Pentecost 3A
Text: Matthew 11:16-19; 25-30
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
June 21, 2020
Vacation’s All I Ever Wanted
Among all the casualties of this time of pandemic there is one more – not the greatest of them, but significant still – that I’m hearing about this summer: the vacation plans you made for this year, are kaput. “We rent a lake house for a week, every year,” one of our households tells me. Nope; not this year. My neighbors told me, “This was the year we were going to take the girls to Disney World.” I love their daughters; my heart just broke.
Vacation is a time to unburden, lay the load down for a time. In a year in which we’re all carrying around extra load, it is unfair in the extreme that this is the year we can’t get away, and lay that burden down.
In the eleventh chapter of the gospel of Matthew, the sense I get is that Jesus needs a vacation. He has been traveling around the cities of Galilee, and has experienced little but rejection. Finally, in v. 16, Jesus blows his top: “To what shall I compare this generation? You are like a bunch of chil¬dren.” He tells all those cities that have rejected him that on the Judgment Day, when God finally gives them what they deserve, it will be no better for them than it was for Sodom.
So it is not one of Jesus’ kinder, gentler moments. I sense he is tired here, tired of rejection, exhausted by hard work without result, dead tired. This is a man who needs a vacation.
“At that time Jesus said, ….” (at that time, the gospel says; right after he reveals his own exhaustion), “All right, come to me, all you that are weary and are 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.”
These are some of the most beloved of all Jesus’ words. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden.” Here is an invitation to unburden ourselves, an invitation to vacation.
We need it. We all need it. This year of all years, we need that vacation.
And Jesus, in the eleventh chapter of Matthew, understands. His own life anxiety, his burdensome world-weariness, his exhaustion; these things are evident. And Jesus says, “Come to me, all that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, ….”
Wait a minute. I thought that we who are weary and heavy-laden were going to get a vacation. But instead of a vacation, Jesus is offering us … a yoke? Why would Jesus offer tired, burdened people what they seem to need least of all? What we need is a vacation, an unburdening, not a yoke, not another burden! A yoke is a work-instrument, you know, used to help hard-working oxen pull together. So instead of escape, Jesus offers tired people new work equipment. A burden. If you’ll pardon me for saying so, it turns out that Jesus has set us up with this. Seems like when we least expect it, the yoke is on you.
So whatever deliverance it is that Jesus offers to tired people, it is not escape. It is not deliverance from responsibility, from accountability; it is not deliverance from purpose. Martin Luther, in a great sermon on this text, notes that only Jesus Christ himself could get away with saying, “Come to me all you who are heavy laden” in one breath and “I will place around your necks a yoke” in the next! I wouldn’t try that, unless I were indeed God’s own Son! Maybe Jesus can do that, can dare to speak of giving us rest by placing his burden upon us, because Jesus knows that the issue in life is not IF we shall be burdened but rather which burdens we shall bear.
Listen to what I am suggesting here. Not all of the burdens that weigh us down are the right burdens, are worth the labor it takes to carry them. Sometimes, for example, in normal times – in normal, non-pandemic times, I mean – I wonder if one of the biggest burdens that I carry is just the conse¬quence of my own affluence. Deb and I own two cars, and it seems that almost always one or the other is in need of some mainte¬nance procedure or minor repair. There is a whole house to maintain and keep fixed up and clean. There are weeks when I feel I am the victim of a revolt of appliances and computer equipment and gadgets. Now, we bought all this stuff to free us, right?; to make our lives easier, to unburden our lives. How ironic that we end up servicing our machines rather than our machines serving us. I wait for the Comcast tech to arrive, therefore I am. Take my four years of installment payments upon you, for my yoke is easy and my burden is an affordable credit plan.
Which burdens will you bear?, asks Jesus. And pandemic times bring that question of Jesus into sharp, sharp focus. Living under pandemic threat you get a much better idea of what is really, really important in your life, do you not? Don’t be burdened by that silly stuff, Jesus says; don’t let your life be spent in the service of things like that. Lay that burden down, and take MY yoke upon you, instead.
And what is Jesus’ yoke? What does that look like, that rest that Jesus offers us, that rest that somehow means taking up his yoke?
My friend Brian Hiortdahl, a Lutheran pastor with whom I used to coach youth baseball, Brian says the answer to that question comes in the next chapter of the gospel of Matthew, chapter 12, in which Jesus continues to explore the nature of rest and the yoke he invites us to bear. Jesus gets into an argument in chapter 12 with the Pharisees about the Sabbath, the day of rest. Is it lawful, they ask Jesus, to heal someone on the Sabbath, on the day of rest? Aren’t we supposed to be on vacation that day?
In reply to them, Jesus simply calls to a man there with a withered hand, “C’mere. Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and it was restored, as sound as the other.
Brian writes, “For Jesus, rest is more than the absence of work; [rest – true rest – ] is the active presence of restorative power. …. What Jesus calls rest, … we might call recreation or re-creation. Bodies are replenished and restored, renewed and re-created for another day.”
That’s why the yoke is easy, and that’s why the burden is light. When the yoke you bear, the work you do, is the work of Jesus, then you should feel that restorative power. That’s the mark of it! It energizes you; it does not drain you. And furthermore, as you do that work in your life – in your place of work, in your home life, in all the relationships into which you are called – you should see its effect on others around you as well as on yourself. Watch for people around you to be replenished and restored, re-created for another day, blessed as they are by you, blessed by the Jesus who works through you, as you labor, with joy, under that yoke. That yoke is easy indeed. That burden, is light.
You should never let a good crisis go to waste, it is said. During this crisis we are all sitting quietly at home, more than we ever have. We are sitting with the people we love, more than we ever have. Don’t let this crisis go to waste: let go of the stuff that is not worth it, and commit yourself anew to the things of Jesus, to what is indeed the yoke that is the right one. Reflect, renew, re-evaluate, replenish, restore, re-create. Re-create. When you get to what’s right you will know it by this: that His yoke is easy, and His burden, is light.