“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.”
This is possibly my favorite passage in all of the New Testament. One reason being that it reminds me that Jesus Christ calls me to rest in his company, something that a person like me—who is inclined to be busy all the time—needs to hear frequently.
Part of my busy-ness comes from my joy in serving you. Serving you this Sunday—thank you for making me welcome—but please know that I am available to you all of the time. In your bulletins you’ll notice my long job title, which includes supporting our diocesan ministries for growing in Christian faith. This includes ministries with families and young people, oversight of our camps and campus ministries, and generally trying to make sure that Episcopalians have the resources and programs they need to deepen their Christian faith.
I came by all this honestly. I am committed to Christian formation because of my own experience as young adult convert from an entirely atheist background. I had an encounter with God—in an Episcopal Church, no less—and in my bones I knew that I was yoked to the one who was manifest in the sacrament. I had no idea what that meant, though. So as I’ve learned the faith, its been my privilege to bring others along.
And maybe its just as well that I didn’t know what being yoked with Christ meant, because the yoke is a complex symbol. People in Jesus’ time would have readily understood it as an instrument of oppression and subjugation. Beasts of burden were yoked, and so were prisoners of war and slaves. But if you read our sacred scriptures carefully, you’ll also occasionally recognize the yoke used as a metaphor for faithfulness, especially to Torah. As in, for example, the deuterocanonical Book of Sirach, “Put your neck under her yoke,” referring to a personified Wisdom—“and let your souls receive instruction.”
To be yoked as a follower of Jesus is find our freedom in being bound, albeit bound to goodness and kindness, which may be a better translation for the word our bible translates as easy. To take this kind of yoke upon oneself is to be bound to the one in whom God’s reign of justice, mercy, and compassion is breaking into this world. But this should not be news to us because, in fact, the very word “religion” comes from the Latin verb meaning “to bind.”
Which brings me to Francis of Assisi. Patron of our fair city, born into wealthy merchant family in about 1181, Francis famously unburdened himself of his privileges in order to take up another yoke. You probably know some of the wonderful, if apocryphal, stories of his life. Which, after a profound spiritual awakening sometimes in his 20’s, in he gave over to poverty and preaching. Francis was especially known for preaching to all of God’s creatures. Because he was convinced that they, along with us, are full participants in God’s reign. He acted as if we were all yoked together, humans and of God’s creatures.
That’s why I asked that we read the story of Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio. It’s an ancient fable recorded right around the time of Francis’ death, and while we can’t verify that its historical, we know that it’s true in the mythical sense because everyone agreed that it’s the kind of thing that happened when Francis came to town. Aggressors abandoned their hostilities. Adversaries became friends. All God’s creatures dwelt together in peace. And—this is not incidental—they shared the same food.
As Episcopalians, we know it matters that we eat together. In fact, that may be the most basic level at which we in the animal kingdom are yoked. All of us hunger, all of us need to eat. The wolf in the story we heard was legitimately hungry and the people were legitimately scared. All of the characters burdened, you might say, by their respective roles in the ecosystem.
But I’d like to suggest that we can hear this story as a parable of the miracles that occur when we let go of our usual roles and behaviors. The people of Gubbio fed the same wolf they were afraid might well have eaten them. When we take the risk of serving each other—whether we like each other, or even trust each other—old burdens, like fear of the other and perceptions of scarcity, fall away.
You’ve experienced this in the Eucharist, or in your own mealtimes with families and friends. When characters who have reason to be suspicious of each other find common ground over a shared meal, you could say that we have all put on Jesus’ yoke of goodness and kindness.
There’s a lot of hunger out there. For justice, mercy, and compassion. For food shared. For ice, even. This week I have been distressed, as I’m sure you have been, by the images of tens of thousands of walruses seeking rest on Alaskan beaches since they can no longer find ice. We live in a time of radical climate change owing in large part to our human abandonment of the yoke we share with the rest of creation. It’s a scary time, and its easy to be overwhelmed into inaction.
It’s a time like this when Francis’ witness of compassion towards the fearsome thing may be more needed than ever. We too may be called to befriend and feed even that which frightens us the most. Which might be an actual enemy, but might just as well be the paralysis that comes from fear, or our doubts that we can make a difference.
You may have heard that other parable about wolves that sometimes makes the rounds among preachers. An wise elder counsels a young man that humans have within us two wolves. One wolf is good and the other evil, he says, and they are constantly fighting each other. The young man asks the elder “But which wolf will win?” And the elder replies, “The one that you feed.”
I think this is parable is useful, to a point, because it acknowledges the complexity of our human motivations. But the choice between wolves is a little too binary for my taste. I like to imagine that if St. Francis were in this story, he’d want both wolves to be fed. What if we followed his example, and let our compassion for what is perceived to be bad call forth its essential goodness?
I don’t know what this might mean for you; what inner or outer manifestation of wolf might be yours to befriend right now. But what I do know is that God in Jesus shows us the way. Because the metaphor of yoking is not just about our willingness to set down other burdens and to be yoked to Christ as disciples, but also about God’s willingness to be yoked to us—the good and the bad of us—so that we might learn and grow in the image of God.
