“God Meant For Things To Be Much Easier Than We Have Made Them”

The Church of St. Paul and Incarnation, Jersey City NJ
July 5, 2020

Year A, Proper 9: The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67

Psalm 45:11-18

Romans 7:15-25a

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

“God Meant For Things To Be Much Easier Than We Have Made Them”

            During these past few months of pandemic, there has been a whole lot for us to miss, hasn’t there?

            I find myself feeling nostalgic for experiences that I took for granted not so long ago: going out for dinner with friends, the chance to get away for at least a few days of summer vacation, the ability to walk through the park without getting angry at the many people not wearing masks, and, of course, I miss being together with all of you here in church.

            One of things I really miss about church is Communion.

            I love making my way down the Communion rail, seeing all the different ways people approach the altar – some walking with difficulty and determination, while kids race each other in a not very reverent but so joyful rush, impatient to get what they know is the Good Stuff.

            When I’m about to give the wafer, some people are eager to make eye contact, looking up expectantly while others look down, as if shy about receiving such an awesome gift.

 Some of your hands are spotted and bent with age and pain, while others are smooth, not yet lined by the hard work and cares of life.

            So, I hope you can tell, I miss sharing Communion with all of you – sharing with you the food that Jesus gives us for the journey – food that we can receive spiritually through Facebook, though it’s not quite the same.

And, I also miss baptisms.

            Now, if you’re a long time parishioner, you may be groaning a little bit, thinking, oh, here he goes again about Baptism!

            So, yes, as I may have mentioned before, I love baptizing people.

            I love reminding people – and reminding myself – that in the water of Baptism, God makes an indissoluble, an unbreakable, bond – no matter what we do or don’t do, God won’t give up on us.

            It’s truly the best news ever.

            In Baptism we are signing up – or, more often, getting signed up - to be a Christian, beginning a way of life, a way that, if we’re doing it right, should be very different from what goes on out in the world.

            So, when I prepare people for Baptism, I spend a lot of time going over the Baptismal Covenant – God makes a big promise to us in Baptism and in response we make some big promises, too.

            We promise to keep praying and breaking bread together (even if it’s on Facebook).

            We promise to resist evil and to ask for forgiveness when we fall short, when, as St. Paul says, we do the very thing we hate.

            We promise to proclaim the Good News through our words and actions.

            (I always say those first promises are hard, but not that hard. Now we get to the really hard promises…)

            We promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons and love our neighbor as our self.

            And, we promise to strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being.

            We know – and say – that we can only live out these big promises with God’s help.

            But, they’re still difficult.

            It’s not easy to follow the way of Jesus.

            Jesus himself warns us that his way is not the easy way.

            If you’ve been with us the past few Sundays, you may remember that we’ve been hearing Jesus sending his disciples out into the world. And, Jesus warns the disciples back then – and warns us disciples of today – that the world isn’t always going to like what we have to say – that if we preach love to a hateful world, we may find ourselves in some big trouble.

            Maybe realizing that disciples past and present might be having second thoughts about following his difficult way, Jesus promises us that God loves us and knows us, knows us so well that every hair on our head is counted.

            That’s reassuring, for sure, but still, I think we can all agree that loving all our neighbors, working for justice and peace, respecting the dignity of everybody, even the people we may despise, even the people who may give us good reason to despise them – this way of Jesus is difficult.

            But, then, at the close of today’s Gospel passage, Jesus calls us to him, offering us rest, saying, “For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

            Jesus says, “For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

            I’ve sat with – walked with - those words all week.

            And, it seems to me, that the way of Jesus – the way of loving our neighbor –  is easy and light because any other way of life, the way of the world, is so much more difficult, so much heavier.

            As Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker, once said:

            “God meant for things to be much easier than we have made them.”

            We can all think of people – people in our own lives, celebrities, maybe even ourselves sometimes – we can all think of people who have chosen the way of the world.

            We can all think of people who have chosen greed, who are only concerned about their wants and needs, convinced that if they have more than everybody else – if they have just a little more than they already have – well then, then, they will be happy and content.

            We can all think of people who have chosen hatred and fear and, yes, racism – demonizing whole groups of people, building ever higher walls to keep “them” out, arming themselves to the teeth, thinking that all of their hardware and security systems will keep them safe, will protect them from the troubles of life.

            And, yet, when we look at those people they always look so miserable, don’t they?

            No matter how much they have, no matter how much security they’ve installed, no matter how superior they think they are, their faces always tell the story.

            There have been so many memorable images from the past few months – “Black Lives Matter” painted in giant yellow letters on the street leading to the White House, the toppling of Confederate statues and the lowering of the Mississippi state flag, the President standing in front of St. John’s Church holding up the Bible – lots of pictures we won’t soon forget.

            But one that has been really haunting me is the picture of a husband and wife standing outside their mansion, located on a “private street” in St. Louis, as peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters passes by.

            He’s cradling a long-barreled gun and she’s waving a pistol.

            Now, we could spend a lot of time reflecting on if the roles were reversed – if this were a Black couple pointing weapons at white protesters – then this story would have had a very different ending.

            But, setting that aside, did you see their faces?

            I can’t know what’s in their hearts, of course, and some news reports described the two, who are both lawyers, as supporters of civil rights and even Black Lives Matter, I don’t know, but looking at their faces, I saw anger and bewilderment and so much fear – maybe fear that all that they had accumulated and thought was secure behind gates on a private street could be lost in an instant – a fear so great that they were willing to step out with their weapons to intimidate but instead they ended up just being ridiculed.

            It sure is a tough way to go through life.

            As Dorothy Day said, “God meant for things to be much easier than we have made them.”

            Or, maybe even more to the point, as Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

           

            So, especially these days when disease and hatred are on the loose, when we sure are missing each other and so much that we took for granted not so long ago, especially during this difficult time, Jesus calls us to the way of love.

            The way of Jesus begins in Baptism when God promises to never let us go, and continues at the altar when we hold out our hands and receive all the Good Stuff that we need for the journey.

            The way of Jesus is challenging, for sure, but, so long as we stick together, it’s also easy and light.

            And, if you don’t believe that, just look at the hard and heavy ways of the world

            Amen.