This weekend we celebrate our independence. Many of us have a day off – literal freedom. We may participate in patriotic events or watch fireworks. We might just stay home and take it easy. We think of freedom as the absence of restraint. We are free to do what we want. If we look back, even at our own history, we see that freedom requires as much as it allows. Charles Kingsley, an Anglican priest once said, “there are two freedoms – the false where a man is free to do what he likes; the true where a man is free to do what he ought.

         Very early in our nation’s history, the founding leaders learned that a declaration of freedom was only the first step in obtaining it. They began to wrestle with questions we have yet to answer. There is no pure freedom. We cannot preserve freedom without laws and institutions to protect it. Someone has to pay for it, and it will involve an agreed-upon infringement of freedom.

         We do not celebrate freedom from responsibility. To be free we must be ready to protect the weak. We have to set aside our personal desires to support the greater needs of the whole community.

         Jesus offers us an easy yoke. He is approached by the disciples of John who asked if he were the messiah. Jesus is reflecting on the ministry of John with the crowd. He realizes that they did not accept the message of John or of Jesus. They are like children singing songs in the marketplace. John had a serious tune and they called him crazy. Jesus played a joyful tune and they called him a drunk. Both John and Jesus offered a new way of living a life with God. The old way of following an ever-growing list of laws, as interpreted by a religious aristocracy, had become a yoke that was too heavy to bear.

         Jesus, the carpenter, knew how to make a good yoke. He knew how to fit a yoke to an animal so that its burden would be easier to bear. Jesus offers us a new yoke – but it’s still a yoke. We would like to throw off our burdens. Jesus wants us to bear a different one.

         Paul (in the letter to the Romans) wrestles with his own inability to live the way he knows he should live. Paul knows that the law (the teachings and traditions) is true. The very fact that he can’t obey all the law proves that the law is good but powerless to help him. It’s not enough to know right from wrong. There is only freedom when we can choose right from wrong. Paul continues using imagery from the world of slavery that was common in the Roman world. No one can free a slave but the slaves’ master. Who frees Paul? Jesus is Paul’s new master who can free him from the body of death – the endless cycle of wanting one thing and doing another.

         I think that this is the yoke that Jesus offers us. It is not easy in the sense that it is without weight or difficulty. The burden we may be called to bear may seem impossible. For many who hear this, the yoke is the cross. Christians die because of their faith. Jesus doesn’t say it is easy, but that it is easy to bear.

         We know this in all the choices of our lives. Whenever we act to please others or live our lives according to someone else’s plan, we are burdened and crushed. Life becomes drudgery. If we ever have the freedom to choose what we will do, especially in order to help the people we love, then that burden is much lighter. If I become a lawyer because my father wants me to be a lawyer, then I will be miserable and unhappy no matter how much money I make. If I become a teacher because I love to teach, or a parent because I love children, then I will accept all sorts of sacrifice to do the thing I love for the people I love.

         This is that sort of burden. Jesus calls us to take something on. We are called to set aside all the baggage we think we ought to carry. We are invited to let go of all the cultural expectations that we think we ought to do and take on instead the burden of following him. It is not easy. It will cost us time and money. We will set aside prestige and power in order to become servants. We will have fewer things and more people will have a legitimate claim on our attention and our resources. We may be more bound but we will be more free.

         As we celebrate our independence, it is good to think about why we are free. We are free to do the good that God desires of us. We are free to set aside our own needs to serve the legitimate needs of others. We are free to stop thinking about our own ego and become willing servants of God. In doing so we not only serve others, we let go of burdens that have never helped us in the past. As we become more and more the servants of God, we become more free in our spirits. The more we are bound to God the more free we become, until we are truly free and at peace.