The blessings of dependence

‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.’ I think those might be the most comforting words in all of scripture. I’m always longing for rest, I’m always wishing I could sleep in or take a nap or just lie around. But I suspect it’s not just me that longs for rest of one kind or another, even on this long holiday weekend. Which one of us couldn’t use more rest, wouldn’t rather lay down some burden or another that we have been carrying? Burdens of all kinds, in our relationships, in our to-do lists, in our hearts.

We could probably all list off burdens we are carrying today, at least if we took a moment to get truly honest. I’ll own one - busyness. All the great labor-saving devices of the last century, the technology that was supposed to bring us all leisure time, somehow only made us busier. The dishwasher was supposed to change our lives – think of the advertisements with the smiling happy housewife. An op-ed I recently read pointed out how tech and AI tools, supposedly making our lives easier, only increase the work we have to do. Now we ‘get’ to do our own banking, book our own travel, fill out our forms online before the doctor appointment, checkout and bag our own groceries, diagnose our own maladies – all things we used to rely on other people to do for us. Instead of ending up with more open time, our life has gotten busier – busywork filled in the gaps. ‘Family time’ or ‘date night’ becomes something we have to schedule on the calendar in advance, or it doesn’t happen at all. Coming to church on a Sunday becomes one more morning we have to get up early – unless a sports tournament or other commitments call us elsewhere, of course. Prayer becomes something we mutter quickly on our way out the door, if at all. We are overscheduled, too busy to get to know our neighbors, too busy all around. We need rest.

And we’re burdened in other ways too. We fear things that will probably never come to pass and limit our lives because of it – other people’s negative opinions of us, or random attack, or a possible diagnosis for our symptoms. Some weeks ago another op-ed in the NY Times was literally titled, ‘There’s Something Else We Should Be Worrying About.’ Really? Another thing?

We chew over outrage generated by political media and argue about things as if they’re life and death – how many families were torn apart by the 2016 election and then COVID? Not to mention churches. Some relationships have still not recovered.

We judge ourselves harshly, and others even more harshly – I can’t believe I did that, it’s just like him to say that, of course someone like that would do such a thing, on and on. And so we’re burdened by anger, by worry, by sadness and outrage and just too much on our plates.

The thing is, these burdens don’t always start out being burdens – we’re trying to do a good job at life, in work, in parenting, in social interactions, so we set expectations and put things on our calendars and then wind up with too much to do. We try to be informed, responsible citizens and then get backed into pockets of outrage online. Our efforts to be healthy lead us into hypochondria and anti-aging treatments and ‘maxxing,’ as if we could control it all. 

Paul has an explanation for all of this in the letter to the Romans: ‘I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.’ He points out that the power of sin is so great that it can take our best intentions, our greatest efforts to find life and truth, and turn them against us. I’m reminded of the moving staircases at Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter books: even as you climb up them towards one place, they move and redirect you towards another. And there you suddenly are in the place you didn’t want to get to at all. Paul is talking about something like that: You wanted to find rest, and instead you are more exhausted than ever. You made resolutions to be a better person and wound up too busy or too mad to see your friends or be there for your family. You aren’t where you meant to be. Your picture of how things should be somehow doesn’t match up with what’s really there.

Jesus laments this tendency of ours as well – he talks in the gospel today about how people rejected both John the Baptist and him. People didn’t want someone reminding them of repentance, they wanted to celebrate, so they didn’t like John the Baptist. People didn’t want someone full of freedom and joy, they wanted rules to follow, and so they didn’t like Jesus. It wasn’t that they were out-and-out trying to reject God. It’s just that their picture of the right way to be kept them from accepting God’s way to be. Just like us. We are so full of our own intentions, and so sure of the rightness of our intentions, that we can’t accept something different when it’s offered. Even when it’s just what we need. Like Paul, we cry, ‘Wretched one that I am! Who will rescue me from this??’

And that cry of desperation is often what we have to get to before anything can happen. Wise and intelligent as we are, we hide the truth from ourselves, thinking that if we just try hard enough we can get there on our own. If we just take control of our schedule, if we just focus a little harder, our lives will be how we want them to be. And what Paul writes, and what Jesus says in Matthew’s gospel, is forget it. It is Christ Jesus who sets us free, it is God who does what we cannot do, it is the Spirit who gives life. Let go of your picture of how it has to be. God has a better idea.

Jesus says that the good news is revealed to infants and not the wise – infants, after all, don’t need to be persuaded of their need; they’re dependent and can’t imagine themselves to be otherwise. They don’t carry the burden of ‘how it has to be.’ All through the gospels Jesus makes it clear – the wise, the rich, the intelligent, the educated, they all have the hardest time hearing his message. It’s the poor and outcast who receive it gladly. And that’s hard for us. One writer commented that one of the hardest phrases for Americans to utter is ‘I can’t.’ We want to think we can do everything, we’re trained to think we can, even when we see over and over again that it doesn’t work. Admitting need is a wretched thing, even though in every part of our lives we keep coming up short. From the hectic work schedule to the abandoned prayer life, the basic spiritual problem pervades all. We don’t just need help when the crisis comes – we need it all the time. 

Jesus says, ‘Come…and learn from me.’ Learn from me as teacher, learn Me as the subject. Get reeducated. Learn gentleness and humility of heart; learn to live according to the Spirit and have life and peace. The way of Jesus is a reshaping of every part of ourselves, everything we do in life. It’s not something we can schedule into an hour a week on our calendars; it’s not something we can make happen on our own at all. It is a lifelong learning that leads to a whole change of mind-set, setting our minds on what gives life, accepting God’s free gift of grace. It is a gift freely offered, a rescuing already accomplished – but it does require us to take it in our hands, cooperate with the rescue, follow the one who leads. The yoke is easy and the burden is light. You know that sounds good.

So my prayer for us on this Independence Day weekend is paradoxical, I suppose. It’s that we might embrace our dependence. That we might stop and listen to God’s voice, spoken in scripture, in our community, in the quiet of our own hearts. And that we might let go of how things ‘have to be’ – and find rest in how God would have us be instead. Let go of the control. Take my yoke upon you, Jesus says. You will find rest for your souls.