Lectionary Readings: Year A, Proper 9

I want you to take a moment and imagine with me: 
You’re out, running errands. Even though you’ve planned the best you can, you’re coming a bit late for the church-wide landscaping and cleanup day. When you get into the parish hall, you realize that no one else is there, and then you see the note the parish admin has left on the door of the office: all the other volunteers have had to cancel. But there’s a city-wide event at your church the next day, and this really needs to be done. After all, “What would people think to see such a dirty church?” So, you start working, all by yourself. It’s hot and heavy work. But someone needs to do it. At one point, you’re carrying a big bag of junk out of the church when your friend Jesus pulls up in his shiny new pickup truck. He leans out the window and says, “Hey, buddy! You look weary. And carrying a heavy load, I might add. Where’s your help?” And you explain how no one else is there, and this needs to get done by tomorrow, and doesn’t anybody else care? That’s why you’re tired. So Jesus tells you, “Come on over to my patio and rest a bit.” And before you can complain about how this needs to be done tomorrow, Jesus says something about how tomorrow will worry about itself.

So you go. And when you get to the shady, covered patio with just the right amount of breeze blowing through it, Jesus comes out of his house with a big pitcher of ice water, sweating with condensation and then, with a wink and a chuckle, he says, “You want some wine?”

I’ve seen calendars with pictures of soft comfy chairs, and tables full of steaming coffee cups. Maybe a smiling Jesus is in the picture too, with the bible verse “Come to me all who are weary, and I will give you rest.” Just this week I received a brochure about a retreat center that offers to give rest to those who are burned out, exhausted.  That’s a lovely image, right? One that reminds us that Jesus is there for you when you do a little more than you should have. When maybe you’ve added 30 hours of work into a 24 hour day. Right? Jesus wants to help you, to make your work easier.

There’s only one problem with looking at this passage in this way. This bible verse is not about physical weariness. It is not about our own troubles and tiredness. It’s not about filling our plates with too much work or labor. Now, it is true that we get burned out sometimes. I’ve been burned out before. But for those of us with income and a place to live, it is usually because we have placed on ourselves our own unsustainable expectations and goals. We are exhausted and burned out because of the burdens we place on ourselves. 

This passage, however, is not about that. This passage is about righteousness. It’s about what Jesus has done, and continues to do, for us.

The religious leaders of the day used to talk about the yoke of the law. What that meant was that If you agreed to keep the law, then you were required to keep all of the law. And the problem was that the requirements of the law often cost a lot of money to keep up with. And the rituals and the obligations required a lot of time. 

At the beginning of the Gospel we read today, we see Jesus comparing the Pharisees to children who say, “We played the flute for you, but you didn’t dance! We wailed, but you didn’t mourn.” He’s pointing out that these religious leaders were demanding that people do as they ask, and they got irritable when people didn’t. Then, Jesus reminds them that the Pharisees claimed John the Baptist had a demon, even though he would neither eat nor drink. And when the Son of Man came, the Pharisees said he was a glutton and drunkard, and a friend of the unrighteous tax collectors.

In other words, no matter what, you will never be good enough for them. It’s like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill, only to watch it roll back down before he gets the boulder to the top of the hill. The goal – in this case, righteousness – is unattainable.

“Come to me all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

With Jesus we do not have to earn our righteousness. We do not have to work hard to live up to social and religious expectations, only to have those expectations change at random. With Jesus, we are made blameless before God, because of what he has done for us. His yoke is easy, and his burden is light.

This passage is about righteousness, and what we do and do not have to do to be acceptable to God.

And yet, it’s not just about righteousness. 

The weariness that Jesus was talking about had to do with the ever changing rules of the religious leaders of his time. There was an element of power and control that was hard-wired into keeping people in constant pursuit of what it meant to be good – to be acceptable to society. And that sort of thing is exhausting. And it is unjust. It makes people weary, because it feels like pushing a boulder up a hill – only to watch it fall down again

Jesus was calling out that injustice. Jesus was pointing out that the burdens these religious leaders placed on the common people was like placing heavy burdens on them and making them work until they were ragged. All just so that these same religious leaders could declare them righteous. 

In 2023, a man named Ken was living on the streets in San Diego because someone had cut the anchor to the boat he was using to make a living as a fisherman; he lost everything. Ken is also a veteran. While on the streets, he had gotten some of his friends to watch his tent while he went to an appointment at a long term shelter program that would help him find work and get him off the streets. He got approved for the program. But while he was there filling out paperwork, the police and the sanitation services came along, and began ripping up tents and throwing stuff into the dumpster. His friends tried to get his belongings, they tried to save his important documents, but the police told them that since it wasn’t their tent, they needed to stay away – or get arrested. Despite their best efforts to save his stuff, all of it got thrown out.

What he lost was his identification card, his DD214 – which is his military discharge paperwork – his social security card, and his birth certificate. And, because he didn’t have anything to identify himself to the shelter program that he had just filled out paperwork for, he was not allowed to enter the program – and so he had to stay on the streets.

This story about Ken, unfortunately, is not unique. Homeless people everywhere talk about how there can be a thousand different reasons for why someone ended up on the street. But, there’s usually the same reason for why it feels almost completely unattainable to get off of the streets – even if they still have the ability and the desire to work. The society we live in demands that streets are clean and nice for those who already have a place to live so that we are not reminded of our own fears. It demands that anything you do needs identification. There are social obligations that are required to move out of one situation into a better situation. And, more often than not, for people like Ken, the motivation to better themselves is met with a society that judges them as unworthy, lazy, and that the reason they are on the streets was their own doing.

This is a fact of our society. We can hear a story about a homeless veteran like Ken, and realize that these things really do happen. For a lot of people, the fact that there are people without a home, who don’t seem to be trying, feels like a burden on “polite society.” It’s easier to clean away the people and their belongings from the sidewalks than it is to find ways of solving the bigger issue of homelessness. But more often than not, they say nothing about this unfairness, because “that’s just the way it is.” But for those who are affected by this injustice, that is exhausting. Because it is a heavy burden. It makes them weary, because it feels like pushing a boulder up a hill. It feels unattainable.

This story about Ken and other homeless people is obviously not a direct correlation between first century Israel, but Jesus was trying to point out that there might be a thousand different reasons for why someone might be declared unrighteous by the religious leaders of the day. And yet, there was only one path for the poor and the socially unacceptable people to attain that righteousness – and that was through religious requirements that cost money, and rituals that cost time. It was a heavy burden, and it made people weary.

“Come to me all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Jesus was calling people into righteousness through belief in him. Jesus was calling out the injustice of placing heavy burdens on people so that they could be righteous in the eyes of society. All Jesus wants is for us to love God, and love our neighbor. And Jesus’ example demands that we too, at the very least, ask ourselves if we are doing anything to perpetuate these injustices, and then to call out injustice when we see it. We may not have the ability to change these things. We may not even know where to begin. But checking our own hearts, and making people aware of these injustices is a small part of the active living out of the command to love one another.

The collect I prayed this morning asks that the Holy Spirit will give us the grace to be united to one another with pure affection. It is only when we understand the great gift that we have been given to attain the unattainable through Christ – the gift that allows us to be loved by God, and to love ourselves – that we are able to confront these injustices with pure affection, and to maybe, just maybe, allow those who are truly weary and carrying heavy burdens, a chance to experience true rest.

[This sermon was delivered at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Wickenburg, AZ on July 5, 2026.]