”Here’s something about preparing sermons in the age of the internet that is vastly different from the way it used to be, a vast landscape of rabbit holes just begging for exploration.  As it turns out the holes are interconnected beneath the surface so you can innocently check one out and find yourself lost and wandering a vast Labyrinth of information.  By the way the Labyrinth was on the island of Crete.  That’s where the Minotaur lived.  The Minotaur was a monster half man, half bull. Imprisoned there by his stepfather, King Minos of Crete, where he dined on human flesh supplied by the city of Athens.  See what I mean?  I got that because I spaced out on the name for the large mythical maze, so I Googled.  The journey started with some research on yokes and plowing with oxen.  I immediately learned that plowing with a yoke of oxen is where we got our measure for parceling out land.  An acre was the amount of land a yoke of two trained oxen could plow in a day.  Obviously not a very standardized measure so eventually they used standardized chains.   I watched an incredibly informative video filmed in Africa by a professor showing a 2 person, 2 ox team plowing a field.  The length of the yoke determined how far apart your furrows would be.  To keep the overturned ground soft, you want to keep the oxen walking in the furrow.  One ox would walk on unplowed ground and the other in the furrow with the plow splitting the difference behind.  When you hit the end you would drop the plow and walk the ox that was in the furrow in an arc to the unplowed ground and the other ox was in the new furrow.  The method keeps everything perfectly aligned and the field looked great.  So how does the yoke work?  It depends.  There are different types and they rely on the type of oxen you have.  There are also alternatives.  If you are plowing or pulling with draft horses or mules you don’t use yokes, you use collars.  The Zebu oxen and cattle have a shoulder/back hump and the yoke, called a withers yoke, is locked in front of it and it is the point of contact for pulling while many of the cattle that we might be more familiar with rely on an oxbow that’s u shaped and goes around the oxes neck and both ends lock into the yoke, so the force is born by the ox’s fore shoulders and neck, and last but no least is a yoke that locks in front of the ox’s horns so the force is born by the head.  Yokes are chosen for what best suits the animal.  We are all different and have different gifts, that is, we pull and push in different ways and have different tasks.  One thing that strikes me though in what Jesus is saying, “ learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart”.  In reading that this time it really lept from the page.  I think that happened because I was investigating the earlier part of the reading, which ends up being  a fantastic contrasting example that Jesus gives.  I’ll admit, even having been a child, I struggled with what the meaning was behind the children, the yoke stuff usually having grabbed the most attention.  This time I wanted to try to get to the bottom of it.  Was the point lost in time as a reference to some particular game that the kids were playing?  Nope, they were simply having a stubborn argument.  Two groups of kids wanting to play two different games.  We yelled, “red rover” and you didn’t run over!  Yeah, but we yelled duck duck goose and you didn’t chase us.  So what ends up happening but all of them sitting… and complaining?  Not doing anything.  Check out the comparison with the adults surrounding Jesus.  John’s a nutcase!  He doesn’t eat or drink!  Who does that?  Jesus eats and drinks, but with the wrong people!  Neither way will do.  So what happens?  Nothing.  Nothing but sitting arguing, complaining, and fault finding.  Children sitting in the marketplace wasting daylight and youth not getting their way and getting way too comfortable with inaction.  The adults are making even less sense.  For the adults, there’s a great Greek word.  Adiophora.  It translates “things indifferent”.  In other words stuff that doesn’t matter.  In the time of the Gospels, in the time of the prophets, in the time of Moses, in the time of Cain and Abel the stuff that often caused the most division, the most dissension, the most bad action, the most inaction, just as it is now, was adiophora.  So much time gets spent debating, fretting, arguing and fighting over adiophora or stuff that has no impact of furthering the kingdom of God, that ends up in the spotlight on center stage, that little time left for the mission of Christ.  We are called to reflect the light and love of Christ.  Jesus points to the yoke that he wants us to bear.  It’s humbleness and humility.  It’s the submission of our will.  The ideology is I don’t like it that way, so I’m out!  No thanks, I’ll just sit.  It was interesting in the video of the people plowing.  The oxen were yoked together and it was a two person team that worked with them, a person that drove the oxen and one that guided the plow.  Now as I studied I saw one ancient method of driving the oxen that employed an Ox Goad which was a log pole with a sharp metal point, which evolved into modern day cattle prods, but the gentleman in the video just had a long thin stick with a small rope on the end.  This was an amazing humble farmer.  He didn’t walk off to the side or pull on a rope or jab the oxen.  He walked with them.  He was sort of behind in between their rumps.  He talked about how important it was to comfort them.  He would place his hands on their backs and encourage them and sing to them and they moved along together.  Occasionally he would use the stick to tap them on their outside shoulder to guide them.  When he wanted them to stop we would begin to whistle,  It was really funny when the professor was telling about this, he showed how the driver whistled and in the background you saw the oxen stop dead.  The amazing thing was how smoothly and evenly and accurately the team of four worked together.  Together that cut the earth like a hot knife through butter with lines that rivaled the fancy grass striping at major league baseball parks.  The humility of the team made for the smoothness.  The harmony, the working together.  What’s that up ahead?  A fork in the rabbit hole!  Here’s a really cool relevant fact about yoked oxen.  An ox might weigh around 3000 pounds.  An ox can be expected to pull its own weight.  But here’s the cool thing, and there’s different information and estimates out there on the internet, but when you yoke two oxen together, you would think that they would pull 6000 pounds, but as it turns out, multiple sites said that the amount close to doubled to 12,000 pounds.  That was bad news for me, because… Why? And another hole.  There’s physics reasons dealing with overcoming initial friction, not going that way, and the fact that cattle are social herd animals.  They will work better together and do more for one another.  They will learn from one another, an inexperienced ox is paired with a newbie on a yoke.  They say many hands make light work.  They aren’t wrong.  Jesus gave amazing examples.  The spirit makes use of our unique gifts and fits us with missions in life accordingly.  Jesus urges and guides and comforts along, with us all the way with a gentle hand on us.  The key is plowing or pulling under his yoke of humility and humbleness.  We can wear all sorts of other yokes and be harnessed to so many other things, things that seem more alluring, things that promise our selfish desires.  We often find that those yoke are neither easy or light and that we can end up making a mess of our field.  Together, as a community, as a family, as a team our efforts are magnified exponentially by physics, social psychology and the holy spirit.  You know, maybe I shouldn’t get so frustrated with rabbit holes, as it turns out, maybe more than one rabbit hole leads to a wonderland.  We are called to stop sitting, to get up and join the game and cut it out with the manufactured excuses that keep us from experiencing the Kingdom of God here on earth.  Christ’s yoke is on us, let’s pull together.  Amen