Sermon

St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Durham, NC

July 6, 2008 - Proper 9 (A)

The Rev. M. Jonah Kendall

Matthew 11:25-30

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard in his treatise on ethics, entitled “Either/Or,” tells the story of great calamity.  A circus once set up its tent outside a small village. During rehearsals there was a fire.

Flames soon spread to the fields surrounding the circus grounds and began to burn toward the village below. The circus master, convinced that the village would be destroyed and the people killed unless they were warned, asked if there was anybody who could go to the village and warn the people.

The clown, dressed in full costume, jumped on a bicycle and sped down the hill to the village below. “Run for your lives! Run for your lives! A fire is coming and the village is going to burn!” He shouted as he rode up and down the streets of the village.

Curious villagers came out from their houses and shops and stood along the sidewalks. They shouted back to the clown, laughing and applauding his performance. The more desperately the clown shouted, the more the villagers cheered. The village burned and the loss of life was great because they failed to comprehend his message.

In today’s Gospel, we hear, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”  Now what I want to suggest is that this phrase often comes to us as a clown on a bicycle.  For it’s a message central to everything Christ was about — what he taught, what he did and most especially what he offers us.  And yet, it’s a message we so often misunderstand.

Now, I should say that I was once told by a mentor of mine that one should never try to teach from the pulpit unless one was pretty darn sure they were a great teacher.  Well, I’m not so sure I am.  But I’ve been bolstered by a thing I read by Paul Tillich.  So I’m going to give it a shot.

Tillich believed that our misunderstanding of this passage has everything to do with why many of us find our spiritual life dissatisfying, why we feel our relationship with God to be burdensome, difficult, and so often beyond us.  Yeah, even though Christ talks about letting our burdens go, the way we read this passage often leads us to believe that taking on his yoke is just one more thing to do, to strive for.  That if we want to be with God then we must accept this yoke.  That rest is something to achieve.  And the reason for this is that we tend to look at it from a religious perspective.

Let me give you three examples.  First off, we think he’s referring to our sin.  If we can only lay the burden of our sins down, then we would be forgiven and so enjoy some king of lightness of soul.  Just give it up to Christ!  And so we’re forever trying to declare our sincerity in this endeavor.  I was down at the Durham County Jail yesterday.  Time and time again it was the same thing: “Just let God know how sincere I am.  Let God know I’m truly sorry and really repentant.”  In this repentance is a struggle for sincerity.

Another way we read this is by believing that what Christ means when he tells us to take his yoke upon us is that we are to take up his life – that we are to live a Christly life.  You know, make sure you still go to church on the three-day-weekend.  Live charitably, lovingly, and mercifully.  Volunteer.  Take up our cross.  Here the yoke becomes a new life beyond us that we must attain, for if attained then our lives would find some deeper blessedness and peace.

Lastly, we imagine Jesus to be talking about our possessions.  To lay our burdens down is to literally give up the possessions that clutter and fill our lives.  The calling to lay our burdens down is the calling to the ascetic life, the life of St. Francis in the wilderness, to simplicity.  For there in such simplicity, we will find a great abundance with God.  And so, again we are to change, transform become something other than we are.

Well, what I want to suggest is that in the passage, in this context, Jesus is not talking about any of this.  Rather he wants to get at what lies underneath such thoughts, such strivings.  He wants us to get out the very ground of being from which they spring.  And so when Christ talks about letting our burdens go, he is speaking about the burden of the religious enterprise.

Now, this may sound strange to you, so give me minute here.  I mean after all, here I am talking to you from a pulpit in a church, a church I love.  But you see, as I think Christ understood it, there’s God and then there’s religion.  In first Century Israel, there was life with God and neighbor and then there was life under the Law — the code of life by which faithful Jews were to live.

The language Christ uses is important here.  Devout first century Jews declared to have taken on the “Yoke of Torah.”  It was their master, their way of life and their devotion to it often led them away from their neighbor and therefore God, for they were so committed to their own righteousness.

And so by inviting his listeners (Matthew’s audience was primarily Jewish) to lay down their burdens and take him up.  Christ is asking them to let their religion go so that they may open up – not a new one, Christ didn’t come start a new religion – but a new ground of being, a new reality with which to live into.

You see religion is a human creation.  It’s here because of our human need for security, order, and direction.  Yet because of that, it is rife with problems because it is created out of our fear and anxiety about the unknown, our lack of control, and the frailty of our lives.  Religion, although a response to the Divine, is a construct of ours to provide answers, regain control and open up a path of immortality.

In this way, the religious pursuit can be understood as our need for more.  And so can be applied this to other things, our jobs, our relationships, even hobbies.  Again, the religious pursuit is an enterprise through which we seek to become that which is beyond.

And it is for precisely this reason that many of us run into trouble, finding our relationship with God to be difficult, burdensome, and unfulfilling.  For who can achieve such divine aspirations?  Who can live as Christ?  Who can be immortal?  And so, if we’re not careful, our religious quest for God can make God seem the furthest thing from us as evidenced by division, tension, guilt, exclusion, rejection, and judgment of ourselves and others.  Sounds a little like Lambeth, doesn’t it?

Yet, what Christ was up to, was not the forming of a new religion, a new thing to take up, but the opening up for us of a new ground of being, a new reality, a new way of looking at ourselves and the world.  Christ came to open up the true ground of being —God’s gracious love — and it’s the one reality, the only real enduring reality that we don’t have to strive for, but rather, strives to claim us.

Isn’t that something?  Not our need to be like God, to raise ourselves up, but God’s need to reach down to us — to meet us where we are, to make our lives the ground upon which God offers God’s self.  It’s the reality of grace, that’s what Christ calls us to.  And the wonderful thing about grace, is that it is for all of us – and not as we shall be, but as we are.  “My yoke is easy, my burden light.”  And with this, Christ is offering to be our teacher and our guide.  That’s what everything in this church directs you to see, Christ the teacher of the great and graceful ground of being in God.

At this point in my sermons I usually ask whether we are up to the challenge.  That is whether we can let ourselves follow in Christ’s footsteps.  Yet, that doesn’t apply here.  I’ve sort of boxed myself into a corner.  For Christ is not asking anything of us.  Rather he wants us to know that what is of God is graciously given.

And so let me simply lift something up from life here at St. Philip’s this past week.  I got an email from a parishioner, the mood of which I could only interpret as one of joy.  There were plenty of exclamation points.  She said that a few years back St. Philip’s had created a bumper sticker that everyone loved.  She had put one on her car.  But a year or so later, the day came when her car died.  And so she went searching for another bumper sticker.  But it was not to be found.  She searched and searched.  Nothing.  The office had run out and no one had an extra, so she gave up.

Well, the other day she walked into Anne’s office and, lo and behold, the bumper sticker was just sitting there, right on a desk.  Do you know what it said?  “Grace Happens!”  Now, you might be thinking, what’s up with this story, Jonah?  Well, I guess I’d say, it’s just that.  Grace happens!  It’s God’s gift, not the product of our strivings.

So keep your eyes and ears open, for grace abounds, it is the true ground of our being in God.  And it’s out there like a clown on a bicycle, laughable in its simplicity, and yet powerful enough to make all the difference.  Amen.

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