Scripture: Matthew 11:25-30; Mark 1:14-15
OK, so now I really am done with Jeremiah. For those who may be relatively new to Sojourners or haven’t been around these last few months, I’ve been preaching on texts from the book of Jeremiah for about the last month and a half. But it’s a new month, a new year, new program year, choir and Sunday School back up and running, time for a new direction.
So I’ve been thinking some about what I might do next. As some of you know, I’m not real big on planning out sermons way ahead of time. It seems to work for some people. It doesn’t work for me. But it does help, I’ve found, to have some vague idea of where I’m heading—a season of the year, like Lent, or a book of the Bible, like Jeremiah, or kind of a general theme, like the time I took a month or two as I recall to do a series of sermons on the theme of healing, those kinds of things. So knowing I was coming to the end of Jeremiah, I have been reflecting on what direction I might feel called to head off in next. And what popped into my mind was: What about a series of sermons on the teachings of Jesus?
I’m not really sure where that thought came from. Maybe it occurred to me because our “Conversations on Christianity” group touched on the topic several times at our last meeting. Maybe it’s because of the beginning of the school year and specifically the beginning of Sunday School and the idea of teaching is connected with that. Whatever. There it was. And I decided to go with it, partly because I don’t think I’ve ever done this before—maybe I have but I don’t think so–organize a series of sermons around the teachings of Jesus, which may seem like a strange thing to say for someone who’s been giving sermons for as long as I have, but let me explain myself a little bit and explain why I’m drawn in this direction now.
The Teachings of Jesus. That’s a really large topic. And my first thought about it is that we don’t really know what we mean when we say that, or we may know what we mean when we use that term but we don’t really mean it to cover all the teachings, just those few that we think are really best or sort of the most basic. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That’s a teaching of Jesus that most people know. Or how about “You shall love God…and love your neighbor”, two teachings that actually weren’t originally the teachings of Jesus but that were in the Hebrew scriptures, in Deuteronomy and Leviticus, but that Jesus identified as the greatest of the commandments in his scriptures and that he sort of adopted as his own. We can include those as the teachings of Jesus. And maybe those and a few others that we each get to choose as electives are what we mean when we talk about the “teachings of Jesus”.
And we do in various ways—talk about the “teachings of Jesus”. People say sometimes that whatever you may believe about Jesus, whether he was both divine and human, whether he is a messiah, or your personal savior, whatever a person believes about Jesus, he was certainly a great spiritual teacher and whatever else Christians may be they must certainly be people who follow the teachings of Jesus. People will sometimes say something like: The teachings of Jesus are the most sublime the world has ever known. I read that somewhere recently.
And it’s not that I want to argue with the sentiment, but I wonder if we’re really clear what that phrase means when we hear it. The teachings of Jesus, as I say, cover a whole lot of ground, not only “do unto others…” and “love your neighbor…” and “love your enemies…” and “do not judge…” but also “do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth…” and “whoever divorces commits adultery…” and “do not swear…” (as in take an oath) and “whoever blasphemes against the holy spirit will not be forgiven”. There are lots of things that might be considered teachings of Jesus, some of them easy to embrace (maybe), at least easy to embrace the idea of them, some of them harder to embrace fully, some of them downright challenging.
Of course I have preached on specific teachings of Jesus in the past, series of sermons on Sermon on the Mount, on forgiveness, on the parables of Jesus, on many aspects of his teaching. But maybe it’s worthwhile going back to some of these teachings, familiar and less familiar, clear and not so clear, compelling and maybe a bit uncertain, all with an eye to understanding what these teachings of Jesus amount to. Of course we’ll need to take those teachings one at a time, and that’s the part I can’t plan out very far ahead of time. And by the way, if you have specific teachings of Jesus you would like me to reflect on, feel free to suggest them. Anyway, that’s the direction I’m headed in this fall.
Having decided that, a scripture for this morning just came to me. I didn’t have to go looking for it. It’s the one from Matthew that ends: “Come to me all you who are weary and 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. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” It was, of course, the phrase “and learn from me” that I’m sure caused this scripture to occur to me. It seemed appropriate. I intend to talk about the teachings of Jesus. Jesus is talking here about learning from him. Seems like a direct connection, so I decided to go with the scripture that occurred most immediately to me.
Besides I like the scripture. It speaks to me, and I presume it speaks to many people because of the way it begins. “Come to me all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens…” That’s me. Not all the time and not in every way, but that’s me. It’s got to be a lot of people. Quite often someone will say to me after a worship service that prayer time seemed pretty heavy that day, lots of concerns, lots of things weighing heavily on people. Truth is, it seems to me, that prayer time is often that way because that’s the nature of prayer time. Of course there are joys and thanksgivings as well, but to a significant degree our prayer time is precisely that time when we bring those things that burden us to the community and to God. And of course we know that for every burden that is shared openly there are many others that are not shared for all sorts of reasons. We don’t have to think of ourselves as martyrs or as joyless people or as “poor me” types but I’m thinking that “come unto me all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens…”, that’s got to apply to lots of people lots of the time just because of the things we care about and the people we love.
And that’s not to mention the ways we are burdened because of the kind of world we live in. How can we not be burdened by the level of violence that saturates our world, or by the conditions so many millions of God’s children live in, or by the uncertain future of our planet, or by countless more specific realities that at any moment can grab ahold of us and make our hearts heavy?
Then too I’ve read several people reflecting on this scripture who identified with it at the level of feeling burdened with busyness, too many things on their minds, too much to do, places to go, things to attend to, good causes to support, claims on their time, money, and attention, people who feel burdened by some combination of the demands made on them and their own good willingness and conscience. And whenever I think of that kind of burden, which I know to be a very real burden for many people, I also think of the burden of those whose once very productive and active lives are no longer possible, who no longer feel very productive or helpful or needed and who may feel themselves to be a burden on others. There are people who are burdened by too little to do as well, too little that they feel to be worthwhile, too little that makes them feel worthwhile, burdened by feeling no longer like contributing members of the world. There is that kind of a burden too. So when Jesus says “come to me all who are weary and carrying heavy burdens”, he could be speaking to many of us, to any of us really.
In fact I think there is a kind of a teaching in all this that I was not really thinking about when I started to reflect on this passage. It is, I think, that we are all broken people and we live in a broken world. It’s an implied teaching but one that I think is present in this passage. Jesus had harsh words for people who thought of themselves differently, people who knew they were smart and competent and successful and who could teach you the 10 secrets to success and 100 ways to get close to God and what the right things to believe were, and what the right things to do were, and who felt like they were pretty much on top of things, had things pretty much figured out—religion…life—and were willing to tell you about it.
I am not that kind of teacher, Jesus says here. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart.” That’s what that verse means to me. Jesus is saying essentially, “I don’t have 100 wise sayings that you should remember because I’ve figured out that these are the secrets of a good life. My teachings do not add up to life’s little instruction book that God has given me to give to you. My teachings are not intended for those who are already exceptionally wise or smart or good, or who are looking to become exceptionally wise or smart or good. My teachings are meant for and will be heard best by those who know that they are part of the world’s brokenness, who know themselves to be wounded and carrying heavy burdens, as I do. “Come to me all who are weary and 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…”
In one sense this is the context of all Jesus’ teaching, I realized. In another sense it is a teaching itself: that we are people who in many and varied ways carry heavy burdens and we come to learn not from a learned philosopher or from an enlightened spiritual guide, and certainly not from someone who reduces our living to a few short sayings we can identify as teachings. We come to learn from Christ’s compassionate heart. We come to learn from one whose compassionate heart meant that he also was burdened and broken, a reality symbolized for us today on our communion table.
But there is an additional context for the teachings of Jesus, for all the teachings of Jesus. I had to add the short verse from Mark this morning because that too is a teaching of Jesus and a context for just about everything else he has to say. “Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the good news of God and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the reign of God is at hand; turn, and believe in the good news.”
I had to add this verse because it is the first thing Mark reports Jesus to have said and it is the foundation, as I say, for all of Jesus teachings. I also had to add it because our hearts carry not only heavy burdens but also hope. In fact the two things go together. I believe Jesus meant to teach us that fuller truth, that we are people whose hearts are burdened but whose hearts also bear the hope of a coming kingdom where love reigns and violence has vanished and people are one again. Jesus had harsh words for people who thought they were on top of things because those people tended not to hope for God’s kingdom. He had a special affinity for people who knew themselves to be burdened because they could easily understand what it meant to hope for a new day to dawn. Our hearts are burdened because of the brokenness of our world, but they also carry the hope of a new creation, a new way of people being together, a peaceable kingdom, a beloved community, a reign of God.
It is not only a hope of heaven. It is not some distant and irrelevant utopian dream. The good news of God, Jesus says, is that the kingdom is at hand, that here and now there are ways to hope the kingdom in, to pray the kingdom in, to live the kingdom in. In that sense Christ’s teachings may be easy, not in the sense of being a snap (I haven’t found them to be that way), but in the sense of being aimed at our heart’s desire. For people who carry heavy burdens they are easy to understand. In that sense, the burden of Christ’s teachings may be light, not because there is nothing much to them but because they are shared. And in that sense Christ may offer us rest, not in the sense of inviting us to a perpetual vacation but to a life that is not rest-less, but that instead is grounded in God’s hopes for us. I will be looking and expect to find in Christ’s teachings bread for that journey. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 7, 2008