VIDEO PRESENTATION

SERMON TEXT

“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.”

Burdens and yokes –
we all have them.
Some of us,
like old lumbering oxen,
are no longer even aware
of the weight we carry
while we soldier on through life.

You know, Jesus was smart as hell.

I mean really, Jesus must have had
a sky high emotional IQ –
he was able to read and understand people in depth.

Not only were his stories and parables
penetrating,
rascally,
and insightful,
he also had all those reversal sayings
that came in the back door
and smacked the listener up side the head.
The Good Samaritan – an oxymoron.
Those who love their life will lose it and those who lose their life will gain it – a paradox.
Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth – an absurdity.

He seemed to talk like that all the time,
or at least within the residue of what we have left to us.
I am sure he said plenty of ordinary things to,
like, “Please pass the spuds” –
though it was likely the humus.
He must have even put his foot in his mouth
more than once.
Still, on the preaching circuit
he was pretty phenomenal.

And so it is with today’s gospel from Matthew.
Imagine what Jesus’ metaphors meant to a peasant?
Seriously, a yoke that is easy?
A burden that is light?

A first century Galilean peasant,
burdened by debt and taxes
to Roman absentee landlords,
would never have experienced a light burden
or an easy yoke – just a horrid oxymoron.

Or maybe just reverse logic meant to be
and shattering, like a Zen Koan.
The wisdom-teacher is waiting in the bushes
of these ancient reversal-sayings.
He is going to jump out and rattle the cage of our logic,
which opens us to new insights –
or slam us shut while refusing entry.

We can hear those first century peasants exclaim,
“No way!”
But that is the beauty of Jesus’ way of teaching:
he pries open up the mind
and invites us to allow something new to drop in;
if we close the gate he will leave us alone.
An easy yoke?
A light burden?

I want to share a difficult story
about burdens and yokes and reverse-wisdom.
I have been preaching to you for four years now,
for at least ten to those who tune in online
via my website.
I fear telling the same story twice
or more
and never knowing it.

If so, perhaps you can just politely nod your head
as if indulging my my ridiculousness.

Also a word of warning here,
this story may be deeply disturbing
as it includes an attempted suicide.

Before I became a priest
I worked in an inpatient Mental Health Unit.
I was a therapy aide
and one of the residents I remember most
was a thirty-something year old woman

I just could not warm up to.
Though ashamed to admit it,
sometimes I even found her difficult to care about.
On her second admission
she was placed on suicide watch
because she had tried to kill herself several times.

We took away her belt,
her shoelaces,
er sheets,
her razors,
we even made sure she didn’t have
a plastic dinner knife.

Anything she might use to harm herself
was taken away
or keenly observed while she had it.

She was very quiet
and extremely introverted,
which I confess bothered me a lot.
Looking back, I realize I was bothered
because I could never connect with her.

I never had any sense
that I knew what she was thinking or feeling.
There just seemed to be dead space between us.

One day on my shift
as I walked past her room
she was hanging from the ceiling.
to the sprinkler pipe on the ceiling
and the other sleeve around her neck.
She was still alive and adrenaline shot through me.
I yelled for help and ran into her room.
My first instinct was to grab the parka
and desperately try to tear it apart as if a string of yarn.
I don’t know how long it took me to come to my senses,
it may have been immediately or a minute
before I grabbed her by the legs and held her up
as I called for scissors.
People came running,
the coat was cut
I lifted her down
and off she was taken to the emergency room.
She lived.

Instead of being elated
or even thinking about having saved a life,
I was angry.
My anger lingered
and it confused me.
Everything about her aroused my anger
and in that anger I felt, well guilty,
ashamed…but still angry.

You perhaps recognize quicker than I did
why she evoked anger inside me.
I felt powerless with her.

An otherwise large, strong
and competent person,
I was reduced to feeling impotent.

Take for example, my immediate impulse
to try to tear a nylon parka with my bare hands,
which is impossible.

But it reveals how much I routinely depended upon
my physical strength.
The fact I could never connect with her,
diminished confidence in my intuitive capacity
and relational skills.

My inability to get her to respond to me
and my growing anger about it
revealed how important it was to me
for other people to respond positively to my efforts.

All my normal abilities
and the sense of power they provided me
were thwarted in her presence
and intensified by the experience
around her attempted suicide.

I am telling you all of this now
as if it was perfectly obvious to me,
but in fact, it was grist
for more than one therapy session.
Like the way Jesus invited peasants
to imagine an easy yoke
and a light burden,
one therapist asked me to intensify my anger.

Rather than try to ignore it
moderate it
numb it
intellectualize it,
she encouraged me to intensify it:
make it bigger.

When I made that anger bigger
I could suddenly see it.
My anger was aroused by powerlessness,
my powerless.
I was not angry with that struggling woman,
I was angry at my own powerlessness.

It was powerlessness I feared
and that which drew me into my fear
made me angry.

The invitation to intensify the anger
instead of keeping it at a distance
was an unexpected strategy
that led to insight.
It was a Jesus kind of strategy.

What is your burden?
What is your yoke?

Put it on
and feel its heaviness.
Put it on
and feel how it captures
and constricts you.

Feel it in your shoulders,
let your knees and hips feel its weight.
What are you carrying –
intensify its weight.
In the encounter
and relationship
with that which burdens us
our spiritual journey ripens.

Oh, let me repeat that, because it is
tricky like one of those Jesus sayings.
In the encounter and relationship
with that which burdens us
our spiritual journey ripens.
It does not even have to be the biggest
or heaviest of burdens,
nor the most restrictive and crushing of yokes.

Even the little ones have something to show us.
The ordinary and everyday
kind of burdens we feel
or yokes we carry
can deliver an insight to us:
our job,
or parts of our job;
our homes,
particular relationships,
or elements of those relationships;
simmering conflicts
or disagreements;
the demands or neediness
of others;
debt, grief, pain,
chronic physical pain or emotional pain;
decisions we do not want to make
or losses we do not want to incur;
obligations we dread fulfilling
and inordinate needs, desires or fears.

What is your burden?
What is your yoke?

Whatever it is,
it is likely something we do not want to do
and so evokes a range of emotions
we do not want to feel.

When we do not want to feel
we tend to do whatever we can to manage it
with the least amount of contact.
We distance it,
deny it,
detach from it, we suppress it.
That is our knee-jerk reaction
to discomfort and pain.
But the wisdom is to enter it
and intensify it
in the hopes of getting clear with it.
Jesus wisdom is often just the opposite of our instincts.

Venture into those burdens
and shoulder those yokes
and feel their weight.
Name what it is
that weighs us down
and makes us leaden.
That is how we lighten our load
and liberate ourselves from our yokes.
It is a paradox – a reversal.

In the encounter and relationship
with that which burdens us
our spiritual journey ripens.