* a sermon preached at New Hope Lutheran Church on July 9, 2017 *

Since sermons are primarily intended to be heard, you can listen along here.

Texts for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost:
Romans 7:15-25a + Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

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Please pray with me:

Holy Comforter,
Our lives are full of expectation,
Maybe none more than the expectation we place on ourselves.
Lighten our burdens and ease our demands this morning.
Help us hear your liberating word of grace.
Amen.

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These last 3 verses of our Gospel this morning are read to every Lutheran pastor at their Ordination. It’s read as the stole, one of the marks of the Office of Pastor, is placed on their shoulders.
Usually the pastor kneels while this is happening, and will stand up and be announced after the stole is put on.

And…if you’re Pastor Chris, you’ll get caught up in your alb as you’re trying to stand and nearly fall on your butt, only to be saved by a quickly-placed hand on the floor, trying to make it look as natural and smooth as possible.

Yeah…tell me again about how easy that yoke is and how light that burden is…

Sometimes the call to discipleship can feel like that. It can feel like a really lofty ideal, completely unreachable. And I wonder, what must that do to our own sense of discipleship? Devastating, right?
Why would we willingly follow if the way seems impossible?

Like St. Paul in Romans this morning, you might find that you’re heaping all kinds of guilt upon yourself, trying to live as God has called you to live. It’s one of my favorite lines from Paul, by the way, “The good that I want to do, I do not do, but the evil, that which I do not want to do, is what I do.”
Paul’s giving voice to a really significant inner struggle, I think. Why is it that I keep doing the thing that I don’t want to do—harming others with my words, my actions…living counter to the way God would have me live—rather than the thing I want to do…living according to the path of discipleship God has called me to?

The Reformer, Martin Luther, resonated deeply with this passage from Romans.
Side note: 2017 is the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. We haven’t talked a whole lot about it up to this point, but it is something that is informing my preaching a lot these days. It’s one of the reasons why when we made the changes to our liturgy for the summer, I wanted to be sure that we heard these passages from Romans. For Luther, Paul’s letter to the Romans is one of the clearest articulations of the Gospel. And you’ve heard those themes these past few weeks.
Saved by grace through faith…baptized into Christ, buried into Christ’s death and joined to Christ’s Resurrection…
Luther had many of his own struggles, but these verses from Romans 7 really vexed him. Luther couldn’t figure out why it was that even though he wanted to live out what he felt God was calling him to, he continuously felt like he wasn’t measuring up. He constantly felt like he was falling short.

Maybe you feel that way too. I certainly do.
You may have heard me preach the past few weeks and thought, “There’s no way I can live like that all the time. That’s an impossible task for anyone.”
And if that’s the case, then I hope Jesus’ words this morning are a welcome balm of grace for you.

Look, the call to discipleship is a tough road, let’s be honest. It’s not easy, it doesn’t come naturally to us, and to try and live the kind of life of discipleship that Jesus is talking about will find you, like St. Paul and Martin Luther, at odds within yourself.
Our default posture is not one of giving of ourselves so that others would have.

But just because the task seems tall and the goal seems unreachable, doesn’t mean that there aren’t steps we can take to try and live the type of life that we’re called to.

But…and this part is key, so don’t miss this…we try to follow Jesus in the path of discipleship in full and complete knowledge that we will fall short and we will be in need of God’s grace to help us and cover us and make up for our shortcomings when that happens.
That the grace of God will catch us when we stumble.
And right here, church…this is the incredible gift of the Gospel that makes all the difference in the world.

I was raised in the city, I don’t know much about agriculture or farming, but I learned something about plowing this week. Yokes, like the kind used to link two cows or horses together, are custom-fit pieces. Yokes have to be made to fit precisely, otherwise it can cause serious injury or harm to the animals.
Friends, if Jesus says, “Take my yoke upon yourself,” you have to know that it is fit exactly for you.
The yoke of discipleship is specifically made for you.
And you are created to be a disciple.

The heaviness of the yoke can sometimes feel like the heaviness of the cross of discipleship that we’ve been talking about these past few weeks. But the magnificent gift of grace is that you are not called to carry a cross or a yoke that is ill-fitting. You are called precisely according to the gifts that you have.

We have a baptism this morning at the late service, and as I sat with Milo’s parents, Peter and Brittany, this week, we talked about baptism as being born into a spiritual family…a community of faith…the body of Christ…and that through our baptisms we celebrate and name the various members of that body and the gifts we bring to that community. We had a wonderful discussion about what part of the body each of us might be and why, and then I asked Peter and Brittany my most favorite question to ask whenever I do a baptismal seminar: What member of this body do you hope your child is?
The warmness of hope and possibility that settles over me every single time I ask that question is one of the great gifts I receive as Pastor of this community.

We all bring gifts to this community, church. You have something to give.
Later on, we’ll bless and commission youth that will serve our neighborhood and community as staff during the next 3 weeks of Camp Hope.
We’ll bless and bid farewell to Cheryl and Tom Braaten as they make their way to San Antonio and we celebrate the gift that they’ve been to us these past 34 years.

What about you? What gifts do you bring? What part of this body are you?

You are made to be disciples, dear friends.
The yoke of discipleship is easy and light.
Know that. Trust that.
Most especially when the weight of the world causes you to stumble.