Come To Me

7th Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 9

Matthew 11:25-30

"Come to Me"

25 ¶ At that time Jesus declared, "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes;

26 yea, Father, for such was thy gracious will.

27 All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

Grace and peace to you from our Lord and Savior, Jesus who is the Christ. Amen

This morning I would like to call your attention to the last two verses of our gospel lesson where Jesus says,

28 "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls .

29* Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

30* For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." "RSV

In a "Peanuts" column, Lucy is running after Charlie Brown. shouting: "I’ll get you, Charlie Brown! I’ll get you. I’ll knock your block off ! I’ll.....

Suddenly Charlie Brown stops dead in his tracks, turns around and confronts her, and says: "Wait a minute!! Hold everything! We can’t carry on like this, We have no right to act this way. The world is filled with problems, people hurting other people. Now if we, as children, can’t solve our relatively, minor problems, how can we ever expect to......

and at that moment WHOP!! Lucy give him one, and he goes head over breakfast and flat on the ground. She turns to her girlfriend and says’: "I had to do that, because he was getting to my conscience."

A story told by the late Pastor Valbracht.

"Years ago, when our older son was 6 years old, my wife, Lois, found him standing on a stool looking at himself in the bathroom mirror. There were great tears rolling down his cheeks She, of course, alarmed, asked,"What’s wrong?" What’s the matter? Why are you crying?"

And he sobbingly cried: "I just don’t like the way I turned out. "

Those two stories, I just told you, help to underscore the point of our gospel lesson this morning. That point being, no matter who we are, how we view ourselves, or whether we are like Lucy, full of anger, Jesus wants us to come to him.

The key phrase of our lesson says: "Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle an lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

In this day and age when it seems all of us have some sort of burden to bear, some sort of troubles and problems to carry with us, this text brings us some assurance that we are not alone with these burdens. There are many of us who face the burden of bodies that don’t do exactly what we want them to do. Others face the prospect of living life alone after the death of a loved one, the burden of coping with this world all alone can be a very large one to bear. Still others have the burden of broken relationships with either their children, their spouses or their relatives. Still others face the burden of making choices in this world. Wondering what they will do with their lives, wondering when they do make a decision if it is the right one. There are other kinds of burdens we face, burdens of sin, or temptation, burdens of guilt, burdens of conflicting loyalties, burdens of providing for our families, this life is filled with stress, with cares, with worries, with situations that call for us to make choices that sometimes are not pleasant to make.

Jesus is saying in our language, come to me all who who are struggling with life in any way and those of you who have burdens that you cannot carry alone, and I will help you with your struggles. Jesus knew that all people have a difficult path to follow in life. Life is not easy because we live in a world that is filled with sin. Sin makes life difficult for us because it has put into our world all those things that God would have kept from us because he knew these things would make life difficult. But we want to be like God, to know what he knows, so now we have to know all the ways in which life will make us carry burdens, will load us down with problems, with guilt, with broken relationships, with not so perfect bodies, and a whole host of other things.