March 4 - Detours and byways

Signposts of Renewal

March 4                Detours and Byways 

Anchor: Signposts for Renewal

Frame: Detours

Thread: Signs Added Each Week  (I don’t know where I am, but I know I’m not lost.)

               

John 14:4-7

“You know the way that leads to where I am going.” Thomas replied, “But we don’t know where you’re going. How can we know the way?” Jesus told him, “I myself am the way— I am Truth, and I am Life.     No one comes to Abba God but through me. If you really knew me, you would know Abba God also. From this point on, you know Abba God and you have seen God.”

In “Christianity for the Rest of us” Diana Butler Bass says: “Christians think that faith is like a set of MapQuest directions—that there is only a single highway to God. After all, Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except by me.” He is the map. And Christianity is a kind of vacation destination, a place you wind up in to escape hell. Such Christians claim that God has a plan for your life, a route you must follow or you will be lost in this life—and damned in the next. They even have things like “four spiritual laws” and “forty days of purpose” that tell you how to get there. Like computer-generated directions, this road is predetermined, distant, and authoritative. You cannot exit this freeway or deviate from the route without peril. Taking a creative risk, as I did in my recent journey through Baltimore’s old neighborhoods, will not lead you home. Instead, it leads directly to hell and destruction. Who cares about a few spiritual traffic jams or construction zones? Better stick to the map. Follow the plan. But what if Jesus is not a MapQuest sort of map, a superhighway to salvation? What if Jesus is more like old-fashioned street signs in a Baltimore neighborhood, navigated by imagination and intuition? Rather than a set of directions to get saved, Jesus is, as his earliest followers claimed, “the Way.” Jesus is not the way we get somewhere. Jesus is the Christian journey itself, a pilgrimage that culminates in the arrival in God. When Jesus said “Follow me,” he did not say “Follow the map.” Rather, he invited people to follow him, to walk with him on a pilgrimage toward God. How, then, do we get there? How do we follow the Jesus way? You have to exit the highway, risk getting lost, and follow the signposts on the ground.”

Bass, Diana Butler (2009-10-13). Christianity for the Rest of Us (pp. 72-73). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

                When I am asked how many of these United States I have been in, I usually include West Virginia. Truth be told, I am not entirely sure that I’ve been in West Virginia, but I’m pretty sure I was. Back in college a buddy and I took a road trip from Minneapolis to check out graduate schools. Somewhere on the way to Raleigh-Salem, we decided to get off the Interstate and explore some of the more local roads. What these two sons of the prairie didn’t figure on was that roads in the Appalachian foothills don’t run straight. We soon lost our sense of direction and hoped that the next turn would finally take us back to the highway. We are both convinced that somewhere in that meandering drive we must have wandered into West Virginia. Y’all.

                What I remember about that drive was the few (well, maybe more than a few) times we stopped at an intersection hoping to gain some sense of the way back to where we knew where we were. The Interstate was the faster, safer, most predictable route. But it was not the only route to get where we were headed. And if we’d kept to the four-lane, we would never have visited West Virginia.

                My grandparents were great believers in the straight and narrow, and had they lived to see today’s society’s conversation about sexuality they would definitely have been on the straight side. They were of that theology and generation that believed that the goal of evangelism was to get everybody in the world to merge onto that grand superhighway of Christendom. They thought that God’s plan was to get all people on that straight and narrow road, confessing their sin and believing in Jesus. To them, the Hindu aphorism that there is one roof but many ladders would have been blasphemous and just plain wrong. But one of the characteristics of the new understanding of Christianity that is currently underway is that we see ourselves as one voice in the conversation of spirituality. And where our grandparents may have chosen the straight and narrow, many of us look for an interesting exit from the highway and seek to get a little lost out by West Virginia. Like Butler Bass’ description, the One Way of Jesus is not an autobahn, but is the act of following wherever Jesus leads us in this life.

In just the same way it took the Hebrews 40 years to go from Egypt to the Promised Land.  In fact, the biblical model is not the straight and narrow but rather the meandering path. In fact, the ancient Hebrew word for teaching, “halakhah”, literally means “the path one follows.”

                So it should come as no surprise that the Lenten journey is full of twists and turns and intersections at which we need to determine where to turn next.  The ending of the movie Cast Away captures this open ended nature. Tom Hanks’ character has survived a plane crash, being marooned on a desert island, losing the love of his life and his direction in life. He has finally delivered the package he protected through all his cast away years, and now stands at a literal and metaphorical crossroads. His life, rather than being over, is now wide open. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvGHSvfnlsQ  And that is possibly the best kind of Lenten message: our lives are wide open. Following Jesus is not about one straight and narrow road, but happens down all sorts of turning and twisting roads. Discerning God’s will for our lives is not a process of divining the one immutable thing God wants us to do. It is discovering God at work in a multitude of byways and options.

                I don’t know where I am, but I know I’m not lost. That little piece of wisdom tells us to trust our journey. I think we should begin by affirming that there is not lost place along the Jesus journey.  On Ash Wednesday we used a poem entitled “Lost” by David Wagoner (thanks, Elaine!). In that we had all of 16 people at Ash Wed, I think we could use it again. The poem affirms that lost is not really lost.