Month: July 2026

Bored with the Board?

My dearly beloved and I live in an apartment-style condominium. We’ve been here ever since I retired thirteen years ago. The place suits us very well, although we still have stuff in boxes from our downsizing from a house. We bought it with the intention of staying here as long as we possibly could. We hope that any change will be years away, but who knows?

After living here for three years, I had enough questions about the building’s management to seek a seat on the Board of Directors. I spent one year as a Director at Large, one as Vice President, and the last eight years as President. During that time, I developed a solid working relationship with our Property Manager/Building Administrator, and also spent some time educating myself about condominium management and related issues. For most of this time, I found myself enjoying the work, which surprised me. When I was in parish ministry, the issues that I found most tiresome related to property management. And what does a condo board deal with? You guessed it: property management! The difference is that managing a building is the mission of a condo board, but is only tangential to the mission of a parish. Yes, it’s important to maintain a building, but that’s not the parish’s mission — or at least it shouldn’t be!

Life on the board started to get tiresome two or three years ago, when a couple of members started to make the board’s workings more difficult. There’s no point in going into the gory details, but suffice it to say that internal board conflicts meant that we spent more time dealing with them, and less on the actual building issues. Just as building matters seemed “off-mission” to me in the church, inter-personal conflicts seemed off-mission on the condo board.

Skipping past internal matters, I started to find my Board work very stressful. My dearly beloved wanted me to step away from the Board, and I almost did. I should have listened to her! After being re-elected to the Board, and then voted out as President, I found myself in a difficult position, with a new President whose leadership style was much more authoritarian than mine. Could I work with him? I wasn’t sure, but when our Building Administrator resigned, I knew I couldn’t in good conscience serve under those circumstances, and submitted my own resignation.

I don’t regret the time I spent on the board. It had its frustrations, but I leave with my head held high, knowing that I did what I could to help make and keep this place a good place to live. I have some regret about leaving the board, mostly around the events leading up to my decision. But I have no regret at all about not being a board member any more. I was becoming a bit bored with the “same old, same old” nature of much of the work, and increasingly stressed by the conflicts around the board work in the past year or two.

I’m looking forward to being just another resident owner, admittedly one with a history, but who has no reason any more to get stressed out over details of contracts, personal conflicts, and the minutiae of building management.

I had resolved to leave the board permanently no later than age 80. Having just turned 78, I have beaten that deadline by two years, and it feels good.

Take my yoke…

Notes for a sermon preached at Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Edmonton, Alberta on July 5, 2026. Text: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

What’s a yoke? And what does it mean to take Jesus’ yoke upon us?

As so often in Jesus’s teachings, the word has agricultural roots. Oxen were yoked together to pull a plow, sharing the burden of the work, and submitting to the farmer’s bidding. Another kind of yoke is the milkmaid’s yoke, a horizontal bar laid across the shoulders to allow the carrier to bear a heavier load more easily.[1]

Oxen were usually yoked together in unequal pairs, to help a younger ox learn the discipline of bearing the yoke from an older one. The younger submits to the older, and both submit to the farmer. The milkmaid carries her yoke because her job is to bring the milk to the master’s table: she doesn’t do it for her own reasons, but because her role in life is to submit to the master.

Clearly, Jesus uses the word as a metaphor for submission. “Yoke” turns up in a number of places in Scripture, in both positive and negative senses. It can refer to the process of learning the law from a rabbi, or to the law itself. It can also refer to oppression by an overlord of some kind, especially a conqueror. It implies a relationship based on submission. It may be to a person, to an employer, or to an authority of some kind, or to an inner urge like an addiction, but it’s always a superior/inferior situation.

When Jesus says, “Take my yoke upon you…”, we are hearing an invitation to submit to his authority. We hear a promise to do this in our baptismal rite when the candidates or their sponsors are asked, “Do you promise to obey [Jesus] as your Lord?” Submission to Jesus is baked into the life of the Church! We seek to do as Jesus would have us do. The question is not “What would Jesus do?” but “What would Jesus wish us (or me) to do?” Seeking to discern the answer to this question is at the foundation of what we call vocation—answering the call, accepting the invitation. And note this: on one level, vocation is a “once and done” proposition, which we affirm in baptism, but on another level, it’s a day-by-day process, as we seek the way ahead in our lives, both as individuals and as a church.

However we read it, submitting to Jesus’ authority—taking his yoke upon us—goes against the flow of cultural norms and expectations.

Many commentators on the passage see it as a comparison between Jesus’ teaching and the teaching of the Rabbis, making the Torah a heavy burden. If that is the sense of the passage, then Jesus is pointing away from the religious norms of his day to a new and less onerous understanding of the Law. It doesn’t take a great stretch to see that this reading can lead to anti-Semitism. However, other commentators look back to various passages in the Hebrew Scriptures, and find that the idea of a “yoke” is more often associated with harsh or imperial rule.[2] If we read the passage with that in mind, Jesus’ invitation is to shed the chains of the Kingdoms of this world, to live into the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom of justice, mercy, compassion, and love, a lighter burden than the chains of any worldly Kingdom. The invitation then becomes not just a call to live into his understanding of the Law, but to see that life as refusing the ultimacy of worldly rulers’ authority.

The religious invitation becomes a profoundly political one. In a world ruled by Caesar, saying “Jesus is Lord” was a challenge to Caesar’s rule.

In today’s liberty-loving political climate, the idea of taking anyone’s yoke on us is still counter-cultural. There are people who cling to the idea of the rugged individualist, whose idea of freedom is that no-one can tell them what to do. That’s a myth, of course—down that road lies chaos. I would suggest that the rugged individualist labours under the yoke of their own pride. Everyone bears some yoke or other, either externally or internally. As Bob Dylan sang,

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
   You’re gonna have to serve somebody,
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
   But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.[3]

We always have the choice to accept or reject Jesus’ yoke. The call to choose is deeply rooted in Scripture, going back at least as far as the Israelites’ time in the wilderness. When the Promised Land was in sight, Moses said to the people,

I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him, for that means life to you and length of days…
                                                           Deuteronomy 30:19-20a

He had stated the consequences of choosing wrongly two chapters earlier:

Because you did not serve the Lord your God joyfully and with gladness of heart for the abundance of everything, therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you, in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and lack of everything. He will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you.                                                             Deuteronomy 28:47-48

There’s that word “yoke” again!

We don’t have a choice about serving someone or something, but we do have a choice about whom to serve.

As Joshua said to the people of Israel,

… choose this day whom you will serve…
as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.
                                                                             Joshua 24:15

Jesus’ invitation to take his yoke upon us is a call to live into the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom of justice and joy, mercy and grace,[4] a Kingdom ruled by the God who is love, who calls us day by day to live in and into that love.

So let us say “Yes!” to this gracious call—today, tomorrow, and always.

Amen.

[1] https://www.christianity.com/jesus/life-of-jesus/teaching-and-messages/the-yoke-of-jesus-biblical-meaning-and-importance.html

[2] I first encountered this interpretation in the annotations on this passage in The New Interpreter’s Study Bible, Abingdon Press, 2003, p. 1766f.

[3] © 1979 by Special Rider Music.

[4] See Hymn #631 in Common Praise, Anglican Church of Canada, 1998