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.