Something to be said for those who have not heard it said in our community:
“The local church is not the place where we are free from “being burdens” to one another, it is the place in which God calls us to carry one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.”
It is something I have said often, even from the pulpit at times, and yet, as continue to grow, there are more and more folks among us who have not heard this. Additionally, even for those who have heard these words said in our community, it is a fact that these words run very contrary to the culture in which we live.
We know how the game works: I am about to ask you something and feel apprehensive about doing so and therefore say “I don’t want to be a burden…” which is almost always not a simple prefatory comment. It is a rhetorical chess-move. You know your line, “oh you’re not a burden…” I’ve conscripted you into the service of my wounded ego, you have felt this immense pressure (experienced as a sheer “badness”) to alleviate my frailty with kind falsities. For the truth is that I am a burden on you. My request is going to lay a tax on your life. I am asking that you lay down your life, in some way, great or small, for mine. But, disgusted and discomfited at my weakness, I side-step in order to avoid having to countenance my need. I must pretend to be strong and independent, a somebody who is something, simultaneously victim and martyr, I will pull myself up by my bootstraps with all the hideous self-focus of Babel and all the swagger of a door-to-door salesman of the postwar era. An accuser of the brethren who demands I have my vanity humored even while I levy my bill.
That’s not good news, that is a yoke of slavery. “Hey I don’t want to be a burden…” subtley opens-up a system of bondage and falsehood. What kind of needs will I have for others to help with which are not burdens? If it wasn’t a burden you wouldn’t need my help, and you wouldn’t feel the shame of asking me for it. Thus, often, even if unintentionally, “Hey I don’t want to be a burden…” is an invitation to join in a lie.
Jesus offers us a better way. He calls us to bear one another’s burdens (Gal. 6:2). My life lays a burden on others; from my umbilical cord to the price of the flowers laid on my grave by grandchildren long after I am dead, it costs this world for me to live. I can do one of two things with that knowledge: I can despise it (rejecting it, trying to atone for it, or using it evilly to my advantage), or I can be grateful. That gratitude turns me around and allows me to leave-off with all of this cowering language of shame about being a burden —I am that— and instead make my requests of my brothers and sisters clear-eyed and freely, “Will you help me carry this burden?”
Asking the question that way also allows for freedom for my brethren, they can say “yes” or “no” as they are able. They may not be able to help me share the burden, that is okay. But they need not carry also a yoke of shame about their abilities to meet (or not to meet) my need.
We encourage people at All Saints towards a great reversal of our thinking. Don’t say “I don’t want to be a burden…” You are. So am I. So are we all, each to the other. Hold your heads up and stop being ashamed. Instead, say “Are you able to share a burden with me?” Or, maybe better, “May I be a burden on your for a moment?”
Likewise, when we respond to the needs of others, as God gives us grace to do, let us be glad: This person is not a burden, they are my burden… and I am theirs. Moreover, in them I get to fulfill the Law of Christ. That is wild language. In the burdens of my brother or sister is an opportunity given me for my righteousness to exceed the Scribes and Pharisees. I cannot always accept or bear these burdens, but when I can —Oh!— thanks be to God he has counted me worthy to share in the fellowship of the Cross… that is, of bearing burdens.