5th Sunday after Pentecost
Romans 8:12-25
July 17, 2011

Green Theology

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

In the year that I’ve been hanging around Decorah you may have noticed that I don’t often preach from Paul. There is a reason for that. The Apostle Paul and I have our differences. He comes across as a pompous know-it-all and, really, there is only space for one of those in a room at a time and I would rather it were me. His prose is awful. His sentences run on and on, dangling participial phrases like charms on a charm bracelet. He starts out to make a simple point and then takes every available detour until he and we have forgotten what he set out to say. To put it succinctly, the Apostle annoys me.

I feel badly about it, of course. I don’t like it when my own preferences get in the way of loving someone, even someone dead for nearly two thousand years. One year I took it as a lenten discipline to preach from Paul every time he came up in the lectionary. And, wouldn’t you know it?—it was every Sunday during Lent! So every week I sat down with this person that I don’t really like very much. We had our arguments, our points of profound disagreement and some surprising agreements as well. In the seven weeks that we met for conversation I found what many people of have found when they’ve really made an effort to get to know someone whom they do not like: I came to respect him.

I discovered that it was not Paul himself I had rejected—it was the report I’ve had about him from others. His writings have been captured and, I believe, distorted by an agenda that I can only describe as narrow and abusive. He is taken out of context and made to seem to be saying things that he simply does not say. I have found him to be innocent of many of the charges made against him.

Don’t get me wrong. We’re not quite friends. I’ve never invited him to a baseball game or out for a pint. But I respect him. I think I understand him a little. I appreciate his perspective. I sometimes preach from his writings when it isn’t even Lent. I was intrigued by something I think I see in this week’s lesson, so this is one of those weeks. I’ll need two weeks of vacation to recover from the effort and maybe you’ll be glad of two weeks with someone else in the pulpit as well!

Romans is unique among Paul’s letters because it was written to a congregation whom he had never met. It is a letter of self-introduction to them because he is planning a missionary journey to the far west of the known world, to the Roman province of Hispania, and he hopes to gain their support for this effort. Rome is on the way and he would like to break the journey into two stages.

The letter is Paul’s fullest statement of what he has been preaching. He doesn’t deal with the particular problems of a particular congregation. Instead, Paul’s concerns are more general. He deals with the issue that has every Christian congregation struggling. In broad strokes the problem was this: How is the community of Jesus-followers going to deal with the presence of both Jewish and non-Jewish Christians? Is the gospel about Jesus for Jews only or is it for non-Jews as well? Do non-Jews have to become Jews in order to become Christians? Must non-Jewish Christians keep the Jewish law? If not, what law are they supposed to follow?

Paul said what God had done in Jesus the Christ was so new, so powerful, so radical, that the categories of Jew and non-Jew no longer made any sense. The Jewish law no longer counted, nor did any other law. The only thing that mattered was confidence in Jesus’ faithfulness and living a life that grew out of that confidence. This new thing rendered the old ways obsolete.

God’s plan includes both Jews and non-Jews. In fact—and here’s where our reading comes in—it doesn’t just include people. God’s plan is a plan for the whole of creation. We are not the only ones who long for redemption. With eager anticipation all of creation longs for it with us, longs for what Paul calls “the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”

Paul’s train of thought has left its rails. The course of Paul’s argument won’t be picked up again until the next chapter. In the meantime Paul’s train of thought continues careening along through —to change metaphors—a poetic crescendo that will end at chapter’s end with Paul’s jubilant shout that nothing seen or unseen in all of creation will separate us from God’s love found in the Jesus Christ! Hooray!

Now, where were we? Oh, yes: Paul was sketching out how things are with us. There are two choices, Paul says, for both Jew and non-Jew alike. On the one side there is flesh, death, the deeds of the body, slavery and fear. On the other side there is life, spirit, adoption, freedom, and glory. We who are Christians, says Paul, still live at least in some sense on the side of flesh, death, slavery and fear. But we hope for the side of spirit, life, freedom and glory. We aren’t there yet, but we hope for it, we yearn for it, we live toward it, we groan for it. We are in labor, giving birth to a new creation. This scares me, because although I’ve never been in labor myself, I have seen it and it looks like hard, painful and frightening work.

But we’re not the only ones who are in labor for this new thing: the whole of creation does, too. Now this is something odd, a thought that neither the ancients nor we have taken seriously.

To the ancients nature was not a good thing. As the opposite of culture it threatened everything they did. Wolves threatened their sheep. The forest threatened their cultivated fields. The sea threatened sailors. Nature could overthrow culture all too easily. Nature could turn an assembly of rational citizens into a blindly furious mob. People wanted to get as far away from nature as possible.

They admired the scenery of a cultivated countryside. They would have liked this part of Iowa, but not for its pockets of woodlands or its limestone cliffs. Nature on its own terms was dangerous and uncanny, hostile to humans. It wasn’t beautiful.

We didn’t start seeing nature as beautiful until the late seventeen hundreds, less than three centuries ago. That only happened after we began to imagine that we could control nature. Then we began to think of nature as beautiful. People began to travel to see the wilderness, not so they could plow it up or cut it down, but so they could appreciate its newly discovered beauty. When Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett cries, “What are men to rocks and mountains?” she is saying something quite modern, something her great grandparents would neither have said nor even understood. We have come so far from the ancient point of view that we now see nature as flawless. We see a “natural” ingredient in an otherwise highly processed food as a selling point. We set aside plots of wilderness for protection. We have turned the ancient world upside down.

But notice that both of these views agree that nature is one thing and we are another. We have changed our minds about the relative value of culture and nature, but we are agreed that human beings and their culture stand outside of and apart from nature.

Paul disagrees. Paul says that we are creatures. We are deeply flawed creatures. And here is the huge point: because we, the capstone of creation, are flawed, so is the entire edifice. The condition of our species is not a problem just for us. It is a problem for the whole world.

But we knew that already, didn’t we? If we misuse fertilizers in Iowa, a patch of the Gulf of Mexico dies. If we build a nuclear power plant on a seismic fault-line, the soil and the sea life suffer. The careless agricultural use of marginal land leaves a gully where there could have been a pasture or woodland. A consensus of climatologists has come to the conclusion that the greenhouse gases that our species is producing are changing the climate of the whole planet. None of this is new news.

What is new is what comes next. Paul tells us that just as our flaws have become a deep wound in creation, our healing will be nothing less than the liberation of the rest of nature from its slavery. So what God plans to do is to rebuild creation from the ground up, to lay a new foundation for the natural enterprise.

God has a dream for us. This is true. What is also true is that this dream isn’t just about us; it’s about the world we live in, it’s about Elizabeth Bennett’s “rocks and mountains,” it’s about salamanders and tree frogs, slime molds and saguaro cactus, fireflies and falcons, blue whales and bluebells.

So far, our efforts to protect the environment we live in have been based either on self-interest or nature worship. When Paul’s train of thought left the rails, he showed us, whether by accident or on purpose, that there is another possibility. It is a happy derailment, I think.

It offers us a different way of thinking about ourselves and our world and a different reason for our caring. We can care for ourselves and for the rest of our world, neither because it serves us to do it, nor out of guilt, but because loving the world towards the “freedom of the glory of the children of God” is part of our calling as God’s children. Our fellow creatures can do more than groan with us because of our deep woundedness. They can celebrate our healing with us. They can rejoice that God is not saving us out of the world, but into it. Then will what we and our fellow creatures hoped for be in plain sight. Then will God’s dream for us be realized.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

"A Sower Went Out to Sow" - July 10, 2011; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23; Proper 10A

Proper 10A
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
July 10, 2011

A Sower Went Out to Sow

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

A crowd gathered around Jesus. That wasn’t unusual. That Jesus used a gathered crowd as a chance to teach is no surprise either. Nor is it a surprise that he taught them in parables. If Jesus is known for anything special in his method of teaching, it is that he taught in parables.

“A sower went out to sow.” And still there is no surprise, no startling new thing. We know this parable. In fact, we’re pretty sure we know them all. At least we’re pretty sure we’d recognize any of them. We may not understand them all, but we know how we’re supposed to go about understanding them. The parables are little stories. They are set in scenes that his hearers recognized, scenes drawn from ordinary life.

And, if we’re sure of one thing, we’re sure that they don’t mean what they say. They are what our English teachers called “allegory.” They aren’t meant to be taken literally. The elements in the story, like the sower, the seed and the different soils, are all metaphors, figures that refer to something else.

In our reading for this morning, we are even told what these particular elements in the story really mean: The seed that the sower sows is “the word of the kingdom.” The different soils are the different kinds of audiences. The hard-packed soil of the path is the hearer from whom the devil snatches the word away like a bird picking seeds off the ground. There are shallow people in whom the word of the kingdom can’t take root, so when hard times come the word dies. There are people who let their anxiety or greed crowd out the good news; they are the thorn-infested soil. And finally there are people who will take the word of the kingdom to heart. They will give it space to grow. They will guard it from the enemy. They will keep it from being crowded out by other commitments or concerns. So be careful about what kind of reception you give to the word of the kingdom: Be like the good soil in which the seed of the good news can take root and grow and bear a rich harvest.

There. That wasn’t so hard, was it? Of course, in this particular case we have the teacher’s edition of the textbook, the one with the answers in the back. For other parables we’ll be on our own. We’ll have to figure these out for ourselves. And it doesn’t look too good.

In fact, if we look at the stuff that lies between the parable itself and its interpretation, the part of this passage that the lectionary committee didn’t think we should read this morning, we’ll find some discouraging news. When Jesus’ disciples ask Jesus why he teaches in parables he answers by telling them that he speaks in parables so that the crowd will not understand what he is saying. They aren’t supposed to understand. Only the disciples are supposed to understand. They are only ones who get the answer key. It’s too bad that they didn’t pass it along to us! Instead we have an interpretation for this parable and a very few others and we’re thrown on our own too-meager resources to figure out the rest.

Now what? Where do we go from here? It looks like we’re stuck.

Let me suggest a way forward. As it often happens, the way forward begins by going back. Matthew’s gospel was written in the last three decades of the first century, anywhere from forty to seventy years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Like every writer of every book of the Bible, Matthew was much less concerned with putting the tradition that he had received into writing while remaining a neutral observer than he was with helping his community deal with its own problems by making use of the tradition that he received.

Matthew’s community was puzzled as to why the good news that had meant so much to them didn’t seem to get much traction with many of their neighbors. Why was it that they just didn’t “get” it? Well, the interpretation that Matthew provided helped them to understand. Some people, maybe even most people, didn’t get it because they were the wrong kind of soil for that kind of seed. Matthew’s community could see their experiences mirrored in the results of the sower’s sowing: some people never seemed to hear the message at all, others seemed glad to hear it but wandered away soon after, still others were so distracted by other things that the message couldn’t really take hold. They, meanwhile, should concentrate on being fertile soil. And, behind those choices, there was another will at work: some people were not meant to understand while they, thankfully, were.

Matthew has recast the tradition to speak to his own day. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s the only thing that we can do. We live in Decorah, not Antioch, in the early part of the twenty-first century, not the latter part of the first.

I believe that Matthew’s reinterpretation of Jesus’ parable does not bind us to follow his reading. Instead, I believe that it frees us to recast the tradition so that it speaks to our world and our life in it, just as Matthew recast it to speak to his world. So the way forward lies back, behind Matthew’s reading.

I find it helpful and useful when reading parables to take the parable at face value. I assume that it means what it says. This parable begins, “Listen! A sower went out to sow.” I am going to assume that this parable, then, is about “a sower who went out to sow.” Jesus’ listeners would have recognized this scene.

The figure of the sower with a bag full of seed walking through a field and casting the seed by hand was familiar. The sower sowed the seed. Then he would go back over the field with an ox and a scratch plow. The scratch plow wouldn’t turn the soil over as our plows used to do. It would—as its name implies—merely scratch the surface inch or so to cover the seed so that it could germinate and grow. Then, much the same as our farmers do now, they would hope for rain. Only they waited and hoped with a higher degree of anxiety. Agriculture was a close thing in that part of the world. Jesus’ hearers knew that farming was a gamble and that there were lots of things that could go wrong. Even if everything went right, it was not a way for a peasant to get rich. Even in good years the yield was meager. The ancients used to say that a harvest was divided into thirds: one-third for seed, one-third for the rats and one-third to eat.

Farming as done by peasants was no get-rich quick scheme, but it would provide a living, especially if the peasant was fortunate enough to have good land, land on a well-drained slope for example. Jesus’ hearers knew this, too.

This brings us to the first surprise in the parable: this sower’s land stunk. It was hardly worth the bother, as the story tells us by detailing the ways in which the land was unsuitable. In the first place, there was a road that ran through the field. The birds would eat any seed that fell on the road. And what they didn’t eat would be trampled.

Part of the field was too rocky and the soil was too thin. No seed that fell there would produce a harvest. Part of the field was thorn-infested. Farmers could and would burn the weeds off before planting but the roots were too deep to be destroyed by fire. The roots of the weeds would send up new shoots and thorns would be well-established before the grain had even thought about germinating.

How did it come about that the sower was casting seed in such a field? Why wasn’t he casting his seed in a more promising field? Why was he trying to farm an upland plot? Jesus’ hearers knew the answer to that question: our peasant friend was farming in the rocky, thorn-infested hills because the good soil further down the slopes was taken.

When the Romans took over Palestine, they began to shove peasants off their land. They consolidated the small holdings of the displaced peasant families into large plantations growing luxury cash crops. The land was being converted from subsistence to commercial use. The economy was changing from barter- to currency-based. Goods and money were moving more freely—not to mention the peasant families thrown off their ancestral holdings. The International Monetary Fund would have been proud.

So it was either farm the poor land in the hill country or give it up altogether. But why would he keep farming? Why would he do something so futile, when all these factors that he could not control were conspiring to frustrate his hopes? Why not just give up?

Why not take up banditry? If he couldn’t live long he could at least live well. Plus, banditry offered the poetic justice of repaying the rich for their theft of his good land. So why not?

Or maybe take up a trade. The life of tradesman didn’t offer the same dignity as being a peasant and he would have to make nice with the people who had stolen his land, but it was a living and those were not easy to come by in those tight times. So why not? Why keep doing what he was doing?

As different as our sower’s situation was from ours, there is still something in his story that sounds familiar. In our lives, if we are ever to accomplish anything worth accomplishing, if we are ever to matter, we will sooner or later face something like our sower’s dilemma. When we have a hope, a good dream, that we are pursuing and we’re working hard to move toward it, and we’ve controlled everything we can control and then things we can’t control come along and threaten everything, why not just pack it in and do something else, something easy?

A woman is raising two children on her own in a bad neighborhood. She works two jobs to keep a roof over their heads and food (of a sort) on their table. Her kids have to walk through gang territory to get to school and they’re facing pressure to join a gang or face reprisals. And, meanwhile, politicians are scoring points with their suburban constituents by calling her lazy and attacking the utility assistance program that makes it all just barely work. Why not just give it up? Why not just take the path of least resistance? Why not just live like the welfare queen she is accused of being?

I can’t speak for others, but I can say for myself that there are times when “the preaching life”—as Barbara Brown Taylor calls it—gets tiresome. We live in a world that, while it is beautiful and even wondrous, is also and at the same time ugly with injustice and pain. I hear Jesus calling us all to live lives that are peaceful and just and I know that this means more than being nice to each other, but I haven’t figured out just what it looks like, much less how to live that kind of life. I’m a preacher, so in the meantime all I have are words to oppose that injustice, to celebrate that beauty, and to ease that pain. Words are in abundant supply and the demand for them has not kept pace, so words have become cheaper and cheaper. We are overwhelmed with words. What we need is silence. What I have are words. So how do I speak so that it doesn’t just dump more words into the verbal floodwaters? Why not just give it up and find some other line of work?

Why does the sower go out to sow?

The sower goes out to sow because, in spite of the injustice he has suffered at the hands of the Romans and their rich friends, in spite of the plant-choking thorns, in spite of the hard-packed road running right through his field, in spite of the seed-gulping birds and the too-thin soil, in spite of all that, there is good soil in that miserable field and some of the seed falls into it. And then something wonderful happens. We’d call it a miracle although it’s not a miracle at all—it’s entirely natural. But it is a marvel: the seed germinates; the plant grows and grows and matures; it blooms; and, despite the long odds and unfavorable circumstances, it bears fruit. Some of the plants bear thirty seeds, some sixty, some even a scarcely believable one hundred seeds. It is those few plants, a gift from a generous God, that justify the absurd venture of planting in such an unlikely place. That’s why the sower goes out to sow. That marvel is what the sower is looking for.

And that’s what we’re looking for. It’s what that woman trying to shepherd her kids from fragile childhood to responsible maturity is looking for. It’s what the preacher who is trying to be faithful to his calling is looking for. It’s what anyone who sets out to do something that matters is looking for.

And there it is: some of the seed falls into good soil. And what happens next is marvelous. So, when you set out to do a good thing, much of what you do will be wasted effort. Much of what you do will come to nothing. Much of what you do will be frustrated. All of what you do may seem futile and foolish. But there is more at work than what you can see. The odds are long, but it only has to happen once. And then what you do will become a marvel, a wonder. It will grow and multiply and bear fruit, some one hundred times, some sixty times, some thirty times. And that will make everything worth the price you have paid. “Let anyone with ears listen!” Amen.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

Proper 9A
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
July 3, 2011

Rest

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

How are you? Are you feeling well? Are you feeling rested? There are at least two kinds of “rested,” you know. The first kind is the rested that means “no more tired than usual.” We’re that kind of rested when last night’s sleep was reasonably good and reasonably long. I’m feeling rested this morning but I know that it’s only the first kind of rested. The second kind of rested is fully rested. And I’m usually pretty far from that.

Most of us a running pretty significant sleep deficits. A century ago Americans reported getting an average of nine hours of sleep a night. Today it’s closer to seven. That’s enough sleep at night to function during the day, more or less. But it’s not enough to really satisfy our need for rest.

We’re working more, too. In the last fifty years we’ve made enormous gains in productivity. Rather than cashing our gains out in extra leisure time, we’ve bought more stuff that we have less time to enjoy.

Families with children still at home are particularly burdened. There are long working hours. In most two-parent families both parents are employed. Evenings and weekends are a blur of organized activities for children.

Even in Decorah there is not enough time. Even in Decorah I hear people express the wish for an extra hour in the day or an extra day in the week. I know better than to think that would help us. If we had that extra hour or day, we’d just fill them to overflowing. We have the kind of shortage of time that more time won’t solve.

I’m always suspicious when I hear the wish for “more.” It’s not that there aren’t genuine shortages for some people. But for most of us the shortages are more apparent than real, more the result of a way of thinking than of the nature of the world.

There have always been places where people were convinced that they didn’t have enough, despite all evidence to the contrary. In ancient Egypt Pharaoh had his Hebrew slaves build whole cities of warehouses to hold the stuff that his armies had stolen from the surrounding lands. And yet the Pharaohs continually sought more: more gold, more tribute, more slaves, more plunder, and more warehouses to store the stuff. When the Hebrew slaves complained that the daily quotas for making bricks were too high, Pharaoh responded by shifting the burden of gathering materials onto the slaves—without reducing the quotas.

Every empire has behaved in the same way. There is never enough: never enough land, never enough gold, never enough slaves, never enough of anything! However wealth has been defined, empires are never satisfied.

In the Bible, which surprisingly often looks at the world through the eyes of ordinary people, the experience of perpetual shortage that characterizes life in an empire is contained in an image: the yoke.

This kind of yoke is not the yellow part of an egg. When the word is used literally, it’s the device put around the neck of one or more oxen so the owner can get some work out of them, make them pull a plow, a cart or some other burden. Of the sixty or so times that the image occurs in the Bible, eleven refer to a literal yoke, the collar for an ox or to a team of oxen who are joined by a yoke.

Only twice does it have a positive sense of referring to the covenant that binds God and God’s covenant people. It also occurs a few times in those books called “the Apocrypha” that are sometimes found in Bibles. In one of them, Ecclesiasticus, it refers to accepting the instruction of a female figure called Wisdom who personifies God’s, um, wisdom.

The rest of the times in our Bible the image of the yoke is used in a negative sense. Twenty uses refer to the oppression that results when an empire—a foreign invader—comes and takes over, abusing the people for its own profit. Another dozen times refer to the same thing when done by one’s own king. Once the image refers to literal slavery, as when a master owns a slave and may therefore make the slave do whatever the master wants. Twice it refers to a burdensome religious obligation.

The remaining two times it is used by Jesus in this reading in front of us: “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.”

As I sorted through this reading to try to puzzle out just what Jesus might mean by “my yoke,” I noticed a few things. For one, the image of the yoke almost always involves work. The oxen work; the peoples oppressed by empires or their own rulers work; even the student bound to a teacher works. And it’s hard work, too. It’s plodding along, dragging a burden behind you. It’s toil. It’s labor. It’s not fun.

So what does it mean that Jesus uses the image of the yoke as if it were an alternative to work? “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.” How does the yoke—which clearly involves unpleasant work—become something that gives rest?

An just what does Jesus mean by a yoke, anyway? As we have seen, there are basically three alternatives. But Jesus probably wasn’t handing out ox yokes for his disciples to wear, so I think that rules out the first alternative. That leaves two.

One possibility is that his invitation to “take [his] yoke upon [ourselves]” is an invitation to discipleship. We come to him as students to a master, willing to trust what he teaches, willing to listen, and finally—and this is the hardest part for us Americans, maybe especially on a Fourth of July weekend—willing to obey. It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, does it? It doesn’t sound like rest, either.

And the other possibility is this. As the Bible’s PowerPoint presentation of yoke images plays out, I notice a succession of empires, one oppressor after another: Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and the Seleucid Kingdom, one of the kingdoms into which Alexander the Great’s empire split after his death. There’s even Israel when it gets acting all imperial and starts oppressing its own citizens. One empire or imperial wanna be after another, each with its own yoke.

Of course, in every book of the New Testament, in every scene of every gospel, sometimes named but usually not, as background, as the imperial elephant in the room, is the Roman Empire. The people of Roman Palestine resented Rome, longed for deliverance from its power, and—as they might have put it—chafed under the it yoke.

They worked hard, but the wealth always seemed end up in Roman hands. Every time they turned around, any time they did anything, there was a Roman hand expecting to be greased with a tax, or a fee, or an out-right bribe. The land would have produced enough to support them, but the best land wasn’t theirs. The best land was producing cash crops, but the crops left on boats and the cash never ended up in their hands. They were stuck with the up-country land with thin rocky soils and inadequate rainfall. So, no matter how hard they worked, there was never enough. Never enough food, never enough land, never enough money, never enough rest.

Which was ironic, because the Jewish people were the only people in the world who observed a sabbath. The sabbath wasn’t for working. The sabbath wasn’t for trade or commerce or deal-making. The sabbath wasn’t for long journeys. It wasn’t for cooking or for washing clothes or mowing the lawn. The sabbath was for rest. It was for leisurely meals with your family, meals where you all sat down around the same table and you ate real food slowly and talked a lot. The sabbath was for long laughter-filled visits with friends. The sabbath was for singing. And best of all, it was for the sumptuous feast of the Torah, when the words of the Bible could be savored at an easy pace, and their meaning puzzled over and debated and argued to your heart’s content. That was the sabbath.

But the rest wasn’t giving any rest. Sabbath isn’t restful if we spent it anxiously looking at our neighbors to see if we’ve lost ground on them while they were working and we weren’t. Sabbath isn’t restful if we are convinced that fundamentally we don’t have enough. Sabbath under the yoke of empire can easily become an anxiety-filled space that is transformed from “don’t have to work” to “aren’t allowed to work.” Even the sabbath can become a burden under the yoke of empire.

Which maybe is why more time wouldn’t help us any. And maybe it’s why we don’t sleep enough. Because we, too, live under the yoke of empire. It isn’t an empire in form. There isn’t an emperor putting out imperial decrees. There aren’t any colonies or conquered territories. Mostly it’s an empire in our heads and in our hearts.

We live under the yoke of the conviction that our restlessness is an itch we can scratch by getting more stuff. We serve under the yoke of the notion that our want, our desire, and (dare I call it) our greed will be satisfied if only we can possess the object of our want, our desire, yes, our greed.

We can throw off the yoke of the British crown. We can detail our freedoms and project our power to defend them. We can jealously guard our rights. What Jesus sees and we do not is that we are going to serve something and someone. The question is what and whom, not whether. We are yoked. The question is to whom and to what.

That’s why Jesus says to us, “You are yoked with the wrong yoke. Put off the yoke of the empire (in whatever form it presents itself to you in your day) and take my yoke upon you and learn from me...and you will find rest in the depth of your being.”

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.