Scripture Reading: Matthew 11:28-30 "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. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."
Approaching the profound nature of Christian faith through the lens of paradox, anxiety, and personal responsibility is hard and that is what Pastor Emillie preached about today.
She started her sermon reminding us a physical yoke is not light. There is a paradox in Jesus' invitation to us
The words of Jesus ring out to us today, inviting us into a rest that transcends the weariness of this world. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Sitting with this passage, the gentle call of Christ reaches out to us across the ages. But what does this rest truly mean? How can we understand it in the midst of the turmoil, anxiety, and weight that often define our lives?
These are the question Pastor Emillie's sermon reflected on during the service. Jesus’ words do not call us into a state of mere physical rest or relaxation, but rather into a deeper, paradoxical rest—a rest found in surrendering the burdens we carry within our souls.This is not a relation where we just turn off the world and retreat to what gives us pleasure without a concern for the world around us.
Soren Kierkegaard, in his writings, saw in this not just the external burdens of life, such as work or physical exhaustion, but the internal struggles that come with being human. To live is to be burdened with the weight of existence itself: anxiety, doubt, fear, and the overwhelming sense of being alone in a vast, confusing world.
Kierkegaard speaks of this as the "sickness unto death," an inner despair that arises when we lose sight of our relationship with God, or worse, when we seek rest in anything other than God. Our efforts to control our lives, to overcome suffering by our own strength, only lead us deeper into despair. We become like those who labor under a burden too heavy to bear.
Pastor Emillie identified we seek validation, success, and security, yet these things can never provide the lasting rest our souls yearn for. As we try to be superwomen or men, showing everyone we have our lives together and under control we begin to feel weary and unfulfilled.
When Jesus calls, “Come to me,” He invites us into something radically different. Kierkegaard famously described faith as a leap, a movement beyond reason and calculation, into the arms of God. It is not a call to find rest through our own efforts but to embrace a relationship with Christ in which we give up the illusion of control.
But this is no easy task. To come to Christ, we must relinquish the burdens of self-sufficiency. We must surrender the pride that says, "I can handle this on my own." This surrender is not a one-time event but a continual act of trust where we daily resign our deepest desires, our most cherished hopes, into the hands of God, trusting that His plan is greater than our own.
Pastor Emillie gave the congregation a reassuring thought. This is the first time you are encountering the circumstances of your life. She has never been thirty before she became thirty. She cannot be expected to know exactly how to do it. A mother cannot know what it is like to be a mother for the first time, any more than a mother of two knows how to be a mother of two rather than a mother of one.
In this sense, Christ's call to “come” is an invitation into a paradox. To lay down our burdens, we must first acknowledge them. To find rest, we must first feel the full weight of our weariness. When we can recognize our own inadequacy, we are prepared to encounter God’s grace
But what of the rest that Christ offers? Jesus says, “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.” Here, true rest is not found in the absence of all burdens but in bearing the right burden, the yoke of Christ shared by community.
What is this yoke? It is the yoke of faith, the surrender to God’s will, and the willingness to trust in God's love and guidance. While this might seem like another form of labor, it is a labor grounded in grace. Christ’s yoke is “easy” not because it involves no effort, but because it is borne with the strength of God’s Spirit and the community. It is a yoke that unites us to Christ, who walks alongside us, sharing in our trials and lifting our burdens in ways we cannot always understand.
This is the mystery of Christian faith: that in yielding to God’s will, in taking on the burden of faith, we find a peace that surpasses all understanding. The rest Christ offers is a rest for the soul, a peace that comes from knowing we are held in the hands of a loving God, even in the midst of our struggles.
The greatest task of all that we face is to live as individuals in relation to God, to come to Christ not once, but continually, communally through every moment of doubt, fear, and joy. This is where the true rest lies—not in avoidance or distraction, but in the transformative power of faith.
At the end of her sermon, as she held up St. Francis as an example of someone yoked to Christ, Pastor Emillie allowed, a five minute contemplation to focus on those areas of our lives where we truly need rest. She asked us to practice ways of true, profound rest and to be rest assured that we are not alone when we face troubles in our lives.
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