Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A (7-5-26)

For those who read this week's newsletter, I mentioned that this year the Fourth of July feels especially complicated to me. But the more I sat with that feeling, the more convinced I became that maybe every celebration of national identity should feel at least a little complicated to the Church.

On the one hand, gratitude is entirely appropriate. We should give thanks for the freedoms we enjoy, for those who have sacrificed on behalf of others, and for the genuine good this country has done. Giving thanks is one of the things Christians are supposed to do best.

But gratitude has never meant pretending everything is fine. Christians have never been given permission to act as though any nation—even one we love—is beyond the judgment of God.

One of the Church's responsibilities is to love a nation enough to tell it the truth — even when that truth is uncomfortable. That's difficult to do if we've convinced ourselves that God's purposes and America's purposes are basically the same thing. That temptation has become increasingly common in our own time, and it has left too many Christians unable to distinguish between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms we build for ourselves.

That brings us to Jesus.

"Come to me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens... Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

It's easy to hear those words as a promise of personal comfort. We imagine Jesus speaking to the stress of our jobs, our relationships, our grief, or our anxiety. And surely, he is. But he's saying something much bigger than that.

A yoke isn't something you put on when you're finished working. It's something you put on when you're about to begin. It's an image of authority. It tells you who is leading, whose direction you're following, and, over time, what kind of person you're becoming.

Whether we realize it or not, we're all carrying someone's vision of the world. We're wearing some kind of yoke. Our yokes are shaped by our families, our politics, our fears and our hopes, our habits, and the stories we tell ourselves about what makes a life worth living.

Every one of those things places some kind of burden on us. They shape our ideas of strength, belonging, success, and whose lives matter. And over time, they become so familiar that we hardly notice we're carrying them.

Jesus' invitation isn't simply, "Come and rest." It's, "Come and learn another way to carry the world."

If you pay attention to Scripture, one pattern shows up over and over again —and it has to do with power. Pharaoh builds his kingdom on the backs of Hebrew slaves. Israel's own kings eventually forget the widow and the orphan while protecting themselves. Rome maintains its peace by asking conquered people to bear the cost of empire.

The names change and the centuries pass, but the pattern hardly changes at all. It's the same story over and over again: those who worship power find ways to hoard it. And yet, someone else carries the burden of having it.

The poor carry it. The stranger carries it. The outsider carries it.

The people with the fewest choices almost always end up carrying the greatest burden. A reality that we need not look too far to see for ourselves.

But then Jesus arrives— and for perhaps the first time in history, a king refuses to rule that way. He doesn't ask others to carry what he won't carry himself. In fact, he touches the people everyone else avoids. He feeds people everyone else overlooks. He kneels to wash the feet of disciples who will betray and abandon him. From beginning to end, Jesus refuses to place on others a burden he is unwilling to bear himself.

That is why his burden is light.

Not because following Jesus is easy. Heck, the gospel asks everything of us! His burden is light because it is carried in love. And love doesn't begin by asking, "Who can carry this for me?" Love begins by asking, "Whose burden can I help carry?"

I think that's one of the clearest ways of understanding the difference between the kingdom of God and every other kingdom. Because every honest society has an answer to the same basic question: Who will carry the burden?

Christians can certainly disagree about policy. Faithful people have always disagreed about the best way to govern a nation, but we cannot stop asking the question Jesus teaches us to ask:

Who is carrying the burden?

The answer to that question tells us an awful lot about what kind of kingdom we're building.

And that is why this moment requires the Church to continue to speak plainly.

Our current government continues to demand that those with the least power to carry the greatest burdens—whether they be immigrants living in fear, refugees seeking safety, families dependent upon public assistance, transgender neighbors turned into political scapegoats— and all while wealth and power continue to consolidate at enormous human and environmental costs.

And so, as our nation marks its 250th birthday, we don't have to agree on every political or economic solution to at least recognize that something is deeply wrong. Nor should we imagine these problems are new. The history of this country has always included people who prospered because others carried the burden.

Loving our country means having the courage to tell that truth about our history—and then more courage to prevent it from repeating.

When we look around to see the burdens of society continue to roll downhill toward those already struggling to stand, all Christians ought to recognize that something has gone wrong. Not because we're Democrats. Not because we're Republicans. And certainly not because we're "not political"...

But because we belong to Christ. We wear his yoke. Not the nation's.

Our first loyalty has never been to a president or a political party. It has never even been to our country.

We can love our nation deeply—ideally, we should be easily able to—but love of country is not the same thing as discipleship to Christ. The Church is at its best when it remembers that its citizenship in the kingdom of God gives it the freedom to tell the truth about every nation, including—and I would argue, especially—its own.

But, Paul's words from Romans remind us how difficult that work really is, if we're being honest. "I do not do the good I want," he admits. We often hear those words as the struggle of an individual conscience, but perhaps they're also the struggle of faithful people trying to live faithfully in a complicated world.

It's easy to point to the failures of others. It's much harder to notice the burdens we quietly ask others to carry for us. We care about workers, but do we ask who made the things we buy? We talk about justice, but do our investments reflect the world we say we want? We speak about loving our neighbors, but how willing are we to listen to someone whose politics frustrate us, or to remain in relationship when it would be easier to walk away?

None of those questions has an easy answer. But Christian discipleship rarely does. Jesus doesn't offer us an easy answer—but rather another way. Not just another ideology, and most definitely not another form of empire.

Another way.

A way in which power of all kinds exists to serve instead of dominate. Where burdens are shared instead of transferred. Where greatness is measured not by how much we can accumulate or control, but by the generosity we're willing to show toward one another.

Because remember, Jesus doesn't simply say, "Take my yoke." He says, "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.

Learn what power is for. Learn that authority exists to serve. Learn that love moves toward the people everyone else is moving away from. Learn that the kingdom of God is built not by protecting ourselves, but by bearing one another's burdens.

That is the yoke we wear, and that is what the Church is supposed to look like in such a time as this. Not a community that refuses to love its country, but one that loves it enough to tell the truth. Because in a world with too many burdens to bear, the Church should be the one place where people discover they don't have to bear them alone.

And I can't imagine a greater gift to our country than that.

Amen.