Yokes—the kind you use to harness a team of animals to a task like plowing or hauling—do not have a positive metaphorical connotation.  In the Bible, they are almost universally a negative image.  See, for example, Dt. 28:48 (“He will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you.”), 2 Chron. 10:4 (“Your father [the king] made our yoke heavy.”), and Isa. 58:6 (“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?”).

There is one notable exception—Jesus.  He spoke positively of the yoke: “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.”  (Mt. 11:29-30)  So, what’s up?

There are a lot of things Jesus said we’d like to forget.  This week’s reading from Matthew is one of them.  

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's foes will be members of one's own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.  Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Mt. 10:34-39)

Though often referred to as the Holy Comforter, the Holy Spirit doesn’t seem like that much of a comfort to me, at least in the way we normally mean it.  Anything but.

Acts likens the Holy Spirit, not only to fire but to a violent wind.  “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.”  (Acts 2:2)  Not so comforting. 

I once had a parishioner who taught be a lesson about going to church, at least at times other than Sunday morning.  It was a frustrating lesson for me to learn as a young priest at the time.

I was trying to revive the parish’s Sunday school program, which had been somewhat neglected over the years.  I was trying to grow the place, and a Christian formation strategy seemed important to me—give people a reason to want their children to be in church and to want to be there themselves, I figured. 

I certainly grew up in a culture that valued knowing God and, in particular knowing that you were saved.  “Do you know what will happen to you after you die?” was not an infrequent question in high school and young adulthood.  I confess that I never knew quite how to answer it.  Somehow it seemed if everything depended on something I knew, which seems to me quite a different thing from something in which I had faith. 

That’s why I love the passage from Acts that is the first reading this Sunday, Acts 17:22-31. 

Many years ago, the seminary I attended had an “off the books” work study program.  Putting legalities aside for the moment, students were assigned some work to do for the well-being of the community.  Some worked in the kitchen, some in the library, some in the day care.  It was rather a Benedictine model of community forming a shared life together shaped by a rhythm of prayer, study, and work.  So far, so good.

This is what the lectionary does sometimes.  After three Sundays of slow pitches for preachers—Easter Sunday, “Doubting” Thomas, and Emmaus—this Sunday’s assigned readings leave me cold.  It’s Good Shepherd Sunday (Jn. 10:1-10). 

For one thing, the metaphor of the Good Shepherd doesn’t do anything for me.  Shepherds are just not part of my experience so the comparison just doesn’t speak clearly to me.  I know that shepherding is a long-standing Hebrew metaphor for leadership.  They knew what a sheepfold was.  They could picture the gate Jesus spoke about and knew what the gatekeeper did.  I, though, don’t get it.  I feel a little better that John tells us the people listening to Jesus didn’t get it, either (v. 6).  

The Emmaus story (Lk. 24:13-35) is one of the church’s favorites.  It is also one of mine. 

I am intrigued at the disciples walking along the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus were joined along the way by the risen Jesus but fail to recognize him.  These were people who knew him personally and had, at least from a distance, been witnesses to his passion and had heard, at least third hand, the reports that he had been raised from the dead.  He was there with them but they failed to perceive who he was.  Luke says, “their eyes were kept from recognizing him” (v. 16).  Why is that?

The phone rang not too long after my family sat down for dinner at the rectory.  I knew it was risky, but I decided to answer.  It might be a pastoral emergency, I thought.

“Hello," I answered as I picked up the phone.  

“Hello.  May I speak to St. Thomas, please?”  the voice on the other end replied.  The number was listed in the phone book as “St. Thomas Rectory.”  I was a bit taken aback, but I was pretty confident I had a solicitor on the line.

There is a curiosity about the two windows above the main door to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the church that encloses both the site of the crucifixion and the tomb of Jesus.  On the ledge outside the windows is a wooden ladder leaning up against the wall and leading to the window on the right.  No one knows for sure how it got there, but it has been there a long time, at least 300 years, with no purpose whatsoever.