The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany 2011
It never was a straight line. It never has been. It never is. It never will be. Our biblical ancestors Abraham and Sarah left the city of Ur in southern Iraq, the book of Genesis says, to move north and west up the Euphrates River to Haran in modern-day Turkey. And from Haran they were called to Canaan, and from Canaan they traveled to Egypt, and from Egypt they returned to Canaan. It wasn’t a straight line.Our biblical ancestors the sons and daughters of Jacob/Israel fled drought and famine in Canaan to settle in Egypt in the Nile Delta until they were no longer welcome there and were driven out or escaped from their home away from home to begin a forty-year journey to return to a land of promise generations old. It wasn’t a straight line.
Our biblical ancestors Israel and Judah were subjected to successive waves of Assyrian and Babylonian domination until they were exiled and dispersed throughout the Fertile Crescent from Egypt in the south to the Transjordan in the east and Asia Minor in the north and Babylonia in the northeast. It wasn’t a straight line.
Our biblical ancestors, the “holy family,” as Mary and Joseph and Jesus are sometimes called, fled to Egypt for safety out of the murderous reach of Herod the Great. And when they returned home, we are told, they did not settle in Joseph’s ancestral town of Bethlehem south of Jerusalem as he had hoped, but instead took up residence in the north in Galilee in Mary’s backwoods village of Nazareth, the kind of place about which it was asked, “Can anything good come out Nazareth?” (John 1:46). It wasn’t a straight line.
The Via Dolorosa, “the way of sorrow,” the path that Jesus walked carrying the cross, zig-zags through Jerusalem’s Old City with falls along the way. The biblical journey of faith never was a straight line. It never has been. It never is. It never will be.
Did you know that in the 1800s, “fewer than half the [American] population claimed membership in a local congregation” (Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven, p. 30). By the 1950s, however, “at least three-quarters of Americans belonged to a local house of worship.”But the 21st century is beginning to look more and more like the 19th century than the 20th century as church membership in the U.S. has slowly but steadily declined since its all-time high in the 1950s.
In his book titled After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s, the sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow argues that a spirituality of a place—location, habitation, domicile—has been replaced by a spirituality of journey. “In settled times,” Wuthnow writes, “people have been able to create a sacred habitat and to practice habitual forms of spirituality; in unsettled times, they have been forced to negotiate with themselves and with each other to find the sacred. Settled times have been conducive to an imagery of dwellings; unsettled times, to an imagery of journeys (p. 4).
We live in unsettled times, don’t you think? Our lives are conducted in comings and goings that would have made our grandparents and great-grandparents dizzy and confused. Singer-songwriter Carole King characterized the unsettled times of our personal lives and our spiritual lives alike forty years ago when she sang, “So far away, Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” We are all on the move, traveling, changing, growing, declining, uniting, separating, arriving, leaving. “One more song about moving along the highway. . . . If I could only work this life out my way. . . . Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” Carole King’s ballad about a long-distance love affair is also a ballad about the spiritual condition of unsettled times.
But what if it never has been about staying in one place? What if the 1950s in America were an anomaly, and oddity, an outlier that we have mistakenly benchmarked as “the norm” against which other eras are measured? What if it never was about the location in Ur or Haran or Canaan or Egypt or Bethlehem or Nazareth or Jerusalem? What if it always has been about the journey not the place?
What if Exodus 13:18 were at the core of our understanding of our relationship with God as individual persons and as a people of God? Listen again to the beginning of Exodus 13:18: “God led the people by the roundabout way.” “The roundabout way.” It never has been a straight line. It never is. It never will be. The journey that we are on with God as individuals and as a people of God is and has always been and always will be the roundabout way. God leads by the roundabout way, Exodus 13:18 says.
It’s important to understand that in Exodus 13 “the roundabout way” is not an endless circle of confusion or being constantly lost and bewildered. Verse 21 makes it quite clear that God is leading along the way. In the wilderness, God’s constant presence and leadership is depicted in the external and visible sign of the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night “so that they might travel—journey—by day and night.” The journey of our biblical ancestors in the wilderness, however threatening or difficult or conflicted it was—and it was threatening and difficult and conflicted; just read the books of Exodus and Numbers to see how easy it was not—that journey always in the presence of God and under the leadership of God.
In the New Testament in the twenty-eighth chapter of the gospel of Matthew in what we have come to call “the great commission,” Jesus is decidedly less pictorial, decidedly less concrete; but Jesus is no less direct in his assurance of the presence and the leadership of God among the people of God. “Remember, I am with you always,” Jesus says (Matthew 28:20).
As I have told you a number times, a fascinating aspect of the great commission is that in spite of the fact that it is popularly translated as a command to go on a journey—“Go therefore,” the great commission in Greek does not begin with an imperative verb, a command, but with an infinitive in a circumstantial clause. The great commission does not command us to go on a journey; it presumes that just as our biblical ancestors were on journey, so are we. “As you are going,” Jesus says. “Along the way,” Jesus says, make disciples and baptize them and teach them.
And there lies the mission of the church in unsettled times. The church is not an end in itself. The church is a means to an end. As Wuthnow put it, “Instead of drawing people in to do God’s work in the organization itself, [churches] need to send people out to do God’s work in the world” (17). In other words, there is still a place for the church in a spirituality of journey.
The church is the place on our journey where we learn who we are and whose we are. The church is the place on our journey that we learn that our relationship with God, neighbor and self are all of a single piece of the woven fabric of life. The church is the place on our journey where we learn the spiritual disciplines of prayer and the study of the Bible and openness to the Holy Spirit who sustains us on our journey. The church is the place on our journey where we learn that we are called to serve not to be served. The church is the place on our journey where we discover a community of support and care along the way we travel. The church is the place on our journey that equips us and sends us out to do God’s redemptive work in the world. Without a church, we are Christian nomads, vagabonds, vagrants. It is the church that teaches us to be at home on the move as citizens of God’s creation sent to do God’s redemptive work in the world.
From Ur to Haran to Canaan to Egypt, from Bethlehem to Egypt to Nazareth, from Antonia Fortress or Herod’s Palace to Golgotha and the Garden Tomb, the journey is the thing. As we go, along the way, the we are discipled to disciple; we are baptized to baptize; we are taught to teach; we are called to call; and we are fed to feed.
And that’s the bread for the journey: fed to feed on the roundabout way that God is with us and leads us.
Photo by Liu Tao, used under license by Creative Commons.
This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.
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