One Yoke or Two
Matthew 11: 25 – 30
Makemie Presbyterian Church                                                      
July 4, 2010 Communion Sunday

²⁵At that time Jesus said, “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; ²⁶yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. ²⁷All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. ²⁸“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. ²⁹Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. ³⁰For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Frances Makemie established the Presbyterian church in the colonies 93 years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Fifty-six 56 men signed the Declaration  including two future presidents, three vice presidents, and ten members of the United States Congress, but only one clergy person,  the Presbyterian Reverend John Witherspoon,  who was a direct descendant of John Knox.

          This morning’s reading contains one of the great consolation passages of all time. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden,” Jesus says, “and I will give you rest.” It’s a passage we can find etched on tombstones or worked into stained glass windows or even stitched into needlepoint & hung in the church parlor.

          It is a wonderful promise, a comforting promise to which many of us turn when our burdens seem impossible to bear, when our best efforts to cope with them have failed & we’re close to collapse. It’s a promise that offers hope of help, hope of a God who will lift the sweaty loads off our backs & replace them with a lighter yoke, lighter because it yokes us with one who is greater than we are & with whose strong help we can bear any burden.

          That’s what this passage means to many of us today, but it meant something different when Jesus first said it. He had just finished a preaching mission to several Galilean cities, where his welcome had been less than warm. The people in those cities were smart & capable. In spite of Roman occupation, both their local economies & their religious institutions were still working. They weren’t looking for help from Jesus or anyone else & whatever gifts he had hoped to give them, they declined to take.

          This Galilean mission was a failure in other words & in the passage at hand we hear Jesus’ response to that failure. After heaping some powerful reproaches on those who didn’t welcome him, Jesus thanks God for showing things to simple people that wise & understanding people can’t  see.  At least one reason why this is God’s will, apparently, is so that no one gets human wisdom & understanding confused with divine revelation. Those who know God don’t arrive at such knowledge by their own natural intelligence or capable efforts. They know God because God has chosen to be known.

          Now Jesus offers to lighten the load of all who are carrying heavy burdens, some of which have been laid on the shoulders of simple by the wise & understanding ones. In the first century this might have been literal sticks & bricks, the increasing weight of Rome, or the invisible load of any of life’s grief & fear. But since this is in Matthew’s gospel, it’s likely that Jesus meant religious burdens as well. By the time Matthew sat down to write the first Jewish revolt had failed & the temple was in ruins. With the Sadducees out of business & the zealots in full retreat, the Pharisees were the only religious party left standing, with the future of Judaism in their hands. This places them on a collision course with Jesus’ party & in many ways Matthew’s gospel is a record of their struggle. 

          In those days, The Jesus party was by far the smaller of the two. It was made up largely of simple people who were stung by the inhospitality of the wise & understanding people to whom they believed they belonged. Both parties shared the same Torah, the same prophets, the same devotion to the same God. Two millennia later, with the separation official & their numbers reversed, it is easy to cast the struggle between them as one between Jews & Christians, but in Jesus day it was a struggle among his own people, no less bitter than those in some Christian circles today. At issue weren’t only who had authority to speak for God but also what those authorizes said about the kind of yoke God placed on humankind.

          Then, as now, some proposed weightier requirements than others. Then, as now, some placed more weight on their own view of those requirements than others. If you read the newspaper then you know that such debate didn’t only happen once long ago in a land far away; it continues to happen right now, wherever religious people meet to decide what it means to know God. In this light, Mathew Gospel isn’t about the struggle within two different religious traditions. It’s about the struggle within one religious tradition over the requirements of faith.

          Thanks to the apostle Paul & his gifted interpreter Martin Luther, most Christians identify this struggle as one between works & grace. In traditional telling, when Jesus offered his heavy-laden listeners a lighter yoke, he was offering them a religion of grace to replace the religion of works under which they were laboring.  I confess with sorrow that I have preached that sermon myself. Offering us, my faith community the high ground while denigrating the competition, my reading was not true on many levels. It wasn’t historical true. It wasn’t theologically true. It wasn’t even humanly true.

          At best I can tell, the truth is every human being who longs to know God lives with the tension between grace & works. On one hand, we long to believe that God comes to us as we are, utterly unimpressed by the tricks we do for love. On the one hand, we live in a world where those tricks often work really well, so that it’s next to impossible to give up believing in them too. Follow us around for a day or two & you might discover what we believe most by how we act.

          I believe I live by God’s grace, but I act like a scout collecting merit badges.   I have a list of things to do that is a mile long & while there are a number of things on the list that I genuinely want to do, t e majority of them are things I think I ought to do, that I should do, that I had better do or God will not love me anymore. I may believe that my life depends on God’s grace, but I act like it depends on me & how many good deed I can perform, as if every day were a talent show & God had nothing better to do than keep up with my score.

          Do you know what I mean? Human begins have a perverse way of turning Jesus’ easy yoke back into a hard one again, by driving ourselves to do, do, do more & whipping ourselves to be, be, be more when all God has ever asked is that we belong to him. That comes first; everything else follows that, but we so often get the order reversed. We think there are all kinds of requirements to be met first, all kinds of rules to follow, all kinds of burdens to bear, so that we are not yet free to belong to God. We’re still loaded down, not only by our jobs & our families & all our other responsibilities but by something deeper down in us, something that keeps telling us we must do more, be better, try harder, prove ourselves worthy or we will never earn God’s love. It’s the most tiring work in the world, & it’s never done.

          A couple of weeks ago, I had more to do than any one person could do, & it was my own fault. I’m not very good at saying no.  I like being needed & I like being like, & carrying a heavy load seemed like the best way to get to be both of those. Carrying it alone worked even better, because I didn’t have to share the rewards of my labor with anyone else. While I hate to admit it I somehow have the idea that God expects more of me than of other people & that I couldn’t let God down. 

          So I worked a couple of sixty hour weeks in a row  told myself that I would rest as soon as I got it all done. I didn’t sleep & when morning came I wasn’t  so alert. Then an unexpected thing happened. I took the dogs out for their morning ramble in Byrd Park & as I looked at the young geese & their parents swimming on the Pocomoke River,  the dogs took off. I flew through the air like Superwoman but then gravity clicked in & I landed like a big flounder. Flump.  My back was hurt. I spent  the last two weeks in bed. At first I panicked & then I did what all good people do when they don’t like what life has dealt them. I pleaded with God, I bargained with God. I assured God that I had gotten the message, that I would slow down & stop playing superwoman if I could just get out of bed.

          No deal. God would not play my game. So there I lay for the next week, my list of things to do gathering dust on the bureau, my appointment book lying neglected by the bed. At first it drove me crazy to look at them, but slowly, as the week wore on, they lost their power over me. I became  more interested in watching how the sunlight moved across the ceiling as morning turned to afternoon. I slept a lot &read a lot & thought a lot about what really mattered in life & what didn’t. I visited with friends who came to call & spent more time with my family than I had in years. And we were still fed with help from my brothers & sisters in this church family. We ate delicious lasagnas, pies, salads, noodles & homemade baked bread. Our community fund raiser & ice cream social still went on & was a big success. Even though I called around for the Sunday worship at Sturgis Park thinking that Saturday night was Sunday morning, we still received Rebecca & baptized Layla, with your help sharing the yoke. And last Sunday as well. And I thank you. It is a time I will remember fondly. It was an easy yoke, but not one I would voluntarily have chosen. I thought that the way to find rest for my soul was to finish my list of things to do & present it to God like a full book of saving stamps, but as it turned out that wasn’t the ticket at all. The way to find rest for our souls is simply to stop, to lay down our list of things to do & be, the heavy yokes we have signed for ourselves & to accept the lighter ones God made for us instead. 

          If you have traveled around the world or even if you have read National Geographic from time to time, you know that there are two basic kinds of yokes that can be used to bear burdens: single ones & shared ones. The single ones are very efficient. By placing a yoke across the shoulders & fitting buckets hung from poles on each side, human beings can carry almost as much as donkeys. They will tire easily & have to sit down to rest & their shoulders will ache all the time – their backs may even give out – but still it’s possible to move great loads from one place to another using a single creature under a single yoke.

          A shared yoke works quite differently. It requires twice as many creatures for one thing, but if they are a well-matched pair they can work all day, because under a shared yoke one can rest a little while the other pulls. They can take turns bearing the brunt of the load; they can cover for each other without ever laying their burden down because their yoke is a shared one. They have company all day long & when the day is done both may be tied but neither is exhausted, because they are a team.

          Plenty of us labor under the illusion that our yokes are single one, that we’ve got to go it alone, that the only way to please God is to load ourselves down with heavy requirements – good deeds, pure thoughts, blameless lives, perfect obedience – all those rules we make & break & make & break, while all the time Jesus is standing right there in front of us, half of a shared yoke across his own shoulders, the other half wide open &waiting for us, a yoke that requires no more than that we step into it & become part of a team.

          “Come to me, all who labor & are heavy laden & I will give you rest.” No wonder those words have weathered the centuries so well; no wonder they’re still music to our ears.

They assure us that those who please God aren’t those who can carry the heaviest load alone but those who are willing to share their loads, who are willing to share their yokes by entering into relationship with the one whose invitation is a standing one.
         “Take my yoke upon you & learn from me; for I  am gentle & lowly in heart & you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy & my burden is light.”

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