Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, July 5, 2026 with The Rev. Angela Compton-Nelson.

https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp9_RCL.html

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This past week, I was away with my extended family in Breckenridge, Colorado. On our second day at 9,500 feet, we took e-bikes for a 10-mile ride between Breckinridge and Frisco. Slightly hilly, but running along the line of a valley between two towns. It's picturesque. Hills and mountains are on either side, and there's an occasional water reservoir, almost dried up from drought in Colorado, just like they are here in North Carolina. As our family settled into the ride, I got lost in my own thoughts. In the background, I was worrying about things that have been on my mind for some time, considering how I was going to approach these worries in the days to come. In the foreground of my thoughts, the landscape prompted my consideration of Psalm 95. Sung or said most frequently at morning prayer, it begins, Come, let us sing to the Lord, let us shout for joy to the rock of our salvation. But the reason it came to my mind was a more on the nose line further down. In his hand are the caverns of the earth, and the heights of the hills are his also. I suspect that I am not the first or the last person to feel dwarfed by the landscape and so moved to a sense of finitude in prayer. But these words, so familiar from years of morning prayer, came to my mind in relation to the present concerns and occupations of my life. Why am I worried about my life? I wondered. And toward what end? Will I change a single thing by worrying? Do I really believe that, like this beautiful world, lovingly and particularly tended by God, every mountain, hill, and cavern, that I am in the hand of God? Or do I only purport to believe this, and my own anxieties betray me? A few weeks ago, we looked at some of the early stories from Genesis. And I offered to you the second thought that came to my mind on this bike ride. Sheesh, Angela, this is what happens over and over again in Genesis. Every major story asks the same question. Will God's people trust in God's promise or will they grasp for their own future? The people of God are asked to trust in God, to partner with the one who holds and has given their very life and future as a gift. And over and over again, instead of trusting in God, the people seek to grasp their own future, to accomplish its ends on their own. Genesis becomes one long meditation on this question. Adam and Eve grasp at wisdom. Humanity grasps at security at the Tower of Babel. Abraham and Sarah grasp at the promise through their exploitation of Hagar. And I know this was a couple of weeks ago in the lectionary, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about that. The very act by which Abraham and Sarah try to secure God's promise becomes part of the long chain of events that eventually carries Joseph into Egypt and Israel into slavery. It's a truly desperate and heartbreaking story all around. And every generation repeats the same mistake. Israel eventually becomes enslaved, not because God abandoned them, but because generations of grasping for their own future by their own means produce a world of slavery. The sin wasn't only an individual moral failure, but the action and activities of generations of families, habits, economies, communities, and fear, such that every poor person is born into the burden of sin created by the generation before them. Gosh. It's just immensely difficult to live as a creature. We're given the gifts of desire and will, and we so often want to move toward ends that are in our own interest. We build larger economies because we fear scarcity, but in doing so, we create societies of immense inequality built on extractive consumption. We build stronger militaries because we feel or fear vulnerability. And in the process, we engage in cycles of war and violence in which each grasp for security spirals into deeper and more intractable conflict. And it isn't just on a national or collective scale. We do the same thing on a smaller scale. On my bike ride, I was reflecting on my own tendency to be anxious, to seek control of my own future, to make sense of its direction on my own terms. We overwork for fear of not having enough. We neglect the Sabbath. And when we do rest or practice Sabbath, we engage in the same extractive consumption on which our lives always depend, and often at the expense of others who do not have agency in their own work. What is this move for you? Every desire is for a good future, but our actions disclose the shadow side of our hopes, and they are rooted in fear and anxieties that get away from us and make it difficult to partner with God in God's work. And at what cost? At what cost to the earth? At what cost to human community and relationship? At what cost to the human soul? Is it possible for us to acknowledge our creaturiness, our own limitation in such a way that we do not seek to advance our own interest, but surrender to a God who's creator of heaven and earth, the one who holds the very caverns and the heights of the hills in his hands? Yes, this is what I think about on walks and bike rides. The lectionary text from the Gospel of Matthew ends with this claim by Jesus: Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. These words are often heard as a promise of relief from ordinary stress, but Jesus first speaks them to people living under Roman occupation. His invitation is addressed to those carrying burdens imposed by the powers of the world. And we live in this world where we're both burdened by powers like this, but we're also participants in them. And that's a burden too. What Jesus offers is more than lifting the burden of a stressful life. It is the release of the wrong work, the exhausting work of self-justification, self-protection, self-preservation, and self-salvation to the end of becoming what we were always meant to be. Partners of God in creation. Jesus does not promise that life will become effortless, but that we do not rightly carry carry the unbearable burden of being our own Savior. And he does this not so that we do not have to labor over our own lives, but so that our labor can be put to use in partnering with God. The contrast is between grasping and securing our own future and being partners with God. But to become partners with God begins first with trust. The repeated human mistake is trying to make those promises come true by our own ingenuity and effort. But Jesus' invitation, come to me, you will find rest, does not offer a reward for finally getting control. It is the fruit of entrusting ourselves to the God who keeps promises we cannot fulfill for ourselves. Standing among those mountains, I sensed again what Psalm 95 had been trying to teach me for years. The God who holds the caverns of the earth also holds my life and yours. And if we begin to believe truly with our lips and in our lives down to our very bones, that the caverns of the earth and the heights of the hills are already held in God's hands, what more of our lives and futures is held securely in this way? And what would change if we actually believed that our future rested in God's promises? Amen.