July 3, 2011 | 8:00 a.m.

Prisoners of Hope

Judith L. Watt
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 145:8–14
Zechariah 9:9–12
Matthew 11: 16–19, 25–30

“Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

Matthew 11:18 (NRSV)

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Thomas Merton
Thoughts in Solitude

Jesus’ words “Come to me, all you that are weary” are familiar words to some of you and favorite words for others of you. My odd sense of humor tells me that these are interesting words to use at the beginning of a sermon—the beginning of a sermon that is preached at 8:00 in the morning, on a holiday weekend no less. Maybe you are tired at this hour. Maybe you aren’t. But I’m hoping in some way that Jesus’ invitation makes you feel better about being in church this early. And I hope you receive the invitation “Come to me, all you that are weary” as an invitation for you. I hope the words will pop into your mind at many different times throughout the week, whether or not you are tired and no matter what the hour. I hope that you’ll be walking along somewhere this week, facing some sort of situation or struggling over some challenge, and that the words will just pop into your head. “Come to me, all you that are weary.”

When Jesus said, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest,” he was speaking to a generation of people who were burned out. They were burned out because they couldn’t sort out how to live. They couldn’t settle on a path. They didn’t know which way was the right way to turn. They would grab onto one anchor for their lives, and then something else came along and they would latch onto a new anchor.

You know what this roller coaster is like. It is exemplified in that way food information changes. One year the newspapers are filled with reports that coffee is bad for you. A year or two later, you read that coffee is good for you. You hear that eggs are filled with cholesterol—bad for you—and then you hear that eggs are the perfect nutritional food. The people back then probably weren’t thinking much about diet fads. They ate what was available to them. They were searching for the “right” way to live out their faith. They wanted to know if they were applying their faith to their daily lives, and they wanted to know how to do that correctly. The answers to their searching weren’t easy to find because Matthew’s Gospel was written in a time when Judaism was in flux and when early Christianity was in flux. Even though the Pharisees held dominance within what was then Judaism, they still competed with other Jewish groups, including the believers in Jesus as the Christ, God’s chosen Messiah. There was competition between and among religious groups. The rules kept changing. And so the people of the day who wanted to live out their faith lives were caught in an environment that was confusing and anything but stable. They were a people burned out by all of the choices and the confusion.

These last few days, Presbyterians from around the nation have gathered in Indianapolis at a gathering that takes place in the off-year between General Assemblies. It is called the Big Tent. Serene Jones, President of Union Theological Seminary in New York, spoke at the Big Tent gathering about the chaos and the opportunity of John Calvin’s world in the sixteenth century. She claimed that time as being remarkably similar to the chaos and opportunity of our time in the twenty-first century: chaos and opportunity.

According to Jones, Calvin’s Geneva at the dawn of the Renaissance was the hub of radical social change that transformed Europe and the world forever. The printing press, a new invention, provided unprecedented access to knowledge. The prevailing economic system of the day, feudalism, was giving way to capitalism, and the borders of nations in Europe were just being established. Waves of immigration were common, the result of the devastation of the plague. Unprecedented access to knowledge, changing economic systems, changing national boundaries, waves of immigration: sound familiar?

God’s people struggling to find stability, truth, or a clear path forward is not new. How am I to be a good person, God’s person, a faithful disciple in this changing, chaotic world?

And Jesus offers an invitation” “Come to me, all you that are weary.”

Jesus speaks to their confusion. He asks a rhetorical question of the crowd to emphasize that he’s noticed how confused everyone is. “But to what will I compare this generation?” he asks. He reminds them of their reaction to John the Baptist, who came calling for repentance with an urgency. He wailed and cried out the message that this world was in terrible shape and that repentance was in order. The reaction? Everyone thought he was possessed or crazy. Jesus came along and ate with the despised of the despised and socialized with sinners. He dispensed grace and gave everyone access to himself. The reaction to Jesus? Everyone thought Jesus was a glutton and drunkard. This generation, Jesus said, doesn’t know what it wants and can’t hold onto any sense of a moral compass.

William Goettler, Assistant Dean at Yale Divinity School, says it this way: “Jesus is not addressing the failure of individuals to respond, but of the society as a whole, indeed of the entire generation, a people who somehow fail to respond as they might to a song that is utterly clear.” Goettler continues, “During a week of patriotic celebration, how can we fail to reflect on the ways in which our own generation understands—and fails to understand—the reasons for dancing and the reasons for weeping. We are so often and so easily lulled by the other songs and voices of our culture. Not only do we miss the moments that matter; we regularly dance when we ought to mourn for a world whose burden is heavy and for a people who need rest” (William Goettler, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 3, pp. 213–214).

The people in Zechariah’s day, hundreds of years before Jesus, had been searching too. They had become confused also—and disappointed. The prophet Zechariah spoke to a community that had spent years in exile yearning to return to their homeland and yearning to rebuild the temple. Zechariah had been an encourager of that returned community, a community finally allowed to come back to their beloved land with hopes and dreams and yet so much had changed. Like us yearning to go back to a time before September 11, almost ten years ago. Or us yearning to go back to how a relationship once was. Or us yearning to roll back the calendar. The people to whom Zechariah spoke found themselves comparing their present reality to what they had once known, and they were disappointed and searching.

If you saw the film Midnight in Paris, you know that Gil, the main character, yearns for a past era, filled with writers like himself—Hemingway, Stein, T. S. Eliot— and he thinks of the 1920s in Paris as the ideal. At one point in the story, the voice of the narrator ruminates about nostalgia and says that nostalgia is only an escape from present pain. Zechariah had been an encourager of the returned exiles. They were nostalgic about the past and disappointed in the present.

And so again Zechariah proclaims the promise: a savior like no other; a ruler like no other; a leader like no other. The promise is the promise of a ruler not bent on destruction but one who will come to make peace. This leader, says Zechariah, will come on a donkey. A donkey is a symbol of life. A donkey is an animal used for the work of food production and transportation of people. This new ruler would not come on a horse, a symbol of war and destruction, but on a donkey.

The people to whom Zechariah was speaking and the people to whom Jesus was speaking were people who were trying to figure it out, just like we are. They were trying to figure out how to live their lives in line with God’s will for them. But they were confused and they were disappointed. They were disappointed because the dreamed of reality for the world wasn’t always visible to them and the promises of faith didn’t always seem real to them. They were disappointed because they were prisoners—prisoners of hope. In other words, hope wouldn’t die in them. Hope wouldn’t let them go. They’d had a glimpse—just as we have a glimpse—of what the reign of God could look like: Nations at peace. People with homes. No one hungry. Everyone with adequate access to health care. Christian brothers and sisters able to listen to one another and show mutual forbearance toward one another.

They were imprisoned by hope; that hope in their hearts made the disappointments that much worse. And if they weren’t careful, the disappointments had the power to cause them to forget—to forget how to live and to forget who was calling them and to forget that Jesus was their hope, because Jesus announced this radical and new way of living: peace instead of destruction, grace enough to consume judgment.

And so Jesus calls them again—and calls us too. Come to me, all of you who are burned out from trying to figure it out and all of you for whom hope has been dashed because the world just seems too complicated and in need. Come and find rest, Jesus says, to those of us who are wearied by the burdens placed on us by the weight of religious rules and regulations. Come and find rest, Jesus says, to those of us who are burdened by the weight of sin or those of us who have no clue about the hope that exists in God. Come and find rest, Jesus says, if you suffer from the frustrations of living in an imperfect world. I am the source of rest, Jesus says. I am the One with perfect knowledge of God.

And then he says to us, “Take my yoke.” Come and find rest, but take my yoke. A yoke is a symbol of work. The yoke used for the work of animals in the field is something that rests on their shoulders and enables them to perform a task, to pull a plow or to carry water. It both restrains and enables at the same time. Jesus says find your rest in me but also take on my work with me. You and I will wear the yoke on our shoulders, and I will be with you in the work that you do for the sake of God’s people. We are prisoners of hope. Hope won’t die in us. That’s a gift. But when the disappointment becomes too heavy, remembering who is calling us and the rest he offers and that he shares in the burden, always, with us, gets us on track again. Amen.