Proper 9: Finding Wisdom and Rest in Jesus
Introduction
Good morning friends. It is so wonderful to see you. This morning’s passage is a very familiar one and is a beautiful invitation to come and know Jesus both because he is the source of God’s wisdom and because he is the source of rest for us who are weary. He is teaching his disciples something really important, and as we look at what he’s teaching them, I want to begin by inviting the kids down to join me.
1. Kids sermon
This picture is of Ashley and I when we started dating. We were about 18 and just getting to know each other. Since I didn’t know her that well, how do you think I got to know her better? [Let the kids answer]
I could have put together a document or spreadsheet and made observations, asked people who knew her about her: family, former teachers, friends. I could have asked to see old home movies or seen a baby book to learn information about her. But if I had done a bunch of fact-finding without being present with her, then that would be very strange. I’d be more like someone in a fan club than someone in a relationship. Getting to know someone better requires presence, vulnerability and trust. We need the moments where we play and laugh, get into arguments and need to make repair, work on projects together, take long drives, and share lots of conversation along the way. These are the ways people come to know each other.
How do you all make friends? [Let kids answer] Even that requires presence. Sometimes we treat the Lord like we’re in a fan club rather than in relationship. We might memorize facts about God and the Bible, read history, know theology, do the liturgy, do really good service for the community in the name of God, but to do these without constantly coming to the presence of God means we run the risk of knowing a lot about God without knowing him. Today’s passage gives us a glimpse into the ways that Jesus, the Son of God, lived in the presence of His heavenly Father. He wasn’t just studying to know facts about Yahweh, but He was living his life in the presence of the Father, listening for his voice, and kind of like in an apprentice, he was watching and then imitating. In our lives we will have really fun things we get to do, really hard things we have to do, times that we are lonely, sad, and scared, times that we are excited, and many times we’re just making it through the day. The invitation today is to live in God’s presence in all of these spaces, listen for his voice, and learn wisdom and how to rest as we grow in our relationship with Jesus. And to do that, we have to know Jesus and not just about him.
I want to invite you to pray with me: “Dear God...you are here...with us...you never leave us...thank you for loving us...give us grace...to live our lives...to know you....and your love for us...amen.” You can head back to your seats. Thank you.
2. Invitation for the simple to find wisdom — Come to Jesus as the revealer of true, hidden wisdom (vv 25-27)
In Matthew 11, St. Matthew takes us into a prayer of Jesus. In this prayer, Jesus names that everything has been given to him from the Father, no one knows the Father except the Son, and if anyone wants to know the Father, he only can if the Son reveals him. In other words, if we want divine wisdom, we must know Jesus.
Jesus is actually alluding to a Jewish tradition about wisdom that we find in the book of Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Sirach.[1] In Sirach 51:23 it says “Draw near to me, you who are uneducated, and lodge in the house of instruction.” Then in verse 26, “Put your neck under her yoke and let your souls receive instruction: it is to be found close by.” This was written several hundred years before Jesus’ ministry and represents a wisdom tradition within Judaism that seeks wisdom from God as its source. If you want to know the goodness of divine wisdom, then come to know Jesus. If you want to know the goodness of the life that wisdom promises learn from Jesus. This involves grounding ourselves in the grace of Jesus. We have to build our lives around habits of knowing Christ and his grace for us.
3. Invitation for the weary to find comfort — Come and bear the yoke of the one who bears us (vv 28-30)
Jesus then invites us into rest. Each Sunday we take time to confess our sins to the Lord. This is not to plague ourselves with a deep sense of guilt, but to take seriously our disordered loves and attachments, the harms we have done, the good things that we have neglected, the ways that we’ve messed things up for ourselves and others, and to tell God about them because he is the one who can make all things new. We make a daily habit of confession to build the muscle of agreeing with God about what is broken and where his grace is available to make us more like His Son. This daily habit builds into what we do each week in confession corporately. It only makes sense if you’re doing it regularly and individually outside of Sunday worship.
As we receive absolution in community, we are invited to share this peace with one another. Exchanging the peace is not primarily a welcome time; however, your smiles that welcome one another in peace are holy and should not change. The purpose is symbolically to remind one another of the grace we’ve received and give to others.
In any given week we been overbearing, controlling, hurtful, avoidant, inappropriately fearful, selfish, longed for the praise of others, neglected the good work God that has for us in the name of what is easier, and we’ve spoken curses against one another. In confession we name these as places of brokenness as we come expecting the grace of God to begin and continue to change us. The work is never done this side of God’s coming again, but there is progressive healing when we are attentive to the work of God. And in between the confession and the offer of pardon, we hear the comfortable words of Jesus, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Insofar as we have come to know the brokenness of our lives and the world around us and we’ve come to grips with how weary we’ve become because of it, we are made all the more aware of our need for rest. One author put this well, saying, “To all of us who are burdened, exhausted by our sin or its effects, the first gift of the Comfortable Words is that God acknowledges our misery. We do not have to hide our longing and need for good news. Even better, God loves to respond and provide the rest we need.”[2]
Jesus says his yoke is easy and burden is light. This isn’t like an animal yoke where two oxen pull a yoke together. This is a yoke that helps distribute the weight of pulling something across someone’s shoulders to lighten the load. The Pharisees had spoken about people carrying the yoke of the Torah, which is the heavy burden of the Jewish law and all its commandments. This is cumbersome and confuses the minutiae for the guiding principles. Sometimes we can make much of the minutiae to try to keep ourselves spiritually and emotionally safe. A rigid and self-imposed heavy load is not necessarily virtuous, but it can make us feel safer. It becomes a wall to keep ourselves in and keep others out. We can do this in other areas of life as we try to control small details, but miss the bigger picture.
Rather than religious scrupulosity or holding onto control, Jesus invites us to come to him and find rest. Pursue rest; this isn’t laziness, it’s not taking the easy way out, but it is prioritizing Jesus as we arrange our day’s goals and calendars. If we find ourselves in a state of overwhelm, exhausted, emotionally drained, totally spent, fed up, and deeply hurt or troubled, come back to this image of the good shepherd with his arms open wide. He is not waiting to condemn us or berate us. He is here to welcome us with tenderness.
Here is one place this showed up for me. I remember sitting with my church planting coach a few years back and telling him about a really hard week I’d had. I probably spent a good 20 minutes in an emotionally-charged rant that spanned different areas of frustration between different areas of my life. He looked at me, took a deep breath, affirmed that what I was feeling made total sense with what I was going through, and then he kindly asked me questions about what my fears were, what Jesus might be asking of me, then he asked me why it was so hard to have grace for myself in the things that were hard. We can often spiral and then heap shame on top of it because we feel like we should be able to move on and get past it. We berate ourselves for our reactions and then become much harder on ourselves than God is. I think deep down, there was this felt sense of “no one is going to come and help. It is up to me. If things fail, I am at fault. If things go well, it is because of me.” As I took that to Jesus later, it’s like he was saying, “Your yoke is too heavy. You’re carrying things I did not ask you to hold. Give yourself the compassion I give you. The outcomes are mine to hold.” Jesus invites us to rest and learn from him.
Conclusion
We busy ourselves with outward markers of accomplishment or networks, successful ventures, or status, that makes us feel safe; these things deceive us into thinking that we just need to push through in our own strength. Jesus’ invitation is to come and rest. Come to know him in the example left in the tradition of the church in the Scripture and in the lives of the saints. Come to know him in the community of faith; in the lives of one another. Come to know him in the prayers of the church, in the moments of attentiveness in the midst of very ordinary daily rhythms. Come to know him in the stillness and silence, no matter how brief, as we learn to frame the the day in the light of God making his dwelling in our midst, giving us rest, and making all things new. Come to the one who says to us, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
[1] Sirach 6:23-30; 51:23-27.
[2] Justin Holcomb, “The Comfortable Words: An Invitation to Rest.” The Living Church, February 16, 2024. https://livingchurch.org/covenant/the-comfortable-words-an-invitation-to-rest/
