Take My Yoke

Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.
- Jesus (Matthew 11. New Living Translation)

Burden.

Yoke.

Weary.

Take.

A yoke is a wooden harness holding two oxen together so that they can complete the heavy manual labor they are assigned. It combines two independent beings to a cohesive unit to complete hard work.

The immediate context of these words - the way Jesus was using these phrases as understood by those in his audience - primarily suggests a yoke of a religious nature. A rabbi would have a multitude of certain, specific teachings and practices, and these together would constitute his "yoke." If a young boy (always a boy. Always a male) wanted to learn from the rabbi, he would be instructed to learn deeply all of the rabbis rules and instructions. And follow them. The young man would pull with the older and all the fellow disciples these burdensome tasks.

We also understand yoke in a broader context. My load to carry. Expectations foisted upon us by social norms, by family, by employees. But mostly by ourselves.

This is how I'm supposed to be. This is what I'm supposed to do.

I'm supposed to save the world.
I'm supposed to be successful.
I'm supposed to hold on to this dream.
I'm supposed to be smarter than I am - or at least he is. I'm supposed to be strong.
I'm NOT supposed to cry.

As a result, we are weary. Overburdened. Crushed.

My burden is light.

Not because Jesus' teachings are easy. I can't think that healing the sick, comforting the afflicted, visiting the imprisoned, feeding the hungry, nor clothing the naked is easy. It's pretty demanding.

But do we need all the other stuff? All the rules, the regulations, the false expectations?

I am humble and gentle at heart.

God is a god of mercy. I've often heard this throughout my life. Often from people who were condemning others for not living up to their standards. So I don't want to press this. I don't want to burden you with the idea that if you just.
came.
to Jesus,
everything would be all right.

Because that's not the truth.

The truth is, from my experience, Jesus doesn't care about our expectations for ourselves. He doesn't sweat our failures. He doesn't let us down when we let ourselves down.

Take my yoke...

Ikonoclast

Speaking of stigma and churches, a pre-teen with cerebral palsy was booted out of a church "service" on Easter Sunday.

Later in the week, when the mother asked to start a ministry (she is resilient and blessed, for sure) for families with disabilities, she was turned down by the church, Elevation.

Elevation employees say the church focuses on worship, not ministries. And in a statement, a church spokeswoman said "it is our goal at elevation to offer a distraction-free environment for all our guests. We look forward to resolving any misunderstanding that has occurred."

Funny how that works. Their focus in on "worship," not ministries. Much can be said of just that little phrase. Their focus is on worship, by which they mean, "an experience of prolonged pleasure and ease which they find when they love God." Or, as the church put it on their home page: "Elevation Church has a passion to see those far from God filled with life in Christ. It's an explosive, phenomenal movement of God – something you have to see to believe."

A few problems with this attitude are highlighted by this example:

1) You cannot love a God you cannot see yet fail to love the one nearby. It's the very heart of Christianity. I've said so much about this topic, but it's so crucial to what Christianity is supposed to be, and yet very nearly fails at much of the time. A humanist can love people without loving God. But a Christian cannot love God without loving his ikon, people.

And when people, who are already shunned by society, are shunned by our approach (or lack of approach) of dealing with those who are so visually broken, how can we claim to love them, or that we desire to see them "filled with life in Christ"?

photo © 2008 Nonie | more info (via: Wylio)

2) This approach is indicative of the therapeutic worship mindset of contemporary American Christianity. We believe that God's love for us means we get the finer things (for instance, a nice horse-drawn carriage for our wedding), that we don't have to endure or even put up with suffering, that church service is an emotional session on the couch with our therapist, God*, that we can be rescued and delivered from not just evil, but evil's touch. Which is why our end-times beliefs are so sacred in the American church, whereas orthopraxis is limited to warnings to our neighbors. We dream of being rescued from the hopeless sinners and from the effects of fallen and broken creation- especially from fallen and broken (and warped, and burned, and twisted, and frail, and barely literate, and loud, and ugly...) humanity.

The type of "service" that churches such as Elevation offers make us feel good for the time in its efforts to conjure up God. By "conjuring up God" I mean, "Conjuring up a feel-good, 'spiritual' experience."

Yet, God showed up there. In that service. On Easter morning. Unexpectantly. But not silently.

And then God was physically moved to the overflow room.

God is present in community, in trials and tribulations, in the poor, the sick, the downtrodden, the imprisoned... And these people ushered God from the sanctuary because God was a distraction to their meditation on God.

.....

I searched a little bit further to see what Elevation says they believe about their fellow human beings. The words are right, for the most part. But their actions and their worship service show that these are just words, and they are failed.

Man is made in the image of God and is the supreme object of His creation. Man was created to have fellowship with God but became separated in that relationship through sinful disobedience. As a result, man cannot attain a right relationship with God through his own effort. Every human personality is uniquely created, possesses dignity, and is worthy of respect and Christian love.

"Every human personality (not sure what this means) is uniquely created (YES!), possesses dignity (I would argue that they are WORTHY of dignity, but ok), and is worthy of respect and Christian love." This church, and every one of our churches that chooses to eschew out the poor, the hungry, the disturbed, has disobeyed this central tenet of Christianity: God is Love.

Now, as Rachel Held Evans points out the obvious floating question, How have I - myself - failed at this? How many times have I thought we shouldn't have distractions in church? Smelly homeless, muttering old women holding on to the last vestiges of memory, mentally handicapped, screaming infants...

Don't they bother me? Don't I sometimes wish they were gone? Don't I occasionally long for quiet solitude in the midst of the mass?

What are your thoughts?

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*I actually don't think that there's something wrong about this approach inherently. The Holy Spirit is our counselor, God sometimes does console us and bathe us in love. And Jesus certainly welcomes us when no one else would, and forgives us when we can't forgive ourselves, and sometimes heals us where the doctors can't touch. That's also a central part of Christianity. But the focus has become so self-centered that, well, we end up worshiping the worship experience as an end of worshiping ourselves.

They're Crazy!

My friend Flaco was driving east down Armitage when he spotted an enraged and drunken man rushing head-long into a pregnant woman sitting at a bus stop. Without missing a beat, he turned the car around and got in between the drunk and the young lady. Before I could ask, Flaco told me that the two were unrelated and never even met. This was not a case of domestic violence. In fact,

"I like to hit pregnant women," the man told Flaco.

Flaco waited for the cops to show. I don't think the woman wanted to wait that long. They carted the man away. Obviously, he was a threat to society - drunk or not.

photo © 2008 Tony Tony | more info (via: Wylio)

But that incident was another in a long line that got me to thinking about mental illness, lack of access for quality care, and stigma.

Take, for instance, the public brouhaha over the arrest of homeless activists in Orlando last week. The demonstrations by Food Not Bombs are there both to feed the hungry homeless (and sheltered-but-barely who are not able to buy food and pay rent) near downtown as well as bring light to a much-neglected reality: we spend more for weapons of mass destruction than we do on "programs of social uplift" (to quote from King).

I was a bit surprised to see how many people opposed FNB and their "fame-seeking" actions. And how unhinged their classless class warfare was in the process. "Families taking their kids out to the park don't want to see homeless men urinating in public/showing off their part in public/talking to themselves in public/shouting obscenities in public..."

Not that any of us should wish any of those on anyone. But it doesn't happen every day, nor with every homeless person. However, the elephant carnival in the public square needs to be addressed: There is a massive disproportion of mentally ill in the homeless population since the Reagan era (and due in no small part to The Vietnam and Iraq Wars). Above all, these people are not to be blamed for the predicament they are in. That is our fault. We have the means but we refuse to offer them the service they need. They are in the streets because WE threw them there. To suggest that they shouldn't even be served food in the park is to continue the lies that we've been telling ourselves for the last thirty years: We're okay; there is nothing wrong with how we treat those with mental disabilities.

It doesn't matter who starves as long as our conscience is not bothered.

Much more can be (and should be) said about this, but I want to try to keep the focus on mental disability survivors and stigma.

My mother moved to the Bible Belt about twenty years ago. While she was in Chicago, she was accepted in our church as family. They knew us and suffered with us through her bouts of bipolar disorder. After she moved, my brother, sister-in-law, and I kept trying to help her find a similar church. And these churches would welcome her (perhaps as a stranger, perhaps as a number, another body to fill their roles). I understand that it's impossible to re-create family. But my mother understood something much sadder, much more real and much more immediate to her.

She would leave every church, saying that she felt guilty and unwelcome - even oppressed - by the god she encountered there.* Oddly enough (or not), it was only in the Catholic church that she felt welcomed. Maybe that has to do with Catholic social teaching. Or maybe it has to do with the fact that they recognize ostracization and empathize with being outcasts in the Bible Belt.

I think of the many runaways who leave home because their mental condition is not appreciated nor understood at home. I think of the many undiagnosed children and adults on the verge of something very dangerous. Because no one wants to admit that they or their loved ones need help. That would ostracize them. That would be crazy.

And then I think of Michelle Bachman and Rush Limbaugh and how, when I disagree with their rhetoric and their policies (or feigned policies) I say that they're crazy.

And that's a disservice to those who survive mental distress.

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*Like it or not, fellow church-goers, we represent the god we worship. If we shun people, then our god shuns them. And I say that deliberately with small letters, because that is not the god of Jesus. Jesus - representing the God of the Bible - did not shun anyone.