Giving it a rest

Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
July 5, 2020

All of the lectionary passages for today speak of longing and desire, wants and needs: comfort, pleasure, rest, safety, spiritual connection, relationship, to be freed from our worst selves. How often are our prayers full of the ache of grief or loneliness, the hunger for justice and peace, the yearning for healing and wholeness? The psalms are replete with cries of “How long, O Lord” and “Save me” and “Listen to me”. We are aching for good news, we are craving to be together, we are longing for hope.



Author T.A. Webb in his book Second Chances writes, “I wanted to lay down my armor, my strength and my pain for just a minute and let someone hold me.” He continues, “When you stand at the abyss, you fall to your knees and you…grab for any comfort, any little thing to keep it from swallowing you whole.”

We would think that our most desperate prayers might draw us closer to God and sometimes they do and yet in the hardest of times God’s promises can seem so far away. Or is it us who is far away from God’s promises? If anything we might think that these longings would draw us closer to each other; a burden or sorrow shared is a burden halved. But sometimes we can be our own worst enemy by not reaching out, by keeping it close to the chest, by not putting words to our yearnings for fear that they go unheard, unsatisfied. 

Sometimes like children who are fussed we don’t know what we want or need. None of us wants to mourn. We’d rather dance. There’s a time for both and yet we are surely in a season of mourning. And yet dancing is an undeniable movement of hope, resilience, and resistance. We look to our heroes and leaders for reassurance and guidance and, the present administration notwithstanding, they often fall short of our expectations, our desires, because the depth of our need—our grief, our anxiety, our weariness—is so great. And when the familiar past is no longer a possibility, the present is heartbreaking, and the future is so unpredictable, we find ourselves longing for rest, for escape, but also perhaps more ready for wisdom, for the truth.



Jesus gives thanks that wisdom and truth have been revealed not to the wise and intelligent but to infants, to little ones, to those that empire discards and devalues. Jesus says that if we want to learn, we must share his yoke, and by doing so we will find rest for our souls.

Let’s remember those to whom Jesus is speaking. He’s speaking to the poor, the marginalized, the devalued, the discarded of his society—tax collectors and sex workers, gluttons and drunks, the sick and disabled, the ones burdened and crushed by oppressive laws, restricted from grace—those who would enter God’s kin-dom first. So how do we who are privileged obtain rest for our souls? What are the burdens we are carrying that Jesus would rather we lay down?

Jesus invites us to share his yoke joined with the poor and marginalized. When we lay down our whiteness, our transphobia, our racism, our homophobia, our fears, when we detangle our faith from the warping of empire, from our need for control, it is then we become truly free. Toni Morrison wrote, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.” We take on that yoke so that someone else can be free and in that process we both are freed. Lilla Watson, an Indigenous Australian, artist, and academic, wrote, “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." Sounds like something Jesus would say.

I think we know what we need to do, the burdens we carry that smack of privilege, as people and as Church, but they’re also awfully hard to let go of. Reparations to Indigenous peoples and people of color have been done before but nowhere near what would be called restorative justice. It was also our faith ancestors who colonized these lands. Many of us live on the stolen land of the Lenni Lenape people (LEN-ee leh-NAH-pay). We declared this truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, but we know that we who have power and privilege will do what is necessary to keep and protect it. We’re foolish if we think we’re not in the company of those who have wealth and power. I know this is uncomfortable, even painful. I struggled with this sermon, feeling no sense of rest or unburdening writing it. This wisdom and truth of Jesus, this yoke of his, is anything but easy or light for us. The yoke of Jesus turns us from self-interest and joins us to the common good. Jesus knew that to liberate the poor, the rich must be liberated from their wealth and power.

The Table to which Jesus invites us is no different. We repeat the words “the night of betrayal and desertion” as if it was so long ago and yet it is also here, right now, as people betray and desert one another in the midst of a pandemic, as we turn from each other rather than toward, forgetting that our liberty is bound together. I know this sounds harsh, especially when we look to this Table for comfort, and yet it is our resistance to hard truths that we need to give a rest. If our faith allows us to persist as we are rather than continue to transform us, it is no longer Jesus we follow.



As we come to this Table with whatever elements we have to yoke us to Jesus, I invite us with these familiar words by Brian Wren:



Spirit of Jesus, if I love my neighbor
out of my knowledge, leisure, power or wealth,
help me to understand my neighbor's anger:
the helplessness that hates my power to help.


And if, when I have answered need with kindness,
my neighbor rises, wakened from despair,
keep me from flinching when the cry for justice
requires of me the changes that I fear.


If I am hugging safety or possessions,
uncurl my spirit, as your love prevails,
to join my neighbors, work for liberation,
and find my freedom at the mark of nails.



Amen.

Benediction


Cancel Culture (lines from. Author unknown.)


may light cancel darkness
may liberty cancel fascism
may love cancel hate


may altruism cancel narcissism
may peace cancel violence
may hope cancel despair


may courage cancel fear
may joy cancel misery
may understanding cancel obstinance
may wisdom cancel foolishness
may science cancel ideology
may integrity cancel corruption


may patriotism cancel treason
may faith cancel fanaticism
may truth cancel falsehood
may justice cancel inequity
may generosity cancel poverty