The Yoke of Ease and Repose

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Fifth Sunday After Pentecost, July 5, 2020 by The Very Rev. Tyler Doherty.

       Those of you who grew up with the Rite I liturgy will recognize those last words from today’s gospel as one of the verses of scripture the priest can read after the confession/absolution and before we exchange the peace: “Hear the Word of God to all who truly turn to him. Come unto me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.” The passage from Matthew continues, “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.”

For many years, this passage has been a kind of koan, or wisdom saying for me. What, I’ve asked myself, is the refreshment of Christ? How does Christ refresh us? What is the effect of being refreshed by Christ and what does it look like in daily life? And what is this yoke that Jesus asks us to put on? How is being a Christian in a world of rivalrous violence, pandemic, and partisan conflict in any way easy, or light?

As with any good spiritual question, the important thing is to let the questions question us, to let the questions call us into question. The purpose is not so much to come up with snappy answers, but to sit with the question long enough that our lives gradually become the answer. You remember those lines from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in Letters to a Young poet (the 19-year old Franz Xaver Kappus):

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

And I can say that Rilke’s advice to the young poet is good advice for each of us. Especially in an era and in a culture that trades in certainty, knowing, and instant gratification, taking time to sit with the questions that scripture raises is a radical intervention. We allow ourselves to be open, receptive, allowing, and edge slowly into wondering, that place where we haven’t figured everything out once and for all. We enter into what that anonymous 14th century English mystic calls, “the cloud of unknowing,” or John of the Cross calls, “the dark night.”

I remember when we were back in Philadelphia, we’d drive past a church on the way to St. Thomas’ that had a billboard out front that read, “The Bible: God’s Answer Book.” Needless to say, we kept on driving. Not out of some denominational snobbery, but because even then, I had a sense that the most important thing that scripture can do is pose questions to us--Who do you say I am? What did you come out to the wilderness to see? Do you think you are less loved than a sparrow? What are you looking for? Who is my mother? 

When we let those questions call us into question, when we allow ourselves to be nudged into not-knowing, a little space is opened in our hearts, minds, bodies, and souls, a little space for grace to do it’s transfiguring work. St. Augustine knew this well. He writes, “God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them." That is, what we think we know prevents us from a deeper, more direct and experiential kind of knowing that grasps our whole being and not just our puny little intellect. And in case we didn’t get the message he reminds us, "God is not what you imagine or what you think you understand. If you understand you have failed." If we really let the questions of Christ question us, they will take us beyond our usual pat, or superficial answers and show us our true identity in Christ--who and whose we really are beyond the usual markers and anchors of identity.

So back to those original questions from our Gospel. Why is Jesus’ yoke easy and why is the burden light? One way I’ve been pondering this question over the years is through the lens of walking in love. When love is at the center of our lives, when we see ourselves as in Christ, and as journeying into greater and greater union and communion with Him, we are flowing with the grain of the universe. It’s not to say problems never arise (goodness no!), but that the problems are held in different way than if it were just ourselves (my thoughts about how things should be going, my desires, my agendas, my requirements, my prejudices) at the center of the whole show. Taking the yoke of Jesus’ love upon ourselves is actually a huge relief in this regard. We don’t have to do it alone. We don’t have to earn anyone’s love. We don’t have to maintain our reputation, or wrangle for power, possessions, and prestige. That’s the exhausting, gerbil-wheel life of endless self-improvement. That’s the kind of pursuit of happiness outside of ourselves that only hollows us out from the inside. That’s the yoke of self at the center of everything that makes us feel anxious, isolated, fearful, and alone. That’s the yoke of what Paul terms, “the flesh,” as opposed to being yoked to the life of the Spirit.

When we realize the dead-end nature of this outward directed pursuit of happiness (one teacher I know calls it rather wittily, “ending the pursuit of happiness”) then something truly miraculous happens. We find that we are already standing in the place of rest and refreshment. That joy--a kind of rooted and grounded steadiness in the face of all the ups and downs of daily life--starts to burble up like living waters rising to eternal life. That gnawing sense of scarcity and lack starts to fall away and we start to see that everything is held in the loving palm of God, that everything is shot through with unquenchable light that no darkness can overcome.

That’s why, I think, we find those lines in our Gospel--“[T]hank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants,”--that at first might strike us as somehow saying that God is willingly holding back the revelation of the way to true happiness from some and granting it to others. But of course, God doesn’t hold back anything from anyone. God pours Godself out in the person of God’s only son for all. Nothing is held back and there’s no place God won’t go in order to unite us to Godself (even death on the cross). So the reference to God’s workings being hidden from the wise and intelligent and being revealed to infants doesn’t tell us about who and how God is, but who and how we, as human beings often are. Infants are symbolic of a kind of spiritual disposition of openness, receptivity, wonder and awe. They aren’t bound by fixed ideas self, God, and others.

The other day, I was watching the neighbor’s daughter who has just learned to walk. Dad was walking behind with the dog as she tottered along like a drunken sailor. Suddenly, she stopped and stared, transfixed, by something on the sidewalk. It could have been a ladybug, a gum wrapper, a dandelion--who knows? But it was the quality of attention and absorption, the sheer self-forgetful abandonment to what was appearing, that was so infectious, intoxicating, and, yes, holy. That little tottering toddler was the perfect embodiment of the gentleness and the humility of heart that Jesus is talking about. She was simply there--selflessly, transparently, joyfully present to God as God presented Godself in that moment.

If we go back to the opening of our Gospel we get another reference to children. Jesus says,  “It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ The lines are from Wisdom and refer to a children’s game where one child plays the flute and other dances, where one child wails and the other pantomimes mourning. They are tuned into one another. They are paying attention to each other. They are in responsive, mutual relationship with one another in seamless play. But Jesus says that “this generation” isn’t like those playfully responsive, attuned, and attentive children. No, “this generation” hears the flute and doesn’t dance. They hear the wail and it evokes no response. This wise and intelligent generation is stuck, stopped dead in its tracks, unable to hear the invitation to love and transformative justice because they’ve got it all figured out. Their hands are too full for them to receive the good things God is trying to give them. 

My prayer for us this week is that we open our hands. To know a little less so that we might love a little more. To drop our fixed certainties and stale stories about ourselves, God, and the stranger, so that something new, some refreshing might slip through the cracks and fashion us into a beloved community with Christ at its center. My prayer is that we might see with the eyes of that toddler, the eye of wonder and unknowing, and in that seeing help us recognize the face of Jesus in others--all others--no exceptions. My prayer is that with ears unstopped, and eyes cleansed by love, we might dance to that flute that calls us away from ourselves, that we might let our hearts be broken by the cries of a world in lament.