Putting on the Easy Yoke of the Cross

Dear sisters and brothers,

This past Sunday we heard the good news that a new kind of life is available to us in God through discipleship to Jesus, and it upends all our assumptions about the good life, and the allegiances we’ve made to secure it. Jesus invites us to let go of all the ways we’ve sought to secure a place and name for ourselves, and instead take up the easy yoke of the cross and follow him into abundant life together.

I invited us to respond to this good news but just with a change in our inner attitude toward those things we seek security and significance from, but with a reckoning with our material participation in these ways of life. For example:

• Let us question our assumptions about what to do when we have more money than we need to pay our expenses and live a simple life,
• Let us interrogate how the banks and funds we invest in may be profiting from exploitation and injustice… and divest in whatever ways we can, and
• Let us not hide behind the privilege given to us by our gender, or racialized identity, or sexuality, or wealth, or social status, but rather let us seek out material, embodied solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed, putting our bodies in the way of the violence aimed at them, so their fate becomes ours.

As a church, hearkening back to our Lenten series on resisting the enchantments of Mammon, we have only begun to learn what it means for us to carry our cross and follow Jesus together in these kinds of ways, but let us continue to do so, knowing the new kind of life we gain together in God is far better than the one we leave behind.

Grace and peace,
Fr. Ben