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SERMON BY
BISHOP DAVID L. MOYER
Pentecost VIII
– July 6, 2008
+In the Name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.
“Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:29-30).
Last Saturday, I drove to Basking
Ridge, New Jersey to ordain a man to the priesthood who was a deacon
in the Reformed Episcopal Church. He had devoted himself to the study
of Church history, and from such study sought to embrace the fullness
of the catholicity of the Church as a priest in the Anglican Church
in America. His knowledge and understanding of the Church was most impressive
in the answers he gave in his canonical exam. He serves as the Chaplain
for a large senior citizen complex known as Freedom Village in Basking
Ridge.
After I laid my hands upon
him to make him a priest, I untied the diagonally positioned deacon’s
stole and placed it in the cross-chest and cross-stoled position of
a priest, and said: “Take the yoke of the Lord. For his yoke is easy
and His burden is light.”
A priest wears a colored stole
around his neck (the color of the particular Church season) as a symbol
of a yoke, as would be placed around the neck of an animal for labor
as the animal pulls a plow. Without the yoke, the plow cannot be pulled
where the farmer directs his beast of burden.
A priest, or any Christian,
is to “wear” the yoke of Christ to pull the message of the Gospel
and Apostolic teaching forward into the world so that good seeds are
planted for a plentiful harvest of Christian produce.
Jesus said in this morning’s
Gospel that we are to “take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for
I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”
He says as well, “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
We are all to assume the yoke
of Christ around our necks, but more so in our hearts realizing that
He calls us to further His work. He says that as we assume the yoke,
we are to learn from Him – meaning that the yoke that has been placed
on our shoulders and how we move forward with it, is to be what we learn
from Him in being yoked in dependency upon Him.
He says that He is gentle and
lowly in heart – meaning that He has no desire to place a yoke of
undue heaviness upon us, but one that is placed upon us by Him who is
gentle and lowly in heart. He cares for us. He knows who we are, and
what we can bear. He teaches us that as He is lowly we are to regard
ourselves as lowly, servants who are to undertake the work of the Master,
whatever it is for whomever it is directed. His choosing, not ours.
We’re told that in bearing
the yoke He places upon us to do His work, we will find rest for our
souls. That’s quite a paradox, isn’t it? A contradiction to what
we normally experience or assume. Work doesn’t equate with rest for
us, does it? We quite normally think that rest is the result of the
absence of work. But Jesus, who challenged worldly assumptions time
and time again, and who turned the world upside down in what He said
that was true and godly, tells us that we can expect to find rest in
and as we are yoked to Him for His work.
I remember (and I think that
I have shared this with you before) several years ago when I was
tired, confused, and unsettled about the way things were in the Church
and in my own life that I called Bishop Parsons for comfort and advice.
After I told him my state of mind and emotions, I thought that he would
tell me to back off, to take a break, to get away, to rest, and to take
care of myself. He didn’t advise any of those things, but rather said
to me, “David, I want you to go visit the sick this afternoon.”
No further explanation or reason was given by him for his pastoral direction.
So I obeyed, and visited the sick, and found myself at the end of the
day to be much refreshed. It was the refreshment found in thinking and
serving others, forgetting oneself, and being ministered to by the Lord
through those to whom I ministered.
I thought later of the words
of the Collect for Peace that I prayed every day in the morning Office,
“…whose service is perfect freedom.” I found freedom from my weakness
of mind and spirit in serving others in the Name of Him who said that
if His yoke is borne, rest will be found for one’s soul.
Can we agree without doubt
in the truth of our Lord’s words, “For my yoke is easy, and my burden
is light,” when we think of how difficult it is so often to think
and act as He did and according to His teachings? When we are completely
spent? When we want someone else to bear the burden?
Many of you know the name Evelyn
Underhill, that great Anglican spiritual writer of the first half of
the 20th century, whose two books Mysticism and
Worship are theological classics. At a retreat she gave in the crypt
of Canterbury Cathedral in 1927, she said the following in reference
to what we have heard from Jesus in this morning’s Gospel:
“I think that the real implications
of the loving saying: ‘Come unto me all you that labor and are heavy
laden and I shall refresh you’ are sometimes lost by us. The exquisite
tenderness of the opening words obscures the bracing note on which they
end. ‘I shall refresh’ is nearer than the original meaning ‘I
shall give you rest.’ Christ is saying: ‘I shall freshen you up
for another spell. I shall take away the tired feeling and the strain,
but not the work or the weight. I shall give you my yoke to help you
bear the challenges more steadily and evenly so that they won’t seem
so crushing. I will feed you, give you the water of life, and make you
more adequate to your job.’
The words of Christ are not
an invitation to holy slackness. They have nothing in common with the
maudlin hymn, ‘Lean Hard!’ If you answer Christ’s invitation,
the room into which you are introduced will not be a room in which to
rest. It will be a well-equipped workshop in which we are shown the
right use of our muscles and tools, a room where we work side by side
with the One of whom it is said that ‘wherever He comes, He brings
His tools with Him.’
That refreshing offer of Christ
to his laborers is different to each and is done in secret, according
to each need. Some of us wish food and some a pause for breath. Some
are disheartened and want renewed confidence. Some want a readjustment
of the yoke according to the strength needed for a special job. Some
want to wash the dust off. Some just want a glance of understanding
and love. The invitation to all is just the same: ‘Come, look, learn.
Take My yoke and do it My way.’ There is no other way to true inward
peace.” (The Ways of the Spirit, p.152).
Jesus promises that He, and
only He, gives the peace that the world cannot give; and this is so
true. That peace is found when we do things His way, when we serve Him
with self-abandonment, when we serve Him with Him beside us, consciously
and thankfully aware of the sacramental food He gives us for the journey’s
labor of discipleship, when we affirm the truth of His words, “He
who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for
apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15: 5).
Those words of Jesus are in
no way a denigration of who we are and the precious value we have in
the sight of the Lord, but simply and clearly the way it is, and what
will be or what won’t be – depending on where He is and where we
are one to another. As Evelyn Underhill taught, “The invitation to
all is just the same: ‘Come, look, learn, Take My yoke and do it My
way.’ There is no other way to true inward peace.”
+In the Name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.
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