Feb. 27 Sermon: Comfort Food
Comfort Food: Rest for the Weary
February 27, 2011
Holy Covenant UMC
Rev. Kate Hurst Floyd
Matthew 11:28-30
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Macaroni and Cheese is my ultimate comfort food.
Next week we’re having our annual chili and pie cook-off at 12:30, and while I’m definitely looking forward to tasting chili, if it we’re up to me we’d be having a mac ‘n’ cheese cook-off. Nothing quite tops the taste of warm noodles and creamy cheese, all topped off with crispy bread crumbs.
It’s comfort in a casserole dish.
When I was 15, I was hospitalized for a week for an illness and then needed to recover at home, away from school for several months. It was a difficult and scary time for me, though fortunately, I recovered completely. But during my hospitalization my grandparents came out to TX to help take care of me. And when I got back home and my appetite came back, my grandmother said she’d make me anything I wanted. And what I wanted was macaroni and cheese. I can still remember, even smell and taste that meal, made with so much love: homemade mac ‘n’ cheese accompanied by lima beans and hamburger steak.
I ate that macaroni and cheese for a week and with each bite felt more loved and received more healing. So when I think of mac ‘n’ cheese, it’s not just that I really love the food; it holds a particular memory for me of a time when I felt loved and cared for in a vulnerable state. I was tired and weak, and my grandmother cared for me exactly where I was through love and comfort.
What’s your comfort food? Is there a dish that makes you think of home, or friends, or family? That welcomes you with warmth and love? Food can be soothing in this way…but maybe there’s a particular person who makes you feel loved and welcomed. Or a place..or a time in your life. When do you feel most safe and loved, for exactly who you are? Where do you go when you are burdened and heavy laden and in need of rest?
Jesus says to us: Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.
The good news this morning is that when we’re tired from the stressors of life, weary from disease and depression, overwhelmed by the world,
We can come to Jesus….
Jesus will be our comfort in times of need. He will give us rest.
It’s good news to hear, but a little harder to believe and live out, isn’t it? His comfort isn’t quite as tangible as a big ol’ piping hot casserole of gooey, cheesy goodness. What does it mean to come to Jesus?
He goes on to say: 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.”
The people to whom he is talking are familiar with really heavy yokes, weighing them down. The imagery is fresh: they are used to seeing, daily, oxen who carry great loads with the weight of a yoke across their backs. Jesus uses this imagery to let them know he recognizes the heaviness that weighs down not just our backs, but our souls. And he says, take off the yoke of the world, stop letting it weigh you down, and put on my yoke, carry me with you…for I am light and easy and carry your burdens for you.
In our pain, we are assured that God is with us.
The good news from Jesus, God incarnate, is that we worship a God who knows our pain. We worship a God who is intimately with us in the midst of our pain. God does not stand over and above us, distant from our reality and disconnected from our suffering. The power that we have pictured here, in scripture, is not a power of might and force, but one of presence and peace. God’s power is as one who sits beside us, who meets us where we are, who comes to us in all of our weary humanity.
Trouble comes when we start to believe that God can’t handle our pain and so we turn to the ways of the world: Instead of coming to Jesus, we turn towards alcohol, shopping, food, to numb our pain, adding weight to our backs; We hold all our troubles inside, never letting anybody know how much we’re hurting, adding weight to our souls; We fill up our days with conference calls and business lunches and drinks with friends and book clubs and volunteering and errands and…, never leaving time for silence or prayer or discernment, making our loads heavier; We try and help everybody else first, leaving no time for tending our own souls, weighing ourselves down. Our yoke becomes really heavy and too difficult to carry on our own.
How do we come to Jesus instead? First, Coming to Jesus is first about being honest and vulnerable. And believing that God loves and accept us right where are, exactly where we are. You are never, ever too much for God to handle. Your burden’s never too heavy, your grief never too strong, your failures never too pronounced. God sees you and loves you exactly where you are. Jesus looks at our heaviness and beckons us to come and rest. He doesn’t say: Come to me when you’ve solved your codependency issues; come to me when you’ve stopped making mistakes; come to me only with a smiling face and happy heart; No, he says, come to me all you who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. We don’t need to hide our troubles from Jesus—he intimately knows us and is with us in the midst of our struggles.
How do we come? It will look different for different ones of us. We can come to Jesus in prayer, silent time alone with God, without the distractions of the world. We can come to Jesus in a small group setting, seeking support from our brothers and sisters. We can journal, we can go see a counselor, we can read scripture about the unconditional love of God. We come to Jesus by willing to be open and vulnerable and believing that we are good enough, right we are.
But our promise from Scripture is more than God’s presence…our promise is that in the midst of suffering, God is bringing new life to the surface. We worship a God of resurrection, after all, a God of new birth, new life, of triumph over death and darkness. In our hurt, with our heavy burdens, we can be assured that God is always giving us a new yoke, one that is light and free and easy.
God heals us by creating new life, but it’s not always what we expect or want. And though the yoke, with God, is easier than bearing the yoke of the world, it’s not easy in the quick-fix way our culture tells us things should be easy. Because God’s ways are not our ways, and God’s time is not our time. When we go to God in prayer, desiring healing, we don’t always receive the answer we want. But, when we open our eyes and our ears, when we attune all our senses towards the divine, we will feel that yoke of new life lightening our load.
When we’re in pain, our first instinct is usually to grab for control and manage the situation for ourselves. Control is the message of our culture: a culture that counsels quick fixes and always smiling faces. We’re constantly on our blackberries and phones, over-scheduling our lives, as if we plan one more event, take control of every second of our time, we might actually be in control of our pain. But busy-ness is dangerous, and complete control is an illusion. It weighs us down.
But when Jesus calls us to come to him, he’s calling us to the opposite of control: he’s calling us to let go. He’s calling us to be vulnerable, to name our weaknesses and our brokenness, he’s calling us to live into the depths of our emotions: sadness, anger, regret, relief, joy and gratitude, love and loss, loneliness and confusion. He’s calling on us to relinquish the fiction that we are in control, and rely instead on God’s strength and presence. To name that we can’t heal ourselves, and to open our eyes to God’s healing yoke in our midst.
For when we let go, really let go, we are able to let love in. When we stop frantically searching for answers, when we take time to pause and reflect and pray, we are able to see that God is present, and God is healing us. God is creating newness in our lives. Our call is to be open to God’s newness.
One of the best ways we can come to Jesus, prepared to take on a light yoke, is to come, fully, into this community of faith. For it is here that we tangibly share the load and carry burdens for one another. The great gift is that here, unlike many spaces in the world (at school or work or even home), we get to be our full, authentic, vulnerable selves, with nothing to hide and nothing to lose. We can let go of the need to be perfect. People say to me all the time, who are going through some kind of struggle: I look around at church and think that everyone else has it together, and I’m the only one with any kind of problems. It’s easy to look around at a group of people for an hour on Sunday, smiling, hugging, clapping and singing, and believe that we don’t have any heavy burdens on our backs. But friends, it’s just not true. Each of us carries around pain—and rather than hiding it, or believing that we don’t belong because we carry pain—we are called to share it, right here, with one another. For Jesus works in and through us to carry each other’s burdens.
How do we come to Jesus? We come to Jesus by coming to one another as the church.
Come to coffee hour in the gallery, and when your friend asks how your week’s been, instead of saying “fine” with a smile, say: I had a really bad fight with my mother and I could use a hug.
Come to women’s group and be willing to say: I’ve been pretty lonely lately. And I bet you’ll get a dinner invitation for Wednesday night.
Put your name on a prayer request card, and you’ll have a whole team of people carrying your burden with you.
Come to me and say, I’m struggling with grief, can we set up a time to talk?
Come to Rebecca and say, can we go to coffee? I’m carrying the weight of a secret and I need to tell somebody.
Come to the casserole committee and say: My partner’s having surgery next week and it sure would help to have some meals when we’re home from the hospital. They’ll gladly stock up your fridge.
Come to a small group and say: here’s my story.
Coming to Jesus isn’t a quick fix that will take away the root of pain: past abuse, the loss of a loved one, a devastating illness. But opening up, bringing our full selves to the table, will open up a new pathway for connection, love, and healing.
We talk a lot here about what we can do for other people, what we can do for the world. And this is a crucial part of our call as Christians. But there are also seasons in our life of faith when we are so heavy that we’re the ones in need of rest, not the ones who are carrying extra weight.
Jesus said “Love your neighbor as yourself”; We often forget the second half of this commandment: love yourself. Jesus knows that until we love ourselves, we can’t love others fully. We are called to come to Jesus when we are weary, and find rest. And know that we are loved, in all of our vulnerability. Then, and only then, can we reach out to others; not out of a sense of obedience, or burden, like a yoke that weighs down our shoulders, but out of a response to that great love.
This is who we are as a church. A place where we can bring our full selves and find rest. And a place where we can shoulder the burdens of others when ours are feeling light. Because you are what you eat: When you take in warmth, comfort, rest, community, and love, you will become someone who shares generously with others.
It turns out, coming to Jesus is as tangible as macaroni and cheese. When we come to Jesus through the church, we are a people who share love by cooking, eating, and receiving together. Let this community be your comfort food.
Through the power of God, we carry each other. In the last years of my grandmother’s life, she battled, bravely, both Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s. This faithful Christian woman, a preacher’s daughter and preacher’s wife, who cared for others throughout her life, was weak. She lost use of her arms and hands and was unable to feed herself. So I found myself, one who had received love when I was most vulnerable, feeding the grandmother who once fed me. Coming to Jesus through the tangible love of one another.
We come to Jesus, through the love and care of one another, and we find rest. We find new life. And our burden is light.
Thanks be to God, Amen.
Tags: Kate
