Love's Light and Easy Offices

For many years, I struggled to understand something that Jesus said and that we often quote as if its meaning were obvious. The statement comes at the end of the eleventh chapter of the gospel of Matthew. Having over the course of several chapters outlined his expectations for his disciples, Jesus adds: “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Given all that has preceded this observation, I often thought to myself: “I’m not so sure. It doesn’t sound that way.”

         Jesus calls us to have faith—and that can prove tough. He asks us to have hope—and that can seem challenging. And, most importantly, he beckons us to a life of love, compassion, and forgiveness—and that can feel almost impossible. How did I miss the light and easy part?

         Compliance with the law of love seems like a particularly daunting prospect. Make no mistake about it, though: Jesus views it as a law. In the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus declares: “A new commandment I give unto you—love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” In Latin, the “new commandment” was rendered “mandatum novum,” a corruption of which gives us “Maundy Thursday,” the day of Holy Week when Jesus spoke these words to his disciples.

         What that law commands may look like a heavy lift. It tells us to love everyone, to have compassion toward everyone, to forgive everyone. Even, indeed especially, our enemies. Even, indeed especially, when we have to sacrifice to do it. Even, indeed especially, when no one showers us with praise and prizes for being such wonderful human beings.

         Love often looks like that—difficult, tedious, burdensome, unappreciated. The poet Robert Hayden gets at this truth perfectly in his beautiful work “Those Winter Sundays”:

         Sundays too my father got up early

         and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

         then with cracked hands that ached

         from labor in the weekday weather made

         banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

         I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

         When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

         and slowly I would rise and dress,

         fearing the chronic angers of that house,

         Speaking indifferently to him,

         Who had driven out the cold

         and polished my good shoes as well.

         What did I know, what did I know

         of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Hayden’s poem gets at love’s central credential: we do it for someone else, and not for ourselves, or for thanks, or for recognition, or for anything else. We give it away “freely,” in every sense of that word—willingly, generously, and with no implicit price tag attached.

Beautiful? Yes. Moving? Absolutely. Light and easy? We might wonder.

As we enter into the doing of it, though, we discover that, of course, Jesus had this exactly right. Ours is a God of Infinite Love, and so hardwired us toward grace: as we give, we grow lighter; as we grow lighter, we become more free; as we become more free, happiness ensues—but only because we were not chasing it on our own behalf in the first place. And it works that way because ours is also a God with a keen fondness for paradox. Who else would appoint a shepherd to slay a giant? Who else would bring an impoverished child to serve as savior? Who else would show us the meaning of life through an empty tomb?  

And the other part of the equation holds true as well. Selfishness, narcissism, the studied indifference to the suffering of others, the harboring of old angers and resentments—these turn out to be the hardest and heaviest loads. They are the stuff of the temptations that Jesus resisted in the wilderness: materialism, egoism, self-aggrandizement. They weigh us down with false assurances of entitlement and fraudulent promises of reward. “I have decided to stick with love,” Martin Luther King, Jr., declared, “Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

As I write these words, the events of the day are calling us to a place of love that will require more from us than ever before. We are understandably concerned about what lies ahead. And what comes next will entail some of the hardest things we could possibly be asked to do … except, it turns out, for the alternatives.

In the living out and fulfilling of the new commandment that guides us, we will rediscover an eternal truth:

The yoke is easy.

The burden is light.

Especially when we all lift together.

Amen.

Love in the Time of Pandemic

          More than twenty years ago, when I was training for my first-degree black belt in karate, one of our instructors would occasionally berate us with a favorite piece of dojo wisdom. He would work us to the point of physical exhaustion and then call out at the top of his lungs: “Hey, anybody can do it when it’s easy.”

We got the point. We were supposed to be different. We were expected to keep going even when things got hard—and especially when they got very hard.

I have drawn on that lesson in more life situations than I can count. In running marathons, in litigating cases, in teaching complex subjects, in raising kids, in dealing with loss and adversity—over and over again, I have said to myself in the midst of weariness and frustration and struggle: “Hey, anybody can do it when it’s easy.”

In this theme, we hear loudly and clearly one of the central messages of Jesus. In the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus pushes back against the conventional wisdom that we should love our neighbors and hate our enemies. In essence, he says: What’s so special about that? Everyone does that. Even the tax collectors do that. That’s easy. And anybody can do it when it’s easy.

The hard work, Jesus recognized, comes when we work to love those who don’t give us much reason to do so. And, let’s face it, we all have people in our orbit who challenge our capacity for empathy and compassion. But Jesus reminds us that if we want to live as the children of an infinitely loving God, then we’re supposed to be different. We love even our enemies.

In the same way, we find it easy to spread faith, hope, and love around when things are going well. Full coffers make for full hearts. But living out these virtues becomes tougher when things get rocky and we have less—whether that deficit comes in the form of less financial security, less physical security, less emotional security, or all of the above.

Again, though, anybody can do it when it’s easy. I take that as the core instruction of the story of the widow’s mite—the woman who gave her last coin out of her poverty rather than one of many coins out of her abundance. Anybody can do it when they have a lot. She knew she was supposed to be different. So she was.

The Bible features many stories of plague and pestilence, and for good reason. Such times radically destabilize us, and invite us into all manner of destructive thinking and bad behavior: fear; anger; selfishness; resentment; hoarding; scapegoating. Those are perfectly natural reactions to dire circumstances. God calls us to resist them like they were the devil himself—because they are.

On black belt testing days at the dojo, one of our other instructors would greet us by calling out: “It’s gut-check time.” Then he’d pile the challenges on us, one atop another, and we’d find out what we were made of. We all discovered the same thing: we could do it.

In the ensuing twenty-plus years, I’ve had the privilege of helping to prepare countless black belt candidates for their examinations. Over and over again, I have watched people who had good reason to believe they had nothing left inside discover that they had reserves of strength and spirit they had never imagined. I have seen people of all different backgrounds, ages, and athletic capacities tap into a dazzling, indomitable willpower and put it to fearsome use.

It’s a glorious thing to observe. It’s inspiring. In its own way, I think it’s sacred.

So here we are.

It’s gut-check time.

Anybody can do it when it’s easy.

Now comes our chance to show that we are, indeed, different.

Here is our opportunity to demonstrate what love can do, what compassion can do, what generosity can do, what grace can do, what we can do when things get tough.

Praise the Lord who goes with us as we enter the fight.

Amen, and amen.

That's How the Light Gets In

Scripture: Joel 2:21-27

Parts of the book of Joel suggest that the author had good reasons to celebrate. “The Lord has done great things!” Joel tells us. There’s been plenty of rain; the pastures are green; the trees bear fruit; the fig trees and the vines are full; grain is abundant; vats overflow with wine and oil. He says: “You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied…”

We might imagine Joel with a self-satisfied smile, a full stomach, a house with a two-car garage, and a tax refund on the way. It therefore does not surprise us when Joel looks at the state of things around him and says “Thanks be to God, who has dealt wondrously with us.” He’s celebrating a lot because he’s got a lot to celebrate.

Now, granted, it’s good to have the proverbial “attitude of gratitude.” But Joel’s praise may strike us as platitudinous and Pollyannaish. It may remind us of Satan’s argument to God in the book of Job: people find it easy to praise you when things go well. Joel’s gushiness in these passages may leave us a bit irritated, especially if we’re going through a time of barren trees and empty vats.

But a look at the broader context of these statements reveals that Joel’s experiences were very different and much more complicated—and so is his message. It turns out that Joel had ample reasons to despair. In the chapter preceding the one quoted above, we learn that his community has just survived a calamitous invasion of locusts.

The first chapter of Joel describes those events in alarming terms:

“What the cutting locus left, the swarming locust has eaten. What the swarming locust left, the hopping locust has eaten, and what the hopping locust left, the destroying locust has eaten …[A] nation has come up against my land, powerful and without number, its teeth are lions’ teeth, and it has the fangs of a lioness. It has laid waste my vines, and splintered my fig trees; it has stripped off their bark and thrown it down; their branches are made white.”

On closer examination, the book of Joel is the work of a man who has lived through desperate and broken times, including no fewer than four different kinds of locusts, which seems to me like a lot.

And this is why Joel has such an important message for us. We live in desperate and broken times as well. Indeed, we may think—perhaps justifiably—that Joel’s locusts pale in comparison to our own.

For years, our country has been struggling through a period of deep and seemingly unbridgeable political division. Public rhetoric has grown unapologetically crude and mean-spirited. We have split into tribes that can barely speak to each other, let alone empathize with each other. Acts of anti-Semitism and hate crimes are on the rise. Mass shootings have become commonplace.

As I write these words, the whole world is struggling with the Coronavirus pandemic. The entire nation of Italy is on lock down. The global death count is escalating. Schools have closed, whole seasons of sporting events have cancelled, Broadway is dark, businesses have shuttered. People are worried about how they will keep a roof over their head and put food on their table. The economic consequences of all this turmoil remain to be seen, but it seems certain that we have a long and challenging recovery ahead.  

Times like these leave us looking for consolation and inspiration. I think that Joel, who was no coddled cheerleader and no stranger to crises, has some to offer.

After Joel expresses his thankfulness for what is he goes on to express his thankfulness for what yet will be. He says:

“And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.”

These lines may sound familiar to you, even if you have never read the book of Joel. If they do, that’s probably because these are also the words Peter spoke at Pentecost.

The great Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggmann describes what this might mean for us:

“Peter, quoting Joel, imagines a community of free, bold, hope-filled men and women, boys and girls … What a stunning vocation for [us], to stand free and hope-filled in a world gone fearful … and to think, imagine, dream, vision a future that God will yet enact. What a work of visioning for [us] when society all around is paralyzed in fear, preoccupied by commodity, mesmerized by wealth, seeking endless power, and deeply, deeply frightened.”

In short, when things have gotten very bad and the world has “gone fearful,” it is our job to imagine and work toward something better. We have traditionally called that something better “the Kingdom of God.” And we can get there, provided that we remain free, bold, and filled with hope.

Leonard Cohen wrote a song that I think gets at precisely the same point. The song has always seemed to me a gospel of sorts, its own rendering of the same good news delivered by those earlier poets named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It includes this refrain: “Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack, a crack in everything … That’s how the light gets in.”

That, Joel tells us, is how we get past the current swarms of locusts. We look forward in freedom and courage and dedication. We see with clear eyes the evils that the present crisis reveals: our systemic economic inequalities, our failures of empathy, our innate selfishness, our willingness to take false comfort in lies, and the violence that we do to others in ways great and small and with which we have become unconscionably comfortable.

Hard times help us to know the truth. The truth is not pretty. But, an itinerant carpenter from Nazareth once said, it shall set us free.

So, yes, things are very broken right now. The bad news is: there is a crack in everything. The good news is: that’s how the light gets in.

And your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.

And your old men shall dream dreams.

And your children shall see visions.

We have work to do in fulfilling those prophecies and dreams and visions. Lots of work. But the good news, indeed the best news, is that we will not do it alone.

And, lo, the Lord sent Joshua, and said unto him:

“Be strong and courageous.

“Do not be afraid.

“Do not be discouraged.

“For the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”

Amen. And amen.