Yoked to Christ
Let’s be honest: we don’t talk much about sin these days. The word has gone the way of the rotary phone. It sounds antiquated, or worse, judgmental, like something shouted by a fire and brimstone preacher. We prefer softer language. We don’t talk about sin, we talk about how we make “poor choices.” We have “growth areas.” We are “works in progress.”
Paul would find this use of language quite strange because in our reading from Romans, he gives us what is arguably the most honest description of sin and the human condition ever put to paper. And he does it not as an accusation but as his own personal confession. “I do not understand my own actions,” he writes. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
“For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Every one of us knows what he means, if we are honest with ourselves. The husband who swore he would never speak to his wife the way his father spoke to his mother — and then hears his father’s voice coming out of his own mouth. The woman who buried her sister without ever making the phone call to heal their relationship (that she meant to make for twenty years), because her pride wouldn’t let her. The betrayal of a friend’s confidence, for the small pleasure of sharing a little gossip. We knew better. We did it anyway.
That’s sin. The power Paul describes that is at work within him, a power so intertwined that he can no longer tell where he ends and it begins. “It is no longer I that do it,” he says, “but sin that dwells within me.” That is not an excuse. It’s a confession. Something has hold of him, and it is stronger than his resolve.
This is why avoiding the word doesn’t help. Because when we stop talking about sin, we don’t stop sinning. We just lose the language to name what’s wrong — and we start believing the problem is a lack of effort. Try harder. Do better. Be better. But Paul had already tried that. He was among the most disciplined religious men of his generation, a respected Pharisee who would have spent his entire adult life trying to obey the 613 commandments of the Torah. But he knew the truth of his own failure, “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” If willpower were the cure, Paul would have been cured. And so, he cries out in the most vulnerable sort of way, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” Notice the question. Not what will rescue me but Who. You can almost hear his sigh of relief when he then proclaims, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” For Paul, as for all of us, the antidote for sin is found in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
In our gospel lesson from Matthew, it is almost as if Jesus is speaking directly to Paul when he says, “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. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Paul is weary; Jesus calls the weary. Paul is carrying a burden he cannot put down, the burden of sin; Jesus speaks to the heavy-laden. Paul cries who will rescue me; Jesus says attach yourself to me and you will find rest. The question Paul raises in Romans is answered by Jesus in Matthew. Both pieces of scripture were written by different hands in different decades, but they fit together like a key in a lock.
Jesus in his words to us today offers us rest, but he says we will find that rest through his yoke. It is a strange image because a yoke is a harness worn by a farm animal plowing the fields. It is an image of work, not rest. When a farmer trained a young ox, he yoked it to an older stronger one who knew the field, who set the pace, who bore the greater weight of the plow. The young ox learned his purpose by walking beside the one who knew the way.
And that is precisely the invitation that Jesus gives Paul and all of us today. Take my yoke upon you. Make my way of life your way of life. Walk where I walk, at my pace, learning from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart. Jesus is not offering us rest from work but rest in it: the deep rest of a soul that finally knows where it is going and whom it is following. Will we still sin, of course we will, but our identity is no longer defined by that sin, it is defined by our desire to follow Jesus, to live in the yoke of his love. As Paul would later say, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” because “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”
On this holiday weekend when we are celebrating the 250th year of this American experiment, I can’t help but hear Paul’s words from his letter to the Romans echo across our nation. Because what is true of a person is true of a people. I do not do the good I want, but the very thing I hate, that is not only the confession of an individual, it is the biography of a country. A people can know the good, write it down, swear to it — and still do the very thing it hates. The same turmoil that infects the single soul infects the country as well. After all, the same people that wrote all men are created equal held men, women, and children in bondage. Both were America. Both are America still.
Don’t get me wrong, we have much to be proud of as Americans – the rights and freedoms contained in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the drive and the vision to go to the moon, the will and the courage to help defeat fascism, the brilliance and creativity to map the human genome, find a vaccine for polio, build the national parks system, invent the transistor, GPS, and the internet. America has done great things, and I pray there is much more to come in the next 250 years.
But at the same time, as St. Paul reminds us, when we want to do good, sin lies close at hand. Therefore, loving this country means telling the truth about it. In the Declaration of Independence, we wrote that all are created equal, but even after slavery was abolished, we invented Jim Crow to keep that promise from the very people it was meant to include. We are a nation of immigrants who have, again and again, slammed the door behind us, forgetting that we were once strangers ourselves. We crossed a continent and called it destiny, but we did it by destroying the people who already lived here. We are the richest country the world has ever known, and still children go to bed hungry. We can put a rover on Mars, but we struggle to house the veteran sleeping under the overpass.
Friends, the work of building a more perfect union is good and holy work. But we will not finish it by our own strength any more than Paul could. For Paul, rescue came when he bound himself to Christ. And that is the word for our nation too.
This doesn’t mean we are supposed to be a Christian country; we are a country of many faiths. But our good future cannot be built purely through our own efforts. Our good future is dependent on our willingness to yoke our common life to essential values that are found in the world’s great religions, the same values we believe became flesh in Jesus: mercy instead of vengeance, humility instead of pride, justice instead of power, the last put first, the stranger taken in, the wounded healed, the enemy loved.
So this weekend, give thanks. Love this country with your whole heart, it is worth loving. But love it the way God loves us: not by pretending we are already what we ought to be, but by seeing exactly what we are, and refusing to let us go. See the glory and see the sin, and do not despair of either because the same hand that reaches down to rescue one sinful soul reaches out to rescue this entire struggling nation. The invitation that answered Paul answers us still: Come to me. Take my yoke. And you will find rest. Thanks be to God, through our Lord Jesus Christ who alone can do in us and through us what we could never do for ourselves. Amen.