Proper 9 A

Proper 9 A

Transcribed from a sermon given

July 3, 2011

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

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 use now. It is only 30 years old so it is called the “New” Prayer Book. But there are some of us here, and it shows my age, who were formed on 1928 Prayer Book. There was one line that was read whenever we had communion that stuck in my mind and in my soul; and I think those of you who are like me and formed on the 28 Prayer Book, will respond to it.

“Hear what comfortable words our savior Christ sayeth unto all who truly turn to him, ‘Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you.’” “Come to me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you.” That’s how they introduced the Eucharist at communion, with the quote from the scripture that we read today, “Come you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

I remember as a child it took me a while to understand what travail meant. Of course I thought of traveling, but travail refers to labor. It was the same word that was used to describ a woman who was in childbirth. It refers to that intense, painful, difficult, exhausting process of labor. Come you who are tired, who are hurting, who are in the process of giving birth but are really having a though time. Come to me all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens.

 One thing about being a parish priest is that 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 lots of others know about, some burdens that I know about and no one else does, and some have burdens that no one at the church knows about because they have not chosen to share them.

But we all know what those burdens can be like. We know how they can tire us out. Burdens like grief - there are people in this congregation who have recently lost spouses, or parents, or children, or friends, or brothers or sisters. That is a burden and it is hard. And there are people in this congregation who have recently been diagnosed with cancer or who have been living with cancer or other chronic illnesses for many years. There are people in this congregation who 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 in this congregation who carry many different kinds of burdens.

Those are just the outer burdens, but then there are also inner burdens. As Paul so beautifully puts it, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate.” We all have that struggle within us of knowing what our intentions are and yet discovering that we are not following through on those intentions. I’m going to get my house clean today. Then you go home and you’ve got to check Facebook and you have to respond… You know how it goes. I have made many intentions. When I was growing up I was never going to talk to my children the way my mother spoke to me. But sometimes I recognized my mother’s voice, and I felt like I looking at 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 for those who have struggled with addiction of one sort or another know that in the worse kind of way. 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. 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 who are pulling a cart. We do fine pulling the cart until somebody puts something in it. We can handle it with one thing in it. 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, carrying too many heavy burdens.

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

Now let us think about what a yoke for an animal is. Imagine you are a farmer and you have a cart and you have a donkey pulling it. Then you get another donkey, and you want to put the two donkeys together. You make a yoke that fits them just right. It has to fit the shoulder just right so it won’t hurt when they push on it. But 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 we are carrying he is carrying as well. We are doing it together. We are not doing it alone. 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. 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 wants to go off in a different way the shoulders are going to get soar, the cart is not going to get anywhere. It is going to be a struggle. So what our part 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 than we do. If we can give ourselves over to follow where he leads, the burden becomes light and we can make wonderful progress. We can deal with whatever comes into our lives. In the 12 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 I 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