Give Me A Break!
Sermon
LIKE A BREATH OF FRESH AIR
Sermons For Pentecost (First Third)
Jesus was having one of those days! You know the kind of day when nothing goes exactly the way it was planned. The kind of day when staying in bed seems to be an option that should have been taken the first thing in the morning. The kind of day when the only words spoken to you, or at you, are words of criticism and sarcasm. The kind of day some of us have far too often. That was the kind of day Jesus was having.
The picture of that day is painted for us by Matthew in the opening verses of the 11th chapter. It started when Jesus received a group of disciples from the camp of John the Baptist. John was now securely locked away in a prison cell, but from that dark imprisonment, he had sent these followers with a question. "Are you really the one?" This question was not what Jesus wanted to hear, especially from John of all people. After all John had seen and heard! How could he possibly challenge the integrity and character of Jesus this way? We know what it feels like when someone calls our integrity into question or falsely slanders our character.
As Jesus made his way into the next town, still stinging from such a probing question from one like John, he encountered children playing in the courthouse square. Their games were the games of energy-laden young people; their laughs were the sounds of joy. None of them paid any attention to this wandering band of strangers. Jesus perceived in their reaction the same he met in their parents and other adults. Everywhere he went, it now seemed, people were so preoccupied with their own games, their own ways of living and their own agendas that no one paid any attention to him, his Word, nor the word of grace offered. We know what it feels like to be ignored, overlooked and treated as if what we said and who we were did not matter in the least. Everyone is just too busy to take much notice.
Finally, there is expressed from Jesus a word of grief and sadness. Remembering his time in the twin cities of Chorazin and Bethsaida, remembering the many displays of power and the miraculous events which had taken place in the lives of their citizens, he recalled that it had not made any impact at all. No one was responding and no one was repenting. Everyone seemed impressed, but not enough so to allow his Word and power to transform their lives. We know what it feels like to have everything we have been working for, planning for and investing ourselves in go for nothing.
This was definitely "one of those days." In the background, and between the lines, I think I hear Jesus crying, "give me a break! What more do I have to do? If this is the thanks I get, I'm ready to throw in the towel!" I could certainly understand such an expression. Perhaps if he could just glimpse one positive result to all he had been doing; just one response that would keep him going to the next town, then it would all be worth it. As it was this day, like so many others, was turning out to be less than what he had anticipated.
So what does Jesus do? He does not go home, slam the door, become a couch potato, sulk and lick his wounds in private. He does not drown his sorrows and apparent failures in the bottle, nor does he pop a few pills in order to sleep with some vague hope that tomorrow will be a better day. Instead, he lifts his eyes toward heaven, to God who is the source of his life, his authority, and his well-being. Jesus knows that he draws his strength from this spiritual fountain of life and from the grace that is extended to give courage and power and passion for living. "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants (Matthew 11:25, NRSV)." After having one of those days, Jesus finds it in himself to offer a prayer of thanks to God. Whatever the source of that kind of faith and life and experience, it's just what I need when I am having those kind of days. It's just what we all need!
The fact is that what Jesus knows and what he has experienced, he now offers to all who have days like that. The familiar invitation which follows is addressed precisely to people like us -- people who are tired, who are weary, who are ready to throw in the towel, who have had too many of "those days." Most of us long for and cry out for that one break that will spell the difference between defeat and victory, between the business going under and the business making it, between a life that is going somewhere and one that is stuck in a rut. All of us long for a break in the routine, some time away from whatever it is that drains us of our energy -- even the time that is filled with nothing already. So here is Jesus' invitation to the tired and weary: "Come… and I will give you rest."
Rest! Blessed rest! Just what we need. For all who are worn out, burned out, tired out, fed up and ready to give up: rest! Jesus invites us to discover the same refreshment and release which enabled him to bear up under the strain of days after days of "those kind of days." And here is the rest for which we have sought: "take my yoke upon you… for my yoke is easy and my burden is light (Matthew 11:29a, 30)."
Hold it, Jesus, you just lost me! How could you possibly speak of rest in one breath and then talk about trading my already heavy burden for another burden? How could that possibly be rest? Look, Jesus, I'm already tired, and you want me to shoulder a yoke, an old-fashioned piece of heavy, restricting farm equipment I've seen hanging in museums and antique shops. Thanks but no thanks!
Yet, for our hesitation and our uncertainty about exchanging one burden for another, we are still drawn to the possibilities. After all, we are tired, and there is a need for some relief. But to take a yoke, even the yoke of Christ, does not sound very appealing. Perhaps it will help if we see a picture of a yoke as it used to be, in the days of Jesus himself, the days when a yoke was as much a necessity as food and drink for it helped provide that food and drink that meant survival.
One of the wonderful legends that was handed down concerning the mysterious quiet years of Jesus, the years prior to his quite visible ministry, is the fact that Jesus the carpenter was one of the master yoke-makers in the Nazareth area. People came from miles around for a yoke hand carved and crafted by Jesus son of Joseph. Perhaps on this occasion, Jesus recalled a friend driving a team of oxen into his courtyard. As a yokemaker, he would have spent considerable time measuring the team, their height, the width, the space between them, and the size of their shoulders. Within a week, the team would be brought back and he would carefully place the newly-made yoke over the shoulders, watching for rough places, smoothing out the edges and fitting them perfectly to this particular team of oxen.
That's the yoke Jesus invites us to take. Do not be misled by the word "easy," for its root word in Greek speaks directly of the tailor-made yokes: they were "well-fitting." The yoke Jesus invites us to take, the yoke that in itself brings rest to weary souls, is one that is made exactly to our lives and hearts. The yoke he invites us to wear fits us well, does not rub us nor cause us to develop sore spirits and is designed for two. His yokes were always designed for two. And our yoke-partner is none other than Christ himself.
When I begin to envision what that yoke looks like and feels like, I come to realize that Jesus in this invitation has cut through to the very heart of the problem for most of us. We are tired, weary and worn out keeping up with our schedules. But Jesus allows us to see that the issue is not that we have too much to do. The problem is that much of what we have to do is insignificant and meaningless.
We are all at times guilty of filling our days with an endless round of activities designed to keep us busy, but little else. We spin our wheels at work because we have to put in the hours, and then we spin our tires running from one meeting to another in the evening. When we finally arrive at home, we wonder why we even bothered. The meetings ran long, the practices were tedious, the people were bores and the rooms crowded. The burdens we carry are no longer the physical loads, but rather are the mental anguish and the fear that somehow we will not measure up to what we are supposed to be and do. We load ourselves with emotional baggage carried over from previous relationships, from childhood, or from some notion of what "they" tell us we "ought" to do. Such baggage presses down and keeps us from living full, rich, whole lives. And then we wonder why we are weary.
A case could easily be made for the fact that the activities and the busy-ness with which we clutter our lives are nothing more than a search for something much deeper: for joy, for inner peace and calmness, for meaning. While we may not spend a great deal of time analyzing why we do our running, when we do pause in the light of such an invitation as this, we see the truth about ourselves and our ways of living. We are trying to stay alive and make sense of it all; trying to discover the reason and the purpose behind and beneath life. We are not the first to come to such a deep realization. Sixteen hundred years ago, Saint Augustine arrived at the same conclusion. His comment has been translated and paraphrased in a number of ways. My favorite is this, which appears in the opening paragraph of Book I of his Confessions: "our hearts are restless until they find rest in God."
Our rest in God is given when we take Christ's offer and become yoked to him and with him. To be so bound to Christ links us with the source of deep and abiding joy emanating not from things but from the heart of God. It restores a proper balance and a new perspective about life and about what is ultimately of significance. Above all, perhaps, because we are yoked to Christ, his closeness and his guidance keeps us on the right track, preventing us from getting sidetracked.
There is our rest! It is not a rest that is a passive sitting down and doing nothing away from the phones. Rather, this rest of the soul is a confidence that we are moving with Christ, the Lord of the universe, along a path that is directed toward God's kingdom of peace and harmony and good will. This rest is an assurance that we are not moving alone nor are we moving aimlessly, but that with strength granted us through the grace of God we journey together. It is a rest that, while we are still active and doing, is pregnant with the possibilities of meaningful, authentic life.
I enjoy reading the novels of James Michener. One of my favorites is Centennial, and in particular the saga of Levi and Elly Zendt. They are a young couple who leave their Pennsylvania Dutch country to carve out a new life in the American west of the early 19th century. On their wagon train journey from St. Louis to the west, they encounter a number of tragedies, none more moving than the day they come upon a burned out conestoga. Nearby, they discover two small children now left orphans, and over the protest of the hard-nosed wagon train master, Elly takes the two children into the Zendt wagon. That night in her diary, she writes: "We have brought the children into our wagon, and they shall be our children from this time on. This is no ordinary trip, for we move within a great dimension." There is about her, and about our journey, a bold confidence that issues in refreshment for our souls for we, too, know that we move in the great dimension of God's reign in and for our lives.
Being yoked to Christ brings the rest, not only of confidence for whatever kind of day we have, for whatever circumstance may present itself, but also of the certainty of the labors which we are called to shoulder with Christ. His yoke invites us to labors of love in his name and, for the sake of the gospel, calls us to right living.
In my teenage years, one of the popular songs which filled our transistor radios and early versions of cassette players was one which told the story of a person walking down a long road. It was a road filled with turns and hills to climb. The person
was carrying another on his back. But, as the title put it (without benefit of adequate grammar), "he ain't heavy, he's my brother." Our yoke-partner in Christ invites us to shoulder the loads of carrying those who need our assistance. They are not burdens. They are our sisters and brothers who may not make it down the long road without us. There is the restful, positive feeling of having acted with compassion on behalf of another in the name of our yoke-partner, Christ.
The early days of the civil rights movement produced many persons who faced dangers and carried the cause of right on their shoulders. In Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus boycott that in many ways gave impetus to the movement and brought the attention of the nation to the cause, the story is told of an elderly black woman. She walked daily from her home to work, a distance that many of her friends and family and others considered far too much for her. But she supported the cause and so walked everyday. When she was encouraged by the leaders of the movement to take the bus because of her age, her health and her limited moving ability, she replied: "my feet are tired; but my soul is rested." That's the rest of the cause of righteousness and justice being lived out.
Are you tired? Exhausted? Burned out? Do you need a break? What we really need is not time off nor time away. Rather what we need is time that is filled with meaning and purpose, that is saturated with the grace of God. What we need, according to this wonderful gospel paradox, is a different burden: the yoke of Christ. To be yoked with him, to live as one of his contemporary disciples brings refreshment for our spirits on "those days." It provides rest for the soul that is tired of chasing after elusive dreams and vain illusions of real life. But best of all, being yoked to Christ connects us with Christ himself. The invitation still stands: take the yoke of Christ and find peace, discover life and salvation, and rest for your souls.
The picture of that day is painted for us by Matthew in the opening verses of the 11th chapter. It started when Jesus received a group of disciples from the camp of John the Baptist. John was now securely locked away in a prison cell, but from that dark imprisonment, he had sent these followers with a question. "Are you really the one?" This question was not what Jesus wanted to hear, especially from John of all people. After all John had seen and heard! How could he possibly challenge the integrity and character of Jesus this way? We know what it feels like when someone calls our integrity into question or falsely slanders our character.
As Jesus made his way into the next town, still stinging from such a probing question from one like John, he encountered children playing in the courthouse square. Their games were the games of energy-laden young people; their laughs were the sounds of joy. None of them paid any attention to this wandering band of strangers. Jesus perceived in their reaction the same he met in their parents and other adults. Everywhere he went, it now seemed, people were so preoccupied with their own games, their own ways of living and their own agendas that no one paid any attention to him, his Word, nor the word of grace offered. We know what it feels like to be ignored, overlooked and treated as if what we said and who we were did not matter in the least. Everyone is just too busy to take much notice.
Finally, there is expressed from Jesus a word of grief and sadness. Remembering his time in the twin cities of Chorazin and Bethsaida, remembering the many displays of power and the miraculous events which had taken place in the lives of their citizens, he recalled that it had not made any impact at all. No one was responding and no one was repenting. Everyone seemed impressed, but not enough so to allow his Word and power to transform their lives. We know what it feels like to have everything we have been working for, planning for and investing ourselves in go for nothing.
This was definitely "one of those days." In the background, and between the lines, I think I hear Jesus crying, "give me a break! What more do I have to do? If this is the thanks I get, I'm ready to throw in the towel!" I could certainly understand such an expression. Perhaps if he could just glimpse one positive result to all he had been doing; just one response that would keep him going to the next town, then it would all be worth it. As it was this day, like so many others, was turning out to be less than what he had anticipated.
So what does Jesus do? He does not go home, slam the door, become a couch potato, sulk and lick his wounds in private. He does not drown his sorrows and apparent failures in the bottle, nor does he pop a few pills in order to sleep with some vague hope that tomorrow will be a better day. Instead, he lifts his eyes toward heaven, to God who is the source of his life, his authority, and his well-being. Jesus knows that he draws his strength from this spiritual fountain of life and from the grace that is extended to give courage and power and passion for living. "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants (Matthew 11:25, NRSV)." After having one of those days, Jesus finds it in himself to offer a prayer of thanks to God. Whatever the source of that kind of faith and life and experience, it's just what I need when I am having those kind of days. It's just what we all need!
The fact is that what Jesus knows and what he has experienced, he now offers to all who have days like that. The familiar invitation which follows is addressed precisely to people like us -- people who are tired, who are weary, who are ready to throw in the towel, who have had too many of "those days." Most of us long for and cry out for that one break that will spell the difference between defeat and victory, between the business going under and the business making it, between a life that is going somewhere and one that is stuck in a rut. All of us long for a break in the routine, some time away from whatever it is that drains us of our energy -- even the time that is filled with nothing already. So here is Jesus' invitation to the tired and weary: "Come… and I will give you rest."
Rest! Blessed rest! Just what we need. For all who are worn out, burned out, tired out, fed up and ready to give up: rest! Jesus invites us to discover the same refreshment and release which enabled him to bear up under the strain of days after days of "those kind of days." And here is the rest for which we have sought: "take my yoke upon you… for my yoke is easy and my burden is light (Matthew 11:29a, 30)."
Hold it, Jesus, you just lost me! How could you possibly speak of rest in one breath and then talk about trading my already heavy burden for another burden? How could that possibly be rest? Look, Jesus, I'm already tired, and you want me to shoulder a yoke, an old-fashioned piece of heavy, restricting farm equipment I've seen hanging in museums and antique shops. Thanks but no thanks!
Yet, for our hesitation and our uncertainty about exchanging one burden for another, we are still drawn to the possibilities. After all, we are tired, and there is a need for some relief. But to take a yoke, even the yoke of Christ, does not sound very appealing. Perhaps it will help if we see a picture of a yoke as it used to be, in the days of Jesus himself, the days when a yoke was as much a necessity as food and drink for it helped provide that food and drink that meant survival.
One of the wonderful legends that was handed down concerning the mysterious quiet years of Jesus, the years prior to his quite visible ministry, is the fact that Jesus the carpenter was one of the master yoke-makers in the Nazareth area. People came from miles around for a yoke hand carved and crafted by Jesus son of Joseph. Perhaps on this occasion, Jesus recalled a friend driving a team of oxen into his courtyard. As a yokemaker, he would have spent considerable time measuring the team, their height, the width, the space between them, and the size of their shoulders. Within a week, the team would be brought back and he would carefully place the newly-made yoke over the shoulders, watching for rough places, smoothing out the edges and fitting them perfectly to this particular team of oxen.
That's the yoke Jesus invites us to take. Do not be misled by the word "easy," for its root word in Greek speaks directly of the tailor-made yokes: they were "well-fitting." The yoke Jesus invites us to take, the yoke that in itself brings rest to weary souls, is one that is made exactly to our lives and hearts. The yoke he invites us to wear fits us well, does not rub us nor cause us to develop sore spirits and is designed for two. His yokes were always designed for two. And our yoke-partner is none other than Christ himself.
When I begin to envision what that yoke looks like and feels like, I come to realize that Jesus in this invitation has cut through to the very heart of the problem for most of us. We are tired, weary and worn out keeping up with our schedules. But Jesus allows us to see that the issue is not that we have too much to do. The problem is that much of what we have to do is insignificant and meaningless.
We are all at times guilty of filling our days with an endless round of activities designed to keep us busy, but little else. We spin our wheels at work because we have to put in the hours, and then we spin our tires running from one meeting to another in the evening. When we finally arrive at home, we wonder why we even bothered. The meetings ran long, the practices were tedious, the people were bores and the rooms crowded. The burdens we carry are no longer the physical loads, but rather are the mental anguish and the fear that somehow we will not measure up to what we are supposed to be and do. We load ourselves with emotional baggage carried over from previous relationships, from childhood, or from some notion of what "they" tell us we "ought" to do. Such baggage presses down and keeps us from living full, rich, whole lives. And then we wonder why we are weary.
A case could easily be made for the fact that the activities and the busy-ness with which we clutter our lives are nothing more than a search for something much deeper: for joy, for inner peace and calmness, for meaning. While we may not spend a great deal of time analyzing why we do our running, when we do pause in the light of such an invitation as this, we see the truth about ourselves and our ways of living. We are trying to stay alive and make sense of it all; trying to discover the reason and the purpose behind and beneath life. We are not the first to come to such a deep realization. Sixteen hundred years ago, Saint Augustine arrived at the same conclusion. His comment has been translated and paraphrased in a number of ways. My favorite is this, which appears in the opening paragraph of Book I of his Confessions: "our hearts are restless until they find rest in God."
Our rest in God is given when we take Christ's offer and become yoked to him and with him. To be so bound to Christ links us with the source of deep and abiding joy emanating not from things but from the heart of God. It restores a proper balance and a new perspective about life and about what is ultimately of significance. Above all, perhaps, because we are yoked to Christ, his closeness and his guidance keeps us on the right track, preventing us from getting sidetracked.
There is our rest! It is not a rest that is a passive sitting down and doing nothing away from the phones. Rather, this rest of the soul is a confidence that we are moving with Christ, the Lord of the universe, along a path that is directed toward God's kingdom of peace and harmony and good will. This rest is an assurance that we are not moving alone nor are we moving aimlessly, but that with strength granted us through the grace of God we journey together. It is a rest that, while we are still active and doing, is pregnant with the possibilities of meaningful, authentic life.
I enjoy reading the novels of James Michener. One of my favorites is Centennial, and in particular the saga of Levi and Elly Zendt. They are a young couple who leave their Pennsylvania Dutch country to carve out a new life in the American west of the early 19th century. On their wagon train journey from St. Louis to the west, they encounter a number of tragedies, none more moving than the day they come upon a burned out conestoga. Nearby, they discover two small children now left orphans, and over the protest of the hard-nosed wagon train master, Elly takes the two children into the Zendt wagon. That night in her diary, she writes: "We have brought the children into our wagon, and they shall be our children from this time on. This is no ordinary trip, for we move within a great dimension." There is about her, and about our journey, a bold confidence that issues in refreshment for our souls for we, too, know that we move in the great dimension of God's reign in and for our lives.
Being yoked to Christ brings the rest, not only of confidence for whatever kind of day we have, for whatever circumstance may present itself, but also of the certainty of the labors which we are called to shoulder with Christ. His yoke invites us to labors of love in his name and, for the sake of the gospel, calls us to right living.
In my teenage years, one of the popular songs which filled our transistor radios and early versions of cassette players was one which told the story of a person walking down a long road. It was a road filled with turns and hills to climb. The person
was carrying another on his back. But, as the title put it (without benefit of adequate grammar), "he ain't heavy, he's my brother." Our yoke-partner in Christ invites us to shoulder the loads of carrying those who need our assistance. They are not burdens. They are our sisters and brothers who may not make it down the long road without us. There is the restful, positive feeling of having acted with compassion on behalf of another in the name of our yoke-partner, Christ.
The early days of the civil rights movement produced many persons who faced dangers and carried the cause of right on their shoulders. In Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus boycott that in many ways gave impetus to the movement and brought the attention of the nation to the cause, the story is told of an elderly black woman. She walked daily from her home to work, a distance that many of her friends and family and others considered far too much for her. But she supported the cause and so walked everyday. When she was encouraged by the leaders of the movement to take the bus because of her age, her health and her limited moving ability, she replied: "my feet are tired; but my soul is rested." That's the rest of the cause of righteousness and justice being lived out.
Are you tired? Exhausted? Burned out? Do you need a break? What we really need is not time off nor time away. Rather what we need is time that is filled with meaning and purpose, that is saturated with the grace of God. What we need, according to this wonderful gospel paradox, is a different burden: the yoke of Christ. To be yoked with him, to live as one of his contemporary disciples brings refreshment for our spirits on "those days." It provides rest for the soul that is tired of chasing after elusive dreams and vain illusions of real life. But best of all, being yoked to Christ connects us with Christ himself. The invitation still stands: take the yoke of Christ and find peace, discover life and salvation, and rest for your souls.
