“Where Is the Lightness?”

Reverend Thomas G. Steffen

St. Peter’s United Methodist Church

6 July 2008

One hot summer afternoon a man by the name of Garret Keizer was at a friend’s house when a neighbor drove her car into the yard. The woman, catching her breath between every few words, said that her two little boys were missing and that she feared they had wandered into the woods. Keizer and his friend took off running up the lane to the woman’s house and then fanned out among the trees. They searched for about half an hour.

Meanwhile, the two boys and their dog meandered back home. Later the mother thanked Keizer and his friend, and they went back to their barbecue. Keizer wrote this about the incident: “What makes this so memorable for me is the sensation of supernatural lightness that I felt running through the woods. The terrain was rough, the temperature hot enough to discourage running, and I was not in the best of shape. Still, I can remember bounding deeper and deeper into the woods with an overwhelming rush of exuberance. I don’t think the sensation can be explained entirely as the result of adrenaline. A part of it had to do with an assurance, rare enough in my life, that nothing I had to do at that moment was more important than helping that mother find her children.”

This story got me thinking about what it feels like to be so present to what one is doing at a given moment that one feels a kind of “lightness.” Keizer described it as a kind of supernatural blessing, as if God was somehow involved in giving him clarity about helping a frantic mother. All this makes sense to me in light of today’s Gospel lesson. Just before the portion that Mia read, St. Matthew tells us that John the Baptizer is in prison and that he sends a group of his followers to ask Jesus a question. They asked if he was the One, the unique messenger of God, for whom Israel had been waiting. And Jesus, in effect, said that he was, which is why his disciples were always eating and drinking all the time. And then Jesus said an amazing thing: “Come to me, all of you who are weary and over-burdened, and I will give you rest. Put on my yoke and learn from me. My yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28f).

As you can see on the screen, a yoke can be a large piece of wood used to bring together two animals. A yoke allows two to work as efficiently as one but with twice the power; a yoke is an instrument of sharing. It is designed to share the load while effectively balancing the power that is needed to complete the task.

But for anyone who knows how Jesus ends up, it is nearly impossible to hear Jesus talk about his “easy yoke” without picturing him bowed beneath his heavy cross, a “yoke” so difficult that he required assistance to carry it to the hill on which he would later die. How was that yoke easy? Where is the lightness in that? The only answer I know is that the lightness is in his love. His love was focused, his concern for others intense, his attention utterly directed to whatever he was doing at any given time. The lightness was in his commitment to establish his Father’s kingdom, a kingdom in which his Father’s love would reign. And he offered his yoke to anyone who would wear it, and with it he offered an unusual lightness, not simply an adrenaline rush, but a supernatural blessing.

And so, the question remains: Will you, will I, wear it? Will we be yoked to the Christ and to each other and to people and programs that need our help, people who want to feel the “doubling effect” of sharing a load?

Now, let’s not romanticize all this. Being yoked with someone, be it a friend or husband, wife, brother or sister, be it the homeless, or group that shares our building with us means that we will have intimate access to the struggle and confusion they experience. To put it crudely, yoking with another can be a pain in the neck and the butt; let’s be honest about all this. But not only the struggle! We will have intimate access to the joy and the excitement the other person is experiencing! Being yoked with the Spirit and others means embracing another life, nothing less than that. Yoking with another is the opposite of running away to live in private; it means to be balanced by and with another, whose shoulder you feel pushing against the plough of life. And we feel the lightness, the lift, the support, and the solidarity.

Before Dean Snyder was appointed to Foundry UMC in our nation’s capital, he served somewhere in Philadelphia and has confessed that several years into his ministry he felt a heaviness and depression that nearly prompted him to leave the ministry. He got into the habit of taking long walks after meetings and services, and one day heard the sound of jazz music coming from a store on a busy street. Lured over to it, he stopped and discovered that it was a store-front Pentecostal church.

A man came up to him and invited him in, but Snyder said, “I’m not dressed for church,” and the man replied: “God doesn’t care how you are dressed.” Snyder went in, sat through the whole service and when the preacher invited people to the altar for prayer, Snyder went forward. The preacher said, “Do you want me to pray with you?” and Snyder said “Yes.”

“When the preacher put his hands on my head,” writes Snyder, “He put them around the side of my head just above my ears….He held the weight of my head in his hands. He cradled my head and took the weight of my head off my shoulders. And then he prayed something like: ‘Dear Lord, I don’t know this young man, but I know he is a child of thine. I don’t know what he is carrying, but I know there is no burden too heavy for you to bear.’ When he finished, I thanked him, got up and gave the usher the bills in my wallet for the offering and walked out of the church.”

“You know, in a way,” Snyder continues, “nothing really changed that night….but in another way, everything had changed. Everything had changed. Since that night, there have been times when I have felt discouraged and alone, but I’ve always been able to feel the memory of that old Pentecostal preacher cradling the weight of my head in his hands.”

The lightness was in his love, I suspect.

I like that story. What about you?

This sermon is dedicated to my loving wife, Juli, who is an agent of Grace that has lifted and cradled me for 30 years. My thanks to Reva Allington, a friend and a member of St. Peter’s UMC, who edits my sermons.