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One of the hits the Hollies had back in the sixties was a song called, "He Ain't Heavy; He's My Brother". Most of you will know it in its more successful revival twenty years later as the theme song for one of those big aid concerts in the 1980s --Live Aid or Band Aid, one of those. What you probably DON'T know is where those words came from originally --"He ain't heavy; he's my brother." In my youth in America we saw adverts in all the magazines appealing for support for a Catholic-run orphanage for boys, called "Boys Town". They even made a movie about it, starring Spencer Tracey. The advert was always the same. It had a picture of a young boy carrying another on his shoulders and talking to a priest. The caption underneath said, "He ain't heavy, Father. He's my brother". It was the same advert every week, in all the magazines, never varying. The words "He ain't heavy, Father--he's my brother" were as everywhere as Coca Cola. They must have really raked it in. Jesus says in our gospel lesson for this morning that his yoke is easy. He doesn't say there is no yoke. He says the yoke ain't heavy, in the same non-sensical way that the lad in the ad says his burden ain't heavy because it is his brother." The boy isn't saying his burden is light because it only weighs three kilos instead of fifty. His burden ain't heavy because it is voluntary, it is meaningful, it not only arises out of significant human relationships but is itself constitutive of such relationships. This is an orphanage, remember, where relationships are not accidents of birth but are forged from commitments made in the face of brokenness. To take on the burden of another person's needs, as a free and loving act, is to participate in the creation of life. So it should not be supposed that Jesus invites us into a life where there shall be no such burdens. When Jesus says, "Come unto me all you who are overburdened, and I will give you rest," he is speaking of those other kinds of burdens that, instead of being life-creating and life-enhancing, are burdensome in the usual sense of the word --oppressive, demeaning, life-destroying. Take that burden off, Jesus says. Lay that burden down. Throw that yoke from your shoulders, and be free. Think for a moment of a yoke in its literal and technological sense. Not very far away from where we are now, in the grassy fields behind where the Bradleys live, if you look closely you can see the hint of a rolling alternation of ridges and furrows scoring the hillside. These ridges and furrows are the remains of Anglo-Saxon plowing. It would be an interesting act of imagination to walk over there this afternoon and see, in your mind's eye, the ploughman with hands to a plough being drawn through the wet, spring ground by huge, broad-shouldered horses straining against the yoke. In other places the plough would have been pulled by oxen, or in places like Indonesia, even today, it would be the long-horned water buffalo. And of course there are situations in which the poverty is so deep that the men themselves would have to pull the plough. But whatever kind of strong beast used, plough horse, ox or human, they are always under a yoke. Imagine the burden, imagine the strain of pulling plough through unbroken turf, and you can begin to understand Isaiah's image here, chapter 58, in the lesson Ian read for us this morning. By a not very difficult leap of our imagination, the yoke becomes for us an image representing all forms of oppression and unjust and meaningless labour. Isaiah is saying that there is a temptation to live out our faith ignoring such forms of oppression, as if faith were merely a matter of performing ritual correctly or pursuing what has come to be called 'religious experience' or pursuing a kind of pyramid game organised only in the interest of recruiting more and more Christians. "This is the kind of fasting I want," says the Lord, Isaiah 58.6: "Remove the yoke of injustice". The Bible is realisitic.. It is full of stories of people who bore the yoke of oppression. How much glory did Pharoah need that he had to push the Hebrews into slavery? How much majesty did wise King Solomon require that he had to build the Temple with forced labour and crippling taxation? Was the Exodus for nothing? Prophet after prophet after prophet rails against the affluence of the religious elite that is born as a bitter yoke on the backs of the poor. Come to me, Jesus says, you who are overburdened, and I will give you rest. The vocation of the people of Israel was not to be slaves. The vocation of the people of Israel was to be free, neither to live as oppressed people nor to oppress, but to take up the burden of the oppressed, to set captives at liberty and unchain the imprisoned, to preach good news to the poor. Put on MY yoke, Jesus says. It ain't heavy, because these people are your brothers and sisters. Jesus offers us the yoke of covenant life, the life-enhancing yoke of life together. Who's on your back? What is it that is grinding you down to nothing? People carry all kinds of yokes that wear them down. What kind of yoke is it you are carrying? I know people in this very congregation who have thrown off the yoke of loneliness in order to take on the yoke of caring for another in time of need. I know people in this very congregation who have thrown off the not-to-be-argued with heavy yoke of their professional position in order to take on the burden of their family's needs. What's driving you? What's calling the shots? Jesus says lay that burden down, and take my yoke, and put it on you. The load I will put on you is light. What burden are you carrying now? Maybe for you the pressure of maintaining your petit-bourgeois domesticity has so smothered your creativity that it is almost too late. How long can you wait before doing something about it? Haven't you ever asked yourself the question, "Why am I doing this?" I saw a cartoon the other day where a mother, holding up her little boy's muddied clothes, says "I don't know why I bother washing these clothes". Have you ever experienced that particular frustration? Have you ever wanted to just quit? "Don't ask me, Mum," the little boy says. "I don't know why you bother washing my clothes, either." Sometimes you're not so alone as you think. Look at your life. Everybody's carrying some kind of burden. How much money do you pour into keeping up the expectations of your class? You can do a very useful audit of your own life by looking at your cheque stubs. Is the kind of wine you serve your guests more important than what's happening down at St Basil's Centre for the Young Homeless? What is that load you are pulling? What yoke is bearing its heavy weight down upon your shoulders? Do you want out? Do you want to break the cycle? Did Christ die on the cross for the kind of life you are living right now? This is really a question of vocation we're talking about here. What kind of yoke are you going to carry that will make your life meaningful, joyful and fulfilled? Does the one you carry now do that, or does it wear down your weary soul? Maybe today is the day God is calling you to think about all this. Maybe CHRISTIAN AID WEEK this year is going to provide you the occasion to think about your Christian vocation. How much more money does the Third World have to pour into our country than we return in aid before we begin to realise how off-balance our life is? How long can we ignore a world refugee crisis before we come to terms with the requirements of hospitality? Christian Aid Week reminds that the faith we practice is real. It does not belong in some sentimental never-never-land where the most important thing is that everyone always likes all the hymns we sing. No, our faith belongs where it ought to belong, in life in its fullest and most complex dimensions. Faithlessness avoids life and the responsibilities of life, prefering simple, magical solutions to the burdens of human living like winning the lottery or turning stones into bread. Faith embraces life as fully as God embraced human life in Jesus, graciously accepting the limitations of life, the tendency that betrayal will come before loyalty, and that loyalties will often be partial and experience ups and downs, and still loving. And God continues to pour out in love through the faithful today, through you and me and all the saints today,. The acts of reconciliation we accomplish may be partial, the relief we provide temporary, the partnerships we make fraught with miscommunication. The rains keep coming to Bangladesh. The colonial inheritance of Africa continues to erupt in painful, unexpected ways. Our wilful independence no more puts a stop to the love of God now than it did then, on the cross. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God meet us in the real world. Perhaps we are never completely rid of burdens we find oppressive. It is romantic to imagine that any revolution in the interest of justice has ever been entirely successful. It is romantic to imagine that any vocation is ever purely won. One still has to make a living. Burdons of the more burdonsome variety are still carried. The cynic gives up trying. But the grace, mercy and peace of God continues to flow, both through us and despite us. Shamom continues to shine, if only here and there sometimes. If we must still carry oppressive burdens, there are envertheless opportunities to lay those burdens down. When you go on a wilderness canoe trip, for instance, you carry everything you need with you, and of course since your burden is for the most part not onyour back but resting nicely on the floor of the canoe, you tend to take along more than you probably need. It's no problem as long as you are gliding across the lake. When you need to portage over land from one lake to another, it gets rough. The packs you have to carry are huge monster packs, fitted with what they call a "trump" line that comes up around your forehead to help bear the weight of it all. You lean forward, straining against the weight, wishing you had left it all back home. Of course it's all in sport, and it doesn't last very long. But there are places around the world where carrying such burden is not a matter of sport but of necessity, places like the mountains of Nepal where there are no roads and no suitable beasts of burden for the mountain paths. There is no alternative. You just get on with it. Life is real. Ever so often along the mountain path, however, there is a "burden bench" provided, a place where you can rest your heavy load until you are ready to carry on. Ingeniously, a Christian church there in Nepal has used one of these burden benches as the design of its communion table. "Come unto me, all you who labour and are heavy laden," Jesus said, "and I will give you rest." Lay your burden down, if only for a while. Rest here. Take up the yoke of table fellowship, the burden of life together, l ife with our Lord Jesus Christ, and you will find joyful rest. Rev Dr Tom Arthur
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