ. As one writer put it cogently, the vital discipleship to which Jesus calls us means that we are called to focus the better part of our energies on transforming the Church so that it truly is a place of welcome and sustenance.

In other words, if all we’re doing is carrying a burden of endless committee meetings, if we find that we are spending the better part of our energy on the maintenance of the status quo, if the most passionate discussions we have center on how we manage our money, that those just might be the burdens the Church is invited to lay down at our Lord’s feet. There is better, more disciplined work for us. There is something better for us to lean our shoulders into: the yoke of Christ, by which we lightly bear the burden of the Gospel to a world that desperately needs to hear its good news.  

© Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral