In my opinion, one of the most powerful sentences in scripture that isn’t in the gospels, is in our reading from Galatians today… Paul tells this new community that is trying to live its life rooted in the Gospel, that they are to “bear one another’s burdens… and in this way, you will fulfill the law of Christ.”
You remember the law, right? Jesus boils it down to love God, and love your neighbor… Those are the greatest of the commandments… bearing one another’s burdens is one of the ways that we love our neighbor, and as a result, show our love for God.
I think I have spoken before about a community I used to belong to when I was in my 20’s. It was college students and young adults from the Episcopal and Lutheran student ministries of San Diego. As we spent more time together, “bear one another’s burdens” became a sort of rule of life for us. It was the banner under which we came together in community. We came together as a broken yet hopeful group of Christians who thirsted for knowledge, for friendship and community; we wanted to be a part of something that was different than the world of success driven life that we saw around us. We tried, sometimes unsuccessfully, to practice discipleship in our friendships, at school and work… and when we came together, we had a place where we could bring our joys and our struggles to each other.
As I read our lessons today, I was reminded of a prayer that is attributed to St. Teresa of Avila, (who is a personal favorite saint of mine…) and it goes like this:
Christ has no body now on earth but yours; no hands but yours; no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ must look out on the world. Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which He is to bless His people.
The fact is, we need each other; and we don’t just need the people we love and care about either. We need the people we don’t always love and care about too… because in them we learn more about ourselves. We learn about our vulnerabilities and our fears; sometimes we even learn about our strengths… we need to face our vulnerabilities so that we can turn them into strengths, or perhaps realize that as people who follow Jesus, even our vulnerabilities are used for the work of the kingdom. We need these people who are different than us so that we can know Jesus.
We are also called into community with others so that we can be workers in the kingdom; we are the laborers in the harvest that Jesus talks about. It’s not glamorous work most of the time; sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s hard, but we are the ones that he has chosen to continue his work in the world… as the mentor of the young adult community I mentioned above used to say, “we’re all God’s got”. And so we muddle together to bear one another’s burdens so that some way, somehow, others will know Jesus by our actions… actions that in this time, like all times in history are so very important and necessary. There has been so much violence in the world, so much that has not been life giving; stories of shootings all over the country, including an elementary school here in Texas; war in Ukraine where innocent people are being tortured and killed; people yelling over each other with no respect for the others story…
Bearing one another’s burdens is in part, about giving another person space to be who they are…. It gives them a place to exist in the world where they are heard and where they are cared about simply because they belong to God… I used to think in my work as a chaplain, that being present with someone else was perhaps the greatest gift I could give… I believe that all of us have a story to tell, and we all need to be heard, and we also need to listen….the thing about listening to another’s story, is that it isn’t without its demand on us… once we truly listen and hear another, they become part of us, their story, their life, has a claim on us. It changes us… and it might even require that we do something even beyond creating space and time… and perhaps that’s why it scares us so much… and yet… it blesses us more richly than we can imagine. Change, as frightening as it can be, when it’s part of a community based on the gospel, is a good thing…. If we are living a gospel life, if we are praying, reading scripture, worshiping, participating in the life and ministry of a community, then we cannot help but be changed…
Everyone we will encounter today has a burden that needs to be borne in some way… it is my prayer for myself and for each of us, that we will risk loving enough to be willing to help bear that burden so that we might learn more about who we are, and who Jesus is… for we are his body, and it is through us that the kingdom of God continues to be born and continues to flourish…
Christ has no body now on earth but yours; no hands but yours; no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ must look out on the world. Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which He is to bless His people.