Christ United Presbyterian Church July 6, 2014

 Sermon: “Easy?”
Matthew 11:25-30     

My Dad came to this country from a tiny village in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, called Glenarm.  It has a population of fewer than 600 souls.  When my Dad left in 1926 it was probably about the same size.  By the standards of most American real estate developers it is a jewel waiting to be polished and peddled.  It’s quaint, it has a long history, and it sits on the northern coast of the Irish Sea looking over at Scotland.  

Like most families in Glenarm, my Dad grew up in a cottage leased from Lord Antrim.  This cottage sits across the road from the sea wall.  He left home wanting to leave a lot of things behind him, but he brought with him a very strong faith in our Lord.  When he arrived in New York harbor, he was shuttled over to Ellis Island where he was eventually processed through into this country and went to live with his Aunt in Rhode Island.  After a short while he found a job in NYC and moved there.  He was drawn to a community made up of other immigrants from Northern Ireland and he was especially drawn to their churches and Bible classes. 

He joined a Bible class made up of several hundred men that met every Sunday morning in a Methodist church in the city of Mt. Vernon, just north of the New York City line.  He didn’t have a car so he would walk every Sunday morning several miles to attend the Bible class and worship. 

My Dad was not given to showy clothes or jewelry, but from my first memory of him he always wore a little gold pin in his lapel.  It was a pin given to members of the Bible class, and I’ve never seen another pin like it.  It was a yoke.  Perhaps my first lesson in the Christian faith was when I first asked him why he wore that strange looking pin.  He explained it to me in the words of Matthew 11:28-30: 

“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.”

He shared the Lord’s yoke, always.

There’s an old story that claims that Jesus the carpenter was a master yoke-maker in his community. People came from miles around for a yoke, hand carved and crafted by Jesus son of Joseph.

When customers arrived with their team of oxen Jesus would spend considerable time measuring the team, their height, the width, the space between them, and the size of their shoulders. Within a week, the team would be brought back and he would carefully place the newly made yoke over the shoulders, watching for rough places, smoothing out the edges and fitting them perfectly to this particular team of oxen.

That's the yoke Jesus invites us to take. I have always wondered about that notion that his yoke is “easy.”  In the Greek that word points to the tailor-made yokes: they were "well-fitting." The yoke Jesus invites us to take, the yoke that brings rest to weary souls, is custom made for our lives and hearts. The yoke he invites us to wear fits us well and is designed for two. His yokes were always designed for two. And our yoke-partner is none other than Christ himself.

Our Lord shares our burdens with us in the same way that two oxen yoked together can more easily accomplish their work.  We focus – perhaps – on the burdens we shift to him, but this is a shared venture.  He invites us to bring our burdens to him, but he also asks us to share his burdens, to share his ministry, to see the world as he sees it and to bring it relief and new life.  He asks us to pray in ways that will reveal his burdens to us and to share with him in the tasks those burdens require.

In the Romans lesson, Paul is talking about “desire.”  He explains that the Law – by which he means the Torah and principally what we call the Ten Commandments – was intended to show us how to live together, but because of our own desires the Law simply exposes how far short of that life we fall.  It’s not the Law’s fault.  It’s our’s.  And the more we try to use the Law as a justification for our behavior, the more the Law convicts us as the sinners we really are.  He says: “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”

And therein lies our greatest burden.

Some people fret about that.  Some people compound the error of their ways by exclaiming that they can live by the Law.  Some people live their lives in chronic anxiety worrying about their inability to meet the demands of the Law.  The yoke that Christ calls us to wear is a double yoke, and he gladly bears the weight of our burdens.  He sets us free from the burden of our knowledge of our sins and invites us to be his partner in ministry. 

For us to give up that burden of sin, for us to recognize that we cannot bear the weight of our sins as they are defined by the Law, means that we are also relieved of our self-righteousness, our pretense that based on our own performance, our own merits, we are holy.

Here’s a riddle for you:  how can it be that the more of our self-righteousness that we wipe away, the closer we come to the righteousness of Christ himself?  But that’s what happens.  When we put on the yoke that has been custom fit for us, Christ takes over the burden of our sins, the folly of our self-righteousness, and suddenly we find that we draw ever closer to his righteousness, his holiness as we share his burdens.  His righteousness is the true righteousness for which we were created by God.

Unfortunately, at that point some of us enter into a dreadful cycle.  We turn our burdens over to Christ. We give up our self-righteousness and find the light of his holiness and righteousness.  And then we fall back into believing that living in that true righteousness, we must go it alone.  We find ourselves back in the cycle of falling under the burden and justifying ourselves with self-serving self-righteousness.  We give up and we say, “Lord, I just can’t keep this up.”  Being a Christian, especially when you feel like you are the only one, becomes another burden.

We forget that our yoked is shared.  The yoke is custom made for our strengths and weaknesses, but as we share the yoke of Christ we will be challenged.  We are relieved from our own burden of sin, but we are not excused from the burden of the cross. 

Christ relieves us from the burdens of sin and righteousness so that we can be free to do the real work that he has called us to do.  We are called to bear the burden of someone else.

Jesus made it very clear that we are called to love one another as he loves us.  All of the Law and the prophets – that is all of the scriptures of God’s people up to the time of Christ – are fulfilled in that one expression:  Love one another as Christ loves you.

Jesus told his disciples something that I always thought was odd.  He told them that they – you and me – would perform greater works than he had performed because we would have the presence of the Spirit working with us.  There are certainly many things in this world that have broken the heart of God, and addressing them may seem totally impossible and overwhelming to us.   If  we accept Christ’s yoke, if we slip it over our shoulders, we will find that working with Christ at our side we can accomplish great and good things.

Some say that we are not called to address the evils and injustices of this world.  Some say that such works are not necessary for our salvation.  Some say that the only mission of the church is to shift the burden of our sin onto Christ’s shoulders and that’s all.

We cannot have faith in Jesus Christ’s redeeming love for us and not live faithfully sharing the burdens of this world that Christ began to address.  Trusting in Christ means trusting in his commandments; trusting in our share of carrying on his ministry; trusting in the strength and power that is our’s when we share the burden of his love.

I pray that the church may be a place where not only are our burdens of sin and self-righteousness taken from us, but where we are then able and willing to share the burdens of others so that they too may know the love of Christ.  I pray that in seeing the love of Christ made real in the hearts of others by the actions of our lives, that those others may also see and know Christ and the Father who sent him.

Jesus says:  “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.”

Amen.