PARISH WEEKEND AWAY 26th -28th June - ASHBURNHAM SERMONS
The fourth and final sermon from our guest speaker, Andrew Rumsey:
COME TO ME
Matthew 11:16-19; 25-30
Just recently, I was strolling past Thresher’s Off Licence in Crystal Palace, as two delivery men were unloading a pallet piled six feet high with cases of wine and corseted with shrink wrap. They’d managed to haul it off the pavement with their pallet trolley – you know the things…explain... But the load had been badly stacked and was listing precariously. As it began to topple, they hurried round, trying to kind of hug it upright, like a glassy-eyed companion.
Sensing the call to assist, I sped over to offer a reassuring presence or see if anyone needed a pastoral chat. It seemed not, so I joined them in their doomed attempt to hold up the leaning tower of Pinot Noir. Several others gamely did the same, but we all got glued in the same dilemma, where we couldn’t push the straining boxes back but, equally, daren’t let them go. So we simply stood there, wheezing, in what you would have to call a stalemate, or an impasse.
Presently, a passer-by sidled up and, with the wisdom of experience, said, ‘lads, it’s not going to work - you’ve just got to let her fall’. He was right, of course. However reluctant we were to admit it, our tipsy cargo needed to collapse. So, on the count of three, we dove out of the way, and the bottles, sensing their moment had come, tumbled and shattered, spilling the wine like blood into the gutter.
By the time of Jesus, the Jewish law – the law of Moses – had become an impossible teetering burden on those who tried to follow God.
Read Luke 11v46.
They didn’t have pallet trolleys, but they had yokes, those heavy wooden beams laid on the shoulders of oxen or men and women, to enable them to carry their load. And in Galatians 5 Paul calls this legal burden a yoke of slavery – as if God’s people are stuck in the street trying to hold up an impossible load that sooner or later is destined to fall. Try as they might to live a righteous life, they were trapped, one way or another, by its cumbersome demands. Paul, who, as a former Pharisee, was in a position to know, despaired of ever being able to carry this ‘yoke of slavery’. ‘I can will what is right’, he wrote to the Romans with disarming frankness, ‘but I can’t do it’.
I love the honesty and the realism of this passage. Some people say it is describing the dilemma of the person before they come to Christian faith, but I don’t. I think this is exactly how it is all the way along!
And as we come to our final session we are inevitably brought back to where we started – with all that prevents us skating as freely as we could, all that stops us resting our full weight on Christ, stops us being fruitful – stops us doing all that we could, all that we should be for God.
‘Inside each of us there is a tangled knot of fear, laziness and pride’ (John V Taylor) and we are held back by it. There is a crack or a hole in the centre of our life that runs through the rest of everything we try to do.
Make hole and tear out of diagram.
The sheer battle to be righteous without the grace of God can be seen everywhere in the present time, not least by environmentalists. My Father-in-law and his wife – Green Party – you can never do enough – can never make the grade, how to deal with guilt... (Socialism faced the same issue).
Very often, without any way of redeeming human weakness, you fall back on idealism. (My favourite example of this has to be the ill-fated Cambridge Green Bike scheme of the early nineties…)
And then into our dilemma come John the Baptist and Jesus, with a radical and outrageous challenge to this dilemma. John calls everyone – religious or not, righteous or unrighteous, to repent in the river – to mourn for the almighty mess that they’d got themselves into. For not bringing shalom to the earth, for not being holy as God was holy.
And Jesus teaches about God’s rescue, not among the religious and the righteous, but among the very people who, if you like, have let the leaning load crash to the floor. Those who have given up the fight to be righteous – the drunkards and the prostitutes and so on.
Read Matt 11:16-19
Now it’s not easy to see who the children here are meant to represent, but most scholars think Jesus is describing himself and John: John as the mourner with his solemn message repentance, and Jesus as the musician, who seemed keen to speak of God’s kingdom as if it were a wedding feast, and mixed with those who didn’t know when to stop. Read v19. Interestingly, a ‘glutton and a drunkard’ is a term used in the book of Deuteronomy (21v20) for a rebellious son – one who deserves to be stoned to death. Their accusation against Jesus is not just a complaint about the company he keeps, but it’s a capital charge against him, as someone who deserves the full penalty of the law to be laid on him.
No matter the allegations against him, wisdom, says Jesus is vindicated by her deeds. Wisdom, you might remember, was one of the main ways the Old Testament used to describe God’s revelation in the world. In the deeds of Jesus, God is truly revealing himself to the world. Which is what Jesus goes on to explain in the second section of our reading – verses 25-30 – read v27.
As the one who reveals God to people, Jesus those to come to him who are weary of their heavy burden.
And in this we may include not only those straining to hold up the toppling load of the Jewish law, but all who struggle with living in an imperfect and sinful world. It includes all those who struggle with the dilemma that Paul so perfectly describes in our Epistle reading - the inner conflict between good and evil, which is nearly as old as creation, and doesn’t stop when you become a Christian, let me tell you. In some ways it becomes much harder.
In which case, the question has to be asked: how is Jesus’ yoke light and easy? If his yoke and ours is the cross, how is that light and easy? If I’m honest, this is a question I struggle with whenever I read this wonderful passage.
Group work – 15 mins
In what ways is our church’s calling and mission held back by our own fears or problems?
How is the yoke of Christ easy and his burden light?
Feedback
But if we are to understand it, we have to consider 2 things – the burden to be carried, and the yoke we use to carry that burden. The cases of wine, and the pallet trolley, if you like.
Firstly because he lightens the burden to be carried. Not unlike the wise workman on Westow Hill, he looks at the creaking tower of wine and says, in effect, this lot isn’t going to stay up – you’ve got to let it go. This is pretty much what Jesus is getting at when he talks about destroying the temple – remember the disciples walking round, looking at the huge stones and Jesus says, like a wise workman: ‘this is going to have to come down’.
Instead of shoring up a leaning tower, Jesus speaks of a new Temple, his own body – direct and personal contact with God. If you want God’s Sabbath rest, don’t go to the Temple, come to me. Come to me. And if you want to learn how to live God’s way, love him with all that you’ve got and love your neighbour as yourself. Do these and you will live. So in this sense, Jesus’ yoke – the law of love - is a perfect fit for human beings created in God’s image. It’s simple – a child could do it.
Secondly, his yoke is easy precisely because it is his yoke, not ours. It’s made with the strong oak of his righteousness, rather than the woodwormy chipboard of our own. His is a yoke that is strong enough both to meet the demands of God’s law and bear the weight of our failure to do so.
This is what Paul is driving at in Romans 7 – he is saying effectively I know what’s right, but I can’t do it – who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
For Jesus does what we cannot – lives a righteous life – and then gives us his righteousness, his yoke. Not only that, but he pays the penalty for living an unrighteous life – he becomes the rebellious son – the glutton and the drunkard - who bears the penalty of the law, and he accepts that death – our death. The impossible burden of our sin is laid on him, and his light burden of righteousness is laid on us.
It’s as if someone had come up to us in the street wheeling an empty trolley and said – ‘leave this lot with me, lads - you take my trolley instead’. (Pause) ‘But Lord, if six of us can’t hold up this lot, you’re not going to manage on your own’ ‘Leave it with me. It’s got to fall. Let it fall on me’. And the wine topples and shatters and spills like blood into the gutter.
Each of us carries a yoke – each of us has a way of trying to haul around what needs to be hauled around. And each of us has a choice – to take on Jesus’ yoke, which brings rest for our souls - or take on some other yoke, which does not.
Your burden may be one of responsibility for someone else – a loved one or an unloved one, the burden of a heavy workload, the burden of past mistakes that you drag around with you like Marley’s heavy chains. It may be the burden of ill health or depression, or addiction. Each of our burdens is personal and private and particular to us. But be encouraged that we all bear one and we must all choose whose yoke we use to carry it.
If we place Christ and his righteousness at the centre of our lives, in the bull’s eye of our target, the very holes and tears in our lives (chart), the weak points, become the means of his grace. Because they become the places where we learn to depend on him.
The places where the handrail disappears are the places where we learn to rest our full weight on him, and find that he bears us up.
Leonard Cohen:
‘Forget your perfect offering; ring the bell that still can ring: there’s a crack- a crack! In everything That’s where the light gets in’
Christians believe that, in Christ, the old creation is remade – this is what we call resurrection. Paul names Christ ‘the new Adam’ precisely because he repairs what Adam undid. If any one is in Christ, writes Paul to the Corinthians, there is a new creation! NIV reduces the meaning to ‘he is a new creation’; the Greek says effectively if anyone is in Christ – dash) new creation!
By resting our weight, not on our own achievements but on his, by first answering his call ‘come and see’, ‘follow me!’ we discover our true calling. By embarking upon the adventure of faith in Christ, we simultaneously embark upon the journey of self-discovery.
God’s good purpose for the world is that each of his children reflects his image and becomes all that they were created to be – and this is fulfilled in Christ, who offers himself on our behalf – to bear what we cannot.
Pray/sing
COME TO ME
Matthew 11:16-19; 25-30
Just recently, I was strolling past Thresher’s Off Licence in Crystal Palace, as two delivery men were unloading a pallet piled six feet high with cases of wine and corseted with shrink wrap. They’d managed to haul it off the pavement with their pallet trolley – you know the things…explain... But the load had been badly stacked and was listing precariously. As it began to topple, they hurried round, trying to kind of hug it upright, like a glassy-eyed companion.
Sensing the call to assist, I sped over to offer a reassuring presence or see if anyone needed a pastoral chat. It seemed not, so I joined them in their doomed attempt to hold up the leaning tower of Pinot Noir. Several others gamely did the same, but we all got glued in the same dilemma, where we couldn’t push the straining boxes back but, equally, daren’t let them go. So we simply stood there, wheezing, in what you would have to call a stalemate, or an impasse.
Presently, a passer-by sidled up and, with the wisdom of experience, said, ‘lads, it’s not going to work - you’ve just got to let her fall’. He was right, of course. However reluctant we were to admit it, our tipsy cargo needed to collapse. So, on the count of three, we dove out of the way, and the bottles, sensing their moment had come, tumbled and shattered, spilling the wine like blood into the gutter.
By the time of Jesus, the Jewish law – the law of Moses – had become an impossible teetering burden on those who tried to follow God.
Read Luke 11v46.
They didn’t have pallet trolleys, but they had yokes, those heavy wooden beams laid on the shoulders of oxen or men and women, to enable them to carry their load. And in Galatians 5 Paul calls this legal burden a yoke of slavery – as if God’s people are stuck in the street trying to hold up an impossible load that sooner or later is destined to fall. Try as they might to live a righteous life, they were trapped, one way or another, by its cumbersome demands. Paul, who, as a former Pharisee, was in a position to know, despaired of ever being able to carry this ‘yoke of slavery’. ‘I can will what is right’, he wrote to the Romans with disarming frankness, ‘but I can’t do it’.
I love the honesty and the realism of this passage. Some people say it is describing the dilemma of the person before they come to Christian faith, but I don’t. I think this is exactly how it is all the way along!
And as we come to our final session we are inevitably brought back to where we started – with all that prevents us skating as freely as we could, all that stops us resting our full weight on Christ, stops us being fruitful – stops us doing all that we could, all that we should be for God.
‘Inside each of us there is a tangled knot of fear, laziness and pride’ (John V Taylor) and we are held back by it. There is a crack or a hole in the centre of our life that runs through the rest of everything we try to do.
Make hole and tear out of diagram.
The sheer battle to be righteous without the grace of God can be seen everywhere in the present time, not least by environmentalists. My Father-in-law and his wife – Green Party – you can never do enough – can never make the grade, how to deal with guilt... (Socialism faced the same issue).
Very often, without any way of redeeming human weakness, you fall back on idealism. (My favourite example of this has to be the ill-fated Cambridge Green Bike scheme of the early nineties…)
And then into our dilemma come John the Baptist and Jesus, with a radical and outrageous challenge to this dilemma. John calls everyone – religious or not, righteous or unrighteous, to repent in the river – to mourn for the almighty mess that they’d got themselves into. For not bringing shalom to the earth, for not being holy as God was holy.
And Jesus teaches about God’s rescue, not among the religious and the righteous, but among the very people who, if you like, have let the leaning load crash to the floor. Those who have given up the fight to be righteous – the drunkards and the prostitutes and so on.
Read Matt 11:16-19
Now it’s not easy to see who the children here are meant to represent, but most scholars think Jesus is describing himself and John: John as the mourner with his solemn message repentance, and Jesus as the musician, who seemed keen to speak of God’s kingdom as if it were a wedding feast, and mixed with those who didn’t know when to stop. Read v19. Interestingly, a ‘glutton and a drunkard’ is a term used in the book of Deuteronomy (21v20) for a rebellious son – one who deserves to be stoned to death. Their accusation against Jesus is not just a complaint about the company he keeps, but it’s a capital charge against him, as someone who deserves the full penalty of the law to be laid on him.
No matter the allegations against him, wisdom, says Jesus is vindicated by her deeds. Wisdom, you might remember, was one of the main ways the Old Testament used to describe God’s revelation in the world. In the deeds of Jesus, God is truly revealing himself to the world. Which is what Jesus goes on to explain in the second section of our reading – verses 25-30 – read v27.
As the one who reveals God to people, Jesus those to come to him who are weary of their heavy burden.
And in this we may include not only those straining to hold up the toppling load of the Jewish law, but all who struggle with living in an imperfect and sinful world. It includes all those who struggle with the dilemma that Paul so perfectly describes in our Epistle reading - the inner conflict between good and evil, which is nearly as old as creation, and doesn’t stop when you become a Christian, let me tell you. In some ways it becomes much harder.
In which case, the question has to be asked: how is Jesus’ yoke light and easy? If his yoke and ours is the cross, how is that light and easy? If I’m honest, this is a question I struggle with whenever I read this wonderful passage.
Group work – 15 mins
In what ways is our church’s calling and mission held back by our own fears or problems?
How is the yoke of Christ easy and his burden light?
Feedback
But if we are to understand it, we have to consider 2 things – the burden to be carried, and the yoke we use to carry that burden. The cases of wine, and the pallet trolley, if you like.
Firstly because he lightens the burden to be carried. Not unlike the wise workman on Westow Hill, he looks at the creaking tower of wine and says, in effect, this lot isn’t going to stay up – you’ve got to let it go. This is pretty much what Jesus is getting at when he talks about destroying the temple – remember the disciples walking round, looking at the huge stones and Jesus says, like a wise workman: ‘this is going to have to come down’.
Instead of shoring up a leaning tower, Jesus speaks of a new Temple, his own body – direct and personal contact with God. If you want God’s Sabbath rest, don’t go to the Temple, come to me. Come to me. And if you want to learn how to live God’s way, love him with all that you’ve got and love your neighbour as yourself. Do these and you will live. So in this sense, Jesus’ yoke – the law of love - is a perfect fit for human beings created in God’s image. It’s simple – a child could do it.
Secondly, his yoke is easy precisely because it is his yoke, not ours. It’s made with the strong oak of his righteousness, rather than the woodwormy chipboard of our own. His is a yoke that is strong enough both to meet the demands of God’s law and bear the weight of our failure to do so.
This is what Paul is driving at in Romans 7 – he is saying effectively I know what’s right, but I can’t do it – who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
For Jesus does what we cannot – lives a righteous life – and then gives us his righteousness, his yoke. Not only that, but he pays the penalty for living an unrighteous life – he becomes the rebellious son – the glutton and the drunkard - who bears the penalty of the law, and he accepts that death – our death. The impossible burden of our sin is laid on him, and his light burden of righteousness is laid on us.
It’s as if someone had come up to us in the street wheeling an empty trolley and said – ‘leave this lot with me, lads - you take my trolley instead’. (Pause) ‘But Lord, if six of us can’t hold up this lot, you’re not going to manage on your own’ ‘Leave it with me. It’s got to fall. Let it fall on me’. And the wine topples and shatters and spills like blood into the gutter.
Each of us carries a yoke – each of us has a way of trying to haul around what needs to be hauled around. And each of us has a choice – to take on Jesus’ yoke, which brings rest for our souls - or take on some other yoke, which does not.
Your burden may be one of responsibility for someone else – a loved one or an unloved one, the burden of a heavy workload, the burden of past mistakes that you drag around with you like Marley’s heavy chains. It may be the burden of ill health or depression, or addiction. Each of our burdens is personal and private and particular to us. But be encouraged that we all bear one and we must all choose whose yoke we use to carry it.
If we place Christ and his righteousness at the centre of our lives, in the bull’s eye of our target, the very holes and tears in our lives (chart), the weak points, become the means of his grace. Because they become the places where we learn to depend on him.
The places where the handrail disappears are the places where we learn to rest our full weight on him, and find that he bears us up.
Leonard Cohen:
‘Forget your perfect offering; ring the bell that still can ring: there’s a crack- a crack! In everything That’s where the light gets in’
Christians believe that, in Christ, the old creation is remade – this is what we call resurrection. Paul names Christ ‘the new Adam’ precisely because he repairs what Adam undid. If any one is in Christ, writes Paul to the Corinthians, there is a new creation! NIV reduces the meaning to ‘he is a new creation’; the Greek says effectively if anyone is in Christ – dash) new creation!
By resting our weight, not on our own achievements but on his, by first answering his call ‘come and see’, ‘follow me!’ we discover our true calling. By embarking upon the adventure of faith in Christ, we simultaneously embark upon the journey of self-discovery.
God’s good purpose for the world is that each of his children reflects his image and becomes all that they were created to be – and this is fulfilled in Christ, who offers himself on our behalf – to bear what we cannot.
Pray/sing
posted by Parish Administrator at 12:32 pm
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