'My burden is light' - a reflection at Open Table #lgbtqia+ #comeasyouare
Reflection by Warren Hartley, LGBTQIA+ Ministry Facilitator at St Bride’s on Matthew 11:16-19, 25 to end.
It was a quite a delight to see today’s Gospel reading come around. It is one I’ve reflected on a lot over the past 14 years since I returned to the Christian faith.
Once upon a time it was one of those scripture verses that weighed heavily on me. Why was it that when Jesus says that his burden is light, did I experience what he wanted of me as a weight that was crushing the life out of me. I heard the invitation to ‘come to me all you are weary … and I will give you rest’ but I experienced coming to Jesus as one more person who wanted more from me than I could give. The Jesus I thought I knew was just one more task master telling me I wasn’t good enough. There was no rest or lifting of burdens.
I don’t know exactly where I developed this impression, I guess like most children and young people I absorbed it from my surrounding culture, family, church and teachers. Certainly, becoming aware of my gay sexuality heightened this. How could I come to Jesus, with this ‘sin’ in my heart?
The first part of tonight’s gospel is so amusing. Even back in the early first century, you couldn’t win. If you were like John the Baptist living an ascetic life you’re labelled mad. Jesus who drank wine and enjoyed eating with friends was labelled a ‘glutton and drunkard’.
I now see that the burden I felt was crushing the life out of me wasn’t a burden put upon my by Jesus, but a weight of false expectation from church and culture. ‘Be straight’ and ‘be a ‘real’ man’ were the expectations and I didn’t have a hope in Hades of living up to either of those false idols!
But as Jesus also says ‘thank you Father for hiding these things from the wise and revealing them to infants’. It isn’t through having all this stuff figured out or living up to false idols in which we find our salvation or liberation as individuals or corporately. It is through the simplicity and clarity of a child’s viewpoint.
I remember hosting a barbecue and standing in the kitchen preparing some food when I remarked to no-one in particular ‘now how will I warm this up’. My friend’s 3-year-old heard me, placed her hands on her hips and stated: ‘Well you could always try the microwave!’ She was quite right of course.
Being set free is a regular theme of both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and indeed some scholars contend that wherever the word salvation appears, it could just as readily be translated as liberation.
I think this liberation comes from knowing who we are as individuals, and as a species. The spiritual insight given us in Genesis 1 is that we are made in the very image of God. Both individuals and collectively, every human being. This is echoed throughout the Hebrew Scriptures by the prophets’ calls to justice while some of their rules read odd to us now; it was a history of attempting to set up a society of justice, getting it wrong and trying again.
So what do we do with the truths and insight we come to about ourselves both as members of the human race especially for us as LGBTQIA+ humans?
This isn’t my original quote but ‘The truth will set you free and it will make you odd’. I think that was the point Jesus may have been making through comparing himself and John the Baptist to the expectations of the crowd. Each of them had a profound insight into who they were and lived that out with authenticity and it made them odd, dare I say perhaps even queer in its broadest sense. Yet it didn’t burden them, despite facing persecution and eventual execution.
Well, if the burdens around you are crushing the life out of you, know that they aren’t from God. The message my brain and I often take from church and culture are ‘try harder’ and ‘not good enough’. But as Nadia Bolz-Weber, the wild American Lutheran pastor said last year at Greenbelt ‘Trying harder does not set me free. It makes me tired’
Like all good sermons and reflections, I’m preaching to myself by the way - I’m still on this journey. So I invite you (and me) to stop ‘trying harder’ and rest. Come to Jesus through prayer, meditation, reading and being in community. Learn who you are, giving up the burdens of false expectations as they aren’t of God. This isn’t a magic bullet, but a journey into oddness, a journey into the queerness that is God, ‘whoever tries to keep their life will lose it‘, ‘the first shall be last‘, ‘take up your cross‘ etc.
Jesus also says ‘my yoke is easy’. A yoke is a wooden crosspiece fastened around the neck of two animals as they pull a plough, or cart. This isn’t a particularly attractive image. This feels more like taking back on our slavery or burdens and indeed is used in literature as a metaphor for oppression.
So here is Jesus again queering a concept. He invites us to take on a yoke that is easy. Not to be yoked to oppression. I think what he is getting at here is about joining with others and working together as a community in the task of creating a world of justice and peace. Being yoked makes the job easier. It’s a lot more work for one cow to pull a plough than it is for two together.