July 7, 2002 - Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Romans 7:15-25a
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Matthew 11:16-19,25-30
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“A Resting Place”

We are a very busy nation, always have been. We're also very conscious of busyness. It's fairly common to see articles decrying our busyness or offering some sort of remedy for it. I logged on to the Internet and did a search for 'busy' and 'people' and it produced 141 different websites. There was everything from services for those too busy to shop to various spirituality sites for folks entirely too busy to be spiritual. We shouldn't be surprised to discover how busy we are. We even make our vacations and our holidays exercises in busyness. We're always hurrying to do something or running off to see something. We're just busy.

I suppose that being busy is built into our bones. It seems to be the fate of an immigrant culture – and that is what we are. When we consider that our national myth hinges on a group called the Pilgrims it should come home to us. Pilgrims are people on a search, a journey with a spiritual destination and the implied promise of fulfillment. Americans are, and always have been, a pilgrim people.

Governor Bradford described the early days of the pilgrimage in Of Plimouth Plantation. The Pilgrims, and the Bay Colony folk, who would follow in 1630, perceived that they were on an "errand into the wilderness." Like ancient Israel, they were on a search for the Promised Land. Bradford described how they felt as they entered on their errand and found themselves in a strange place, and among strange, and sometimes even hostile, people.

They had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather-beaten bodies; no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor . . .

They had left their familiar world and now had to be busy about making a wilderness into their home.

As the American experience grew and deepened it became apparent that there was a 'manifest destiny' drawing us ever westward and even beyond. This was to be a people always on the move, always growing and changing, always ever so busy. Alexis de Tocqueville devotes a whole chapter in his Democracy in America to "Why Americans are so restless in the midst of their prosperity." He wrote:

In the United States a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it before the roof is on, he plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops; he embraces a profession and gives it up; he settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves to carry his changeable longing elsewheres. If his private affairs leave him any leisure, he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics; and if at the end of a year of unremitting labor he finds that he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his happiness. Death at length overtakes him, but it is before he is weary of his bootless chase of that complete felicity which forever escapes him. [p. 145, book 2]

Does his observation still ring true? When did he make these remarks, you might ask? 1835.

James Oliver Robertson says something in American Myth American Reality that I believe gives us some additional insight into what de Tocqueville observed and what you and I experience every day. As I said before, it all goes back to migration. Robertson writes:

The roots of this powerful attitude lie in the migration to the New World. The regeneration of the attitude in every new generation of Americans both explains and justifies migration. From the very beginning, immigrants came to America to change and improve their lot in life. The act of migration had indeed changed their lot, and it is generally portrayed, in all of the American myths and stories, as having improved it. [p. 148]

We're immigrants, pilgrims, whether on the Mayflower, the prairie schooner, the upwardly mobile path, the interstate or the Internet. We're obsessed with the frontier and see our manifest destiny – and our happiness – in moving toward it. So, we're busy.

Now, contrast this concept with what Jesus said. He tells the people who accuse him that "wisdom is vindicated by her deeds." Yet, his great deed, and his wonderful words are an invitation to a resting place. He says, "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." We keep missing the point, as did the earliest followers of Jesus that the true frontier is within us. Our truly manifest destiny is to be at one with the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of all that is. Our pilgrimage is not to a place, but to a person, to a relationship, with God. Jesus' invitation to follow him begins first with an invitation to come to him and learn from him the way of relationship and rest.

Jesus' words are reminiscent of yet another vision of America, one seen by the daughter of one of America's first Jewish families, Emma Lazarus. Her "New Colossus" described the Statue of Liberty and the words of her poem reminded folks that our land was to be a resting place – a place where pilgrims could find their destination, as well as their starting point.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

I suppose that what I'm trying to say is that we need to reconsider our busyness and our pilgrimage. Perhaps we would be better served both as communities of faith and as a nation if we took the inward journey and listened to and learned of Jesus. It is, however, the most difficult journey we'll ever undertake. The journey to a resting place involves traveling the way of surrender and that is not a road very many of us wish to travel. As Wayne Muller has said in his book Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest, the way to rest is the way of giving up, of realizing that our busyness ultimately hinders the journey. He observed that whether he visited the very poor, the very middle class, or the very rich that complaint was always the same, "I am so busy." Having seen that, he also noted that "the Chinese pictograph for 'busy' is composed of two characters: 'heart' and 'killing.'" [p. 2-3] If we wish to stop killing our hearts, we need to heed Jesus' invitation to come to him and to rest.

I know it's more difficult to do it than to talk about it. The Lord knows that I am living proof of that. Even Paul complained about the desire to do the one, right, thing and dulling reality of falling back into the "same old – same old" time and again. There is wisdom in his words, though, because he sees the 'out.' We can't do it ourselves.

If we are to heed Jesus' invitation, we must ask God for the strength to follow and trust God for the grace to be different people. The old proverb says, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." So it is with this pilgrimage of the heart that will lead us to a resting place deep within us. We must first begin by asking God to help us to grow, to learn, and to change. And, we must accept Jesus' invitation to "learn of me." Jesus knows the way to the Father and if we covenant to be Christ-followers, we must follow his lead. We may stumble along the way, but the true pilgrim knows that the secret is to just get up, dust off and keep moving toward the destination.

Governor Bradford and the Pilgrims knew where to turn when it seemed that the pilgrimage was to fall short of its goal. They turned to God. "What could now sustain them, " he wrote, "but the Spirit of God and his grace?" Paul looked to God and was lifted to new service. You and I can do the same thing – it begins with taking the step, with making the decision to come apart and to rest in God's love and to know God's peace. Even in the midst of our busyness there is one who stands even more welcoming and greater than Lazarus' "New Colossus" and beckons us to a resting place. This place has been in us all along, if only we'd curb our busyness and discover that we were already there. "Come to me, you tired and poor in spirit," Jesus says, "and rest."