The Yoke of Freedom
The Rev. Samuel Schaal
First Congregational Church of Wauwatosa
July 6, 2008

Romans 7:15-25a
Psalm 146:5-10
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

I live in a condo that’s built in a townhouse style: you drive into a private two-car garage, then walk up the stairs to the condo itself. It’s nice, especially in winter, when I can just push the automatic garage door opener, the door opens, and I’m in my garage.

To fully understand the point of this story, you need to know that in this building, the condo units are paired, so two units share one stairway from the garage to the condo itself. So in getting from my garage to my living room, I walk through a door, into a little hallway with stairs up to my unit. My next-door neighbor shares the same service stairway from his garage to his condo.

After I bought the condo several years ago I met my neighbor and right off we agreed that we trusted each other enough to not lock the door from our garages to the service stairway, as this simplified life some when each of us were carting groceries up the stairs, for example. This meant I didn’t have to lock the door from the garage to that little hallway that goes to the stairs. This also meant that I had access to my neighbor’s garage, and he had access to mine.

One morning I left for work and I noticed that my neighbor’s garage door was open and his car was gone. I wondered if he forgot to close his door. I came on into the office, but was worried that the door might stay open all day. This meant that a burglar would have access to that service stairway that leads to our two condos. Though the doors into the two living rooms were both locked, a person could sit there all day long and work on breaking the lock and clean out both units.

I wanted to call my neighbor at work but I didn’t know where he worked and I didn’t even know his last name. At noon, I went home for lunch and the door was still open. It was then I noticed that he had a set of golf clubs at the back of his garage, and I felt sure that those clubs would not be there if the door was open all day.

I had to do something. I had to figure out how to close that door. I decided to call the Wauwatosa police. Surely they had seen this happen before and would have some advice. I call the number. A woman answers, “Wauwatosa Police Department.” I explain my plight (and it was a rather long explanation, like this story I’m telling you now, as it was important that she understand all these odd doors with and without locks. I said, “I don’t know what to do and I’m hoping you might have some advice for surely you’ve seen something like this in the past.”

She paused for a moment. I waited. She said, “Is there a button you can push?”

She was referring, of course, to the button that all automatic garage doors have, that’s always mounted on the wall.

“Oh,” I said, chagrined. “I hadn’t thought about that. Thank you.” I hung up and one could almost hear the laughter coming from the Wauwatosa police department. I walked down the stairs, through my neighbor’s side door, pressed the button, and the door came down just fine. Our condos were safe again.

Is there a button you can push? The answer was right in front of me and it was the simplest thing imaginable, but I couldn’t see it. I made it much more complicated than it really was.

I think that’s what Jesus is talking about in today’s lesson. It really isn’t that complicated, but people keep making it something it isn’t. Jesus isn’t talking about closing garage doors, but he’s talking about how simple God’s grace really is. All you have to do is follow me, Jesus says. And God will provide for you. All you have to do is accept God’s love, God’s presence, God’s beneficence. And following me, he says in today’s lesson, is taking on a yoke, a discipline, that is easy and is light.

In other places Jesus suggests that following him is not all sunshine and roses. You also have to be willing to give everything you’ve got, but that journey begins in a simple act of freedom. God’s grace is wider than any problem you’ve got. God’s love is greater than any issue you’re facing. God’s heart is kinder than anything we have experienced on earth. All we have to do is accept it.

But the easiest thing in the world can be the most difficult to do. And we just don’t get it. Like the crowds of Jesus’ day – they just didn’t get it.

In today’s lesson, Jesus first compares his culture to a group of children playing. First they play a happy game but the other kids didn’t want to play. Then the other kids played a sad game and the first group of kids didn’t want to play. Then Jesus interprets his little analogy. When strern and gruff John the Baptist showed up people didn’t listen to him. When Jesus showed up – and he defines himself as one who enjoys eating and drinking and running with the wrong crowd (one scholar calls him “Jesus the Party Boy”), no one listened, either.

His disciples didn’t get it. The scholars of the day didn’t get it. No one got it except the infants in the faith. To become a disciple does not require theological sophistication. To become a disciple does not require that one be a good citizen or a good businessperson or to be middle class or upwardly mobile. To become a disciple means to give up our heavy burdens, to take up rest, and to take up the yoke of Jesus which is an easy yoke. It is a yoke of freedom: spiritual freedom in Christ. It is a yoke amazingly free of doctrine and dogma, rules and regulations, though heaven knows over the ages the church has tried to make it into that.

One of the things that has always drawn me to Congregational church traditions, first among the Unitarian Universalists where I did ministry and now among us here, is that at the core of the Congregational experience is God found in freedom. As you have heard me tell so often, I grew up unchurched. Though I was intensely curious about spiritual matters and as a teenager and young adult I would visit various churches here and there. I saw in all those churches not so much God’s universal love but God’s supposedly judgment and condemnation of those who did not fit the status quo. I saw in those churches not so much a promise of eternal life for all, of a ground of being that is present here and now and that naturally seeks out all, especially the lost and lonely, but I found a tribalistic God that condemned those who believed differently to some sort of eternal damnation that better fit a first century cosmology and not a 20th century (as it was then) experience. I saw in those churches not so much a God that is spirit and love, but a God that is created in our image and likeness instead of the other way around.

So when I finally found church I found a religion of freedom and a God of freedom. In my experience in Congregational Christian ministry, that concept is only deepened and grounded when I see God at work in the life of Jesus. When I look at Jesus’ life and see God, this amazing experience of divinity entering humanity in a new way and I realize that in my own life I might see divinity entering my humanity in a new way.

But this freedom is so much more than our modern ideas of individualistic freedom that we find in our society. Our political freedoms, our economic freedoms, our individual freedoms, are all important. But as important as these freedoms are, they are but a distant and dim reflection of the incredible and radical spiritual freedom that Christ came and comes to express and to share with humanity.

Through and through the teachings of Jesus we see the simple and pure and essential spiritual teachings of eternity: That we are created with a divine spark in God’s image and likeness, that we and all creation are deemed by this creator to be very good, that God cares for us, that God expects us to reflect this love and care for each other and all creation, that in Jesus we see divinity come to humanity in a new way, that by following Jesus we enter a grand spiritual journey that goes forever.

It is simple, but not always easy. Paul, in these immortal words of our human angst, asks why in the world he (and we) don’t do what he (and we) know we should do. All of us in this room have had that experience. “I do not do the good that I want but the evil I do not want is what I do.” It’s the human condition.

So this divine freedom, this yoke of freedom that Christ comes to bring us, is simple, but not always easy. But in taking on that yoke, we do not have to do it alone. We do it in community which is why we gather as church to hold each other up in our spiritual journeys and then to move beyond our own concerns so that we can minister to the world.

That journey begins in saying “yes” to Jesus’ invitation. That journey begins by accepting the love of God in Jesus Christ. Accepting it for what it is: an invitation to a journey of freedom in God, where we are encouraged to be more of what we really are, more of what God has created us to be, even if that does not fit with what the world expects of us.

This is for me the core of my own Christian experience. Having been one who resisted the gospel for so long (and for good reason as I still believe much of the gospel as presented to me was perverted from it’s original pure and essential teachings as I’ve tried to explain), I want to close with a brief reading from one of the beacon lights of my own journey—the 20th century theologian Paul Tillich. This is an extract from what I think is his greatest sermon: “You Are Accepted.” When I first read these words, I felt the divine light beginning to break into my darkness, through my agnosticism, and I felt something in these simple words that I had not felt in all the churches I had visited and, if truth be told, something which is all too rare in our churches today: acceptance. Tillich says:

“Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual...It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: "You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!" If that happens to us, we experience grace After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance.” (1)

Nothing but acceptance. These words are to me a modern corollary of Jesus’ ancient invitation, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” This is the yoke that Jesus offers, which takes us to our own perfect spiritual freedom.

May it be so. Amen.

(1) Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), p. 161. Also online at: www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=378&C=84