William H. Willimon - "The Blessedness of Being a Burden" (December 3, 2000)

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Preacher	Our lesson today is from	0:09
	Paul's letter to the Thessalonians.	0:11
	Paul had a lot of trouble with the church at Thessalonia	0:15
	and yet Paul, in his letter to them asked,	0:21
	"How can I thank God enough for you.	0:27
	For all that you have meant to me?"	0:31
	One might expect Paul to say,	0:36
	"How can I thank, how can you thank God	0:41
	for all that I have meant to you?"	0:44
	He has had to intervene in this church	0:47
	on a number of occasions,	0:50
	Paul has had to go there and teach them.	0:51
	And yet Paul gives thanks for these Thessalonians	0:55
	who, to him, were such a heavy burden.	1:00
	This is odd because in my pastoral care of people,	1:06
	people facing the end of their lives,	1:10
	for some time I have noted that it's,	1:14
	that when people are facing death	1:18
	or physical infirmity,	1:21
	they do not fear death, what they fear is the dying,	1:25
	more specifically, what they fear is, in their words,	1:31
	becoming a burden to my family.	1:36
	Our prayer is to end our lives in such a way	1:40
	that we will never have to trouble other people	1:43
	In the matter of our passing.	1:47
	"I don't want to be a burden."	1:49
	this is a major reason why we stash away thousands	1:52
	in our pension funds and make a living will or advance	1:56
	directive specifying just how we will be disposed of	2:00
	before and after our deaths in such a way	2:05
	that nobody will be put to trouble by us.	2:09
	I for instance, have a couple of children.	2:16
	Do I really want, in my last days,	2:20
	to be a burden to them?	2:23
	Well, my response is, why not?	2:27
	(Congregation laughs)	2:31
	They have certainly been a burden to me.	2:32
	(Congregation laughs)	2:34
	True, I did not give them birth but I was there	2:36
	and I had to pay for it.	2:41
	And then there were the diapers, I've changed a few.	2:44
	And sweltering in the hot sun at swim meets,	2:49
	the worst form of parental punishment.	2:53
	I can't tell you how many times	2:58
	I've had to rearrange my schedule for theirs.	2:59
	The piano recitals, the mediocre meals at McDonald's,	3:03
	they were a burden to us for about 20 something years	3:09
	why should I bother being a burden to them	3:13
	for the couple of years of my dying?	3:15
	Now, maybe you're saying,	3:19
	this is not the most noble of parental ponderings.	3:20
	And it's true, we desperately wanted children	3:23
	and all in all they have been a great joy.	3:28
	But I say this and none too politely	3:32
	because as a reminder that being a burden	3:36
	is just part of the business of family.	3:41
	If we were going to list assorted family values,	3:45
	and I have no desire to do so,	3:50
	but surely the most persistent and counter cultural of them	3:53
	would be a willingness to be a burden	3:57
	and to take up a burden of another.	4:01
	Maybe what is miraculous is that so many	4:07
	so gleefully assume the burdens of bearing children	4:11
	because we live in a society under the tutelage	4:17
	of certain philosophical mistakes of people like John Locke	4:22
	and Thomas Jefferson, who tell us that we live	4:25
	under some invisible social contract,	4:29
	where we as autonomous individuals decided to come together	4:33
	in some kind of contractual agreement	4:37
	with one another in order to better gratify	4:40
	our individual desires.	4:43
	Well, maybe that kind of arrangement	4:47
	is enough for a nation, but it's not enough for a family.	4:48
	'Cause being a family means to have claims on one another.	4:54
	Nobody contracts to be in a family.	4:59
	You don't choose your parents	5:02
	and despite the misnomer, Planned Parenthood,	5:05
	your parents or they didn't choose you either.	5:09
	When parents are choosing, in my experience,	5:14
	they always choose children who are polite, chaste,	5:16
	high achievers, excellent takers of SAT tests	5:22
	and parental directives.	5:26
	In short, the sort of people that would get into Harvard,	5:29
	which tells you a lot about parental values.	5:33
	But parents never choose all of that negative baggage	5:37
	that invariably comes with raising human beings.	5:41
	I don't know anybody who planned to be a parent to a kid	5:46
	who was a drummer in a rock band	5:50
	or who has pierced seven different parts of her body	5:54
	and yet, sometimes as parents,	5:58
	these are the children you get.	5:59
	All parental planning and deciding	6:02
	and choosing to the contrary.	6:04
	And the beauty of it is that in bearing such children,	6:06
	we come quite intensely to love them.	6:12
	We take joy in them we take joy in those	6:17
	whom we would have never have chosen	6:22
	if we'd been left to our own devices.	6:25
	Of course, it's the nature of this God	6:29
	not to want to leave us to our own devices.	6:31
	And so there was a point in our lives	6:35
	in which, despite ourselves,	6:37
	we are able to turn to the other and say,	6:38
	"You know, I think her nose ring is rather cute, don't you?"	6:41
	It is the nature of love to seek out burdens	6:47
	rather than avoid them.	6:51
	People are always accusing love	6:53
	of being blind and crazy, stupid.	6:55
	But I wonder if sometimes romantic love appears that way	7:00
	in this society because in our society	7:03
	we put huge stress on the	7:06
	unburdened autonomous individual.	7:09
	And that means we have no explanation	7:14
	for why two people would quite joyfully be willing	7:16
	to yoke their lives together forever	7:19
	except for hormones or bad judgment or unbridled lust	7:22
	or whatever has made them, as we say crazy with love.	7:26
	Well, love isn't crazy.	7:32
	Maybe love knows that we are no more human	7:34
	then in those moments when we quite joyfully	7:39
	burden ourselves with other people.	7:43
	Maybe, as ethicist Gilbert Meilaender says,	7:49
	"To turn our back on such burdens	7:55
	is to turn our back upon our very humanity."	7:57
	It is the nature of love to expose us	8:04
	to the needs of others, to have our lives interrupted,	8:07
	detoured, and, in general, disrupted by others.	8:10
	And from what I can tell, we are at our best	8:15
	when we respond to those un-chosen, undecided,	8:19
	unplanned demands, interruptions and burdens.	8:23
	Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."	8:28
	which is just the sort of thing	8:33
	you would have expected a professor to say.	8:35
	We'll, it was Jesus who said or, well, he should have said	8:38
	that the unburdened life is not worth living.	8:43
	Honestly, to say that your life is totally free of others	8:48
	and the burdens of other people,	8:51
	is another way of saying I am very lonely.	8:54
	I have no better purpose for me than me.	8:58
	And I suppose that's one of the lessons	9:04
	I tried to teach my children	9:06
	When they were still in range of my voice.	9:09
	It's one of the lessons of the Christian faith.	9:14
	Our choir sings it here in Messiah.	9:17
	That weird passage where Jesus says,	9:21
	"Come unto me all you who are heavy laden,	9:24
	come unto me because my my yoke is easy,	9:29
	my burden is light."	9:35
	And it is interesting that Jesus did not say,	9:39
	come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden	9:41
	and I will relieve you of your burdens,	9:46
	rather he said, come unto me	9:49
	and I will put a yoke around your neck,	9:51
	I'm going to put a burden on your backs.	9:53
	Now, he says his yoke is easy his burden is light	9:57
	but a yoke is still a yoke, a burden is still a burden.	10:02
	Jesus said that the burdened life is the abundant life.	10:09
	So maybe this Sunday, think of church as training	10:16
	in laying down so many of the burdens	10:21
	that our society tries to put on our backs.	10:24
	The treadmill of financial success,	10:27
	the relentless attempt at unbridled personal autonomy,	10:29
	and so forth, and training in bearing upon our backs	10:33
	burdens that we would never have worn before we met Jesus.	10:38
	I remember that Sunday when at the close of the service,	10:44
	this woman comes up to me and says,	10:48
	"Are you ever bothered that we don't really pray	10:51
	for anybody in this church accept ourselves?	10:56
	We pray for those who are in the hospital,	11:01
	we pray for those who are going	11:02
	through some kind of difficulty,	11:05
	but didn't Jesus tell us to pray for enemies?	11:07
	Don't you think Jesus expects us to consider,	11:12
	as our responsibility,	11:17
	people that we hardly even know?"	11:20
	Well, moments like that make a preacher despise laity -	11:25
	(congregation laughs)	11:28
-	'cause she was right.	11:30
	Christianity is lifelong training and taking responsibility	11:32
	and bearing a burden for somebody other than yourself.	11:37
	I think too much of American higher education,	11:41
	American entertainment industry and all the rest,	11:45
	as a culture that tells us that any bothersome burden	11:50
	of a dependent human being hanging around your neck	11:55
	is an unwarranted abridgment of our right	11:58
	to have lives lived for nobody but us.	12:01
	Thus, a couple of years ago	12:07
	the Duke Chronicle praised Doctor Jack Kevorkian	12:08
	as they're great hero.	12:13
	He perfectly embodies	12:17
	so much that this culture worships.	12:20
	No, this doesn't mean that attempts to do a living will	12:26
	or advance directives are bad.	12:29
	It doesn't mean that we are wrong to seek help	12:33
	in caring for those parents or those children	12:36
	whose lot in life make them particularly vulnerable	12:41
	and in great need of constant care.	12:44
	One of the things that happened in Bill Moyer's	12:47
	recent PBS documentary, On Our Own Terms,	12:50
	interesting title for a documentary about our dying,	12:56
	but one of the interesting things about that is,	12:59
	at the end Moyer said, "The greatest need in our country	13:02
	related to the dying, is more care	13:06
	for those who are caring for the dying."	13:10
	No one is an island unto him or herself.	13:16
	Our children need adults who are willing	13:21
	to discipline our lives in congruence	13:25
	with the needs of children.	13:27
	Our older adults need adult children who are willing	13:30
	to order their lives so that they have the blessing	13:34
	of returning some of the love that was shown to them	13:37
	when they were dependent.	13:42
	Christians are crazy enough, looking through the lens	13:45
	of the self-giving love of Jesus, to refer to such	13:49
	burdens as God-given blessings.	13:55
	One of the reasons why we flee from the burdensome care	14:00
	of those who are dependent upon us	14:04
	is that their sickness or their mental	14:07
	or their physical incapacity is, to us, a reminder	14:10
	of a truth that many of us spend our entire lives avoiding	14:16
	and that truth is this: we are all dependent.	14:21
	All of us are moving each day	14:26
	towards some final end capacity.	14:29
	Now, most of us, as we've said, we hope to die in such a way	14:33
	that we may never know that we're actually dying.	14:37
	Quickly, painlessly, with no messy leftovers.	14:40
	Truth is, most of us are going to die	14:45
	in a very different way.	14:47
	Attached, attached, not simply to some machine,	14:50
	but attached to other people.	14:56
	For most of us, the last days of our lives	14:59
	are even more dependent and burdensome to other people	15:02
	than our first days as infants.	15:07
	I hope that my children, my spouse will have more	15:11
	pity on me when I'm in such circumstances.	15:16
	And I do expect that they will be far more patient	15:20
	and wiser in caring for me in this state	15:22
	than I would be in caring for them.	15:25
	In the course of this life	15:29
	they have, despite me, come to love me	15:31
	and because of that love	15:35
	I am, of necessity, a burden to them.	15:36
	And because of their Christian faith,	15:41
	they've been told, if not by me at least by the Bible,	15:44
	that they are indeed their brothers' and sisters' keeper.	15:48
	That every time we reach out to the least of these,	15:53
	we reach out to Jesus.	15:57
	And this is what makes life worth living.	16:01
	This is why I'm bothered that at Duke	16:06
	as the students often say, "Nobody at Duke dates."	16:10
	Now, you would think that a Minister would be glad	16:14
	to keep adolescents from touching each other	16:16
	and going out together into the gardens and things.	16:19
	But it bothers me because the image is that	16:23
	we want to get through these best years of our lives	16:27
	with no other human beings hanging on us.	16:29
	We don't want to lift anything heavier than a briefcase	16:32
	as we go on to success on Wall Street	16:36
	or wherever we're going.	16:38
	That's just not a very Christian view	16:41
	of how human beings are meant to be.	16:43
	I think I told you this story of a man	16:48
	in one of my earlier churches	16:51
	who spent most of his life unattached.	16:53
	He loved to dance and at some kind of	16:56
	Arthur Murray convention or something,	17:00
	he met this woman who shared his love of dancing.	17:02
	And she quickly fell in love with him,	17:06
	he fell in love with her.	17:08
	They were always in church on Sunday morning	17:11
	but on Friday and Saturday nights they danced,	17:14
	and I'm talking ballroom and swing and South American	17:17
	and you name it they danced it.	17:21
	One day she went to the hospital with a terrible fever,	17:23
	which was a prelude to a terrible illness	17:27
	that attacked the central nervous system.	17:30
	And in just a few weeks she was bedridden,	17:33
	never to walk again, never to dance again.	17:37
	Well, Victor changed his work schedule	17:43
	so he could be home three or four days a week.	17:46
	He secured the help of a whole network	17:50
	of people to help care for her.	17:53
	For seven years he watched constantly,	17:57
	loving her, helping her to adjust,	18:01
	to organizing parties and dinners at their home,	18:03
	where guests gathered around her bed and laughed and talked	18:06
	because it brought her such Joy.	18:09
	At the end of seven years she died.	18:13
	And when the church gathered to praise God	18:17
	for her life and Witness,	18:20
	we praised Victor as well.	18:23
	I told Victor at the funeral,	18:27
	"You know I'm proud of you as your pastor.	18:29
	You know this church is proud of you,	18:33
	the way you lived your life through such a difficult time."	18:36
	he replied, "Difficult?	18:40
	That isn't how I would put it.	18:44
	Oh sure, there were days when I wondered	18:47
	how we would keep going.	18:49
	I wondered if I would have the strength	18:52
	to do everything that was needed.	18:53
	But you forget, I spent 36 years of my life	18:57
	without anybody who needed me.	19:01
	She made my life count.	19:08
	She gave me a reason for living. No,	19:12
	she was a gift and not a burden."	19:17
	I pray to God for such a character.	19:23
	I pray for you too,	19:26
	one day by the grace of God,	19:29
	somebody may be a great bothersome burden for you	19:33
	and thus a way to life and that abundantly.	19:38
	Now, this Sunday, did you hear over in Galilee	19:46
	a young woman, peasant woman, poor named Mary?	19:48
	Young, poor.	19:54
	Told that she was going to have	19:58
	a burden	20:02
	and she was supposed to name him Jesus?	20:05
	And she said,	20:10
	"The Lord has found favor upon me.	20:13
	Yes."	20:19

Item Info

Title:

William H. Willimon - "The Blessedness of Being a Burden" (December 3, 2000)

Description:

Sermon start time: (Part 1) 0:09. Sermon end time: (Part 1) 20:21.
With a deep awareness of the interdependence of human life, the preacher argues that it is the nature of love to bear one another’s burdens. Bearing each other’s burden forms community, brings abundant life, and makes true disciples of Jesus. (Abstract created by Duke Divinity School staff.)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4c24r35j

Date:

December 3, 2000

Speaker:

Willimon, William H.

Liturgical Calendar:

Advent

Biblical Book:

1 Thessalonians

Chapter and Verse:

1 Thessalonians 3:9-13

Subject:

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 CS-1042
ref10241_wut
uachapelsermaud
duke:321152
dcrau001686
ark:/87924/r4c24r35j
9be33dd9-97e5-42ac-99d6-b3c4cfbd9751

Digital Collection:

Duke Chapel Recordings

Source Collection:

Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

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Language:

English

Location:

United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

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Provenance:

The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

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CC BY-NC 4.0

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This recording may contain 3rd party materials, such as music or readings that are therefore not covered by the Creative Commons license indicated here. For more information see https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

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William H. Willimon - "The Blessedness of Being a Burden" (December 3, 2000)

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1. William H. Willimon - "The Blessedness of Being a Burden" (December 3, 2000)

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William H. Willimon - "The Blessedness of Being a Burden" (December 3, 2000)

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