The Rev. Canon Rosemarie Logan Duncan: Yoked for the Work of Justice

Let us pray. Holy God, open our eyes to your presence. Open our ears to your call. Open our hearts to your love. Amen.  Please be seated.

In our gospel this morning, if you didn’t notice it right off, Jesus is clearly frustrated. And to give some context, in the verses is leading up to our gospel text, we find various responses to Jesus’ teaching and his ministry as he moved from town to town. Jesus describes a generation that cannot recognize the truth that is right in front of them, and he compares them to fickle children who keep changing the rules of a game. The problem with this generation, Jesus says, is that they listen neither to John nor him. Now I know you heard it, but they criticize John the Baptist for not eating or drinking and say that he is possessed by a demon. Then they criticize Jesus for eating and drinking with the wrong people too often.  They find reasons to take offense at both John and Jesus and therefore evade the call of both. Then Jesus speaks a powerful truth for those who have ears to hear, “Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds”. Here Jesus identifies with wisdom, a traditional feminine image of the divine.  Wisdom has founded the earth, walks in justice, guides into truth and is beloved of God.

Now while verses 20 to 24 are not included in our reading, they reflect that Jesus did many deeds of power in several towns, but the people in them refused to heed Jesus’ call and remained unrepentant. Well, Jesus is not addressing the failure of individuals, but of the society as a whole, to understand and respond to the message that he and John have proclaimed. And their messages have been extremely clear. However, the society, the towns, the entire generation was unfaithful, fickle, and even worse, often indifferent. The people had been given every opportunity to hear, but they refused. No wonder Jesus is frustrated.

But it’s important to note that Jesus’ first response to his frustration is to pray, not a bad reminder for us. He prays aloud to God in thanks for having hidden the purposes of what God is doing in Jesus from the wise and intelligent of his age, revealed to infants. And let’s be clear, Jesus is referring to those who are considered wise and intelligent by human standards, not God’s standards. The wise and intelligent often refer to any who reject Jesus and his message, but perhaps especially to the religious leaders whom Jesus often rebukes for their self-importance and hypocrisy.

And Jesus further invites the weary, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. For I am gentle and humble and heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” The yoke was a familiar symbol of burden bearing, often oppressive and often a mode of subjugation. And yokes were laid on the necks and shoulders of oxen for work, but also on prisoners of war. And the enslaved. To take Jesus’s yoke upon oneself is to be yoked to the one in whom God’s kingdom of justice, mercy and compassion is breaking into this world. And to find the rest for which the soul longs. To live in the way of Jesus is to live in the way of love and compassion, freedom and justice.

One of the things that Jesus has done in his doing is freeing us from this false idea of complete and utter independence from God and from each other. This freedom is not a free for all but is a yoked freedom. We are liberated by the yoke of Christ into new relationships with God and each other. This is a timely message for us. We are just days away from the celebration of the 4th of July holiday when we uphold the ideals of freedom and justice.

One thing is for sure, freedom is not a passive thing. It requires investment and sacrifice. Jesus and Paul in today’s readings both talk about struggle, about confusion, in our human experience. Freedom has always come with a cost. The civil rights movement of the 1960s, 100 years after the enslaved had been granted freedom, was met with horrifying, violent resistance. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his 1963 Letter From the Birmingham Jail, “Freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed.”  Freedom must be demanded for will not be given freely. And this has always been true through the ages from the story of Moses and the Israelites to this day.

Jesus, in Matthew, talks to his disciples about how difficult it can be in the chaos of this world to see truth from lie, to know God’s will when there is so much that distracts us. The mission of Jesus is to transform both people and the social order rooted in love. Love is the broadest form, for the human family means in ensuring that everyone gets a fair equitable access to the means of life. How does everyone get access to the basic requirements of life, food, clothing, shelter, adequate employment, education, medical care?

You see the creation of a just and equitable society is rooted in that question, but it is love that calls us to do the work. Cornel West has said, “Justice is what love looks like in public” end quote. I’m gonna say it again. “Justice is what love looks like in public”. Justice is the key to loving our neighbors for justice is a form of love. And love is in turn a form of justice. Justice is what God demands, what God desires.

And our work for justice also seeks to eliminate the root causes of oppression and suffering. It’s about transforming the social structures and institutional systems that produce and maintain a status quo of oppression and suffering for the vulnerable, the poor, the disenfranchised, people of color and the LGBTQ community. Our fundamental disagreements over justice are not about the abstract concept of justice, but over which people or groups have rights and to what degree. The recent decisions of the High Court have brought this reality to the forefront of our common national life. Beloved, to follow Jesus is to be political, and the politics of Jesus’ love and justice are first to be lived out by the body of Christ.

Today we are baptizing four young siblings into that body and welcoming them in into the household of God. And we will join their parents and their godparents in renewing our own baptismal covenant. These vows form the way in which we are to live our lives, not in detached theory, but in practice. We are asked, “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” And, “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being?” We answer, “I will, with God’s help”. “I will, with God’s help.”  We are reminded of the mysterious grace of God, what it means to be in the yoke with God and what burden it is that we carry as we bring the life giving, liberating message, of God’s love to this world. It is the work to which we are called and as history demonstrates, it is constant. Work and struggle that continues from generation to generation.

Fighting systems of oppression is exhausting. We can become weary and feel burdened in our efforts. But our weariness can by no means be compared with the weariness or burden of those who shoulder the weight of inequality and oppression. That is why Jesus’s invitation is so important to us today. “Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest.”  He offers rest to those who have been made weary by a world that fails to comprehend the burdens of injustice. And he helps us learn how to live in a world that too often rejects love, rejects truth, rejects beauty, rejects goodness and compassion.

Jesus calls us, all of us, to bring our burdens to him, telling us that his yoke is easy. And it is not that Jesus invites us to a life of ease. Following him will be full of risks and challenges, and he has made that abundantly clear. He calls us to a life of humble service. When Jesus calls us to him, he is calling us to a new relationship that comes from being intimately connected one to another, bearing our burdens together. And we can trust that Jesus’ yoke has been fitted for each of us and that we will find rest, when we walk with one another and with our God.  Amen.