Saturday, July 30, 2011
Sunday 31 July 2011
No sermon for posting - the service will be led by the Knox Church Young Adult group Rendez-vous (18+)
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Readings and Sermon for Pentecost 6 - 24 July 2011
Introduction to the reading from Hebrew Scriptures
Those of you who were here last Sunday morning will remember Judith McKinlay preached on the Genesis reading for the day – part of the extensive Jacob narrative to be found in Genesis. Judith referred to a conversation amongst scholars, where it was suggested that Jacob’s family might find a place on the Oprah Winfrey show. (I’d even venture to suggest that the Jacob narrative competes for soap-opera awards – it’s real-life Oprah and barely believable Coronation St, Shortland St, Home and Away – all rolled into one. And, perhaps even, not that different from some of our real-life experiences.)
The Lectionary compilers have set down for today another juicy episode of the Jacob narrative. Perhaps not quite as salacious as it might have been; in fact, rather sanitised, for a family audience. This episode is about how Jacob meets Rachel, the love of his life; how he works seven years to earn her in marriage, only to be unkindly tricked by his father-in-law into marrying her older sister. A further seven years of labour are demanded before Jacob can marry the woman of his dreams. But, in this sanitised snippet, the lectionary compilers have omitted so much. The reading we are encouraged to hear today doesn’t take in the complexities of these relationships, which are spelt out in surrounding verses. No mention in today’s reading of the deeply painful, understandably competitive, relationship between Rachel and Leah – not to mention their maids, Bilhah and Zilpah, each of whom also bore Jacob’s children. Today’s suggested and rather sanitised reading, doesn’t act easily as a stepping stone towards next Sunday’s challenging account of Jacob wrestling with God. The torment and anguish found in next Sunday’s part of the narrative, only make sense if we understand the depths of cunning, trickery and pain that are part of the missing episodes. We need to get a sense of hurt, anger and betrayal intermingled with the delight and joy from love and the trickery underlying it all. The narrative loses meaning if we miss the episodes that describe the jealousy and the celebration; the honesty and the deception; the running away and the turning towards each other – all parts of life we each experience – to one extent or another – in our living and loving – in our attempts to be fully human.
I’ve chosen a different reading for this morning – one that occurs a few chapters on. It’s after Jacob has fallen out of favour with his father-in-law Laban – after Rachel and Leah have not only felt betrayed by each other, but also become disillusioned and resentful towards their father. This episode comes after Jacob, his household and flocks have cleared out – escaping without his father-in-law knowing – while Laban was out shearing sheep. Top drawer family betrayal.
This morning’s reading comes immediately on the heels of Laban’s desperate pursuit of his family. When he catches up with them, Laban says to Jacob: “What have you done? You’ve deceived me and carried away my daughters like captives of the sword. Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to go away? I could have sent you off with a farewell party. Why didn’t you let me kiss my children and grandchildren goodbye?” And Jacob replies: “I was afraid – I thought you’d take your daughters from me by force.”
Laban is furious – Jacob has taken more than he was entitled to.
Not knowing that his beloved Rachel has stolen Laban’s household gods, Jacob gives permission for a full search. Keeping the gods hidden in the camel’s saddle, Rachel remains seated on them – excusing herself for not standing up when her father enters her tent “for the way of women is upon me” she explained.
How do loving people get into such fixes? How do you deal with such deceit, betrayal and anger?
Listening for the Word in the Hebrew Scriptures: Genesis 31:36-55
Hymn “O three-fold God of tender unity” words William Wallace
Sermon: In the name of the one in whom love is born and people are reconciled[1]. Amen
We started out on this service this morning acknowledging that here in this place – with these people around us – here, we recognise the presence of the One whose love makes transformation possible. It’s here, we said, that we celebrate possibilities – here, we celebrate the One who weaves the future with love. ‘God in your grace, God in your mercy’, we sang, ‘turn us to you to transform the world.’[2]
As we have sung and prayed and listened together, each in our own way has expressed our yearning for that which we often cannot name – that which we sometimes name as ‘God’.[3] The goal of our longing – the Whither of our journeying[4] – more often than not, seems way beyond our reach. Oh yes, here in this place, we can sometimes catch a vision that takes us into new possibilities; sometimes we can find that mustard seed of possibility dwelling within the depths of being; sometimes we even feel that our lives are nurturing amazing new growth. But then, our daily lives get in the way of it all. All that we have brought with us from our daily living – and all that we will return to as we leave the service this morning – all our hurts and hopes, cloud the horizon of Holy Mystery – closing down the possibilities of what might be.
We’ve come from a week where some of us have acknowledged how incredibly difficult it is to live on this life journey. For some of us, the letting go of all that we have held dear – and all that we might have hoped for – has been unbearable. We’ve experienced too much pain and loss; we’ve seen too much despair and hopelessness; we’ve been plunged too deep into the depths of ethical complexity. And, yet, in this same week, some of us have buzzed along with inconceivable joy and hope; life has never been so good. For some of us, love has burst into the winters of our lives with astounding delight.
Whether it has been a week of joy or sorrow – or, more likely, a mix of both – a question for all of us, might be: have we been alive and open to the presence and purpose of God[5] – i.e. have we been aware of our longing for the Holy Mystery; have we lifted our hearts to the Whither of our journeying, or have we been so constrained by the living out of our lives in their daily drama that we have forgotten the bigger story in which we dwell?
As we consider this question, it may be helpful for us to put our life dramas alongside those who feature in the Jacob narrative. Perhaps, some of us will identify with Jacob: we too, with cunning and trickery, have blazed out a trail for ourselves which, amazingly, has still brought much blessing – even if it has been at the expense of personal contentment or the rights and happiness of other people.
Others of us will recognise our lives in this week’s off-stage presence, of Esau – the cheated one – still waiting for the reconciling moment, which hovers hopefully on the horizon of a later episode.
Sisters Rachel and Leah - or their maids - offer other points of identification – each caught up in complex webs of relationship, violently see-sawing from ecstasy to misery as love and jealousy intertwine; joy and sisterhood challenged by destructive hurt and bitterness.
Others of us might share Laban’s bewilderment and pain in his desertion – betrayed by everyone, even his beloved children – when all he was trying to do was to be fair – weighing up his decisions and taking risks not to play favourites - providing even his not-very-lovely-older daughter a chance in life.
It’s very difficult to remain untouched by this deeply human drama, which plays out on the pages of Genesis. All the anger, all the hurt, all the loss reverberate through this morning’s reading. “What have I done that you’ve pursued me?” Jacob, self-righteously and angrily demands of his father-in-law. Laban’s response wrenches the heart: “but these are my daughters and their children”.
The outcome of this deeply painful encounter could be violence. Jacob reckons himself to be within his rights – he’s entitled to all that he has taken. What more has Laban to lose? His daughters, his hard-working son-in-law, his slaves, his animals, his livelihood – and even his household gods – have all been snatched from him. Laban’s cry echoes our own cries: “But what can I do today about all this?”
Somehow, from the depths of their pain, Laban and Jacob choose not to take the path of violence. Instead, they look to the horizon beyond the drama of their lives: Let’s make a covenant together, they decide, a heap of witness, which will be a sign of our commitment in the name of God not to do harm – even when we are absent from each other.
It’s through this commitment, this covenant, that Laban is able to set his children and his grandchildren free; to bless them and to return home.
The pain has not necessarily disappeared, but in the letting go, seeds of hope and possibility for a transformed world have been sown. And, isn't that what we do - each time we come together in worship - we too create a "heap of witness" - a covenant of reconciliation and love between us - a reminding symbol of “Life’s great unknown that binds and sets us free: felt in our loving, greater than our thought, ... the mystery found, the mystery sought.”[6]
And so, as we go into this next week – encountering our many joys and sorrows, let’s take courage from this Jacob narrative – remembering that we too can lift our hearts to that Great Mystery, which reaches out in longing for us, offering us hope, possibility and transformation. Even in these wintry days, the kin-dom seeds are growing. Thanks be to God. Amen
[1] From “O Three-fold God of tender unity”
[2] Shirley Murray, “Love is your way” Hope is our Song
[3] “agnosticism which knows it doesn’t know ... is the way God is experienced today” Karl Rahner, quoted in Elizabeth A Johnson Quest for the Living God
[4] See earlier sermons based on Elizabeth Johnson
[5] “Sung Response: “David Manton, “Alive to the presence and purpose of God”
[6] William Wallace, “O three-fold God of tender unity” Alleluia Aotearoa
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Guest Preacher: Judith McKinlay
Sermon for Bible Sunday, Knox Church
Genesis 28:10-22
Bible Sunday & the Lectionary gives us Jacob – along with Ps 139 and the weeds parable. But Jacob! – born already gripping his brother Esau by the heel - Ya‘akov – the name’s a pun: Jacob the grasper – a hint of what is to follow.
It’s a good story – a very good story, told by a good storyteller - in the Bible! Not to be read a few verses at a time – from a lectern – but a story to be read as we read all good stories – sitting comfortably – enjoying the puns, the turns, the pathos and the laughter – just as those earliest communities in ancient Israel must have done.
Today we have this section in ch.28 and a lot has happened since that grasping birth. So, a quick catch-up: the chapter that followed is pure comedy – like the Shakespearean bits for the pits – told three times in Genesis twice of Abraham but here of Jacob’s father, Isaac, who’s driven by famine to go over the border to Gerar & has a culture shock tizzy fit. Convinced the men will be after his wife, because she’s so beautiful, and kill him, he says Rebekah’s his sister – not his wife – no mention of the twin babies she’s already borne. But - the king of that place just happens to look out the window & sees the two of them canoodling – so much for that ploy - but a hint we’re into tricky families.
Then we skip time to discover Esau has married two Hittite women. i.e. bad move, making life bitter for Isaac and Rebekah. It’s watch-out time for Esau, and ch.27 is the famous birthright tale. Jacob, urged on by Rebekah, his mother – we’re now into favouritism – tricks his blind father, passing himself off as Esau and so gains the birthright, which rightly belongs to the first son, i.e. Esau. It’s a long chapter and again the ending is pivotal. Esau, perhaps not surprisingly, is out to kill Jacob - openly out to kill Jacob. So Rebekah comes up with another tricky plan - Jacob must go - to her brother and marry one of his daughters, i.e. a good Israelite wife, not a Hittite. Esau, always one step too late, and one step out of line, then marries the daughter of Ishmael, Abraham’s son by Hagar, so she’s only half a good Israelite & he still has the two Hittites. Esau can’t win! He’s virtually disinherited – to become the ancestor of neighbouring Edom
Some years ago there was an American TV series where a group of biblical scholars and writers, Christian, Jewish and Muslim, sat and talked about these Genesis stories. As one of them says, you could imagine this family on the Oprah Winfrey show![1]
But where we are now, is with Jacob, fleeing for his life – a thief and a fugitive – his only interest seemingly himself. But then he has this dream: of a stairway stretching up to heaven with angels going up and down, and he senses God standing beside him, delivering the classic divine promise – of land – of offspring – of divine help. This promised to Jacob! Can we believable it?! Jacob does, saying in some wonderment, surely God is in this place and I did not know it – so sets up a stone - anoints it as a sacred pillar – and names the place Bethel, bet-el, house of God.
It’s a turning point – with that lovely image of angels going up and down on the ladder from earth to heaven & heaven to earth. Walter Brueggemann, who is part of the Genesis conversation, in rather computer geek language, calls them “connectors” … “{Jacob} is disconnected, and what he discovers in his vulnerability is that he is connected” (292) – with God.
But he’s still Jacob – still wanting to outmanoeuvre. His vow is full of conditions – full of “if”s –if you protect me, if you make sure you get me home, then – i.e. and only then, you’ll be my God. Cheeky! Not quite the word!! Interestingly, of course, God’s promise that Jacob will be returned home means that Jacob will have to face Esau – but that’s later.
The angel imagery may seem lovely, but the dream is terrifying. Biblical angels don’t say “fear not” for nothing! God and fearsome angels are intruding upon Jacob. This is, quite literally, an awesome experience. He is rightly terrified. No wonder he wants reassurance – will God really be with him and stay with him. He wants to know – he wants to hear it a second time!! He now wants God.
There is, of course, an earthly political agenda behind this text: Jacob’s descendents, as many as the dust of the earth, are to spread out in every direction - a text most likely written late in Israel’s history, for a people under heavy imperial rule in dire need of such hope. But this promise, like the promise to Abraham, carries a universal blessing, a blessing for all the families of the earth. The striking thing is that it’s to come through Jacob! This Jacob.
Later - in another God encounter - from which Jacob emerges the crippled victor – his name becomes Israel
Well, what do we do with this text? Dissect it and extrapolate messages for ourselves? Brueggemann suggests (305) that communities of faith, “whether Israel or the Christian Church [are] … always going to be weird and odd misfits,” and that “what is now being rediscovered, as the Church is being disestablished in the West, is that we are having to face up to our weirdness and the sense of being a misfit in the world.” He continues, “I suppose we always chafe against it, but it seems to me it’s a given in the nature of this community of faith.” But is Jacob either weird or a misfit? Is Brueggemann overstating to make a point? Do we agree in any case?
The vision is, of course, a dream - a night dream. Brueggemann also makes the point that most of us, and the Church itself, are so full of daytime busyness, we need to experience night-time vulnerabilities to recognize the phony-ness of much of the daytime stuff. A bit tough on the administrators & all those we depend on for that daytime stuff?
Brueggemann’s connections are, as always, worth thinking about, but as with all stories there is no prescribed message to be drawn – each of us receives the story – each of us makes of it what it brings to us – in our here and now.
We may not see angels - we may be very relieved we do not see such awesome angels - but do we sometimes sense, with Jacob, that surely God is in this place and [we] did not know it?
Well all this is early on in Jacob’s story – it continues to his death & he doesn’t entirely change his character – albeit God is with him. If you haven’t met the full story, there’s a lot to come. His love for Rachel, the mother of his sons, Joseph and Benjamin – the trick played upon the trickster himself by Laban, his uncle – such poignancies, such losses, such conflicts - along with the blessings – & reconciliation with Esau.[2] A life writ very large in a story gifted to us – each time we return we experience it differently – we learn something more about ourselves, about being in the world, about this God/human relationship, which is the very heart of faith.
Take this book out of the Bible’s library, read it and reread it – in the daytime and in the night. You might even sense some angels. For this story, like the Bible itself, comes to us as a blessing.
& we are now to retell it. The poet, Sheila Nelson-McJilton does this in poetry, in the voice of Jacob:
You have found me, broken and empty,
On holy stones that ascend to the very gates of heaven,
And you have not cursed me.
In a desert midnight, I know
The smell of blessed fields …
The sweet dew of heaven.
1 will tell of You, O Lord God,
To laughing children who bless my tent,
To strong children who become tribes as countless as dust.
I will tell them of desert midnights filled with blazing stars,
Of fierce angels who carve holy stones
And dance with glittering swords among clouds,
Of hymns sung by joyous stars over Bethel
And over Bethlehem
What can we say but amen.
Judith E. McKinlay
[1] Bill Moyers, Genesis: A Living Conversation (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 280.
[2] See Frank Crüsemann “Dominion, Guilt, and Reconciliation: The Contribution of the Jacob Narrative in Genesis to Political Ethics,” Semeia 66 (1994): 67-77.
[3] From Sheila Nelson-McJilton,” Who Sleep on Holy Stones: A Meditation on Genesis 28:10-17,” Anglican Theological Review, 82.1 (Wint 2000): 152-153.
Saturday, July 9, 2011
"God beyond the reach of mystery" ... another sermon with thanks to Elizabeth Johnson (10 July 2011)
Two weeks ago[1], I offered some thoughts which might assist us in this wintry season of faith. Several of you appreciated Karl Rahner’s observation that “agnosticism which knows it doesn’t know ... is the way God is experienced today”; others of you found compelling Rahner’s suggestion that our struggle against atheism is foremost and of necessity a struggle against the inadequacy of our own understandings of God. Although some may have experienced discomfort with the tenor of that sermon – no-one spoke to me about that. In all the feedback I received – and there was more than usual after a Sunday morning sermon – the common thread was an interest and energy to enter this less travelled path as we explore what it means to be people of faith in this wintry season. Theologies of certitude, regulation and restriction just don’t work for the majority of us today. We are more persuaded by open, inclusive and invitational engagement with the Holy Other, the mystery beyond ourselves, whom we call God.
However, when we enter that less defined place, concerns can – and do – arise. Is there nothing we can say about God? What happens to the strength, security and bedrock of our faith, when we are invited into the place of unknowing, into which we are called to surrender? Can we risk the terror of letting go and letting God?
Rahner suggests a fruitful starting point to be the dynamic orientation found in each and every human being – a condition every one of us possesses – that condition of yearning for something more. This innate questioning, thirsting for life, love and meaning, known as self-transcendence is found in atheists, agnostics and believers alike. It’s the way we understand and explain this questing-yearning that defines whether or not we are people of faith.
“In mid-[20th] century Europe” Elizabeth Johnson writes, “an interesting debate broke out about what [self-transcendence] might mean. Existential philosophers with a fierce commitment to atheism ... concluded that life is absurd. The universe with its empty heaven endlessly frustrates human questing. Since there is no ultimate fulfilment to our self-transcending, all our desires come to naught. Held for a few brief moments over the void, human beings with all our strivings are the butt of a great cosmic joke. Religious thinkers, to the contrary, contended that life is meaningful because an infinite holy God, who is the surrounding horizon of human questing, intends to be our fulfilment.” What is interesting is that “both sides agreed on the dynamic structure of human experience, which is oriented always to the ‘more’.”[2]
People of faith, have made the choice – not by proof, not by rational argument – we have taken on faith, that there is a goal for our yearning, longing selves – and it is to that goal we orient ourselves and our lives. “Working within the context of modern culture, [Rahner] is trying to relocate the question of God. He is moving it from a question about a Supreme Being ‘out there’ to a question about what supports [this] dynamic orientation of human nature. If God exists, he argues, it is no accident that we find ourselves so open and so yearning. The Creator would have made us this way in order to be, as infinite Truth and holy Love, the fulfilment of our questioning, loving, thirsty-for-life selves.
“To appreciate this, we must get away from the conventional picture that the very word ‘God’ conjures up, which too easily leads to inadequate misunderstanding.”[3]
Johnson proposes the archaic term Whither as a replacement for the word God (for a time anyway) as we attempt to shift from that understanding of God as Supreme, out-there Being. “Whither”, she suggests, “refers to a point of arrival, a destination, as in the question “Whither goest thou?” The Whither of our self-transcendence is that toward which we are journeying, the goal toward which our self-transcending minds and hearts are forever reaching.”[4] This Whither, the horizon beyond our being, is what our restless hearts yearn for – the Holy Mystery to which our lives are oriented.
“Mystery here is not meant in the spooky sense of something weird or ghostly. Nor does it have the mundane meaning of a puzzle that has yet to be solved, as in a literary murder mystery. Rather, mystery here [suggests] that the Holy is so radically different from the world, so wholly other, that human beings can never form an adequate idea nor arrive at total possession.
“The Whither of human self-transcendence is and must remain [totally] incomprehensible ... We will never reach the end of exploring having figured it all out. It is something like parallel train tracks that appear to meet at a point in the distance, but when you get to that point the tracks have opened up to another distant point. It is something like the horizon one sees when flying in an airplane; no matter how fast the jet goes, it never catches the horizon, which remains still farther beyond the window. It is something like being in love and finding your beloved endlessly interesting and beautiful. There is always more.”[5]
Taking this path towards God means we will never master the mystery. We will turn away from the path that “think[s] of God as an element within a larger world, as a part of the whole of reality. Holy mystery cannot be situated within our system of coordinates but escapes all categories. Hence, to think rightly of God we must give up the drive to intellectual mastery and open up to the Whither of our spirit’s hungry orientation” – letting ourselves “be grasped by the mystery which is present yet ever distant.”[6]
Over this winter period, we are attempting to do this in our contemplative and meditative evening worship – allowing images, music and candlelight, prayer, communion and readings to provide a vehicle for our yearning souls to open up to the horizons of Holy Mystery – that is, the basis of our being; that which people call God.
Understanding God in this way ... “even if we were eventually to know every blessed truth there is to know in the entire universe; even if we were to have our fill of loving pressed down and running over; even if we were to experience all dimensions of life in abundance – there would still be more, the Whither, calling forth and sustaining our spirit. When we become aware of this and lucidly allow ourselves to be encompassed by God so understood, then our not knowing God who is boundless mystery ‘is not pure negation, not simply an empty absence, but a positive characteristic of a relationship between one subject and another.””[7]
“For some people struggling with faith amid modern culture, the idea of God as incomprehensible mystery comes as an enormous relief. It liberates them from cramped, confined notions of theism and places their spirit into a relationship where they can soar.... [here] the human person glimpses the mystery of God not as absence, but as overabundance.” [8]
In the minute of silence that follows the sermon, I invite you to read the words of the hymn[9] we will sing after the Affirmation of Faith. Ponder these words in the light of God as horizon of our self-transcendent longing. Take time in the silence to allow these words assist you to engage with and respond to the Whither of the human spirit.
But, before we go there, a word of warning:
While some enter into the liberty and freedom of relating to God in this way, “this glimpse makes other people dizzy and disoriented; they experience such boundlessness as a loss of connection to the domesticated, even if authoritarian, God of theism they were used to. Still others become fearful because the nameless, ineffable Whither seems so distant and aloof. All need to recognize, however, that at this point in the argument the idea of God as holy mystery is only half-finished.”[10]
Later sermons will pick up that second half of how Holy Mystery, does not remain remote, but comes into radical closeness, so that we can experience this goal of all our longing, not only as beyond all that we can ever know, but also nearer than our breathing. But that’s for another time... For now, I invite you to enter the agnostic space - that space of knowing we cannot (and must not) define God – and open ourselves within this cloud of unknowing to a way of experiencing God, which nurtures growth in this wintry season. And may we know the leap of recognition in our souls as we encounter the ultimate Whither of our very beings - beyond even “the reach of mystery”.
[1] This sermon (the second in a series) continues to rely on and quote extensively from Elizabeth A. Johnson, Quest for the Living God 2008.
[2] Johnson, p.34-35.
[3] Johnson, p.35.
[4] Johnson, p.35.
[5] Johnson, p.36
[6] Johnson, quoting Rahner p.36
[7] Johnson, p.37-38.
[8] Elizabeth Johnson, quoting Jeannine Hill Fletcher, p.38.
[9] “Eternal God beyond the reach of mystery”, Colin Gibson Hope is Our Song
[10] Johnson. p.39.
Monday, July 4, 2011
A sermon from Ministry Intern: Margaret Garland (for 3 July 2011)
Jesus says: Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly."
Verses 28 – 30 of the gospel reading from the Message Bible
It really is worthwhile to read differing versions of the bible – to glean new understandings and to challenge words or phrases that have become humdrum or predictable.
When we hear the familiar words ‘Come to me all that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest...for my yoke is easy and my burden is light - what kind of picture does that invoke for you? It may be that the passage is so well known that you draw from it comfort and relief rather than challenge and a call to action? Are words like yoke and burden so evocative of being harnessed and driven that you just gloss over them as a bit uncomfortable? I know I have done that at times.
Today I want to invite us into the space of revisiting these words and to circle that space with the invitation of Christ “I invite you to learn the unforced rhythms of grace”. Its a thought provoking and intriguing phrase which deserves much more that the time given today.
First of all what is our understanding of resting in Christ – how does that fit into learning the unforced rhythms of grace? We have the story of an eighty year old woman who convinced her daughter that she wanted to celebrate her 80th birthday by climbing to the top of the Statue of Liberty – heart condition and all. There were 342 steps to the top and it took 6 hours and resting every 3 or 4 step. You do the maths on the number of rests but she was determined and she got there. The rhythm of Christian life is made so much more sustainable if we can learn to take regular times of resting along the way. Not only does it keep us up to the journey but it allows us to follow directions and visions that others might think impossible. The renewal and refreshment is not a time out but a reflection on where we have come from and a nourishing for the journey still to come. When we come together in worship as the community of Christ as we do today we come to be renewed and replenished, experiencing the grace of God in Christ anew and together. When this balance of action and rest gets out of kilter then our choices and our directions become limited and ill informed. Paul was talking about this when he laments the ability to both know what is right and do it without God’s rhythm of grace in our lives. That resting time is our chance, in community with God and each other, to follow the Spirit and make choices about where our journeys should go, in spite of the utmost difficulties, no matter the 342 steps to the top.
And how do we understand taking on the yoke of Christ – the word to me always has meant confinement, hard yakker, head down and burdened and I have had to find a way to get past that understanding. How can a yoke be an unforced rhythm of grace I ask.
It is interesting to hear how the term was used in Jesus time. It was common, according to Rob Bell, for the ancient rabbis to understand their role as that of interpreting the biblical writings and God for the people. Many had different interpretations of course and therefore developed different rules of behaviour – and these were called the Rabbis’ yoke. When you chose to follow a particular Rabbi, you believed their set of rules to be the closest to what God intended through the scriptures and you took up that particular yoke. And then you acted them out – in the Jewish context it was always about action. Furthermore each Rabbi would learn their understandings at the feet of another – that is where their authority to teach came from.
And so when Jesus talked about his yoke he was offering a new interpretation of how to live the way God intended, offering a new set of rules. But there were differences.
His authority came from God, through and was authorised not by other rabbis but by John the Baptist, his baptism and the direct blessings of God. It was a radical step to take – this call by Jesus that there was a completely new way to interpret the teachings of God? One could say that this lack of a traditional mentoring rabbi was one of the chief causes of conflict between Jesus and the priests – how dare he say his authority came directly from God.
And he stated that his way that was easy and light – in comparison to the heavy load he saw the priests putting on the people in God’s name. Make no mistake – this is not light and easy in the sense of handing everything over to God and walking away but rather that we are walking lightly and easily because we have entered into the rhythm of life that is the grace of God and are walking it alongside Christ. The difficulties and the challenges of life are a part of that rhythm and that is where we can rest in God and be renewed in our journeys.
The other thing that made this yoke different too was that it was a shared burden – one that Christ has shouldered with us. In fully embracing the human yoke Christ had lifted a burden from our shoulders and in responding to this amazing love we gladly take on the yoke of bringing that love and care to this world in whatever way we can. A new interpretation of God and the scriptures, a new yoke.
So can we turn away from the concept of the yoke as a restraining implement and instead see it as the acceptance of the teaching that Jesus offers us, inviting us into a life lived as God intended. There is a last thought that I would like to share here – one more thing we might ponder from the ways of the Rabbis .
By choosing to accept Jesus yoke we are choosing to live in according to the rules of that life – to live and be as God wants us to be. And by accepting that yoke we are in turn being given the authority to ourselves ponder and debate and pray about how we can best live the life God calls us to. That puts a whole new angle for me on the idea of accepting a yoke. Jesus expected his followers to be constantly engaged in the endless process of growing in knowledge and teaching others what it meant to actually live the Scriptures and to know God through Jesus Christ. Rabbis each one of us.
There is a real rhythm to that as we think of the church over the centuries, as we bring to mind all the people that have encouraged our faith journeys, as we embrace our traditions and open ourselves to new understandings, as we in turn share our thoughts and understandings with those we are in community with here today and elsewhere.
So learning the unforced rhythm of grace – today I have suggested its about the balance of renewing rest that informs our actions and empowers our understanding, about the constant learning and questioning of how we today live the Gospel truth, and about a willingness to choose to put all of our living in the completeness of the love and grace of Jesus Christ.
And so we have an invitation from the rabbi who dared to different, who offered a yoke of teaching unlike any that had gone before and a place of rest that challenges our limitations.
Jesus says walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace and you will learn to live freely and lightly. What do you say?
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