Come to Me

A Sermon from Reverend David

​"Come to me all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens ... take my yoke upon you."
 
I could have done with a yoke when I had a Sabbatical 20 years ago and spent a week drystone-walling. 
On the first morning I had to carry bucket loads of pebbles
to fill between the two outer walls.
It was raining, there were clouds of midges and within minutes my hands and arms were aching. 
How was I going to survive a week of this?!
 
Actually I had a great week but for that first chore 
a yoke would certainly have helped. 
With one I could have carried those buckets much further 
or for much longer - taking the weight on my shoulders rather than through my hands and arms.
 
The Hebrew prophets knew all about yokes. And they used the image in four ways.Picturing four different sorts of loads in their buckets.
 
1. They used it as an image of enslavement - either of domination by a foreign power or of exile.
Just as the oxen were yoked to the plough and under the control of the farmer, so their nation was often oppressed, under the yoke, of a foreign empire.
 
2. Sometimes the image is used for how the rich and powerful within Israel laid the burden of injustice on the shoulders of the poor and vulnerable.  As Isaiah puts it: 
"Is not this the fast that I choose, to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke."
3. The third way the yoke is used is to illustrate the burden of a person or nation's sin, "weighing on the neck and sapping the strength" as it says in Lamentations. 
 
4. And finally, the yoke is linked to the idea of serving God, or refusing to do so. As Jeremiah puts it: "you broke our yoke, 
you burst your bonds, you said "I will not serve". But that yoke could also be embraced gladly as a healthy, life-giving discipline.
 
So when Jesus talks about yokes, his hearers might have had those different meanings in mind.
 
Some of them would have thought of the yoke of Rome's imperial rule weighing heavily upon them.
 
Some of them would have thought of the injustice that was rife in their society - such as the division between the uber-rich landowners and the struggling peasants.  Burdens that were added to by the Pharisees' countless religious regulations - 
laws that often shut out ordinary working people. 
 
And doubtless Jesus' hearers would have thought of their own sins - "weighing on the neck and sapping the strength", 
their burden of guilt or shame or regret.
 
Jumping forward to St Paul, writing to the Christians in Rome, in a passage of striking honesty, we see that his burden, the yoke he was labouring under was his own self; wrestling with the contradictions and conflicts of his own personality.
 
Of course, he doesn't have the benefit of modern psychology and so we may find some of the ways he puts things unhelpful. 
So we probably wouldn't want to say "it is not me that does all the bad stuff but sin within me", nor would we want to put it in terms a clash between the will and the flesh. 
 
But having said that, like Paul, we are aware of the struggle we face trying to do what our best selves want to do.
 
We are sometimes ruled by deeper energies that overpower our good intentions. Sometimes we wish we could be free of those things But our passions are part of our good, God-given nature. It is just that they have become misdirected and corrupted by our egos.
 
The poet and artist William Blake recognised this but said the answer was not to reject those passions. Instead he said that we needed to: "Seek the form of heaven with the energies of hell". 
 
In other words, we need our deep, sometimes unruly energies, but we need to harness and direct them properly - to yoke them so to speak - because that's where we'll find the drive to work for God's kingdom.
 
Paul recognises this inner struggle and feels it deeply. 
It is his great burden: that something in him gets in the way of his desire to be faithful to God. "O wretched man that I am" he says.
 
Perhaps Jesus' hearers wouldn't have put it so strongly but I guess their sins "weighed on the neck and sapped their strength."
 
Jesus looks at them and knows all this, and issues one of the great invitations in the Bible: "Come to me." ONe that is at the heart of the gospel.
 
Whether you struggle under the burdens that the system or the powerful in society - lay on you.
Or whether your burden is more inward and personal 
- the worries, the depression, the fears, the regrets you find it hard to face or live with. 
Or perhaps it's the burden of family or work, or illness or age
 
Whatever your burden, whatever is in your bucket
- come to me, says Jesus. I may not always take away your problems. But I invite you to accept my yoke - the yoke of obedience - and let me guide and direct your life.
 
But I won't impose the yoke -  I invite you to take it, to choose it freely for yourself.
 
Because it still has a weight - it isn't always easy - at times it may even mean carrying a cross. But somewhere inside you, 
God willing, you will recognise that it fits; that for all 
the cost of discipleship there is an even greater blessing.
 
And one more thing. I will help you carry it. Because this yoke is not for one ox but a pair - I will share your burdens, walking alongside you every step of the journey. For my way is about sharing the burdens of others. And a burden shared, as they say...
 
Yes, there will be a lot of things to learn along the way, 
lots of ups and downs, but it starts with a simple invitation: 
Come to me, know yourself loved, and take my yoke upon you.