Sermons

Give Me Your Tired…

John Wilkinson	Third Presbyterian Church
July 6, 2008	Matthew 11:25-30

    
This morning’s conversation is framed by two sets of iconic words, words that we might be able to identify even if we did not know the source. The first is a line from a poem, “The New Colossus,” by the nineteenth-century American poet Emma Lazarus:

“Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Sound familiar? “The New Colossus,” describing the Statue of Liberty, appears on a plaque at the base of the statue. They are words that describe the vision of that remarkable symbol standing in the harbor, and, we pray, the country for which it has served as a beacon of welcome and hope.

Give me your tired. And we sense in our very bones wave upon wave of immigrant pouring through the gates of Ellis Island, and all who came before and all who come after, immigrants even now, whose bodies and spirits are tired in some deep way, and who seek the safety and sanctuary that this still-new nation offers.

And then this: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Sound familiar as well? Jesus had called and commissioned his followers, and sent them out. He tells them that their work will be hard, that they will not always be welcome.

He then begins an intenerating tour, traveling from village to village, teaching, preaching. The crowds gather and grow. People like what they are hearing; they are compelled by it. But they are not altogether sure about what they are hearing, or the authority of the one saying all of these things.

So Jesus claims a direct connection to God, that would have seemed audacious and amazing and a little unclear. Why should we listen to you, Jesus, the crowds seem to say. Why? Because I have authority from God, he replies. But is that enough for them? It is not just power with which he speaks, but truth as well. That truth speaks to their needs, their aspirations, and, in turn, ours. It speaks to the internal authority that draws them to him in the first place.

“Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens.” And you sense the crowd drawing just a little closer. I am weary, Jesus. I am tired. My body is weary, but more so, my spirit. I am carrying heavy burdens – my livelihood, my relationships, my deepest doubts and highest yearnings. Heavy burdens, so when you say that you understand, when you gently promise gentleness, when you offer rest for my soul, I will listen. And I will follow.

We must not conflate the two. And we must not confuse the two. But we certainly connect the two. On this Independence Day weekend, we are mindful of our many contexts. And we believe that God is active in all of them. Public and private. Religion and politics. Our lives as citizens and our lives as people of faith.

Just as we cannot compartmentalize the different aspects of who we are, so we cannot compartmentalize the linkages of religion and public life. Last week we reviewed Jon Meachem’s very fine book called American Gospel. Meachem speaks of a balance in American history – what he calls “public religion” – a balance between the proper role of religion in American life and either too much or not enough.

The founders, Meachem says, were not as piously Christian as some would have them to be, but they weren’t as secular as others would have them. That seems about right for us.

It’s a never-ending topic in the body politic:

* The Puritans and Pilgrims, each reflecting religious impulses as they left Britain.
* The faith of the founders – or, rather, the diverse faiths of the founders: Jefferson, who excised portions of the Gospels he didn’t like; Franklin, who rejected the notion of the Trinity; Washington and Adams.
* Lincoln’s deep, unorthodox faith, which led him to church but never membership, and which sought God’s hand in the events of the Civil War but never too casually or too directly claimed that hand’s operation on the side of the North.
* Kennedy’s Catholicism.
* Carter’s born-again faith, an irony in recent American history in that it was rejected politically by the very ones who should have most embraced it theologically.
* Reagan’s frequent use of scripture, including the appropriation of John Winthrop’s “a city on a hill,” which is really an appropriation of biblical language from Isaiah and Jesus himself.
* And now this: fairly juvenile debate about sermons and ministers and church attendance that undermines a deeper national conversation.

Mark Twain, on the cover of Time magazine this week, once said that “one can be a Christian or a patriot, but not legally be a Christian and a patriot -- except in the usual way: one of the two with the mouth, the other with the heart." I am not so sure. If we take Emma Lazarus seriously, we would envision a nation who would – first of all – be having a different kind of debate at the moment about immigration.

But more than that, we would envision a nation that welcomes all those whose lives, whose livelihoods, whose values, are under assault anywhere else in the world. And after having done so, we continue to provide sanctuary for the tired – through education, through safe streets, through economic fairness and opportunity.

And regardless of our national origin, or the citizenship marked on our birth certificate, but perhaps particularly so if it says the United States, and particularly so if we take Jesus’ words seriously, we could envision a faith operating in this national context, that urges our nation to act on its fundamental commitments, and that inside its walls does the very same thing.

If people show up here and the yoke they are carrying is hunger, or homelessness or economic hardship, it is our absolute responsibility to provide relief, short-term and then long-term.

And if people show up here and the yoke they are carrying is spiritual – loneliness, depression, addiction, brokenness of any kind – it is our absolute responsibility to provide relief.

And if it is you or me experiencing such burdens, and we know that we are and we know that we will, then it is our absolute responsibility to be a community of burden-sharers, to reflect Jesus’ humility and gentleness.

Humility and gentleness seem to be in short supply – both in our political life and in our religious one. But they are what the crowds wanted – the crowds who showed up at Ellis Island, the crowds who showed up to overhear Jesus. We must not conflate the two nor confuse the two. But we must connect the two, the mission of a nation and the mission of our faith.

There is, as Martin Marty writes, a difference between “partisanship and discipleship.”

Jon Meachem claims the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. to help us make such a distinction. King did not confuse religion and politics, Meachem would have us understand. But he also understood that Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between public life and organized religion did not mean that religion and politics would have nothing to do with one another. And so King brought his moral force – forged in his Baptist faith – to the most persistent sin in our American story. And by so doing, he made a difference, one that surely reflect the words of the one he was ordained to follow.

Some of you will remember FDR’s “four freedoms” speech, from January of 1941. Freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world. Freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world. (And now we might add, freedom not to worship at all) Freedom from want. Freedom from fear.

It is too easy to say that the political is about the material and the religious is about the spiritual. We know better. And we must be smart enough and sensitive enough not to equate the highest values of this nation – including the independence we celebrate this weekend and all those who struggled to achieve it – with the highest values of our faith.

But life is messy enough and complex enough for us to know that the weariness our neighbors experience and the tiredness we know in our own bones and spirits is not neatly contained or sub-divided. So we reach out wherever we care called, in whatever way we are called, and we receive a comforting embrace from any source that can provide the comfort.

In some moments it will be from the words inscribes on a bronze plaque. In other moments it will be from the words uttered by an itinerant teacher. In every moment, it will be inspired and under girded by the God of earth and altar. Amen.