July 3, 2005

There once was a pet store delivery truck that was making its rounds, and as the driver would stop at a red light he would jump out of the truck with a 2x4 and beat on the side of the truck. He repeated this at every red light, jump out of the truck and beat on the sides with a 2x4. Finally a driver behind him leaned out and hollered, “Hey, what in the world are you doing?” The driver hollered back, “Buddy, I’ve got two tons of canaries in this truck, but it’s only a one ton truck. So I have to keep half the canaries in the air at any one time.”

Ever feel like that? Ever feel like you’re trying to keep a ton of canaries in the air all the time? That’s what we’re going to talk about today, but first, a few words of introduction.

We are gathered here on the occasion of the 70^th birthday of Bob Stahl, a real-live nephew of his Uncle Sam, born on the Fourth of July.

There is a story that says that King George III of England wrote in his diary on July 4^th, 1776, “Nothing important happened today.” That of course, was the day that King George’s American colonies declared their independence. Now I don’t know what else important happened on July 4, 1935, Bob, but we’re all here today to declare that something important did happen that day—you were born, and we give God thanks for that birth, and for the faithful, faith-filled way you have led your life.

Now I could stand here and sing the praises of Bob Stahl for 20 minutes with no problem at all.

Come September Robin and I will celebrate our 25^th wedding anniversary, and I have received many, many blessings from God through my father-in-law, plus I’ve had the chance to see how God works in others’ lives, using Bob as his instrument. It’s pretty cool to watch, and even better to be on the receiving end.

 In many ways Bob’s example motivated me to become a pastor. But I think Bob would be the first to say that the spotlight should be on the word of God this morning, not on the virtues of Bob Stahl, many though they may be.

In that spirit, then, let me ask you to take a little quiz with me. It’s not a hard quiz and there are no grades involved. But I want you to just shout out the first word that comes to your mind to complete the following sentences: I’m ready to throw in the (blank.) I’m at the end of my (blank.) I’m just a bundle of (blank.) My life is falling (blank.) I’m at my wit’s (blank.) Yeah. Sounds like you’re all too familiar with some of these sayings. Sometimes people think the rat race doesn’t run all the way out here in Somerset County, but it does. Stress is something that reaches out and finds you no matter where you are. We all need rest, and I want to talk this morning about where to get it.

There is a story about a little girl and her father who went out to work in the garden, but before flowers could be planted a number of big rocks needed to be moved. One rock in particular was a stubborn obstacle to planting, so the father told the little girl to pick it up and move it out of the way. “If you use every bit of your strength, you can do it.” Well, the little girl wanted to please her daddy, so she heaved and tugged and shoved at the rock and she couldn’t move it one inch, until she finally started to cry. That brought her father to her side, and he asked her, “Did you use every bit of your strength?” “Oh yes, daddy, I used all the strength I possibly could use.”

He smiled and said, “No you didn’t, because you didn’t ask me to help.” And then the two of them were able to move the rock out of the way together. If you’re trying to move some big rocks in your life, have you asked your heavenly father for help? That’s where real rest, spiritual rest, comes from.

You see, our greatest need in life is not rest for our muscles. Most people today could actually use a little more activity for their muscles. We’re overloaded in our minds. We’re overloaded in our spirit. We’re overloaded in our emotions. We need rest for our souls. We need release from tension. We need release from worry. We need release from stress, and guilt, from fear, from bitterness, from anxiety. And this is what Jesus Christ is trying to tell us this morning: “If that’s what’s you need, if you’re tired, if you’re worn out, come to me, and I will give your soul rest.”

But Jesus talks about rest in a strange way. He says “Take my yoke upon you,” which sounds to our ears a lot like “get to work so you can get some rest.” So let’s talk about yokes for a minute.

Chances are that Jesus the carpenter made many a yoke in his shop in Nazareth. Now a yoke, as many of you know, is a wooden crosspiece that fits across the shoulders of one or two oxen pulling a plow. If a farmer is to get the most out of his animals, no matter how strong they are, it’s essential that the yoke fit properly, so the carpenter had to take measurements of the team. Then in a week or so they would be brought back for a fitting, so that any adjustments could be made, watching for rough places, smoothing out the edges and making the yoke perfectly fit this particular team of oxen.

If the carpenter didn’t get the right fit on the yoke, what would happen? The animals would be overburdened. And that’s exactly what people do to themselves in the modern world. Their yoke doesn’t fit, and they get overburdened.

What we sometimes forget is that everybody, rich or poor, male or female, everybody in this life wears a yoke. Everybody’s pulling a load of some kind. It’s just a matter of what you’re willing to give your life to. Some people are yoked to the quest for money, some for fame. When Jesus said, “Take my yoke upon you,” it wasn’t as if he was saying, “Only in me will you be asked to work.” No, he was saying, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” The Pharisees and teachers, they were upfront about their way of life. They called it “the yoke of the law,” and it was a heavy, grinding yoke where you pulled and strained and sweated and never quite completed the task. They were never good enough to live up to the letter of the law, so they never found rest.

But Jesus called out to “all you are weary and burdened.” He understood then and he understands now what it’s like to live with heavy burdens. After all, he accepted the weight of the sins of the whole world onto himself. He could see what it meant when the Pharisees piled the weight of the law onto the backs of the people, and how they never could be quite good enough to measure up to the law. To all those people, he says, “You are good enough for me to love.” It doesn’t matter what you’ve done or left undone, it doesn’t matter if your life is a mess, you’re good enough for Jesus.

But is Jesus good enough for you? Let me ask you, when you get exhausted, when you get overloaded, when you get worn out, where do you turn? You may be a Christian, but I doubt that your first choice is Jesus. Some people turn to food when they get bone weary. Some people turn on the TV and stare. Some turn to a drink or a pill or some other kind of escape. But none of these things will give your soul rest. Only God can give you that.

And that’s what the prophet Isaiah wrote some 3,000 years ago: “God gives power to those who are tired. He gives strength to the weak. Those who wait upon the Lord will receive new vigor.” My favorite part of this passage is the image of God bearing us up on eagles’ wings. It reminds me of a poster I saw when I was a kid, a picture of a butterfly struggling to escape from its cocoon and the caption read, “You can fly, but the shell has to come off.”

God’s rest and renewed strength break us out of our shell, and allow us to fly on eagle’s wings.

That sounds so good when I say it, and I bet it sounds good to you, but my friends, the sad fact is that people don’t want to accept God’s rest.

What they want to do is keep piling more and more on their own backs, until their overload reaches a critical level.

Most houses today have circuit breakers or at least enough fuse box capacity so the fuses don’t blow out. But that’s not the way it used to be, is it? Time was when blowing a fuse was almost an every day occurrence in many homes, especially if you plugged something in that drew a lot of power, like a toaster. Pop, the lights would go out and you’d have to grab a flashlight and a fuse and run down to the basement, where the fuse box was often behind the coal stove.

There’s a great scene in the movie “A Christmas Story” where dad is putting up the Christmas tree and he’s got all the tree’s lights plugged into a single outlet with extension cords and octopus plugs going every which way, pulling about a million amps from one circuit. Naturally, the fuse blows constantly, and each time it does, dad yells something like “Dagnab it” and runs down to change fuses. The narrator says “My dad used to buy fuses by the boxcar.”

You could blame the wiring in your house for the problem, but it wasn’t the fault of the wiring at all—it was the fault of the person who overloaded the wiring. When there’s a load limit and it gets exceeded, there’s going to be a breakdown.

That’s not what Jesus wants for us. What he wants for us is simple, so simple I can sum it up in three little words: come, take and learn.  Note the first of those three words: come. Jesus doesn’t say, “Come to church” or even “come to the Bible,” he says “come to me.” Come to my open arms.

 Then he says “take.” Take my yoke upon you. My yoke is easy and my burden light.” Why? Because Jesus promises to take up the yoke with you, and he always pulls more than his share of the load. And the third word he says is “learn.” You need a role model? Jesus Christ is the best role model there ever was.

We have in today’s gospel reading some of the only autobiographical words Jesus ever spoke. He described himself as gentle and humble. He was gentle in a world that was ruled by the strongest and cruelest. I’m gentle, said this Jesus who was given all power and authority in Heaven and on Earth by his father. He was not gentle because he lacked power. He was gentle because he was the living embodiment of love. And he yoked that gentleness with humility. He was equal to the Father, completely God in every way, yet he cared enough about us to become a human being, teaching us that when we get full of ourselves, it’s good to remember that God is the creator, and we are the created.

So many people get that backwards, and that’s when they get truly worn out. Basically there are two ways people get weary, from work, and from worry. Everybody knows about getting weary from work. We get weary from trying to carry too much of the load ourselves. We try to make all the pieces fit together and produce a good outcome. Jesus answers our weariness with a one-word command: Come! And you’ll find rest, which really means refreshment before returning to work. But some people wear themselves out worrying about things they cannot change.

For example, an elderly woman received a visit from one of her church’s members. “How are you feeling,” the visitor asked. “Oh, I’m just worried to death.” “What are you worried about, dear? You look like you’re in good health. They’re taking good care of you, aren’t they?” “Oh yes, they take very good care of me here.” “Are you in any pain?” “No, no pain to speak of.” “Well, then, what are you worried about?” The old lady paused, then said, “At my age all the people I knew have all died and gone to heaven, and I’m afraid they’re all wondering where I went.”

Few emotions take a toll on us the way worry does. If you want to get real tired real fast, worry will do the trick. Chronic worriers are prone to headaches and knotted up muscles that are obvious physical symptoms of anxiety, and other conditions like high blood pressure that can trigger many more problems. Part of taking Christ’s yoke upon ourselves is going from being a worrier to a warrior.

 In other words, when we’re partnered with Christ we can take action to get past our fears, to take healthy action to deal with them. Such people trust that in all things, God will sustain them.

Jim Lovell was a real warrior that way. I don’t know if you remember Jim Lovell, but what if I mention the flight of Apollo XIII? Sure, that was the doomed moon launch where the oxygen tanks blew up in mid-flight, and Jim Lovell was the astronaut who was in command. Later, after the spacecraft made it safely home, the crew of Apollo XIII held a press conference where somebody asked Lovell, “Were you worried?”

Some people snickered at the dumb question, but Lovell gave a surprising, thoughtful answer. He said, “No, not really. You see, worry is a useless emotion. I was too busy fixing the problem to worry about it. As long as I had one card to play, I played it.”

   Now we still need to tie all this into the occasion of Bob Stahl’s 70^th birthday. Robin and I have a dear friend named Phyllis, a lovely Christian lady, and when I told her what I was doing today and where I was preaching, she mentioned a bit of Bible trivia. Did you know that not once in the Bible is the word “retirement” used? Mostly people simply work until God sees fit to call them home.

  That’s certainly the case with Billy Graham, still preaching and fighting the good fight at age 86.

 But the Bible does say something about 70^th birthdays, so let’s turn back to Psalm 90, which states that “Seventy is the sum of our years, or eighty, if we are strong. Most of those years are sorrow and toil, they pass quickly, we are all but gone.”

Bob, that sounds like I’d better run and get you a bucket to kick. But that doesn’t sound like the Bob Stahl I know. That Bob Stahl is all about working, and working in the fields of the Lord, planting good seed and tending it carefully, evenly yoked with Christ as he goes. Frankly, Bob wouldn’t know what to do with himself if didn’t have a church to pastor, and retirement is the last thing on his mind.

If you want to know the secret of how he stays so young while working so hard, it’s no secret at all. Bob learned long ago to take seriously the words of his lord and savior Jesus Christ who said, “Come to me, all who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart, and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Bob, scripture also says, “By their fruits you shall know them.” I want you to take a look around the sanctuary this morning and savor the love of all these people. The greatest spiritual fruit of all is to touch the lives of the children of God, to love them and take their hand and draw them closer to God’s throne. Their love for you is a reflection of your love for them, and of Christ’s love for his people.

Today we wish you the happiest of birthdays and many more years of ministry in the name of the one who bids us all, “Come.”