Rest For The Stressed

Mask or no mask? Go out to eat or dine in? Send the kids to school or keep them home? 2020 is shaping up to be one of the most stressful years many of us have experienced thanks to COVID. We want this pandemic to be over! We want to be free to move about and to visit who we want when we want. We’re tired of bathing our hands in sanitizer. Tired of all the extra precautions we take just to go out and buy a gallon of milk.

There is of course another kind of virus that has been invading the world for much longer than COVID. Its infection rate is almost 100%. The virus I’m talking about of course is sin. Sin causes stress in your family, at your school, and in your workplace as sin prompts people to put themselves first…first before YOUR needs and wants! Even Jesus, the only person who was never infected by sin, was still greatly affected by it. In fact sin, our sin, killed him. But there is rest for those stressed out by sin and its effects—a rest that only comes from Jesus. Listen to what Jesus told his disciples. (Read Matthew 11:25-30.)

If your child’s preschool teacher announced that eating animal crackers provided a cure and a vaccine for COVID, would you run out to the nearest store to buy some for the whole family to eat? I doubt it. Only a gullible person would believe that eating a child’s snack could save you from a deadly virus. And no offence to preschool teachers (Miss Hannah and Miss Abby!), but what would a such a teacher know about viruses and their cure that scientists who have spent their whole live studying those things wouldn’t?

That seemed to be what the people in the towns of Bethsaida and Capernaum thought of Jesus. Oh sure, he had healed their sick and had driven out demons from their loved ones, but believe that he could save them from death and hell? “Hah. Nice try, carpenter’s son from Nazareth!”

But Jesus was not fazed. On the contrary, he said: “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from clever and learned people and have revealed them to little children... No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wants to reveal him.” (Matthew 11:25, 27b)

On the island of Antigua where we lived for three years, we quickly learned that to get things done like get your work permit, it wasn’t about what you knew but who you knew. If a friend could personally introduce you to someone in the Ministry of Immigration, you wouldn’t have to wait as long to get your paperwork completed. Jesus is telling us here that if we want to see God, we can only get a personal introduction through him. Reject Jesus and his Word, and we reject God and his love. It’s really that simple. It doesn’t take a PhD to understand the basic truths of the Bible and for that we can be thankful! There will be no IQ test to get into heaven. God won’t ask how many papers you have published or even if you can say your multiplication tables. That’s good news for most of us and for our really young children. Faith isn’t a matter of intelligence. Faith is a trust that God himself places in our heart through the Word and Sacrament.

But there is a warning in the words that Jesus shared. Since the truth about salvation is really quite simple, do I treat it as simplistic? Now that I’m all grown up, have I come to think that the Word of God is incompatible with the “real adult world”? For example, do I think that while the people of the Bible could expect God to provide for them in miraculous ways, that certainly doesn’t happen anymore. And so if I want to keep food on the table, then I need to make that happen. But that’s also why we end up worrying and stressing so much because we are relying on ourselves to get things done. Or do I think that prayer for God’s protection is pointless? Isn’t God going to do with me what he wants? So if I want to stay safe and healthy, then it’s up to me to eat the right foods and take the right precautions when out and about, right?

But to treat God’s Word as simplistic and incompatible for our life in the modern world is to really say that we know better than God! That’s nothing less than a sin against the First Commandment. In the First Commandment, God says that we are to fear, love, and trust in him above all things—even more than we trust our own intellect and feelings. If we continue to refuse to put God’s Word above our own ideas, we will have to face the eternal consequences for that rebellion as surely as someone who jumps out of an airplane without a parachute will quickly face the consequences of his actions!