The longtime pastor at my church retired a few years ago. The new pastor is a wonderful man I’ve grown fond of and close to. The old pastor still occasionally says mass. Two weeks ago, his homily struck me with a force that rarely occurs to me. Short on deep theology but long on meaning, I asked him for a copy–which I’ve posted below.

I think the homily was especially meaningful as I move through an increasingly stressful and busy season of life. I am obsessed with the idea of simplifying (in everything), but I nonetheless continue to overcomplicate life…as time marches on. Here’s the text of the homily:

“Tis a Blessing to Be Simple”

At about the time America was becoming a nation, a small religious movement, the Shakers, was coming to these shores. If you know about the Shakers, you may feel some of their ideas were odd. But they got one thing very right; they believed in being simple. They produced furniture that is still imitated today because of its elegant simplicity. So, too, with their poetry and their music; they had a genius for finding the beauty that dwells in simplicity.

The hymn for which they are best known is titled, “Tis a Blessing to Be Simple.” Several years ago a prestige automaker used the tune as background music for a commercial touting a special model. Ironically, it was the kind of luxury car that’s the very antithesis of the simplicity the Shakers sought and lived!

But that figures. Because we human beings are a pretty self-contradictory lot. We want the blessings of the simple life, but we’d like to have those blessings in the midst of our complex lifestyle.

We want the blessings of the simple life, but we’d like to have those blessings in the midst of our complex lifestyle.

Nor did we invent this attitude in the 20th or 21st century. We humans have always been this way. Mind you, we’re currently developing these attitudes to a fine art, but the inclination has always been there.

Never satisfied

I think that’s what Jesus was driving at in our scripture lesson of the day. He said that his generation was like children who called to one another, “We played the flute and you didn’t dance; we wailed, and you didn’t mourn.” That is, no matter what’s done, you’re not satisfied.

That’s typical of people who haven’t learned to find happiness in the basics of life—the simplicities. They’re never really happy. Give them music or give them mourning, Jesus said, and it makes no difference. They just don’t seem to know how to grab hold of life, in either its joys or its trials.

But Jesus wasn’t talking in vague, philosophical terms. He was speaking specifically, at the moment, of the way many people of several cities had responded to his preaching and teaching. They had heard his message, had seen him heal the sick and deliver the oppressed, yet very few were allowing it to change them. Sometimes you and I think we would give almost anything to see Jesus at first hand, or to observe a real, unmistakable miracle. But in truth, I’m afraid we would respond just the way they did in Jesus’ day. A few of us would be transformed, and would follow him, but the majority of us would continue in our usual ways.

So Jesus spoke harsh words. “Woe to you,” he said. “If the deeds of power done in your had been done in ancient cities—Tyre, Sidon, even Sodom—they would have repented.”

Why did most of the people in Jesus’ day miss the point? And why do so many of us miss it today? Why, as a matter of fact, might we miss it, you and I?

Complicated lives

At least part of the issue, I’m sure, is that we insist on living complicated lives. That’s what Jesus said. In the midst of his sorrow over how people were missing the way, Jesus suddenly lifted his heart in prayer. “I thank you, Father,” he said, “because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent, and have revealed them to infants.”

And it’s then that Jesus speaks what may well be the loveliest invitation ever extended to our human race. “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.”

I don’t need to convince you that a great many people (perhaps everyone) are carrying heavy burdens. You can see it in the television news every evening, as reports come to us from the several battlefields of the world, the settings of famine and destruction. But you don’t have to go that far. If you ride public transportation to work, you see the burdens in the faces of your fellow travelers; if you drive, you get the message at the stoplight. Have you noticed the faces in a newspaper photo of a crowd scene, or in the television reports? Not many seem openly happy, do they? I imagine most of the persons in those pictures are living rather normal lives; why do so few seem naturally upbeat and glad? I want to say, “Listen to Jesus. He will take your heavy burden, and will give you rest. His yoke is easy, his burden  light.”

On being simple enough

But you have to be simple to accept Jesus’ invitation. You have to be simple enough to believe that someone cares enough about you to be interested in your load. And simple enough to believe that this particular Someone is capable of lifting your load. Most important of all, you have to be simple enough to recognize your load.

That’s where our complicated, adult minds mess us up. We’re sometimes simple enough to think someone might care about us—that’s what makes us susceptible to those people who say, “Have I got a deal for you!” But it’s quite another thing to recognize that we have a load that we ought to be rid of.

We like all this stuff that weighs us down, these things that add to our worries.

That’s why we so often cling to our burdens, because we don’t realize that they are burdens. We like all this stuff that weighs us down, these things that add to our worries. We go shopping for them, look them up on the Internet, drive bargains to get them. And let me hasten to say that I’m not referring simply to our possessions, our houses and automobiles and stock holdings. I’m speaking about the whole fabric of our lives, the way we tie ourselves up with worries and fears, longings and seekings, resentments and revenges.

Francois Mauriac, the 20th-century French novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, said, as he looked back on his own childhood, that there is “a state of grace natural to childhood.” I believe it is tied to childhood’s innate simplicity. And incidentally, I think in many instances parents are unknowingly robbing childhood of its simplicity by flooding children with complications. We not only don’t recognize the yoke in our own lives, we try to introduce our children to the same yokes, preferably as early as possible!

Now let me make something clear. Jesus didn’t say that life with him would be yoke-free. Yokes are written into life. It isn’t a matter of living without yokes, but of what the yokes will be. And Jesus said that his is easy, that it fits us well.

How can this be? How can a yoke be easy, since a yoke is something that restrains an animal, and controls it? What makes the yoke of Jesus easy?

This, that because the yoke of Christ is eternal, puts life in perspective. Why do we worry about so many things? Why do we fret away our lives over matters that, a week later, we can’t even remember? It’s because we don’t keep an eternal perspective. A woman who enjoyed a close friendship with the remarkable Dutch saint, Corrie Ten Boom, remembers a day when she was serving tea, and dropped a cup. It was a lovely piece, and she was distressed by her own clumsiness. But Conie answered quietly, “It isn’t eternal, my dear.” We make life so dreadfully complicated when we give temporal matters eternal significance. No wonder our yokes are heavy when we treat so many passing matters as if they possessed the stuff of eternity.

So Jesus said a wonderful thing. Looking out at the burdened crowd he said, “Lighten up! You carry such heavy burdens, and it isn’t necessary.” But he knew that “the wise and the intelligent” (poor fools!) would cling to their loads, adoring them, and that only the infants would get what he was driving at.

Important for eternity

Earlier this week, we celebrated one of our great national holidays, Independence Day. I think most of us are very conscious these days that it’s a privilege to live in freedom. We know well enough that our country isn’t perfect, but we’re grateful that over 200 years ago our national ancestors bought for us a special kind of political and personal freedom.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t make us free of our yokes. They couldn’t deliver us from our fears and our grasping, our worries, and our angers.

But fortunately, they didn’t need to. Our Lord Jesus Christ took care of that two millennia ago. “Come to me,” he said, “all of you who carry heavy burdens. My yoke is easy, my burden is light.” Because his yoke puts life in perspective, so that we know what is important not just for today, or for the next 20 years, but what is important for eternity. But so many of us don’t get it because we’re fascinated with making life complicated.

‘Tis a blessing to be simple. As simple as a child that takes Jesus at his word.