Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens,
and I will give you rest. 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.
Do you have a bible verse that sticks with you? Maybe just a snatch of words, a short phrase. Jesus wept. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Here I am, Lord.
What’s your verse? I’ll be quiet for a few seconds, and let you remember it.
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My guess is that your verse comes with a story, some event that it got you through, a question that it resolved, a sorrow that it helped you to bear.
I’ll be quiet again for a few seconds, while you remember your story.
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And now I’ll tell you my story. It was thirty-some years ago. After half a dozen different marriage counselors over half a dozen years and three individual therapists, as well, I knew that my first marriage was over. Regardless of who did what to whom, regardless of those half a dozen attempts at counseling, it felt like a personal failure to file for divorce. It felt like sin.
For months I struggled with my sense of obligation to my vows, my responsibility for my child, my pride. And then one night, driving home from work in the dark, that verse came to me.
Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 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.
I remembered about the yoke. In Jesus’ day, farmers plowed with teams of oxen yoked together. If one ox were stronger than the other, the stronger might pull ahead, which made the plow turn, and the furrow crooked. Well, you don’t find oxen of equal strength. One is always a little stronger than the other. So to compensate, farmers added weight to one side of the yoke, and lightened the side carried by the weaker of the two.
Jesus used that metaphor to remind us that he walks beside us through the day. He yokes himself to us. And he tells us to take the easier side.
That is when I remembered—in the relationship between Savior and saved, he’s the one who is the Savior. I’m the one who is saved. It was time for me to give up my righteousness, God help me, so I could get on with doing what I knew, under the circumstances, was right.
I am a strong person. I carry heavy loads. But between me and Jesus, there is no contest. And I do a better job of plowing the furrow that is mine to plow, if I let him share the load.
So I did. I did. It broke my heart with grief, the loss of the life that I thought I would lead with that marriage, the loss of my image of myself who would never fail in that way. The next few years were a struggle. But I did not bear the burden alone. And I got on with the life that God really had in store for me.
I thought about that story last week during Jeff’s sermon. Bear with me here. This discussion of blizzard, winter, and ice age as images for COVID-19—I looked up the article he referred to. Here is the link. That passage from the gospel is for me something that endures, something to carry me through an ice age.
The blizzard is the temporary hunkering down, the stay at home orders we thought would be over in a couple months. The winter is the longer-term hard time, maybe where we are now, beginning to realize that the consequences of the virus and its disruptions will take a while to recover from, longer than we first thought, still wondering how and when we will get back to normal. And the ice age, the thought that we don’t want to speak out loud, that we will not get back to normal, that life will be different going forward in ways we don’t even anticipate yet. The ways we were in the world and in the church have to change.
What are those changes? The first change for St. Andrew’s is how we gather since the blizzard first struck. It is a change we are negotiating, though there are some cracks around the edges. Some of our newer members are missing from this gallery in front of me. They were not fully on board to come with us through the change. That happens in blizzards. We constrict.
The way we draw in new people has been disrupted. Our evangelism has often been building-based. We worked hard to make our new building beautiful. And it was working, it was drawing people in to experience a new space. So we worked it. People enter our fellowship by coming to a central place on Sunday morning. When they come to us, then we proclaim the good news, pass the peace, break the bread, and listen to their stories over a cup of coffee and a gluten-free cookie.
As the winter of COVID continues, we have some thinking to do about that—now how do we invite people into discipleship, to become followers of Jesus. The blessing box has been one way, both feeding and inspiring others to do the same. But there is a depth to the regular practice of prayer and study of scripture, that process of exploring together and becoming like Christ—we haven’t figured that out as the winter continues.
We don’t have to have it figured out yet. I put it out there to invite you to give it some thought. Because that’s what happens in an ice age. People think about what is important, what is the core that carries through. And then they create new things, new ways to be in the world, and new strategies to do what is still most important to them to do.
I think where we are right now is maybe working through our grief for a way of life that is passing and taking stock of the resources we still have. What is most important, what is really most important remains.
Our stories remain, those snatches of scripture that attach to our life-changing events, our most significant relationships, our secret sorrows, our deepest sense of self.
The Old Testament lesson today is something of a gift this morning. It’s an obscure story about an obscure woman. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are the fathers of the faith, though once his father didn’t kill him, Isaac is pretty much overlooked. And his wife Rebekah isn’t one of those names that leaps to the front of bible history.
But she has her moment. And today’s story is it. Will you go, Rebekah, with this man? He’s not a total stranger. He works for a kinsman, Abraham, a kinsman whom God called to leave behind the world and the ways that he knew. God called him to an adventure, a life of faith. And now Rebekah is asked, Will you leave what is familiar to you, to join this adventure? Will you go, too? She said, I will.
What did Rebekah have to learn in her new land? The climate was different, there was less water. The food would have been different, but she learned to cook it. When it came time to give birth, her mother was not with her. Did the women of Canaan have different practices around childbirth, and child rearing? What was this circumcision thing?
Were there times, did she grieve her old life, its familiar ways, its certainties?
Nevertheless – “She said, I will.” There’s a snatch of words from Scripture that we can attach to these days, as we set out on a new world to come. We come from a people of faith, people like Rebekah, not always of great stature and fame, but a willingness to go forward.
Here is a quote from that article about blizzard, winter, and ice age, about what is most important, what we take with us as we go forward:
“Christian creativity begins with grief — the grief of a world gone wrong. It enfolds it in lament — the loud cry of Good Friday, the silence of Holy Saturday — and still comes to the tomb early Sunday morning. We are burying and saying goodbye to so much in these days, and around the world people are burying and saying goodbye to those they loved.
“But we do not grieve without hope. If we grieve with Jesus, and make room for others to grieve, we can hope to be visited by the Comforter, the Spirit who breathed over creation before it was even formed. And that Spirit will guide us in the choices we have to make, even on the hardest days that are ahead.”
My friends, remember your story. Remember your hope. And this week, when so many need to find hope, need to find what is most important to carry us forward, go find somebody else and tell your story.
And listen to theirs. Amen.
Dear reader -- this was preached to St. Andrew's Church in Prineville, Oregon. I invite you to put your own bible verse, your own story in the comments below.
photo of Oxen plowing near Lima taken by an employee of the US Department of Commerce, in the public domain
phtot of Prospect Heights Blizzard, 02-12-06, from Flickr, used under the Creative Commons license
Rebekah at the well by Harold Copping, in the public domain
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