Come to Me
Matthew 11:25-30
Sunday, May 6, 2007

Those of you who have been hanging around South Church for a while and who actually read the newsletter – for which I give you tons of credit, because while I really hope you do read the newsletter, I don’t assume that the first thing you do on a pleasant spring morning is to sit down with a fresh cup of coffee and say to yourself, Oh, goodie, it’s time to read the church newsletter! (I’m an optimist about such things, but not a fool.) Anyway, those of you who have been reading have noticed my columns about who we are at South Church . You have heard me call this church a Jesus centered, Open and Affirming, Multi-racial church. It’s a statement that stretches me and I have heard from you some great questions about what the statement means. Open and Affirming you get. Led by our deacons six years ago this month, you voted to openly welcome all God’s people and openly affirm the presence and gifts of gay and lesbian folk. Multi-racial is a real stretch – we are so white in some ways, but we are changing, our context is changing, our membership is changing and our sense of worship is evolving as well. Multi-racial is a stretch, but we mostly get it.

Oddly enough, it’s the Jesus centered part that causes the most questions. Jesus is a different matter. There’s some discomfort. Partly, the discomfort comes from hearing fundamentalists use the name of Jesus to whip their favorite enemies: gay people, liberals, immigrants, the French, terrorists, climate alarmists and uppity women. By the time you count all the folk fundamentalists tell us to shun and despise, you wonder who’s left!

Partly, people in churches like ours wonder about Jesus because mainline churches have done such a lousy job of introducing Jesus as somebody worth knowing. You grew up in a mainline church, chances are you know a whole lot more about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny than you do about Jesus. Shame on us.

And then there is our increasingly secular world. Jesus just isn’t part of the world’s buzz. Oh, Jesus comes up when movies like The Da Vinci Code surface or when – perhaps you heard it at Easter this year – somebody claims to have found Jesus’ bone burial box. But as the risen One who calls you to life, love, courage and conviction?

Not in this world!

So I begin this brief sermon series reintroducing Jesus by putting out to you His great invitation in Matthew’s gospel: Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

Do you hear him? It’s a very strange invitation – this rest -- because Jesus is not saying come with me and take a nap in the sun, or come with me on a cruise or come with me and get raptured into another world. No. It’s more like: Come and do my work with me and I will give you inner freedom. That’s right. Inner freedom from shame, from fear, from penalty, from panic.

I have an image for this rest, this inner freedom. Inner freedom, after all, is a confidence that the arc of our lives will fall along lines that are just and loving.

It’s an odd image I have. Bear with me. It’s an image of bringing a great old tree down, a tree long past its time, bringing it down majestically and safely to rest.

Out where we live we had a couple trees taken down this past weekend. Both rotten at the core and threatening to come down in any mild storm coming from the wrong direction. One was an enormous white pine. The tree stood right by the road and the tricky part was figuring how to bring it down without taking power or telephone lines with it, without destroying the road surface which would annoy the highway department no end, and without taking with it our roof, standing there just twenty feet to one side. On stormy winter nights I would wake up in a sweat imagining that great white pine coming to rest above my head in the attic!

You have to imagine how big this tree is. Probably sixty feet tall and easily thirty feet across near the crown, five or six feet around at the base. There is only one direction this tree can go down, right along the roadside, and there is only a matter of a few inches to spare. So I hire this guy Rob and his crew. Rob gets out his ropes and chain saw and rappelling gear, and by God he shimmies up that tree with his chain saw hanging on one side and his long pruning hook on another, and he sets a whole series of ropes like a spider web up in the crown of the tree. Some of the ropes I can tell are to secure his place in the tree. Some are to keep limbs from crashing down.

It’s terrifying to watch. I keep coming out of the house and looking up, but I can’t watch and I go back inside. I’m not good at heights even looking up! Rob’s up there hanging, then rappelling, then bouncing around the tree trunk, then cutting, then guiding these great limbs down, then resetting and reroping, while the guys below hold the lines from every side and pull or let go according to Rob’s shouted instructions.

Man! It took seven hours! Then, finally, Rob resets the spider web one more time, comes down, cuts the base almost delicately from side to side, gestures to the guys to pull those ropes one more time, and down she comes – precisely, easily and majestically, exactly where that tree needs to fall. Whomp!!

Rob pulls up the face mask from his safety helmet, grins, and says to me, What? You were worried?

I reply, I’m in awe!

Jesus’ rest is that kind of work, you see. It’s the rest of difficult work, done with patience, care, love and deep confidence that in God’s care, living and dying will fall where they should!

{Pause}

It’s a huge challenge, isn’t it? You see, when Jesus continues in our text this morning and says, Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, he means, come apprentice yourself to me, and I will show you how to do your own living and dying.

I say living and dying today because I am thinking about Lillian Ruell who died Thursday morning. Lillian’s life was not an easy one – she was born poor and soon orphaned and farmed out first to that family and then the other -- but she became a person of great beauty and dignity. She made a decision over a week ago that she was done with constant medical care and dialysis and she decided to go home with her daughters, stop the dialysis, and let go. On Tuesday she spoke on the phone with a favorite grandson in California and she joked with him, It’s my time. I tell you what – you hold the bucket and I’ll kick it!

Yes! We live and rise and die and fall, and in some fine and mysterious way, Jesus invites us to do so along the guidelines of humor and courage!

For my yoke is easy, Jesus continues, and my burden is light.

{Pause}

I find Jesus astonishing, as I continue to get to know him in my life. The truth is, I don’t always know how to live my life with wit and patience and kindness, neither being stopped by the world’s evil, nor sidetracked by my own anger and self-justification. Do you? Do you live in deep, inner freedom, able to love God and your neighbor? Can you hold yourself lightly? Is your inner schedule your own, and do you believe your living and dying will fall along just and loving lines?

Jesus did. He knew what the price might be for claiming the love and authority of God in His life. He knew that healing the ill and the crazy and calling the poor and marginalized to himself and turning over the tables of the liars and the manipulators, would earn him rage and scorn and pain.

Yet he believed his falling and rising would lead others to do the work he had done, and that he could promise them – promise us – His yoke would prove kind and His burden joyful.

It’s why I come to church. Because nowhere else do I hear about work that is kind and joyful that cannot be stolen from us, not even by death!

So, is Jesus alive? Is He footloose somewhere among us? I want to see Him. Do you? Come to me, He says, and I will give you life and laughter!

Sometimes, I wonder. I wonder whether I have seen Him, even though I cannot put my hand on him, because something in me wants to get up out of myself and follow the echo of His voice.

Listen. Listen with me to a poem, part of a poem, by Mary Oliver. It’s called “The Vast Ocean Begins Just Outside Our Church: The Eucharist.”

The vast ocean she talks about is, what Jesus calls the kingdom and says has come near. The Eucharist – our communion of bread and cup – are like a beach where waves of kingdom life lap at the solid landscape of our days. The beach is fluid and changing. So are the bread and cup. They may be grain and grape. Or they may be love and laughter!

Mary Oliver imagines Jesus walking the shore line between our life and His. Her words go this way:

I want
To see Jesus,
Maybe in the clouds,

Or on the shore,
Just walking,
Beautiful man,

And clearly
Someone else
Besides.

On the hard days
I ask myself
If I ever will.

Also there are times
My body whispers to me
That I have.

Yes, Lord! I will come!

How about you?

Amen