When Rest Is Found

Sunday, March 19, 2023
Pastor Bonnie Lomen

This the sermon which accompanied the Rutters Requiem on March 19, 2023. The choir and musicians treated us to wonderful music. At the contemporary service, God had moved us to surprise each other with “Breathe” which is mentioned in the sermon. God is good.

Matthew 11:28-30

Come to me all you that are weary and are carrying burdens, and I will give you rest. 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.

Grace and peace to you from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Jesus’ words in Matthew are invitation. As Jesus speaks this invitation, He is offering listeners a new framework for life.

A yoke was not only the wooden piece holding two people or animals together for working. It also was a teaching. If you were a disciple to a priest, you wore their yoke. You lived their teaching. If you are Jesus’ disciples you wore and lived HIS YOKE. He tells us His yoke is easy, He will not burden us inappropriately. His promise of help doesn’t fall short of His work He has for us. Then, like now, Jesus spoke to people living in a broken world. The people are yoked to many different things, as we are;

Grief and despair

Loss of dreams
Loss of loved ones
Loss of health
Perhaps betrayal by a loved one-which can cause us to exist in brokenness
We despair in our feelings of helplessness or inability to fix what is broken in our lives or in the lives of those we love
It can be pain to which we are yoked, relentless pain of body or spirit
Some are yoked to fear; even a fear their lives serve no purpose and they will leave no footprint
Despair can come from being yoked to success, in feeling we were never good enough and now deserve no love, or the drive to succeed which eats away at souls
We can be yoked to remorse of things done, or left undone
Being yoked as a Christian, to the LAW, can burden us; always being angry-working so hard to change people by beating them up with the law……..and so on.

Gosh, if we understood and were changed by the law, if the law saved us, Moses would be our Savior. But he is not. The Savior, Jesus, comes with a teaching of truth which will not burden us with lies. He comes with patience so we might have time to learn to live His ways. He isn’t speaking of no law……..His invitation is to His law; LOVE.

This invitation to come to Him, is for all people. We may yoke ourselves to Him as begin our lives at baptism, or as we drop to our knees exhausted and immobilized in despair. His yoke takes us from the darkness of death offered by a broken world, to life available now, and as we pass into eternity.

Pain is real. Our brokenness can sometimes be paralyzing. But Jesus yoke is HOPE. This is why we are ‘the church.’

I share a story in two parts:

It was shortly after beginning ministry in Pine River when we took a look at our future as a congregation. We had someone from outside the congregation lead the process. One question which stuck with me was this: “What is you love language to God musically? Pipe organ? Piano? Gospel? Something in the line of praise? What musical voice best helps you speak worship?”

We found we had people from the background of pipe organ and large choir………all the way to a Pentecostal person who wanted swaying, hands in the air praising. Yet we were a congregation with an electric organ and a praise team which used piano.

Not long after this, I received a call from the school principal. One of my members, a school teacher home on maternity leave, had just lost her son. As she heard the school bus arrive with her first grader and went to greet him, she suddenly heard the bus back up. It had driven over her son. She was the first one on the scene.

The journey from that point was hard for everyone. It required prayer and uncomfortable silences. There were times when no words could be spoken. The grief was deep, the despair palpable. The funeral was held in the school auditorium and 900 attended. No one had the words to speak a eulogy. Song became the voice of all of us. The team used their musical love language……………..

This is the air I breathe. This is the air I breathe. Your holy presence, living in me.

This is my daily bread, this is my daily bread, your very word, spoken to me.

And I am desperate for you, I’m lost without you

This music was our voice that day.

We used words of the Psalmist:

Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord! Lord, hear my voice.

Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy.

And The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

In time, yoked to Christ, new life emerged.

Today, our choir and musicians come to give words and music to hearts which are heavy. Broken. Requiem offers words for us to face darkness, and move into light. The requiem takes us from death into life.

Yoked to Christ, our prayers rise together, and we sing, or listen to this love language of music because we may have no voice this day. The Psalmist will remind us of hope which is ours.

Are we tired yet? Tired of other yokes which exhaust and break us?

Then let’s listen to the invitation our Lord:

Come to me all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. YOU TOO will become gentle and humble in heart. You will find rest for your souls.

AMEN.

Past Sermons

Sermons

Mutually Encouraged by Faith

Sunday, May 19, 2019
Pastor Megan Torgerson

Romans 1:1-17

The book of Romans is a letter. An actual letter. Like, a letter written by hand and then sent to someone else for them to read. Paul, the author of this letter, wrote a lot of letters. Paul was an apostle, that is, someone who is sent – in this case, he is one who is sent to preach the good news of Jesus Christ to the furthest reaches of the known world. He’s really, really good at it.

At the time that Paul writes this letter to the church in Rome, he’s been doing this work for probably twenty years and is at the peak of his career. He’s developed a great pattern in his work: visit a place, get to know the people, continually share his faith with them, help gather a community of believers from all walks of life, and stay with them while they learn how to be followers of Jesus. Then Paul leaves – after all, he’s got other places to visit and more people to teach. He is an apostle – he is sent. But he doesn’t leave the church abandoned. He writes letters back to these churches, especially when he hears about crises or conflicts. Sometimes they need comfort, sometimes challenge, sometimes critique, but always he writes as one they know and love. They welcome his input.

The letter to the Romans is not like that. Paul has never been to Rome. There is already a Christian church there, one brought over likely from Jerusalem very early in the faith. And the church in Rome has recently seen conflict. A few years before the writing of this letter, the Roman emperor expelled all the Jews from Rome. Because Christianity was effectively a form of Judaism at the time, Christians were also exiled. After the emperor died and the Jewish Christians returned, they found a church that had continued to grow and develop – this time with Gentile Christians.

It’s hard for us to understand how shocking and despicable this would have been. Two weeks ago I preached on Acts 10, and how Peter’s vision of God calling all animals clean and good to eat flew in the face of millennia of culture, history, and society for Jewish Christians. Jesus himself was Jewish and kept these laws – surely if anyone else wanted to be Christian, they could likewise follow these rules. Peter’s vision and the general movement of the church revealed otherwise.

That didn’t mean it made things easy. It is hard to let go of tradition and expectation and legislation as the Spirit moves us to new places. I hear people struggle when someone sits in their pew or wears sweatpants to church. Let’s be honest: those are enormously trivial things. If still we grind our teeth at the thought of these worthless infractions how much more might faithful people be driven to despair by moving on from the purity laws ordained by God?

This is the faith community to which Paul writes. He writes to a church redefining and fighting. It is a church that feels a deep rift, a painful split, one that goes deep into matters of identity and righteousness, one that threatens to dissolve into name-calling and condemning and finger-pointing and disgrace to the very name of God in whose name they mean to gather – and if we’re honest, we know how that feels. Those fears are not unfamiliar.

So how does Paul start his letter? He has no standing in that church in Rome. They don’t even know who he is – and if they do, it’s possible that they might still remember him as he was in his youth, an aggressive persecutor of the early faith. What can he say that would possibly invite them to listen to him, to hear the word he will share, to receive the message that he hopes will join them together in the work of the gospel?

He keeps it simple: he tells them the truth. He tells them who he is, and it is fully wrapped up in who Jesus is. His self-introduction is the story of the gospel. Nothing he can say about himself means more than who he is in Jesus Christ.

He tells them he wants to come see them, that he wants to be with them, that he hopes he can share some spiritual gift – but even more than that, so that they might mutually encourage each other in faith. He doesn’t want to come to them because he’s better than them, because he can fix them so they can get things right, because they’re obviously sinful mess-ups who just haven’t been taught the truth. No, he wants to join them for mutual encouragement in faith. He wants to walk with them. He hopes he has something to offer them in his teaching and leadership, but just the same, he knows he will grow by being with them as well.

What if that’s how it’s supposed to be? What if we’re supposed to talk about what we believe and why, not because we’ve got it right and we want to establish our superior knowledge, but because we know that God works through our mutual encouragement in faith? What if we were not ashamed of the gospel, not afraid of getting it wrong, not worried that someone would think we were weird for talking about what we believe and why and then asking others the same? What if we trusted that the power of God was at work in this mutual encouragement? What if we were not so proud and short-sighted as to think that the way we see God is the only way God works in the world? What if we actually believed that God is at work in the world, that God has already been working long before we showed up, that we arrive as much to learn as to teach?

Ah, but I know the argument against it: we’re supposed to keep polite conversation, right? What don’t you talk about at the dinner table? Religion and politics, right? Look where it’s gotten us. It’s gotten us to a place where we can no longer have civil discourse, where we are more likely to condemn than to seek to understand, where we claim a Christian can only look one way, live one place, vote one direction, take one moral position. It’s gotten us built up and walled off and fighting against our own beloved members of the family of God.

So don’t do it. Take Paul’s example. Tell people who you are. Tell them where you’re from. Tell them what you believe. And then invite them to do the same. Make your story of faith as natural a part of your introduction as where you work and where you live and who’s in your family. And when someone’s story is different, listen to it. Hear it. See God at work in it. Be amazed. Allow for the mutual encouragement of faith, because this is how the gospel is shared.

No matter where you go from here, no matter where you find yourself, no matter what comes next for you – you can do this. You are called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel which is the power of God for salvation for everyone who has faith – no matter what. Thanks be to God. Amen.

When Rest Is Found

Sunday, March 19, 2023
Pastor Bonnie Lomen

Matthew 11:28-30

Past Sermons

Reclaiming our Place as Creatures of God

Living a New Life with Christ

The Power of God’s Love

Sermons

Mutually Encouraged by Faith

Sunday, May 19, 2019
Pastor Megan Torgerson

Romans 1:1-17

Past Sermons

Reclaiming our Place as Creatures of God

Living a New Life with Christ

The Power of God’s Love

About Augustana

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When Rest Is Found

Sunday, March 19, 2023 Pastor Bonnie Lomen

Matthew 11:28-30

Past Sermons

Sermons

Mutually Encouraged by Faith

Sunday, May 19, 2019 Pastor Megan Torgerson

Romans 1:1-17

Past Sermons

About Augustana

Quick Links

Contact Us

Worship Hours

Sunday, March 19, 2023
Pastor Bonnie Lomen

Sunday, May 19, 2019
Pastor Megan Torgerson