Finding rest for our souls

I love one of the prayers suggested might be used in a service today:

Grant, O Lord, we beseech you,

that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by your governance,

that your Church may joyfully serve you in all godly quietness;

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

A peaceably ordered world, wouldn’t that be nice?

And us serving in that world in godly quietness. The church that is calm offering people sabbath rest. Drop thy still dews of quietness til all our strivings cease. Quiet, still, be — let your God love you. 

 

“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.”That’s how the Message translates Jesus’ words, which in an old service book used to be called his “comfortable words.” 

 

More familiar is this translation: 

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.’

But surely you can’t rest with a great big yoke on your back can you? 

 

What’s a yoke? A yoke is a large and heavy piece of agricultural ploughing equipment, used to harness two animals to a cart that they then pull. A yoke can also be used with a heavier piece on the larger, stronger animal, and a lighter portion harnessed to the new or younger animal being trained. The yoke was designed to better distribute the weight of the load and also to give mechanical capability to the work the animal was set to do. So, what is the yoke of Jesus? It is a place of rest where we will find humility and gentleness and learn his ways. We must first accept the yoke of Jesus’ relationship to experience the easing he speaks of. The yoke of Jesus will provide us with the mechanical capability to do the work we have been called to – but we first must be attached to him – physically and spiritually. We may just be surprised with how light the yoke actually is, and how much easier we operate when connected with to Christ. What are you yoked to in your life right now? Jesus? The world? A person? Something else?

There are times the church feels like a yoke. It’s hard work. We get stressed. We get tired. We are challenged by how we keep the church open. There are some who say “you can’t do it like that” and put faith in a small box making it confined and narrow. I’ve had people in the past who’ve been made very unwell by the church. That cannot be right. Jesus in these verses has a swipe at the narrowness of the Pharisees and their pompous law abiding religiosity.

He says the heart of who God is has not been revealed to them but to infants, little ones, who aren’t cluttered by life or yoked to tradition or to rules, but open to new ideas. They also aren’t tempted to conform to the world being burdened by its issues. Anna in the classic Mister God this is Anna had it right: 

“The whole business of adults going to church filled Anna with suspicion. The idea of collective worship went against her sense of private conversations withMister God. As for going to church to meet Mister God, that was preposterous. After all, if Mister God wasn't everywhere, he wasn't anywhere. For her, churchgoing and "Mister God" talks had no necessary connection. For her, the whole thing was transparently simple. You went to church to get the message when you were very little. Once you had got it, you went out and did something about it. Keeping on going to church was because you hadn't got the message or didn't understand it or it was "just for swank.” 

Maybe today’s lesson is how we find rest in church is to take on Jesus’ yoke not the church yoke. The old covenant service wording had it right: “Beloved in Christ, let us again claim for ourselves this covenant which God has made with his people, and take upon us the yoke of Christ. This means that we are content that he appoint us our place and work, and that he himself be our reward.” And making space to rest in Jesus might mean we see things differently. The Old Testament reading this week is from Zechariah. You might be saying “it’s not Palm Sunday!” But it’s saying to us this week Jesus is radical if we will only take time to see him. Only those who really saw got what he was up to in Jerusalem that day. “Return to your stronghold o prisoners of hope.”

Jesus says “Come to me, take my yoke upon you, my burden is easy, come and find rest for your souls.”  Rest…

When you travel on a motorway these days a sign can be passed which warns “tiredness can kill – take a rest.” Indeed our car after a lot of miles will flash a picture at me on the dashboard which is a cup of tea and above it comes these words “do you think it might be time to take a rest?” We all need rest especially after stressful things. There’s a Facebook group called the  nap ministry. It says you are enough right now - every system in this toxic culture tells you the opposite. It thrives con you hating yourself and believing the lie that your birth didn’t grant you divinity. You are enough! 

Rest is your birthright. You can just be.

The Church needs to be a place people can find rest for their souls. I had to be in Manchester for something yesterday which was fun as I love Manchester – I had a very happy and life changing time living in the city for a while – and I hadn’t been for ages. I went into the John Rylands library on Deansgate and there was an exhibition in there how workers in the industry of the city in Victorian times mostly mill workers found rest. Not just the wakes week where factories closed and everyone went to Blackpool but it reminded me that Methodist churches used to be places where people went to find rest and relax. There was a wonderful programme of a Methodist tea party in Eccles put on by the married gentlemen of the church – I bet they didn’t make the tea! There were Sunday school outings in a charabanc – my first church in Manchester still had a Sunday school outing even though it hadn’t had a Sunday school for years! 

But rest in Jesus isn’t about an afternoon snooze after lunch nice as that is nor restful space or outings nice as they are. It’s about resting safe in s relationship that holds us especially all else is a bit mad. Jesus promises us rest not stress. And if the church is making us stressed we have to have a serious look at ourselves, don’t we? 

Let’s remember the words weary and burdened and tired can be our experience. So we get tetchy and we enjoy nothing. We can feel mentally and, in some cases, physically “worn out, tired, and fatigued.” But Jesus says, ”Come to Me.”

We must to go to Jesus. 

And how do we do this? We go to Jesus when we pray. We go to Jesus when we declare His promises in our lives. We go to Jesus when we praise and worship Him. We go to Jesus when we sit quietly in His presence.

Remember what Jesus said in John 14:27 about his peace? Peace I leave with you, my peace give I unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

The peace that Jesus gives us is not determined by the circumstances we face. The peace that Jesus gives is not determined by what we see in the news or read in the news. The peace that Jesus gives is “not of this world.” And the only way we will be able to access that peace is through Jesus.

The phrase weary and burdened means to be “overloaded or to carry a heavy burden.” Does this not describe how most people are feeling right now? And perhaps some you are feeling this way too. But Jesus says “Come to Me.”

Well I’ll end with a reflection from the US Episcopal Church sermon site. This is the crux of it. Do we do stress and worry and get bogged down or can we find rest and joy?

“When we think we know what we’re doing according to the world’s view or even the church’s, God teaches us a new step in our dance. We are supposed to be different. We are supposed to be followers of Jesus Christ. After all, if we made God in our image like in Norse or Greek mythology, who would save us? 

Who would draw us out to be the people God created us to be? Jesus says in our Gospel today, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.” Boy, is that out of our comfort zone! The more we follow God’s ways, the more we know that we will be rejected by the acknowledged experts of the world—those that might see what we do as followers of Jesus as foolish.

We are called to a different standard. When we stop listening to those voices from without, we can finally hear the voice that comes from within. When we try to carry out our own salvation, we get weary, we feel burdened. That is when Jesus says to us, “Come to me… and I will give you rest.” This rest can come to us like a mindfulness exercise: pausing to be still and noticing five things with each of our senses—things that will ground us in the present moment with God. In doing so, we rest in God and who God created us to be instead of being taken over by the “devil” or our complexes. When we rest, we also give other people permission to rest and experience God fully. How would our world change if we focused on simply being with God and cultivating thanksgiving? Let’s find out.”