July 5 - “Heavy Burdens”

Heavy Burdens

5 July 2026

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Rev. Mary W. Nelson, First Congregational Church UCC, Williamstown, MA

            At this point, we’re familiar with Matthew’s community’s situation: they’re a minority community of Jews living probably in Antioch, in Syria, a big multicultural metropolitan area. The Jewish authorities centered in Jerusalem, an increasingly-dominant sect called the Pharisees, are beginning to insist on very particular rules of observance for Jews, and because of this, Matthew’s community is not really sure that they can think of themselves as Jews anymore—but they’re also not totally sure that they’re ready to commit to following this Jesus guy, either. And in the context of the Roman Empire, both Jews and Christians are persecuted and traumatized minorities. It’s a time of great cultural upheaval in general, which the Roman Empire is trying mightily to subdue.

            One of the enduring questions of the early Church that communities like Matthew’s were also contending with was the role of another prominent street preacher who was operating at the same time that Jesus was: John the Baptist. Who was he? What was his deal? Now as we read the gospel stories, John is (to us) this background character who functions as a kind of foil for Jesus in all four gospels. Different gospels highlight different aspects of the legends that have been told about John: he’s a weirdo ascetic mystic-type wearing a hair shirt and eating bugs and baptizing people in the Jordan River; he’s enough of a threat to the Empire that Herod Antipas happily serves up his head on a silver platter when asked; he’s Jesus’s cousin; he’s a new Elijah the prophet, but also the answer to a prophecy; he has come to “prepare the way” for Jesus. 

All of the gospels downplay this bit, but John was actually a rival to Jesus. In the landscape of first-century Jerusalem, there were a lot of street preachers, and both John and Jesus emerged from the “compelling preachers tournament” with some serious street cred. They’ve definitely progressed to the quarterfinals, at least.

All of the gospels mention John in particular because all of their communities have to respond to someone genuinely asking the question, “But what about this John the Baptist guy? He sounds pretty good, too.” So all of the gospels have to address that question somehow. Didn’t he, like, baptize Jesus? Doesn’t that confer some kind of authority on him that makes him better than Jesus, actually? John was there first, right? So why wouldn’t we just follow the teacher instead of the student?

The response of the gospel writers, for the most part, is to dismiss John somehow—he’s a Far Side cartoon. He’s a kook straight out of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. He eats BUGS, for cryin’ out loud! He and Jesus came to an agreement, a truce. In one of the gospels, John even tells his followers, “that Jesus guy is the real deal, I’m not as good,” and they leave John and go follow Jesus. 

Here, in Matthew, as Jesus is teaching a crowd of people (he’d been talking to the disciples only for a while, but now his audience has grown), he brings up John—it’s a way for Matthew to illustrate the impossible position that his community finds themselves in, caught between the overly-strict rules of the Pharisees in Jerusalem and the cosmopolitan anything-is-possible crossroads-of-the-Empire atmosphere in Antioch. No matter what, Jesus says, somebody’s going to be unhappy with how you choose to worship, how you choose to order your community. Look at John, he didn’t eat or drink and hid himself away, and people said he was demon-possessed; but here I am, eating and drinking and connecting with people, and everyone says I’m a glutton and a drunk, keeping company with the wrong folks! There is no satisfying the people who are determined to be dissatisfied. They’re like children who won’t dance when we play pretend wedding, and won’t cry when we play pretend funeral. 

But then Jesus prays in front of the crowd, and invites them to a place of clarity where they can make up their own minds: don’t worry so much about the rules that other religious leaders want to impose on you for inclusion in their little clubs. It’s a reminder, through this oblique reference to things that are hidden and things that are revealed, that the Kingdom of God is among you. The rules of the power-hungry leaders will always be burdensome by design, but the Kingdom of God is among you, and the rules of the Kingdom are really pretty simple: treat others the way you want to be treated. Put God’s principles first, and let everything else you do extend from that. My yoke is easy and my burden is light. Come into the Kingdom, and find rest from those heavy burdens that they want you to carry. You don’t have to prove yourself to anyone. Come to me, you who are weary, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

It’s the invitation that we also want America to make, right? The promise that we thought was wrapped up in all our rhetoric of liberty: Freedom from the imposition of inscrutable and arbitrary rules that determine identities and belonging. Rest from the hamster wheel that demands proof of loyalty and obedience to a leader or a system. Gentleness and humility that empower the pursuit of happiness, not the pursuit of dominance or adulation.

It’s a helluva time to celebrate the 250th anniversary of an ideal, when it feels like we’re rapidly moving away from living up to it. All week, this invitation from Jesus has played on repeat in my mind, in conversation with the poem by Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus, most readily known as the poem that was added, in part, to the Statue of Liberty in 1903: 

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “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-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

And then to contrast both Jesus’s invitation and Lady Liberty’s invitation with the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling on birthright citizenship, barely hanging on to the protections and promises of the Constitution itself – when anything less than a unanimous decision to uphold the Constitution provides a roadmap to overturning what it means to be an American. Contrast these invitations with the news that a Christian Nationalist neo-Nazi group marched in Washington DC yesterday, waving Confederate flags and chanting their call to “reclaim America.” What is the imagined America these white supremacists want to reclaim?

            America is not, and never has been, a “Christian nation.” We have a foundational law prohibiting the establishment of religion by the government, in fact, and it is one of the greatest protections of that much-vaunted freedom we claim to hold so dear. People of multiple faiths and of no faith, including some from this town, members of this church, fought to bring about the reality of a different kind of governing system here, free from, among other things, the imposition of a state religion. And that system, “of the people, by the people, for the people,” was built on a set of ideals that were debated and contested and strengthened through compromise: Nobody who signed the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago got everything they wanted in that document, they all walked away disappointed somehow. No matter what, somebody’s going to be unhappy with how you choose to order your community, but we live in it and make it what it is together. The system was also built on promises that are compatible with Jesus’s invitation, with Lady Liberty’s invitation. The Kingdom of God is no empire of human kings! And as we celebrate 250 years of those promises still in our sights, it’s hard to know how we might move forward from here as that vision becomes increasingly clouded. That same law prohibiting the establishment of religion does also protect the rights of those neo-Nazis to protest and speak. 

            But we can speak louder our conviction that they are wrong. We can disagree, as Jesus and John did, and know that the arc of the moral universe will bend toward justice in the long run. We can speak louder that invitation of Lady Liberty, to “the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and we can work to make good on the promise of that invitation for those who take us up on it. We can speak the invitation of Jesus, to opt out of the nonsense rules that are designed to exclude, and instead to bear the yoke of gentleness and humility that offers rest for the weary. We can work to make good on that promise, as we offer welcome and rest in our ministry, too. We can decry the raising of false idols, the misuse and corruption of the language of our faith, and refuse to capitulate in the face of Empire’s false claims to power. 

We can live as children of God, heirs of a Kingdom that is already among us, widening the welcome and securing safety for the vulnerable—and we can find rest for our souls, too, in the knowledge that we are doing all we can to be faithful to Christ who invites us to take his yoke upon us, and learn from him. We will not be alone in this effort, thanks be to God. Amen.