Tune My Heart to Sing Thy Grace

Matthew 11:25–30 MSG

Abruptly Jesus broke into prayer: “Thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth. You’ve concealed your ways from sophisticates and know-it-alls, but spelled them out clearly to ordinary people. Yes, Father, that’s the way you like to work.” Jesus resumed talking to the people, but now tenderly. “The Father has given me all these things to do and say. This is a unique Father-Son operation, coming out of Father and Son intimacies and knowledge. No one knows the Son the way the Father does, nor the Father the way the Son does. But I’m not keeping it to myself; I’m ready to go over it line by line with anyone willing to listen. “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

Guitar

This past week, I had the privilege of leading our Vacation Bible School kids, all 45+ of them, in music each day. We sang “Jump Clap Stomp Shout, Give God all the Praise. God is our savior, we’ll praise him all our days.” We sang about Furry Bears, Happy Wolves, Silly Goats, and a Madness of Marmots. We sang about how we look to the mountains and find God’s faithfulness and love.

It was so fun.

I have not played my guitar much the last couple of years, so it was a joy to pick it back up and learn these songs and lead them for our kids.

When you pick up a guitar after a period of disuse, what do you usually need to do?

Tune it! Stringed instruments go out of tune pretty quickly, especially when they are not being used regularly.

Strings need to be tuned up and brought together into proper tension in order to play chords and resonate properly in relationship to one another. Before, they can sound dead and dull, half right, but not right at all.

But when tuned, the strings sing with resonant beauty. The notes fit together again, the chords form fully, and the melody can begin again.

We regularly go out of tune too, don’t we? You know what I mean — our bodies and spirits, hearts and minds, oftentimes feel like they just aren’t resonating like they used to. Perhaps we feel like we’ve grown dull or even discordant within ourselves.

The Good News today is that through Jesus Christ, our savior and redeemer, we can all come back into tune once more. And back in tune, we are more readily able to sing praises of God’s unfailing grace.

Let’s pray.

Prayer

Forcing Rhythms

These last couple of months, we’ve looked at Sacred Rhythms that we can participate in to come back into tune to God’s grace. Sabbath keeping, prayer, engaging with Scripture, taking time in solitude, all of these pieces can help us get back in tune.

When Jesus teaches us to take on the unforced rhythms of grace, it is these things that we can practically take on to help us grow into those rhythms. These practices form us, change us, orient us back into the right direction. These rhythms tune us.

But don’t we also know about how it feels to force a change to happen? Round peg, square hole type stuff.

One of the great missteps we can take as followers of Jesus is to think that we have to work super super hard to get it right, to achieve God’s goodness, to be worthy. We want to perfect our prayer life. We want to be very disciplined about how we keep the sabbath. We hold that we will only take communion once a month and are thrown off when that rhythm is expanded.

The same is true for the guitar. Forcing a rhythm that is out of sync with the song will make for a mess. There were a few times this week, when I’d lead the kids and try to pick up the tempo, move the song a little faster. They were game for this, jumping and clapping and stomping faster and faster. But staying together got harder. The songs moved faster and we had trouble keeping up! We tried to force the rhythm to be what it wasn’t and it got a little wild!

The yoke of Jesus, that is, the rhythm of work and engagement with God’s story, cannot be forced. Jesus’ words ring so true to us as we hear them, for they are a relief, an unforced settling into the movement of the song of our lives.

We know how easy it is to sink into legalism or to make sure that we are following Jesus in very specific, rigid ways. This kind of rigidity is naturally, in that it is bred from our desires to do it right, to be good, to prove ourselves. I feel it, you feel it.

But Jesus is reminding us that his way is easy, the burden light. Come, especially if you’re weary and tired from the rat race of life. Come, step away from the competition and find deep grace.

Resting into Graced Rhythms

As you know, we’ll be taking sabbatical these next three months. My family and I will step away from life here at St. James to rest and reconnect. It is intended to be a time of rejuvenation, after which I look forward to returning here to begin a new chapter of ministry.

In preparation for this sabbatical, I have absolutely felt the creeping of rigidity and forced rhythms. To be offered such a graced gift of this time, it is something that has caused me to be confronted with my own propensity to want to control things, to worry, to desire to “do it right.”

But the reality is this: it will be what it will be. All is in God’s hands and, because we know God is loving and good, it’s on us to learn to trust those hands. God guides, God sustains, God restores.

And this is where the wisdom from Jesus’ teaching meets the goodness of our morning Psalm.

The way we step into these unforced rhythms of grace is to plant ourselves beside the sustaining, flowing, glorious river of God’s grace.

We see the tree for it’s branches, leaves, trunk, fruit. But the tree is more than what is above ground. There are deep roots that run into the earth. And from these taproots, the tree drinks deeply from the waters of life.

We’ve all seen twisted, winding roots before. Most of the time, they are far from orderly, instead rather twisted and meandering. They are not forced, so much as they extend out into the spaces where they can find sustenance naturally. Certainly, we know a root can grow through a crack in a stone, but the natural way of things is to find paths to nutrients that are less resistant.

For us, our family, but also all of us, this congregation, these next few months are an opportunity to settle into some unforced rhythms. It is a time to pay attention to what is in tune and working and, as well, what is dissonant and broken.

The tree planted beside the running water. The yoke which is not burdensome, but sustainable. These unforced rhythms of grace are how we come back into tune.

Free and Light

Jesus’ call goes out to the weary and the broken. Are you weary or broken down?

I’ll confess, I’m weary. These have been an amazing 7 years. So much has changed and been established anew in our lives, together, right? God is good and we have seen the goodness of God here in our midst.

But I’m weary. It’s time to set things down for a little while to breathe. Even the yoke or rhythm that we carry, it must be set down to rest from time to time.

In Jesus’ teaching, he invites us to set down the heavy burdens we carry. Do you carry a heavy burden today? I know many of us do. And perhaps it’s not a difficult thing, a burden we’d rather not carry. Maybe it’s the yoke and burden of joyous new things. Maybe we’ve been working so hard to plan a VBS program (thank you Tracy) or celebrate a marriage (looking at you Trent and Thomas). And maybe it’s a painful burden, one of great loss and sadness.

Whatever you carry, hear this invitation to set it down and pick up the easy, free, light rhythms of Jesus.

I began with this image of tuning a guitar and I’ll close us with that. Finding the unforced rhythms of God’s grace is about finding our tuning again. It’s about plucking the strings and noticing where it’s not resonating how it should.

To rest in God’s love is to tune back in. And when tuned in, we respond. We sing. The chords ring out true. We show up and offer our lives to one another in freedom and hope. To tune in to God’s grace is to come back to who we are meant to be.

I’m going to spend some time this summer tuning back in. I’ve got a couple of strings that are a little too loose and a few that are a little too uptight. It’s time to bring them back into harmony.

How do you need to tune in in this coming season? What simple practices could you take on to feel these unforced rhythms? What do you need to set down for a while, letting it rest while you restore beside the stream of God’s loving waters?

I pray that we, together, will experience the deep restoring love of God’s unforced rhythms of grace, of which we sing and abide in. Amen.