Sermons

“Take My Yoke”

Jeremiah 29:11-14a; Matthew 11:28-30 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – April 15, 2018

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we might open our hearts to your Christ and find our rest in you. In the name of Jesus we pray, Amen.

Mark this day. I am about to embark on a preaching task I have rarely attempted. I am going to preach for two weeks in a row on just three verses of scripture. And I’m going to do it in the context of our annual stewardship campaign. There’s a reason we read that passage from Matthew so slowly and then read it again. There are just 54 words in our second lesson today, and we’re only going to look at 28 of them today. We’ve got to save something for next week when Consecration Sunday arrives!

This passage is one of my favorites in all of scripture, largely, I’m sure, because I’m a big fan of sleeping. But mostly because it’s so breath-taking. It’s one of the shooting stars of scripture: so astonishing and yet once you take your eyes away, it’s hard to believe it happened. But there it is. We read it. You can go back and look at it while we discuss it. So let’s begin by locating ourselves in it.

Did you feel the invitation? “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens.” Is that you? I’ve been back at work here for exactly a month today. On my very first day back in the office, our sabbatical interims told me they’d noticed a tiredness among the congregation. Now, I dare say there is a keening weariness across the nation and indeed the whole world these days, but hearing their observation also brought home to me the sacrifices that were required for me to enjoy the gift of a three-month sabbatical. Please never think that I take that for granted. So many of you work so very hard to help this congregation live out the gospel faithfully. Meanwhile, the personal struggles many of you are going through are exhausting enough on their own.

Are you weary? What about burdens? Have you got some of those? Some of them we know about because they’re the kind of difficulties you feel comfortable mentioning aloud during the Prayers of the People. But I promise you that you are not the only one in this room who’s carrying a burden you don’t feel you can talk about out loud. And because it’s the day it is – namely the first Sunday of our annual stewardship campaign – I’m going to say the thing you might wish I wouldn’t: many of those burdens are about money. Believe me, I feel you.

Five years ago, I stood up here and confessed that after tithing for 13 years, I had had to make the decision to cut my giving in half. Super inspirational stewardship message, right? Some of you weren’t here then, so let me explain. I moved here in 2011, after working at a church in Alabama for ten years. That congregation had about 35 people in worship on a good Sunday. The way that “worked” – and I use the word “worked” loosely – was that I was racking up a lot of credit card debt. Which worked, for a while. There was a period there when credit card companies were incredibly profligate with their 0% interest balance transfer offers.

Unfortunately, those offers dried up shortly after I moved to California and about the time I got my first power bill after an East County August. Was it a perfect storm or a “Come to Jesus” moment? I suppose it was both. I had to find help, and fast. I got enrolled in a debt management program, which meant a very strict budget for the next five years, including cutting my tithe in half. So when the stewardship campaign rolled around 6 months later – a ministry moment I had always felt better prepared for because I knew I wasn’t asking my church members to do anything I wasn’t doing myself – I didn’t know what else to do but be honest. Truth be told, honesty about money is one of the most powerful tools the church has.

There’s a reason I took my sabbatical a year later than originally scheduled: I couldn’t afford it any sooner. I’m telling you this story today, because I’m out on the other end of it now. I know what a financial burden is, and I know what it means to take it on as a spiritual struggle. I know how it makes you feel small and stupid and unworthy in our culture that measures value by our bank accounts. And I’m here to tell you our culture lies. Not having enough money sucks, and I’m not going to tell you that Jesus is going to magically fix that. But there’s a lot of other junk – emotional junk, self-esteem junk, pride junk – that goes along with our money issues, and I think Jesus does have something to teach us about that. “Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me.”

Some of you are carrying heavy burdens that aren’t about money. You’re invited too. As we often hear during the Invitation to the Offering, our gifts are not just financial, but also the time we give, the energy and presence we offer, the talents we share. Some of you are weary precisely because you’ve been doing that a lot. I think Jesus offers rest for that condition too.

So let’s look at that second sentence. “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me.” When you hear the word “yoke”, what does it make you think of? To be clear, I’m not talking about the yellow thing in the middle of an egg. This isn’t a y-o-l-k; it’s a y-o-k-e, which honestly, is something most of us have likely never seen. But is there something that comes to mind? Is it perhaps a pair of oxen? This is often the image we use. And then preachers will tell you about the lead ox – who is, of course, Jesus – carrying the bulk of the burden when we’re yoked in with him. I don’t know anything about oxen, but apparently that’s a thing when you’re training a new ox. But what about a different image of the yoke? It’s even more archaic, but a bit more human.

What if we thought, instead, about a milkmaid? Now, again, I don’t think any of us have ever seen an actual milk maid, that is, a woman from a dairy farm who walks through the village with giant buckets of milk hanging from her shoulders, selling it to the townspeople by dipping some out into each of their own personal containers. It would cut down on packaging waste, but our society has decided this is neither an efficient nor a sanitary method of distributing milk. But imagine with me, for a moment, that you are a milkmaid. Those are big buckets of milk. They’re heavy. Now we know that milkmaids are always pictured with their buckets hanging from a wooden yoke that rests across their shoulders. Can you imagine if they weren’t? If those buckets were just hanging from a rope looped around your neck? Can you imagine how that rope would rub and burn? Suddenly, a yoke seems like a revelation from heaven, doesn’t it? What if taking on a yoke isn’t about accepting an onerous job? What if it’s about receiving a tool that makes the work easier?

A yoke is a tool that spreads out the pressure, or “shares the joy” if you will, to put it in VLM terms! And a stewardship campaign is all about that. The Estimate of Giving cards you received in the mail are a tool for making the spiritual discipline of financial stewardship easier on a personal level. Faithful giving becomes easier when we make intentional decisions and commitments about it. As with most things, it’s easier to do the right thing, the thing that best matches our values and priorities, if we’ve made a choice about what to do before we’re faced with doing it. Decisions made in the heat of the moment – in this case, when you’re staring down that deacon with the offering plate in their hand – such decisions rarely reflect our best selves. It’s hard to give the gift you want to give if you spent it the night before. We fill out those cards in order to prod ourselves to go through the process of doing the math and figuring out what’s possible regarding our financial support for this church. And once we’ve written it down and asked God’s blessing on it, which is what happens next week on Consecration Sunday, it becomes much easier to follow through.

A stewardship campaign is a yoke in another sense too, that is, a tool for making the work easier by spreading out the pressure and lightening the load. Among the hundred or so of us who make up Vista La Mesa Christian Church, there are a specially burdened few whose job it is to project a budget for the upcoming ministry year, which starts on July 1^st. Can you imagine what that task would be like if those three or so people had to do it all on their own? You can help with that. Your Estimate of Giving cards, in aggregate, are part of the yoke that our budget committee depends on to know that the numbers they’re projecting aren’t just pulled out of thin air. And believe me, that certainly relieves a lot of pressure!

The yoke of Christ that we are invited to take on does grant us rest, and one reason for that is that it helps us share the load. Most importantly, it helps us remember that ultimately, our fate, and our congregation’s fate, and the fate of the whole world are in God’s hands. But it also helps that more than one person helps pull off the homeless outreach each month, and more than one person organizes the birthday parties, and volunteers with the children, and comes to church to meet the plumbers when they’re called. “Share the joy” has a lot of layers. So does “take my yoke”. Maybe it means your time is coming to step into a leadership role. The Nominating Committee is meeting on Wednesday. On the other hand, maybe it means that it’s time for you to ask for help with the burden you’re carrying, so we can find someone to wear that yoke with you and lighten the load. But what I know it means is that we’re all asked to pitch in, whatever that may look like for each of us as individuals, and that the tools provided by our stewardship campaign will make that easier for all of us. I am grateful to have gotten through the season of my financial burden and come out the other side. I am excited to write a bigger number on my card than I have been for the past five years. I hope you will join me in using the Estimate of Giving card as a tool that facilitates the spiritual discipline of stewardship. Jesus offers us an astonishing promise of rest, if only we can learn from him. May it be so. Alleluia and Amen.