Thomas J Parlette
“Come to Me”
Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30
7/5/20
I don’t know about you, but I haven’t felt “normal” since mid-March. With our “stay at home” order, online school, masks and social distancing requirements, everything in life has felt out of balance. My normal, comfortable routines have gone out the window. Everything from stopping to get my morning coffee to getting up early on Sunday morning to come to church is different. It’s exhausting to absorb so much change, so much technology, so much new information that changes every day, sometimes every hour. It’s exhausting. And it is stressful.
I read recently that many people are finding temporary relief from their stress by watching videos on You Tube. Which I understand, I do that too. But what is surprising is what they’re watching. They’re watching videos of people cleaning their house. That’s right, watching people clean their house. For myself, I’ve always agreed with the wise soul who said that cleaning with kids in the house is like brushing your teeth while eating Oreos. But some people are de-stressing by watching cleaning videos. Actually, they are hugely popular, with millions of fans.
The people tuning in to these videos say that watching someone else clean and organize their home makes them feel less anxious, more in control of their own surroundings. The people who make the videos say they regularly get emails from their viewers telling them their show helped with anxiety, depression and various life crises.
One young woman said she falls asleep each night to cleaning videos because they clear her head of anxiety and fear. Another viewer said the videos, “make my head stop rushing around for a bit.” And another says, “I think there’s a lot of aspects to our daily life that seem chaotic, so watching something in a state of order is relaxing.”(1)
That’s an interesting way to deal with stress. My own “go-to” strategies are things like take a walk or ride my exercise bike, listening to my favorite chamber music, or watching an episode of Downton Abbey. But I guess cleaning videos work for some people. But it doesn’t really tackle the deeper problems in our life that cause us to feel out of control in the first place.
Perhaps you’ve heard of something an organization in South Korea has started doing to help people deal with their stress. This organization stages “living funerals.” Participants in living funerals write out a short testament of their last thoughts and wishes. Then they put on a funeral shroud and lie down in a closed coffin for about 10 minutes.
Sounds a bit ghoulish, I know. But the point of living funerals, which is a free service offered by the Hyowon Healing Center, is to help people gain a new perspective on life. About 25,000 South Koreans have undergone a living funeral so far. The director of the Healing Center says that some people have reconciled with family or friends after their living funerals. Others have changed careers. Some participants who were contemplating suicide credit their living funeral with changing their minds. The purpose of the living funeral, according to the director, is to realize that “Happiness is in the present.”(2)
Happiness is in the present. Most of us would agree with that, but many of us don’t really live like that. All too often many of us describe our lives as busy, hectic, even crazy. That seems to be the norm. No one has any time anymore. No one gets any rest.
In our passage from Matthew today, Jesus challenges the people around him with these words, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, 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.”
Jesus points out here that weariness is not meant to be our natural way of living. That’s not what God created us for. In fact, no matter how productive our out-of-control schedule makes us feel, it is actually living in opposition to the rhythms of life that contribute to peace, clarity, and purposeful living.
Weariness and burdens blind us to the true purpose of our lives and binds us with a sense of powerlessness. They isolate us. When you are weary and burdened, your focus narrows to what is right in front of you, to what is urgent instead of what is important. This behavior is the norm in our culture, so we don’t question it. That’s just the way life is, everybody does it. Except that Jesus says it isn’t the way things are meant to be. So what did Jesus mean by rest for our souls?
This predates my time in Minnesota, but perhaps some of you remember back in 2005, a store opened in the Mall of America called MinneNAPolis. I tried googling it, but it kept auto-correcting to Minneapolis – but no, evidently there was a store called MinneNAPolis. For 70 cents a minute, tired shoppers could rent a sound-proof room for napping. The rooms had special themes like Deep Space, Asian Mist, and Tropical Isle. Or, if you didn’t feel like napping, you could sit in a massage chair, gaze at a waterfall, listen to soft music and breathe in the “positive-ionization-filtered air.” It was described as “an enjoyable escape from the fast-paced lifestyle.”(3) I could see how that would be nice after dealing with the Mall of America.
However, rest for our souls is not the same thing as a nap, or a vacation, or breathing in positive-ionization-filtered air while gazing at a fake waterfall. It’s not a temporary respite from our stress. Rest for our souls is a re-orientation of our values and perceptions of life to match up with the values and perceptions of God, the One who created us – the Source of our soul.
Listen again to Jesus’ words, “Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, 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.”
So the first thing Jesus is saying to us is – “You have a soul.” Or, to be more precise, you ARE a soul. You are not a random collection of cells. You are not the sum of your current circumstances. You are a work of art, made in the image of God. You have the imprint of the eternal, all-powerful God within you. Your soul is a mark of God’s abundant love for you. It marks you as incredibly valuable in God’s eyes. Which leads us to a question – are you experiencing life the way God meant you to experience it? Or do you feel weary and burdened because you are living in a way that is disconnected from your soul?
Mike Jaffee was a young, successful business man working for a Fortune 500 company. In his mid-thirties, he began to realize that he wasn’t fulfilled in his work. He was neglecting his family. He felt disconnected from any greater purpose in his life.
Every morning, Mike’s wife would drive him to a train station for his 2 hour commute into New York City. Their 1 year old daughter slept in the back seat on the way to the station. Mike worried that he rarely saw his daughter when she was awake, and his wife was basically a single mom.
His success at work wasn’t making a meaningful difference in the world. His life was so hectic he barely had time to think. But all of Mike’s colleagues and friends lived like this too. Who was he to think that life could, or should, be any different?
Then it happened. One morning, Mike decided that he would stay home and eat breakfast with his wife and daughter and take the late train to work. To him, this was a huge sacrifice. All his colleagues came in early and stayed late. He couldn’t afford to stand out. But he was just so tired of being controlled by his job and missing out on his family. That morning, Mike and his wife and daughter had a great time eating pancakes and chatting about their week. And Mike took the late train to the office.
Because of this one decision to re-connect with his family, Mike Jaffee was not in his office in the North Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, when the first hijacked airplane slammed into the building. His life was spared by a simple decision one morning to have pancakes with his family.
Mike Jaffee has written a book about the tragedy of losing his friends and colleagues in the Sept. 11 attacks. It’s titled Wake Up! Your Life is Calling. He says his mission now is to be a Human Wake Up Call, to convince people to live meaningful lives that don’t revolve around society’s definition of success.(4)
That’s what Jesus is for us – the ultimate wake-up call for our soul. Listen to some of the other statements Jesus made about our souls – “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world yet forfeit their soul? Or, what can anyone give in exchange for their soul.” Or this one – “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” Jesus cares about our souls because he knows that our souls are a reflection of God’s image within us. So, are you weary and burdened because you are living in a way that is disconnected from your soul?
Here’s another thing Jesus’ words tell us – we have a bridge between our soul and God. Jesus did not say, “Come to me, and all your troubles will go away.” He said, “Come to me, and I’ll share your life. You won’t be alone anymore.” That’s what he meant when he said, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me…”
A devotional that appeared in Guideposts tells about a young boy named Caleb who was diagnosed with a nervous system disorder that left him for a time with temporary paralysis. You can imagine how Caleb’s parents ached to see their little boy’s slow recovery from this illness.
One day Caleb’s dad came to visit him at school. From a distance, he watched as 5 year old Caleb limped across the playground. Caleb’s father was heartbroken to see other kids playing all around his son, games in which he couldn’t participate.
But then he saw Caleb’s best friend, Tyler, come up beside him. Tyler could have been off with the other kids, running and playing, but he chose to walk slowly alongside Caleb for the rest of recess.(5)
Tyler didn’t take away Caleb’s burdens. He simply walked beside him in his weakness. Jesus does the same thing for us, and having that love and power freely available to us makes any burden easier to bear. “Take my yoke upon you…”
We have a soul and we have a Savior. Jesus also says to us, we have a solution for our weariness and burdens.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, 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.”
There is a woman named Rose who has experienced unbelievable stress in her life – stress that should put our anxieties into perspective. Rose is a woman in Rwanda who lost most of her family to the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. This was a horrible conflict in which Hutu citizens of Rwanda murdered more than 800,000 Tutsi citizens in about 100 days. But Rose and her two daughters survived the attacks. When asked how she dealt with the shock and grief of witnessing such carnage, she says, “For this, I have Jesus.”
Rose adopted two children who were orphaned in the attacks, and now she supports he family by translating Christian pamphlets into the local language and organizing an annual conference for widows. She has been asked what inspires her, what keeps her going in the face of such loss? And one more time she says, “For this, I have Jesus.”(6)
“Come to me, all you are weary and burdened, 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.”
For this, we have Jesus. May God be praised. Amen.
1. Dynamic Preaching, Vol. XXXVI, No. 3, p3
2. Ibid… p3-4
3. Ibid… p4
4. Ibid… p5
5. Ibid…p6
6. Ibid…p7
