Daily Reading for July 6 • The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
This morning’s reading contains one of the great consolation passages of all time. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden,” Jesus says, “and I will give you rest.” It is a passage you can find etched on tombstones or worked into stained glass windows or maybe even stitched in needlepoint and hung in the church parlor. . . .
Human beings have a perverse way of turning Jesus’ easy yoke into a hard one again, by driving ourselves to do, do, do more and whipping ourselves to be, be, be, be more when all God has ever asked is that we belong to him. That comes first; everything else follows that, but we so often get the order reversed. We think there are all kinds of requirements to be met first, all kinds of rules to follow, all kinds of burdens to bear, so that we are not yet free to belong to God. We are still loaded down, not only by our jobs and our families and all our other responsibilities but by something deeper down in us, something that keeps telling us we must do more, be better, try harder, prove ourselves more worthy that other human beings or we will never earn God’s love. It is the most tiring work in the world, and it is never done.
One September a couple of years ago, I had more to do than any one person could do, and it was my own fault. I was not very good at saying, “No.” I liked being needed and I liked being liked and carrying a heavy load seemed like the best way to get to be both of those. Carrying it alone worked even better, because I did not have to share the rewards of my labor with anyone else. While I would not have admitted it at the time and I do not like admitting it now, I somehow had the idea that God expected more of me than of other people and that I could not let God down.
So I worked a couple of sixty hour weeks in a row and told myself that I could rest as soon as I got it all done. I did not sleep well and my back began to hurt but I pressed on, until one morning an unexpected thing happened: I could not get out of bed. The muscles in my back had gone on strike, and I could not move. . . . I lay for the next week, my list of things to do gathering dust on the bureau, my appointment book lying neglected on the bed. At first it drove me crazy to look at them but slowly, as the week wore on, they lost their power over me. . . .
It was an easy time that I remember now quite fondly. It was an easy yoke, but not one I would voluntarily have chosen. I thought that the way to find rest for my soul was to finish my list of things to do and present it to God like a full book of savings stamps, but as it turned out that was not the ticket at all. The way to find rest for our souls is simply to stop, to lay down our list of things to do and be, the heavy yokes we have designed for ourselves, and to accept the lighter ones God has made for us instead.
From “The Open Yoke” in The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons from the Episcopal Series of the Protestant Radio Hour by Barbara Brown Taylor (Forward Movement Publications, 1990).