Proper 9A - Come you who are weary

I still remember from the 1928 Episcopal Prayer Book the "comfortable words."
Jesus is with us when we are tired. He will help us carry the load.
I hope you find this post comforting.

Proper 9 A

July 3, 2011

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Arroyo Grande CA

The Rev. Valerie Hart

I know that there are some of you here that are old enough to have been formed on the 1928 Prayer Book. For those of you who are new to the Episcopal Church, that’s the old prayer book. The “new” prayer book is the 1979 one that we currently use, and it is only 30 years old so it is still call the “new” prayer book. But there are some of us here, and it shows my age, who were formed on the 28 Prayer Book. There was one line that was read whenever we had communion that stuck in my mind and in my soul. I think that those of you who are like me and were formed on the 28 Prayer book will respond to it.

“Hear what comfortable words our savior Christ saith unto all who truly turn to him, ‘Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you.’

‘Come to me all that travail and are heavy leaden and I will refresh you.’ That’s how they introduced the Eucharist, communion. The quote from the scripture we read today. “Come you who are weary and I will give you rest.” I remember as a kid that it took me a while to understand what travail meant. Of course you think of traveling, but travail was like labor, and it was the same word that was used to represent a woman in labor. Think of that intense painful, difficult and exhausting process we call labor. Come you who are tired, who are hurting, who are in the process of giving birth, who are really having a tough time. Come to me. All you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens.

One thing about being a parish priest is you have the opportunity to know what the burdens are that some of the members of the congregation are carrying. Some people have burdens that others know about, some have burdens that I know about but no one else does, and some have burdens that no one here knows. They have not chosen to share them. But we all know what those burdens are like. How they can tire us out. Burdens like grief, because there are people in this congregation who have recently lost spouses or parents or children or friends, or brothers or sisters and that is a burden and it is hard. And there are people in this congregation who have recently be diagnosed with cancer or who have been living with cancer for many years, or other chronic illnesses. There are people in this congregation that have lost their jobs and are concerned about whether they will lose their homes. There are people in this congregation who are lonely. There are people who carry many different kinds of burdens.

And those are just the burdens that are the outer burdens, but there are the inner burdens. As Paul so beautifully puts it, “I do what I don’t want to do and don’t do what I want to do.” We all have that struggle within us of knowing what are intentions are and discovering that we are not following through on those intentions. I am going to get my house clean today, and then you go home, and well you’ve got to check Facebook and you’ve got to respond to ……. Oh, gosh, when I was growing up I was NEVER going to talk to my children the way my mother spoke to me.   But sometimes it felt like I was seeing my mother a mirror in front of me.

We all do what we don’t want to do, and it is a burden for us. And of course those who have struggled with addiction of one sort or another know that in worse kind of ways. Over and over again you make the intention that you are going to stop that addictive behavior, and then suddenly you find yourself with a glass in your hand, or a piece of chocolate, or looking at the wrong thing on the internet, or whatever your addiction may be. And it is not your intention, you want to be free of it, but you are doing it anyway.

We carry lots of different kinds of burdens. It is almost as if we are donkeys and we are pulling a cart. We do fine pulling the cart until someone puts something in it. And we can handle it with one thing, and then another thing comes along, and then another and pretty soon we are struggling. We are tired and we are not able to move forward. We become weary, and carrying to many heavy burdens.

For those of us who know what that feels like, which I think that is most of us here. We know what that feels like when we are tired, when we feel like we can’t do one more thing. We wonder how are we going to get through this day when we are feeling like that. To us Jesus says these comfortable words. “Come to me those who are weary and carrying heavy burdens and I will refresh you.”

And the way he will refresh you is, he says, “Take my yoke upon you.” Now think about what a yoke for an animal is. Imagine you are a farmer and you have this cart and you have a donkey pulling it. Then you get another donkey, and you want to put the two donkeys together so you make a yoke that fits them just right. It has to fit the shoulders just right so that it won’t hurt when they push on it. Once you have the two donkeys pulling they can pull much more than one donkey by itself. That’s what Christ offers. To be yoked to us so that all the burdens that we are carrying he is carrying as well. We are doing it together. We are not carrying it alone. And in fact he is much stronger than we are so we don’t have to work so hard. We don’t have to get so tired.

But of course there is a “but.” And that but is that when you put two animals yoked together they can carry much more as long as they are both going in the same direction. But if one of the donkeys is kind of stubborn and want to go off in a different way the shoulders are going to get soar, the cart not’s going to get anywhere, and it is going to be a struggle. So, what our part is when we are yoked to Christ is to try and walk with him, because he really does know where we should be going. And he really does have more wisdom then we do. And if we can give ourselves over to follow where he leads the burden becomes light, we can make wonderful progress and we can deal with whatever comes into our lives. In the twelve step programs they talk about giving it over to a higher power. Or as Paul would say, “I do what I don’t want to do and don’t do what I want to do, but there is hope, thanks be to God in Christ Jesus.” When we open ourselves and yoke ourselves to Christ we find that life is much easier and filled with peace and joy.

Amen