My biggest pastoral concern for us as a congregation is burnout. As your pastor, that is the thing that keeps me up at night. Not the state of our finances, not our declining attendance, not even the failing condition of the building. No, my biggest pastoral concern for us as a congregation is burnout. You people are some of the biggest hearted and hardest working people I know. You want to be at the food pantry, you want to support the St. Thomas breakfast, you want to write your congresspeople and read up on issues and help out in worship. Some of you aren’t as physically able to do things as much as you used to, and I know it drives you crazy, because you want to be busy. This is a congregation of doers, when you see a problem, be it around the property or in the neighborhood or on the other side of the world, you want to jump in, rolled up your sleeves, get to work, and solve it. As your pastor, I love that about you. My favorite thing about doing ministry with you is how genuinely much you care about everything and how active you want to be in working on it. But, as your pastor it also keeps me up at night, because I worry that you, that we, take on too much, and I worry that it’s going to wear you out.
Of course, we come by this honestly. We live in a culture that glorifies work. Rugged individualism, the self-made man, this pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps philosophy that tells us that anything, everything, is within our grasp if only we’re willing to work hard enough. But here’s the thing friends, those phrases, that philosophy, it’s a myth. If hard work and determination were all it took to succeed, the women of the Co-op would all be billionaires and this church would have a new roof and no budget problems. But unfortunately, hard work itself is not enough. You know the phrase “God helps those that help themselves?” That phrase is not actually in the Bible. Success is not solely based on ones ability to work hard, but instead requires, work, resources, availability, connection, and no small amount of good old fashioned luck. Sometimes the hardest working people have nothing, and those who do nothing seem to get everything.
As Lutherans, of course, we know this as well as anyone. We know that grace is a gift, we didn’t earn it, and there’s nothing we can do to deserve it, but God gives it to us freely simply because of who God is. We read in Romans just a few weeks ago about how while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And how we are justified by faith as a gift, and it is not of our own doing. We know that, we proclaim that, we believe that, but it is much harder to internalize that. I can’t speak for you all, but I know I am a pastor, I have a master of divinity degree hanging on my wall, and I still find myself trying to prove that I am worthy of God’s love, trying to deserve the gift that I have received. I don’t accept things well; I don’t take help easily. I’m learning, you’re teaching me, but it’s hard.
This was the trap that Luther himself fell into. He wanted so bad to be worthy of God’s love, so badly to do everything right so he could be sure that God would forgive him. He read every rule, followed every order, flogged himself mentally for every perceived failing or stumble or errant thought. I think I’ve told the story before about how he spent so much time confessing his sins that he literally wore out his confessor. The confessor told Luther not to come back until he had committed an actual sin, instead of these nit-picky little details. All of this obsession with trying to do everything right didn’t just wear out the confessor, it also wore out Luther. Luther was working so hard to do everything right, but he was just spinning his wheels. There was always something he could have done better, some prayer he could have prayed with more focus, some thought he could have let go easier. The harder he worked, the further behind he got.
But here’s the good news, my dear, good, hard-working, people of God. You know what got Luther out of this trap of labor and perfectionism. Work. Yep, work. After this whole intro about how hard work is not the answer, what saved Luther’s life was work. And Luther the reformer was one of the hardest working, most prolific, theologians in history. Only part of his writing have been translated into English, and there are fifty-five volumes of Luther’s Works. The guy worked all the time. So the difference wasn’t in the effort put forth, the difference was in the attitude. What shifted for Luther was really realizing that the grace of God was a gift he already had, and nothing he did would ever lose it. Once he understood he was already loved by God, he was able to let go of the results and instead enjoy the process. Because the results were set already, Luther had been saved by God through Jesus, and the amount of effort he put in had no effect on the outcome, he was free to work, to write, to learn, and to teach, to satisfy his own curiosity and not for any need to produce. It was freedom that made Luther one of the most prolific writers of all time, not fear.
In our Gospel reading for this morning, Jesus told the crowd to take up his yoke and learn from him. Notice he didn’t say sit in this chair or learn from him or lay down for a nap and learn from him, he said take up his yoke and learn from him. A yoke is a tool of labor, it means there is work to be done. But a yoke is a unique tool of labor, because it binds you to another. A yoke connects a pair of oxen, it allows them to pull exponentially more than they could manage on their own, but it also forces them to work together. When you are yoked to another, you cannot pull more than your fair share of the labor, but you cannot pull less than your fair share either. When we are yoked to Jesus, we are forced to go at Jesus’ pace. At times that pace may be faster than we are comfortable, and at times it may well be slower than we are comfortable, but the pace is not ours to worry about or to set. The burden, the pace, is not ours to bear alone. By being yoked to Jesus we are both freed to participate in the labor and freed from the burden of thinking we must do all of it on our own. The yoke of Jesus is both joy and challenge, both freedom and responsibility, both work and rest, labor that we are invited into and gifted with which moves the kingdom of heaven forward.
So as we read the Gospel of Matthew as a handbook for discipleship, what does this mean for us, my dear, hardworking, people of God. I think it is an invitation to find joy in our work. What really got me pondering in this direction was spending Tuesday with a two-year-old, with the line from Jesus about hiding things from the wise and revealing them to infants ringing in my ears. Because two-year-olds are workers. They are so new that every moment of every day they are working, working to learn new things, to grasp hard concepts, to understand the world around them. It is hard and busy and exhausting work being two. They work hard, and they play hard, and then they sleep hard. Whether they are at work or at rest, it is one-hundred percent of everything, all of the time.
They work hard, but there is no drudgery in their work. Because everything is a new discovery, everything is a fresh perspective. Tasks that I long ago found mundane, picking up leaves off the ground for example, or putting away a pile of books, these tasks were fascinating through the eye of a two-year-old. How high can I stack the books? What might be hiding under this leaf? Will the radio turn on again, if I push the power button? Yep. How about this time? Yep again. And this time? Still yep. Earlier in the text, Jesus had chastised the crowd for being a bit too Goldilocks, John the Baptist was too hard, Jesus was too soft, they wanted a savior that instead was just right. But the yoke of Jesus may be a bit like Mary Poppins, a spoonful of sugar doesn’t just help the medicine go down, but in fact makes it a joy to participate in the work of healing. What if the lesson Jesus has for us is to, like Luther, shift our perspective on our working so that our work is not drudging obligation but joyous discovery.
The other piece of this, my dear, hardworking, people of God, is that the yoke of Jesus may be forcing us to put down parts of the labor that are not in the direction Jesus is moving. Sometimes weariness is not caused by the labor, but by the mental exhaustion of maintaining structures that no longer serve us, of holding up institutions that no longer support us. We cannot bear the yoke of Jesus while simultaneously managing our own pet projects. To lean into the yoke of Jesus means that some much beloved ideals will fall. And we have to be willing to let them, trusting in the promise that death has no meaning for resurrection people, and if things fail it may well be because they were no longer serving us well, and our hands needed to be made free anyway for the new task for which God is preparing us.
Dear good, hardworking people of God, as your pastor, my hope for you, for us, in this summer, this redevelopment process, this time in the life of our congregation, is that we will continue to work. That we will continue to work hard and well and with passion. To work is in your DNA as a congregation. Since the first stone was laid to be a congregation for the workers at the Post factory, this has been a congregation who labored, and you, and I would not be happy to have it any other way. We are laborers, we would be bored and restless without this good work. But my prayer is that we work hard together and with joy. That we do not toil over tasks that do not fulfill us, but instead we lean into the yoke that Christ walks alongside us. It may, in fact it will, mean letting some projects fall. Some things we’ve long loved may not be serving us well any more. But let us find joy in bearing this yoke together and with Jesus. I think, I believe, that we will find the burden rewarding and the journey a joy. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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