Carrying (and Sharing) our Burdens

 

Rev. Molly F. James, PhD

DFMS Noonday Prayer via Zoom

Anselm of Canterbury, April 21, 2021

May God’s Word be spoken. May God’s Word be heard. May that point us to the living Word who is Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

“‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” 

Anyone else breathing a little more deeply after hearing those lines from Matthew? I am weary. We are all carrying heavy burdens. Sometimes I think more than we even realize. I was reflecting a bit on this past year, and the image came to mind of walking with a heavy backpack. I certainly feel like I am. And in some ways I feel like I have only begun to realize what it is that I am carrying. So much grief over all that we have lost in the last year - lost lives, lost opportunities. The fear and anxiety of rising case numbers. Another mass shooting in a grocery store. What will the aftermath be of the guilty verdict in the Chauvin case? And the knowledge that no matter what happens in the days ahead we still have so much work ahead of us to undo the systemic realities of oppression in our nation and our society. 

And while we may share many of these burdens, we each have our own. Burdens particular to our circumstances, our family or community. Burdens we carry because of race, gender, sexual orientation, or another category society has placed upon us. Those burdens may weigh on us in different ways at different times. Even though I think Atticus and Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird were on to something, we cannot fully know what it is like to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. We cannot fully know each other’s burdens. 

But here’s what we can know. We ALL have them. We are ALL carrying them. No matter how peaceful someone may seem on the outside. No matter how “all figured out” or “put together” they may seem, the burdens are there. So there is our first invitation of the day, an invitation to compassion, for ourselves and for others. We don’t need to beat ourselves up about the burdens. We don’t need to get trapped in a cycle of comparison about who has more or whose are heavier. Let’s just stipulate that everyone’s got them, and we are all weary.

So, I think oh good, thank you Jesus, we are going to get to rest. But then we keep reading in Matthew, and out comes my argumentative self. What? Jesus, you just promised rest, but now you are talking about yokes, and learning, and more burdens. Did you miss the part about how we are weary? And by weary, we mean bone tired, exhausted, sacred, anxious, worried, and all the rest of it. 

Then I pause. I breathe. I think. Would the Jesus I know really say, “Oh I see you are carrying a lot of burdens there. Here let me give you some more stuff to carry.” No. That doesn’t actually sound like Jesus. Could I imagine Jesus saying, “Oh, I see you are carrying a lot of burdens. How about we take that backpack off and look through them together and see what we can put down?” That I could imagine. 

So, my friends, there is our second invitation. An invitation to learning, an invitation to lay some burdens down or to ask for help carrying whatever it is that has to stay in the backpack. 

I hope that for many of us there has been a gift buried in all the challenges of the past year; it is the gift that comes with being confronted with the fragility of life. The gift of having our priorities clarified. The gift of being able to see and know with certainty what really matters in life. We can indeed lay some burdens down. We can let go of those things that no longer serve us. We can let go of those things that have been barriers to connection, barriers to a deeper relationship with God and with each other. If this year has shown us nothing else, it has shown us the primacy of community, of connection, of belonging. 

So, in this week, in this Easter season, I invite you to take some time in your prayers to unpack whatever it is you are carrying. To see if you might lay some of it down. And then to ask for help, from Jesus, from those who are beloved to you, to pick up whatever it is that you need to keep carrying. We may not be able to fully understand the particularities of each other’s burdens, but we can certainly bear them. We can carry them together. And I trust, my friends, that as we move forward together sharing the load and leaving some behind, we will no longer be quite so weary. We will be energized with hope and possibility for the future. Amen.