I Am With You In the Garden | I AM... The God Who Gets Close | Menlo Church Live Stream

For though he had no burden of his own, in love, he took our burden, the burden of the whole world, and he hoisted it up on his shoulders, and he carried it to the top of the hill. And there, he stretched out his arms. They thought they were nailing his hands into a beam, but he was nailing our burdens into his hands. He was reversing the first disobedience of taking fruit from a tree with the ultimate obedience of giving his blood on a tree. And there on that wooden cross, Jesus became the fulfillment of all of our myths. [00:53:48] (37 seconds)  #BurdenBearerJesus

That right there is the problem. Who can we hand our burdens to? Who can we rely on to take them from us? You know, now Hercules, he had bad intentions. I get that. But even sincere friends often can't shoulder the weight of what we need to offload. Jesus himself finds this. He asks his friends just to be present with him and to pray. But when he rose from prayer and went back to the disciples, he found them asleep, exhausted from sorrow. Matthew in his version says their eyes were heavy. [00:47:40] (42 seconds)  #WhoWillYouHandItTo

Really? Is that really the best we've got? Life is short and it's full of brokenness and and injustice, but there's nothing we can do about it. You know? So just try to distract yourself. Try to entertain yourself. Find some some momentary coping mechanisms, some temporary fleeting pleasures. Is that really the best that we've got? Now maybe instead of distracting ourselves from the weight of life, what we need to do is realize that we are actually stronger than we think. [00:42:00] (30 seconds)  #StrongerThanYouThink

of our lives include this process, this process of ever increasing pressure, responsibility over time. We take on responsibilities more quickly than we release them. The pressure of life just continues to build. And here's the scary thing. When that water pressure is just one pound less than the dam can take, everything looks totally normal, completely fine. And then when it's just one pound more than what the dam can take, then you have catastrophe. How much water is behind your dam? [00:34:54] (35 seconds)  #PressureBuildsUntilBreak

Most of us have tested that hypothesis and found it wanting. It is not true to experience, and the Christian faith finds it wanting as well. Our burden does not need to crush us. That's absolutely true. But that is not because it is lighter than we think, and it is not because we are strong enough to become our own saviors. It's because we were never supposed to be the ones to carry it. In this third depiction, Atlas is shown handing the heavens to Hercules. [00:45:57] (35 seconds)  #WeWereNotMeantToCarry

That's very significant detail. Because Jesus, he already knows at this point that Judas has gone to betray him. And so the natural thing would have been to go and hide. But instead, Jesus goes specifically to a place that he frequented. He goes specifically to where he knows they will come looking for him. When betrayal, isolation, suffering, death, all of this is on the horizon for Jesus, he's literally standing on a ridge that looks out over the walled city that he's about to be dragged to to stand to to to stand trial. [00:36:45] (35 seconds)  #HeChoseToStay

shame. I experienced loved ones dying. My cousin went to dinner with my aunt and began choking on a bite of chicken, and a few minutes later, he had stopped breathing and that was it. And I came to understand the the fragility of life and the the naivety of my youth. And without me even realizing it, you know, that childhood idealism, you know, quickly turned into an adult realism and then a sort of cynicism until ultimately, I think I just kind of resigned myself for a form of hedonism. [00:30:07] (30 seconds)  #LossShapedMyRealism

I mean, in this world, have you seen the news? You can do anything if you just put your mind to it. Are you sure? Because I really set my mind to some really important things, and they only seem to be getting farther from reality. The future is bright. Is it? No. For who? Everyone or only for the lucky few? I remember journeying with a seeker named Dylan. We're was I was sharing with him about the Christian faith, and he said something really profound to me. He said, life is like a movie. [00:30:53] (30 seconds)  #WhoGetsTheHappyEnding

Atlas, the fifteen foot Greek god in Rockefeller Center, triumphantly thrusting the celestial heavens above his head. This image symbolize all the mantras of my youth and never show weakness. There's nothing to fear but fear itself. You can do anything if you just put your mind to it. The world is your oyster. The future is bright. Nothing is impossible. But you know, it didn't take long before the harsh realities of life began to chip away at that childhood idealism. I experienced failure. I experienced bullying. I experienced [00:29:26] (40 seconds)  #SisypheanCycle

He said, but the problem is that the credits never roll. When you finally get to a point of of resolution, when things finally work out and at last you can be happy and satisfied, the credit credits, they never roll. It just cycles back into the same problems, the same frustrations, the same challenges over and over and over again. The philosopher Albert Camus, he likened life to the myth of Sisyphus, condemned to roll a large boulder up a mountain for all eternity. Every time he'd get to the top, just roll back down [00:31:23] (32 seconds)  #FallenAtlas

Here's a second famous depiction of Atlas, the Farnese Atlas. It's a it's a second century Roman marble statue. It's the oldest depiction of Atlas in existence, and if you can see it's a very different depiction. Atlas is older. He's fallen to his knees. He's off balance. His head is sort of uncomfortably pushed to the side. Doesn't look like he can hold the heavens for much longer. And I wonder for you what words come to mind when you see this depiction of Atlas. For me, it's burdened, [00:32:00] (34 seconds)  #LifeLayersResponsibility

And then, you know, maybe you get married. Well, that's a significant responsibility too, but you don't necessarily get to just drop your job just because you got married. So now you're trying to be a good spouse and a good colleague. Then, woah, maybe a child is on the way, and now you are responsible for another life. And you still gotta get up and go to work, and you're still trying to be a good spouse. And then, another child. [00:34:03] (24 seconds)  #CarryMultipleResponsibilities

And you don't get to just drop the responsibility for a first child because you had a second child, you're still getting up, and you're still trying to go to work. And now all of a sudden, parents have health issues, and you're trying to be there for them. But now you're getting your own health issues, and you're still carrying the responsibility of work and friendships and family. And right now each person's experience is different and and not every life includes marriage and children. But in its own way, [00:34:27] (26 seconds)  #ChosenSacrifice

He knows exactly what's coming, and he chooses to walk right into it. That is very significant because there are things in the coming hours in his life that he will be forced into as he is arrested and beaten. But here in the garden, we see that no one forces Jesus to give his life for us. He freely wrestles to that decision, and he freely makes that choice, compelled only by love. On reaching the place, [00:37:20] (29 seconds)  #JesusUnderstandsDarkness

and pretend that everything's great when it's not because that is not what Jesus did. He was honest about the anguish. And the anguish, it was not overly emotional. It was not an embarrassing lack of composure. It was actually latching on to something deeply true about reality, that we live in a painfully broken world. And at some point, for every one of us, the burdens of life get so heavy that you wind up on your knees, unbalanced, with your head pushed uncomfortably to the side, [00:40:09] (36 seconds)  #SorrowDemandsMoreThanDistraction

Now look. I do believe that some of these skills can be helpful, very helpful. I think that they're worth investing in. And yet, as every athlete knows, there eventually comes a point where no amount of additional training is going to make up the difference. If you can lift a 150 pounds and the weight of life gets to a 155 pounds, then let's do some additional training and see if we can get there, see if that'll be enough. But many people's experience of life is that they've been saddled with 500 pounds [00:42:55] (31 seconds)  #NotAllFearsAreIrrational

But let me just footnote here. Let me just footnote how amazing it is that this is how the disciples are presented in accounts that are circulating in their lifetime based on their retelling of the story when they were the leaders of the early church. Historians use what they call the criterion of embarrassment as one of the main markers for historical accuracy in a text as opposed to mere myth. In other words, when people are telling a story, if they include embarrassing details about themselves, they're probably telling the truth. Because if they were gonna fudge the story, the very first things they would change would be the things that make them look bad. [00:48:29] (38 seconds)  #GodIdentifiedWithUs

A good friend of mine is a clinical therapist, and he told me about a young woman who came to him. And in their first session, she had a long history of cutting herself. And at the end of the session, she said, well, there's just one more thing before I can decide whether I can trust for you to work with me or not. And my friend said, well, what's that? And she rolled up her sleeves and she said, will you touch my scars? And so my friend asked why that was important to her. [00:50:23] (37 seconds)  #ScarredSavior

And she said, well, that's the only way I'll really know if you care about me, if you're willing to cross a divide to touch my scars and my wounds. As my friend put it, she needed to know, will you viscerally descend into the darkness with me? Are you willing to to reach out and be identified with my brokenness? Are you willing to reach out with your being in a in a sort of fully embodied way and be identified with mine. Through their counseling, my friend had the privilege of sharing with this young woman that there is one person who was willing to literally identify his being with ours, who did not stay far off on some distant heavenly throne [00:50:59] (45 seconds)  #SurrenderNotDefeat

This one not a mythical character, but one who proved his character in history. And in another story about a garden and forbidden fruit, we warred against his father, and he had every right to come with revenge and to come with punishment. But instead, he became the true Atlas, the one who held the universe in his hands, who had literally created sustained it and breathed life into it at every moment, who then voluntarily dropped to his knees in the garden. And yet that other garden where the where the olives were crushed, he chose to be crushed by the very universe he had created. And when he asked his father if he would take this burden from him, [00:52:48] (47 seconds)