William H. Willimon - "The Blessedness of Being a Burden" (December 3, 2000)
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| Preacher | Our lesson today is from | 0:09 |
| Paul's letter to the Thessalonians. | 0:11 | |
| Paul had a lot of trouble with the church at Thessalonia | 0:15 | |
| and yet Paul, in his letter to them asked, | 0:21 | |
| "How can I thank God enough for you. | 0:27 | |
| For all that you have meant to me?" | 0:31 | |
| One might expect Paul to say, | 0:36 | |
| "How can I thank, how can you thank God | 0:41 | |
| for all that I have meant to you?" | 0:44 | |
| He has had to intervene in this church | 0:47 | |
| on a number of occasions, | 0:50 | |
| Paul has had to go there and teach them. | 0:51 | |
| And yet Paul gives thanks for these Thessalonians | 0:55 | |
| who, to him, were such a heavy burden. | 1:00 | |
| This is odd because in my pastoral care of people, | 1:06 | |
| people facing the end of their lives, | 1:10 | |
| for some time I have noted that it's, | 1:14 | |
| that when people are facing death | 1:18 | |
| or physical infirmity, | 1:21 | |
| they do not fear death, what they fear is the dying, | 1:25 | |
| more specifically, what they fear is, in their words, | 1:31 | |
| becoming a burden to my family. | 1:36 | |
| Our prayer is to end our lives in such a way | 1:40 | |
| that we will never have to trouble other people | 1:43 | |
| In the matter of our passing. | 1:47 | |
| "I don't want to be a burden." | 1:49 | |
| this is a major reason why we stash away thousands | 1:52 | |
| in our pension funds and make a living will or advance | 1:56 | |
| directive specifying just how we will be disposed of | 2:00 | |
| before and after our deaths in such a way | 2:05 | |
| that nobody will be put to trouble by us. | 2:09 | |
| I for instance, have a couple of children. | 2:16 | |
| Do I really want, in my last days, | 2:20 | |
| to be a burden to them? | 2:23 | |
| Well, my response is, why not? | 2:27 | |
| (Congregation laughs) | 2:31 | |
| They have certainly been a burden to me. | 2:32 | |
| (Congregation laughs) | 2:34 | |
| True, I did not give them birth but I was there | 2:36 | |
| and I had to pay for it. | 2:41 | |
| And then there were the diapers, I've changed a few. | 2:44 | |
| And sweltering in the hot sun at swim meets, | 2:49 | |
| the worst form of parental punishment. | 2:53 | |
| I can't tell you how many times | 2:58 | |
| I've had to rearrange my schedule for theirs. | 2:59 | |
| The piano recitals, the mediocre meals at McDonald's, | 3:03 | |
| they were a burden to us for about 20 something years | 3:09 | |
| why should I bother being a burden to them | 3:13 | |
| for the couple of years of my dying? | 3:15 | |
| Now, maybe you're saying, | 3:19 | |
| this is not the most noble of parental ponderings. | 3:20 | |
| And it's true, we desperately wanted children | 3:23 | |
| and all in all they have been a great joy. | 3:28 | |
| But I say this and none too politely | 3:32 | |
| because as a reminder that being a burden | 3:36 | |
| is just part of the business of family. | 3:41 | |
| If we were going to list assorted family values, | 3:45 | |
| and I have no desire to do so, | 3:50 | |
| but surely the most persistent and counter cultural of them | 3:53 | |
| would be a willingness to be a burden | 3:57 | |
| and to take up a burden of another. | 4:01 | |
| Maybe what is miraculous is that so many | 4:07 | |
| so gleefully assume the burdens of bearing children | 4:11 | |
| because we live in a society under the tutelage | 4:17 | |
| of certain philosophical mistakes of people like John Locke | 4:22 | |
| and Thomas Jefferson, who tell us that we live | 4:25 | |
| under some invisible social contract, | 4:29 | |
| where we as autonomous individuals decided to come together | 4:33 | |
| in some kind of contractual agreement | 4:37 | |
| with one another in order to better gratify | 4:40 | |
| our individual desires. | 4:43 | |
| Well, maybe that kind of arrangement | 4:47 | |
| is enough for a nation, but it's not enough for a family. | 4:48 | |
| 'Cause being a family means to have claims on one another. | 4:54 | |
| Nobody contracts to be in a family. | 4:59 | |
| You don't choose your parents | 5:02 | |
| and despite the misnomer, Planned Parenthood, | 5:05 | |
| your parents or they didn't choose you either. | 5:09 | |
| When parents are choosing, in my experience, | 5:14 | |
| they always choose children who are polite, chaste, | 5:16 | |
| high achievers, excellent takers of SAT tests | 5:22 | |
| and parental directives. | 5:26 | |
| In short, the sort of people that would get into Harvard, | 5:29 | |
| which tells you a lot about parental values. | 5:33 | |
| But parents never choose all of that negative baggage | 5:37 | |
| that invariably comes with raising human beings. | 5:41 | |
| I don't know anybody who planned to be a parent to a kid | 5:46 | |
| who was a drummer in a rock band | 5:50 | |
| or who has pierced seven different parts of her body | 5:54 | |
| and yet, sometimes as parents, | 5:58 | |
| these are the children you get. | 5:59 | |
| All parental planning and deciding | 6:02 | |
| and choosing to the contrary. | 6:04 | |
| And the beauty of it is that in bearing such children, | 6:06 | |
| we come quite intensely to love them. | 6:12 | |
| We take joy in them we take joy in those | 6:17 | |
| whom we would have never have chosen | 6:22 | |
| if we'd been left to our own devices. | 6:25 | |
| Of course, it's the nature of this God | 6:29 | |
| not to want to leave us to our own devices. | 6:31 | |
| And so there was a point in our lives | 6:35 | |
| in which, despite ourselves, | 6:37 | |
| we are able to turn to the other and say, | 6:38 | |
| "You know, I think her nose ring is rather cute, don't you?" | 6:41 | |
| It is the nature of love to seek out burdens | 6:47 | |
| rather than avoid them. | 6:51 | |
| People are always accusing love | 6:53 | |
| of being blind and crazy, stupid. | 6:55 | |
| But I wonder if sometimes romantic love appears that way | 7:00 | |
| in this society because in our society | 7:03 | |
| we put huge stress on the | 7:06 | |
| unburdened autonomous individual. | 7:09 | |
| And that means we have no explanation | 7:14 | |
| for why two people would quite joyfully be willing | 7:16 | |
| to yoke their lives together forever | 7:19 | |
| except for hormones or bad judgment or unbridled lust | 7:22 | |
| or whatever has made them, as we say crazy with love. | 7:26 | |
| Well, love isn't crazy. | 7:32 | |
| Maybe love knows that we are no more human | 7:34 | |
| then in those moments when we quite joyfully | 7:39 | |
| burden ourselves with other people. | 7:43 | |
| Maybe, as ethicist Gilbert Meilaender says, | 7:49 | |
| "To turn our back on such burdens | 7:55 | |
| is to turn our back upon our very humanity." | 7:57 | |
| It is the nature of love to expose us | 8:04 | |
| to the needs of others, to have our lives interrupted, | 8:07 | |
| detoured, and, in general, disrupted by others. | 8:10 | |
| And from what I can tell, we are at our best | 8:15 | |
| when we respond to those un-chosen, undecided, | 8:19 | |
| unplanned demands, interruptions and burdens. | 8:23 | |
| Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." | 8:28 | |
| which is just the sort of thing | 8:33 | |
| you would have expected a professor to say. | 8:35 | |
| We'll, it was Jesus who said or, well, he should have said | 8:38 | |
| that the unburdened life is not worth living. | 8:43 | |
| Honestly, to say that your life is totally free of others | 8:48 | |
| and the burdens of other people, | 8:51 | |
| is another way of saying I am very lonely. | 8:54 | |
| I have no better purpose for me than me. | 8:58 | |
| And I suppose that's one of the lessons | 9:04 | |
| I tried to teach my children | 9:06 | |
| When they were still in range of my voice. | 9:09 | |
| It's one of the lessons of the Christian faith. | 9:14 | |
| Our choir sings it here in Messiah. | 9:17 | |
| That weird passage where Jesus says, | 9:21 | |
| "Come unto me all you who are heavy laden, | 9:24 | |
| come unto me because my my yoke is easy, | 9:29 | |
| my burden is light." | 9:35 | |
| And it is interesting that Jesus did not say, | 9:39 | |
| come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden | 9:41 | |
| and I will relieve you of your burdens, | 9:46 | |
| rather he said, come unto me | 9:49 | |
| and I will put a yoke around your neck, | 9:51 | |
| I'm going to put a burden on your backs. | 9:53 | |
| Now, he says his yoke is easy his burden is light | 9:57 | |
| but a yoke is still a yoke, a burden is still a burden. | 10:02 | |
| Jesus said that the burdened life is the abundant life. | 10:09 | |
| So maybe this Sunday, think of church as training | 10:16 | |
| in laying down so many of the burdens | 10:21 | |
| that our society tries to put on our backs. | 10:24 | |
| The treadmill of financial success, | 10:27 | |
| the relentless attempt at unbridled personal autonomy, | 10:29 | |
| and so forth, and training in bearing upon our backs | 10:33 | |
| burdens that we would never have worn before we met Jesus. | 10:38 | |
| I remember that Sunday when at the close of the service, | 10:44 | |
| this woman comes up to me and says, | 10:48 | |
| "Are you ever bothered that we don't really pray | 10:51 | |
| for anybody in this church accept ourselves? | 10:56 | |
| We pray for those who are in the hospital, | 11:01 | |
| we pray for those who are going | 11:02 | |
| through some kind of difficulty, | 11:05 | |
| but didn't Jesus tell us to pray for enemies? | 11:07 | |
| Don't you think Jesus expects us to consider, | 11:12 | |
| as our responsibility, | 11:17 | |
| people that we hardly even know?" | 11:20 | |
| Well, moments like that make a preacher despise laity - | 11:25 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 11:28 | |
| - | 'cause she was right. | 11:30 |
| Christianity is lifelong training and taking responsibility | 11:32 | |
| and bearing a burden for somebody other than yourself. | 11:37 | |
| I think too much of American higher education, | 11:41 | |
| American entertainment industry and all the rest, | 11:45 | |
| as a culture that tells us that any bothersome burden | 11:50 | |
| of a dependent human being hanging around your neck | 11:55 | |
| is an unwarranted abridgment of our right | 11:58 | |
| to have lives lived for nobody but us. | 12:01 | |
| Thus, a couple of years ago | 12:07 | |
| the Duke Chronicle praised Doctor Jack Kevorkian | 12:08 | |
| as they're great hero. | 12:13 | |
| He perfectly embodies | 12:17 | |
| so much that this culture worships. | 12:20 | |
| No, this doesn't mean that attempts to do a living will | 12:26 | |
| or advance directives are bad. | 12:29 | |
| It doesn't mean that we are wrong to seek help | 12:33 | |
| in caring for those parents or those children | 12:36 | |
| whose lot in life make them particularly vulnerable | 12:41 | |
| and in great need of constant care. | 12:44 | |
| One of the things that happened in Bill Moyer's | 12:47 | |
| recent PBS documentary, On Our Own Terms, | 12:50 | |
| interesting title for a documentary about our dying, | 12:56 | |
| but one of the interesting things about that is, | 12:59 | |
| at the end Moyer said, "The greatest need in our country | 13:02 | |
| related to the dying, is more care | 13:06 | |
| for those who are caring for the dying." | 13:10 | |
| No one is an island unto him or herself. | 13:16 | |
| Our children need adults who are willing | 13:21 | |
| to discipline our lives in congruence | 13:25 | |
| with the needs of children. | 13:27 | |
| Our older adults need adult children who are willing | 13:30 | |
| to order their lives so that they have the blessing | 13:34 | |
| of returning some of the love that was shown to them | 13:37 | |
| when they were dependent. | 13:42 | |
| Christians are crazy enough, looking through the lens | 13:45 | |
| of the self-giving love of Jesus, to refer to such | 13:49 | |
| burdens as God-given blessings. | 13:55 | |
| One of the reasons why we flee from the burdensome care | 14:00 | |
| of those who are dependent upon us | 14:04 | |
| is that their sickness or their mental | 14:07 | |
| or their physical incapacity is, to us, a reminder | 14:10 | |
| of a truth that many of us spend our entire lives avoiding | 14:16 | |
| and that truth is this: we are all dependent. | 14:21 | |
| All of us are moving each day | 14:26 | |
| towards some final end capacity. | 14:29 | |
| Now, most of us, as we've said, we hope to die in such a way | 14:33 | |
| that we may never know that we're actually dying. | 14:37 | |
| Quickly, painlessly, with no messy leftovers. | 14:40 | |
| Truth is, most of us are going to die | 14:45 | |
| in a very different way. | 14:47 | |
| Attached, attached, not simply to some machine, | 14:50 | |
| but attached to other people. | 14:56 | |
| For most of us, the last days of our lives | 14:59 | |
| are even more dependent and burdensome to other people | 15:02 | |
| than our first days as infants. | 15:07 | |
| I hope that my children, my spouse will have more | 15:11 | |
| pity on me when I'm in such circumstances. | 15:16 | |
| And I do expect that they will be far more patient | 15:20 | |
| and wiser in caring for me in this state | 15:22 | |
| than I would be in caring for them. | 15:25 | |
| In the course of this life | 15:29 | |
| they have, despite me, come to love me | 15:31 | |
| and because of that love | 15:35 | |
| I am, of necessity, a burden to them. | 15:36 | |
| And because of their Christian faith, | 15:41 | |
| they've been told, if not by me at least by the Bible, | 15:44 | |
| that they are indeed their brothers' and sisters' keeper. | 15:48 | |
| That every time we reach out to the least of these, | 15:53 | |
| we reach out to Jesus. | 15:57 | |
| And this is what makes life worth living. | 16:01 | |
| This is why I'm bothered that at Duke | 16:06 | |
| as the students often say, "Nobody at Duke dates." | 16:10 | |
| Now, you would think that a Minister would be glad | 16:14 | |
| to keep adolescents from touching each other | 16:16 | |
| and going out together into the gardens and things. | 16:19 | |
| But it bothers me because the image is that | 16:23 | |
| we want to get through these best years of our lives | 16:27 | |
| with no other human beings hanging on us. | 16:29 | |
| We don't want to lift anything heavier than a briefcase | 16:32 | |
| as we go on to success on Wall Street | 16:36 | |
| or wherever we're going. | 16:38 | |
| That's just not a very Christian view | 16:41 | |
| of how human beings are meant to be. | 16:43 | |
| I think I told you this story of a man | 16:48 | |
| in one of my earlier churches | 16:51 | |
| who spent most of his life unattached. | 16:53 | |
| He loved to dance and at some kind of | 16:56 | |
| Arthur Murray convention or something, | 17:00 | |
| he met this woman who shared his love of dancing. | 17:02 | |
| And she quickly fell in love with him, | 17:06 | |
| he fell in love with her. | 17:08 | |
| They were always in church on Sunday morning | 17:11 | |
| but on Friday and Saturday nights they danced, | 17:14 | |
| and I'm talking ballroom and swing and South American | 17:17 | |
| and you name it they danced it. | 17:21 | |
| One day she went to the hospital with a terrible fever, | 17:23 | |
| which was a prelude to a terrible illness | 17:27 | |
| that attacked the central nervous system. | 17:30 | |
| And in just a few weeks she was bedridden, | 17:33 | |
| never to walk again, never to dance again. | 17:37 | |
| Well, Victor changed his work schedule | 17:43 | |
| so he could be home three or four days a week. | 17:46 | |
| He secured the help of a whole network | 17:50 | |
| of people to help care for her. | 17:53 | |
| For seven years he watched constantly, | 17:57 | |
| loving her, helping her to adjust, | 18:01 | |
| to organizing parties and dinners at their home, | 18:03 | |
| where guests gathered around her bed and laughed and talked | 18:06 | |
| because it brought her such Joy. | 18:09 | |
| At the end of seven years she died. | 18:13 | |
| And when the church gathered to praise God | 18:17 | |
| for her life and Witness, | 18:20 | |
| we praised Victor as well. | 18:23 | |
| I told Victor at the funeral, | 18:27 | |
| "You know I'm proud of you as your pastor. | 18:29 | |
| You know this church is proud of you, | 18:33 | |
| the way you lived your life through such a difficult time." | 18:36 | |
| he replied, "Difficult? | 18:40 | |
| That isn't how I would put it. | 18:44 | |
| Oh sure, there were days when I wondered | 18:47 | |
| how we would keep going. | 18:49 | |
| I wondered if I would have the strength | 18:52 | |
| to do everything that was needed. | 18:53 | |
| But you forget, I spent 36 years of my life | 18:57 | |
| without anybody who needed me. | 19:01 | |
| She made my life count. | 19:08 | |
| She gave me a reason for living. No, | 19:12 | |
| she was a gift and not a burden." | 19:17 | |
| I pray to God for such a character. | 19:23 | |
| I pray for you too, | 19:26 | |
| one day by the grace of God, | 19:29 | |
| somebody may be a great bothersome burden for you | 19:33 | |
| and thus a way to life and that abundantly. | 19:38 | |
| Now, this Sunday, did you hear over in Galilee | 19:46 | |
| a young woman, peasant woman, poor named Mary? | 19:48 | |
| Young, poor. | 19:54 | |
| Told that she was going to have | 19:58 | |
| a burden | 20:02 | |
| and she was supposed to name him Jesus? | 20:05 | |
| And she said, | 20:10 | |
| "The Lord has found favor upon me. | 20:13 | |
| Yes." | 20:19 |
