Come to me all who are weary: especially in needed grieving
Sermon for Sunday, 5 July, 2020 Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
“Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden,” says Jesus. I’m not sure that I know of anyone who isn’t weary right now. The disruptions of our lives by the worldwide pandemic of the Coronavirus, weary, many of us are because we are working harder, because we’re working differently, learning new skills, making technological adaptations, to try to stay connected. Of course, we are tired of being isolated from friends and family and our church. We of course have the worry about the anxiety of the news, about rising cases of the virus and how little we still know about why some people get longterm damage and others get it and seem to have no symptoms at all.
Why some live and some die. The weariness and dread thinking about the months ahead and not knowing when this will really be over. When public gathering can take place again and feel safe about it. Schools are planning to open, or reopen again and yet they’re not sure that they can or will or how, or if they’ll have to close down again, quickly. Weddings have been postponed, some of them indefinitely. Long time family businesses are being closed for good in the economy. We are aware, we are deeply aware of the emotional heavy burden that our nation is lifting on this particular, 4th of July. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and with demonstrations larger than ever before in the history of our nation, for the call that yes, black lives matter. We are all acutely aware of how we fall short of the ideals that Jefferson penned in the Declaration of Independence. We may have been created equally as beloved precious children of God, but we have not lived that way, all of us, in what we call a free nation. Clearly we are not all free. Native peoples, minorities, black and people of color have born the heaviest burdens in our country.
Scales are beginning to fall from our eyes, and in getting to this point there is much heavy lifting being done. In the midst of this weekend of celebrations, we hear Jesus say, “Come to me, you who are weary and heavy and I have a yoke, which is easy, and a burden that is light to bear.” Do you know what a yoke is? If you haven’t worked on a farm and if you haven’t worked on a farm probably in a hundred years, or if you haven’t worked on a farm with ox and oxen, you may not fully be aware of what a yoke is. I have a picture of a yoke from a friend of mine. Can you see that? That is a yoke. My friend Carol sent me a picture of this old fashioned yoke and you’ll notice that it has two loops in it. The middle circle is where you might connect it to the plow that would pull along behind and till up the soil and move the land. Each of those particular loops on either side was meant for a beast of burden and for an ox that would pull or a horse that would pull the plow along. Two yokes.
When Jesus says my yoke is easy and my burden is light. We are not being given a yoke to wear individually but one that is actually shared, now two animals, could it be us and our neighbor, Jesus talks a lot about that. Could it be us and our nation together as we are trying to do things together? Absolutely, but Christ is telling us perhaps that it is him, who is in that yoke beside us. Because it is also his yoke. My yoke is easy. My burden is light. Take this upon you with me and you and I shall bear it together. Christ welcomes you and me in our weariness, and as we heard in last week’s gospel and continue to hear, even in this weeks, in our vulnerability. In our place of deepest pain and in our place of deepest risk. In Christ, we are brought from our own individual and solitary efforts into a common effort with Christ.
Where we often fail to accept this yoke, is where we are like when Jesus says, “We are like the children who dance when we should grieve, we are the people who grieve when we should dance.” That earlier portion of today’s gospel well, he said, “We’re like children in the marketplace.” John, the Baptist came along saying, “Grieve with me.” He says, y’all didn’t grieve. Jesus says, “I came feasting and drinking,” and you said, “Oh, he’s a glutton and a drunkard. You didn’t feast while Jesus is in your midst.” Here in this country, we failed to grieve when we should grieve, dance and feast when we should dance. Actually, most of the time we probably do just dance in this country, when many times we probably should be grieving. We usually dance and feast in some commercial industrialized pursuit of happiness.
We fail to respond to the song of Christ and John the Baptist, to enter more deeply into what we are called. Many will feast this weekend, many will celebrate with fireworks and joy, but this weekend we are also given another witness and many I know, in the last couple of days have been watching the broadcast of Hamilton on our screens. Where the Internet hasn’t slowed down because of the crunch of everybody wanting to watch at the same time, many have watched it all the way to the end, and there have been tears and tears and tears. I think that’s appropriate. Healing has long been delayed in our country and I often like to say that Hamilton is a great example. The story that we now know, many of us, thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda, that there are two bullets that have kept us from healing, especially the sin of racism in our country.
The bullet that was launched by Aaron Burr to kill Alexander Hamilton and the bullet given by John Wilkes Booth to Abraham Lincoln. Hamilton, as many of us know, was a staunch abolitionist and may not have succeeded if he had continued to live in dismantling slavery in the South, but he may have moved us much, much further along in the conversation. Abraham Lincoln, who was shot shortly after the Civil War and killed would have led the nation in grieving. Lincoln, as many of us also know was no stranger to his own personal grief. Corporate grieving is nothing that we usually engage in even thinking about, except in minimal ways at funerals and with family members. What would it be like to be in a nation weeping together? The theologian J Kameron Carter, who wrote Race: A Theological Account, describes the state of our nation as being riddled with melancholia, an ancient Greek word, which gives profound depth to understanding and naming the kind of grief that we carry.
Perhaps the 4th of July is a time for us to engage in that melancholia, to not be afraid, to recognize that all are created, but not living equally. Our nation has not lived up to the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence. Grieving that the history of our nation was maybe not what we were taught in elementary school, but there is so much more to the story of human beings in this land. That much of it includes exploitation, genocide under the cloak of manifest destiny, and of course slavery. We are not to do this work alone. We remember the early words of the Declaration, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but we often fail to recall the final words of that Declaration, which are penned, “We mutually pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. We mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.” The Declaration of Independence is not an individual proclamation, but it is about being yoked together with others mutually. We as Christians rely on Jesus to do that with us mutually. To carry our burdens with us, making our burden bearable, to trust in his gentle, vulnerable, and life-giving Holy spirit to lead us in this work.
Jesus, our partner in the yoke, who does the heavy lifting for us. Allow grief to be grief, even as Jesus says, “Blessed are you who do so, for one day you shall laugh.” You shall laugh with the fullness that expresses the joy of what it means for us to be in the presence of Christ with others authentically free. “Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden. My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” May you and I bear our weariness and our work with Christ.
