For the Weary
November 15, 2020
Matthew 11:25-28
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church

Who is weary?

Show of hands, who is tired and worn down at this point in 2020?

It’s November 15, friends. It may still be 80 degrees outside and feel like early summer, but we’re halfway through the month of November. We have just six more Sundays left in this year!

I keep hoping the time is right to gather some of us back together for worship in-person, and then the COVID numbers start rising up again. Are you weary from the uncertainty and unpredictability of 2020?

Here’s just SOME of what we’ve collectively faced and felt and discussed this year:

• Australian bushfires

• Prince Harry and Megan Markle quit the royal family

• COVID-19 was announced in Wuhan, China

• The UK withdrew from the EU

• Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna died in a helicopter crash

• Donald Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives and acquitted by the Senate

• COVID-19 reached the United States and lockdowns began

• Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced they had COVID-19

• COVID-19 viciously made its way through Lambeth House, home to many of our dear friends and ravaged Louisiana, especially among communities of color

• Armed protestors stormed the Michigan state capitol building

• Murder hornets arrived in the U.S.

• Elon Musk and his partner welcomed a baby and named him an unpronounceable series of letters and numbers

• Chadwick Boseman, Black Panther star, died after a private battle with cancer

• West Coast wildfires

• Black Lives Matter demonstrations across America in response to continued police brutality against people of color

• Biden and Harris became the Democratic candidates for Pres/VP

• Ruth Bader Ginsburg died

• 7 named hurricanes in the Gulf with projections across Louisiana

• Amy Coney Barrett of Metairie was rapidly selected to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court

• Biden and Harris won the election

• the outgoing president has yet to concede in the election

• Mayor Cantrell is hinting at going back to Phase 2 or even lockdown as numbers of COVID-19 cases continue to rise all around New Orleans

That just the broad list. It leaves out all kinds of international news and personal life events. Life-long friends have died. Parents and siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles have died. Beloved cats and dogs have died. Marriages and relationships have been tested, and some are being stretched dangerously thin. Anxiety and depression are on the rise as we have have pushed through and pretended this year is normal. We have educated our children at home. We have run zoom calls from our dining room tables and attended church in pajama bottoms. We have panic dreams in the night about crowds of people approaching us without masks.

Who feels like they’re hanging on by their fingernails, scratching to hold their lives together?

That is to say: who here is weary?

You are not alone.

Jesus famously says in today’s gospel reading, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” I learned it as “all ye that labour and are heavy laden.” The burdens are so heavy, they are weighing each of us down. You’re carrying as much as your muscles will allow, and if one more thing is piled on top of the burdens,  you will crumble.

Jesus invites you to come to him and promises rest for your soul.

Now that might sound like the direct opposite of many of my sermons in recent months, particularly as I continue to call us to the hard, lifelong work of weeding out white supremacy in all systems and structures that benefit us people called white. And I will us, as a people, to that work just as I will keep calling myself to it. Work, in our vernacular, is the opposite of rest. But what I am really describing is more akin to what our friends in Eastern traditions might call karma—I am talking about the work and action of our lives and the impact that work and action has on the world around us. Not our jobs so much as the cosmic, forever impact the stuff or our lives has on the world around us.

And in the midst of that labor— the work of our lives linked to the activity of the world— we also hear this gospel word from Jesus to rest in him.

One of the great mysteries of our faith is the simultaneous call to deep, soul rest in the presence of the Christ and intentional, prophetic work for the what Matthew’s gospel calls “the least of these, my brothers and sisters.”

How is deep, soul rest possible when we are called to champion and advocate and repent and un-do and repair? How can we rest when there is still so much work to be done? How can we take a minute to breathe when our pastor is forever calling us to our highest, best selves?

It’s both and. It’s soul rest and soul action. They are companions and desperately need one another. That is why Fr. Rohr named his center the Center for Action and Contemplation, right? And why our friend William Thiele named his the School for Contemplative LIVING. These are ways of embodiment.

To have only rest and soul care without championing and advocating for justice and righteousness in our world is self-indulgent and myopic. To champion and advocate and push and fight for change without tending to the inner workings of our spirits is not only a recipe for burnout but is also different form of self-indulgence. By working without meaningful, purposeful ceasing, I am expressing the belief that the world will crumble and cease to spin if I dare to be still for just a little while.

The good news is not good if it leaves us depleted, breaks our spirits and wears us out.

The good news is not good if it only benefits me and my needs but doesn’t make the world over in the way of God’s radical love.

I think this is especially hard for us in the 21st century United States because we are  living and swimming and breathing in the water of autonomy and independence. We are the nation that preaches the mythology of bootstraps. Our culture raises up people who suffer in silence and don’t ask for help and calls them heroes. We say things like, “She is so strong. She never complains.” 

Jesus is talking to his disciples about accompanying him on this journey of embodying the love of God. Jesus the Christ—the one we call savior and messiah and lord—he is inviting people to labor with him because he cannot do all of the work alone. He will share the load with them. They will help make his work lighter and he theirs because they are partners, joined together for embodying the radical love of God. Jesus is not talking about a burden for one person to carry or one person to live out. They will row the boat while he sleeps. They will keep watch while he prays. They will meet the needs of the people while he goes away to a quiet place. They are able to do this really well when they are in flow together.

The relationship between soul rest and soul work is flow—effortless movement between polarities.

Minneapolis Pastor, Kara Root, writes, “When we return to trust and alignment with Christ, the result is rest. Not just metaphorical rest, actual rest. You will find rest for your souls. If our faith requires constant striving and insistent measuring, if we’re never good enough, always needing to do more or be more, it is not the faith of Christ.”

So what is the faith of Christ? Jesus modeled this Way for us with his team of 12 that he sent out in pairs to work in the world as partners LONG BEFORE they were actually equipped to do so. He trusted they were fully capable of living this Way out together. We need to comprehend that the work we are called to do in this world is not solo work but the work of a people much like a team of woking animals would pull a heavy load together.

From her study of Wisdom across scripture, Alyce McKenzie writes of the power of the “yoke” metaphor. “The background to [today’s] text is found in the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach, a book written by a Jewish scribe in around 125 B.C.E. The author invites people to study the law with these words: Put your necks under her yoke, and let your soul accept her burden. See, I have worked but little and found much rest.

‘The yoke of the law’ is a common phrase in rabbinic writings. Jesus was not so much criticizing the law itself, but the scribes who load people down with burdens hard to bear (Lk. 11:46; Mt. 23:4).

‘You who labor and are carrying heavy burdens’ refers to those who have lost the spirit of the law (constant gratitude to and mindfulness of God) in the letter—believing that adherence to a multitude of precepts and commandments constitutes righteousness.

‘I will give you rest.’ (See Mt. 12:43; Rev. 6:11, 14:13.) The rest is both future and immediate. It could also be rendered ‘I will refresh you.’ In the kingdom of God, the faithful find rest.”

Most personally, I experience the soul support of this kind of gospel partnership in my relationship with Nathan. We are opposites in many ways and complement one another in our strengths and weaknesses. Nathan and I are nearing our 20th wedding anniversary and have passed all of these two decade dates over the last 12 months—20 years as a couple was last year, 20 years since Nathan proposed was last week, and we’ll mark 20 years since the vows of our wedding in the spring. On the night before our we were married, Nathan’s father read to us these words from Ecclesiastes:

Two are better than one,
    because they have a good return for their labor:

If either of them falls down,
    one can help the other up.

But pity anyone who falls
    and has no one to help them up.

Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm.
    But how can one keep warm alone?

Though one may be overpowered,
    two can defend themselves.

A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.

Now, please don’t hear me saying that you have to be married or partnered to live this Way out. But DO hear me saying that this Way Jesus is describing— with its easiness and lightness—is made easy and light not only because it is shared with the Holy Mystery of God but also because it is shared with others. Friends, neighbors, siblings, the community of faith represented on this screen today. We share this work. We are YOKED together with Christ as the third strand of our cord—not quickly to be broken.

The way of Love is the easy, light Way even when there is work to be done because we are making this easy, light Way together. The burden of living for oneself and in disconnection with one’s neighbor is heavier and lonelier and harder.

One thing we as white people (specifically) tend to forget in all of our talk about injustice and oppression and our work is that injustice and oppression hurt the oppressor, too. That’s part of why Dr. King said, “No one is free until we all are free.” This flow between soul rest and soul action is about a collective unburdening that is easier and lighter for the whole of humanity. Not just the single follower of the Jesus tradition. In fact, the whole concept of being yoked together makes it impossible to be a single, solo follower of the Jesus tradition. We have to do this together. 

When we encounter the word translated as “yoke” in other gospels, it’s connotation is better, more beneficial, or kinder. Brian Stoffregen writes, "Jesus may be saying that his yoke fits us well -- it is suitable for our human condition and abilities. Perhaps like a couple ‘who are made for each other’ -- being good and kind to each other is not a chore, but a natural and gracious response to the other.”

Stoffregen also notes, “It is possible that ‘learn from me’ means more than simply ‘listen to my teaching.’ T. W. Manson (The Teaching of Jesus, pp. 239-240) proposes that as a designation for his disciples Jesus selected an Aramaic word that meant not ‘pupils’ but ‘apprentices.’ From him they were to learn not merely to think but to do. They were to learn not only by listening but by watching. If Manson is correct, the metaphor of the yoke attains a new force. The yoke is not one that Jesus imposes but one he wears! We remember that commonly a yoke was a wooden instrument that yoked two oxen together and made of them a team. In this word Jesus may be saying: ‘Become my yoke mate, and learn how to pull the load by working beside me and watching how I do it. The heavy labor will seem lighter when you allow me to help you with it.'" [p. 129]

Friends, I am weary, too. I am in need of that deep soul rest that fuels the soul action of my life. As much as I want to believe we are about to turn a corner and get to some normalcy, I suspect the bizarre nature of this year will be our normal for some time. More masks. More COVID. More lockdown. More political divides. More unrest between neighbors. More racism. More justice to be sought.

But hear the invitation of Jesus today—this life’s work, this soul action, is light and easy in the mysterious Way of the Christ as we learn how to pull the load working beside him and beside one another. This too is our work. And I pray it may be so with us.

Amen.