Good morning, welcome and I know we’re not supposed to mix politic and religion but Happy 4 of July anyway! I am indeed happy that we have this occasion to get together, to celebrate, I’ve heard it’s been a while we’ve haven’t had a cookout here at Holy Trinity – it may not be the ideal weather – but it yet is so good we have this chance to be together. Thank you for those who are helping us to make this a beautiful day and thank you for those visiting us on this occasion, I know some of you attend other churches or live in other places, and we are all the more excited to have you with us today and get to know you a bit better, I hope you’ll feel very welcome and don’t be shy! Don’t be shy because you may have been invited by a friend or a family member, but all of us strangers we are here because we’ve been first invited by the Lord. We’ve first been invited by the Lord. And you know, although the readings we have in the Episcopal Church are set in advance on a regular three years schedule like clockwork, I think this is so perfect we actually get to hear Jesus say to each one of us on this day:
“Come to me”. And there’s more: “Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” And then again “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”.
Twice in a short paragraph, Jesus promises us that if we come to him, we will find rest, and not any kind of rest, rest for our souls: Encouragement, peace, comfort, contentment, joy even. And rest, this is of course what Sunday was meant for to start with. Why do we come to church? Sometimes we feel we have to, because we have a job to do, people may rely on us for different tasks, or maybe we feel we need to, we go to church to learn, to grow spiritually, to ask forgiveness for our sins. And it’s not untrue of course but yet, first of all, Sunday worship is meant to give us rest and to give rest to our souls.
You may know that when Jesus was speaking to his disciples and making this invitation to them, people were really big on keeping the Sabbath, this day of rest God gave to his people after God set them free from Egypt, because, indeed, they weren’t slave any more, they had a day where they wouldn’t do any work, a day meant for worship where they could just sit and be together and be with God. The thing is, by the time Jesus started his ministry, roughly a 1500 years after Moses, people weren’t so sure anymore it was good enough to just sit and be with God. They started to feel that they had to do this and that to make sure God would be extra pleased, and over the centuries they had added 613 commandments in their oral law – a lot of them concerning what you could do or couldn’t do during Sabbath, and I guess it ended up not being that fun anymore because you never knew if you weren’t doing something wrong. The day of rest ended up being a day of extra work and extra pressure.
Why am I saying all of this? Because that’s what Jesus wanted to free people from. It might not be obvious for us but this is what it means when he speaks about “his yoke”, at the time the rabbis used to talk about “the yoke of the Torah”, “The yoke of God’s law” and mainly the yoke of all the religious commandments they had thought of, and so Jesus opposes “his yoke” to that yoke. Jesus wanted to make it easy for people, or at least “lighter”, and certainly not feel like religion and their relationship with God should be a burden. What a terrible thing to say isn’t it, that our relationship with God could be a burden. Imagine saying your spouse or parents or children are a burden! And yet sometimes it can become like that when we have so many things to do for them, and maybe sometimes we have this fantasy to escape for a few days at a spa on our own, but maybe it feels so bad because we know that’s not how it is suppose to be: Relationships are not about doing things for people, it’s about being with people and it’s not meant to bring stress and constraint but rather peace and joy and relief from our continual striving in life, and so it is with God. Now I am afraid church hasn’t done such a good job at teaching that, I wonder how many wake up on Sunday morning and think: I am going to go to church to rest, and to find rest for my soul. And yet, this is Jesus’s invitation and rest for our souls might be the one thing we need and that is so difficult to find today. Jesus isn’t asking his followers to serve him or to prove themselves, to perform, or even to “grow spiritually” as we hear so often, if anything he asks them to “decrease”, to make themselves like little children and to just let him do the work for them, he will take the yoke, he will take the lead, he will guide them and give them everything they need.
So, it’s pretty cool isn’t it? And yet, it’s also the most difficult thing for us to do, to trust God enough to believe it is enough for us to be here, to let Jesus teach us and feed us and maybe just look at us and love us – sometimes I think this is really what he wants to do when we come to church on Sunday, just have us sit so he can take a good look at us and love us, like my grandmother uses to do when we sat at around her kitchen table, and she fed us breakfast and she didn’t eat she just sat and looked at us, with her small, piercing eyes, and at the time I didn’t understand but now I do understand that she was just thinking: “I can’t believe these are my grand children” and I think God is exactly like that. Just come at the table and let yourself be loved, as you used when you were at Grand Ma’s.
Now, I am not silly, we have things to do when we’re grown up and I know that at church we have vestry meetings and bills to pay and someone has to make coffee and clean the altar. I think though that we can rely on God’s guidance to do what God calls us to know, not more and not less. I decided not to preach on the Old testament this morning as I did in the past weeks because it is such a long story – Chapter 24 is the longest chapter in Genesis – and it’s all about Abraham’s servant who goes to try to find a bride for Isaac. And so it’s kind of prosaic isn’t it? And yet, the passage is really about that, this man trying to do his job, trying to do his best, trying to do God’s will and I can only invite you to read this story at home and see how God guides him every step on the way because he keeps praying, asking God for directions instead of running around in all directions, thinking he has so much to do and God is so difficult to please. He has a job to do yes, and it can be hard at times, a long journey, but it isn’t difficult, he isn’t left on his own to figure it out, he isn’t constantly in doubt or exhausted, because God shows him the way.
But then, it’s not only about the things we need to do. More deeply, when Jesus asks us to lay down our burden he speaks about our inner life and I don’t think we can really understand this Gospel if we fail to see that. For this reason, I think this is helpful we have this passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans this morning. Sometimes Paul can be a little cryptic and we’re not sure what he is talking about, but today I think we know exactly what Paul is talking about, when he says: I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate (…) I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. When Jesus wants to relive people from their heavy burden, he doesn’t just want to give them less stuff to do, even religious stuff, what he wants is to relieve them from the burden of their powerlessness and guilt, and always falling in the same mistakes, being trapped in the same addictions or behaviors. Sometimes we are to ourselves our own burden, aren’t we? And yet, Jesus’s offer still stands: Come to me. I read an interesting commentary this week about this passage from Romans. The author said that one of her children asked her what it brought to her to be a Christian, and she said well, it gives me hope, it gives me direction, purpose, meaning and so on. And then she said she started to think more about it and she realized that maybe one of the most underestimated gifts of Christianity is that we know that we are sinners. And you know it’s like when you’re not feeling well, for weeks, months and then suddenly you have a diagnostic. It can be scary but mostly it’s good in the sense that now finally you know and you don’t have to figure it out on your own and try to make yourself feel better, doctors can do something for you and you don’t have to be embarrassed about anything because that’s what they are here for.
I don’t know what is your burden today, but I think Jesus wants us to know that we are safe with him. We are safe with him because he is gentle and humble in heart. We don’t have to be perfect to come to him, we come to him to be perfected. He will deal kindly with us, if only we open our hearts, and that’s the only requirement. At the beginning of our passage, Jesus wonders aloud what it would take for people to turn to God. Jesus and John the Baptist may have had different style, John was austere and Jesus was very approachable, and yet they both taught the same thing. Not a long list of requirements but repentance, not for people to beat themselves up but to repent, that is to turn to God, as they are, and let God heal them, and make the burden lighter. I hope you can leave this place feeling a little lighter today, receiving God’s rest for your body and mostly for your soul because that’s the invitation inside the invitation you’ve received today, and that’s the invitation you receive every Sunday.