Deuteronomy 26: 5, 9-11; Romans 10: 12, 13

The wanderer in us

We are into the season of Lent already.  It seems ridiculously fast.  Christmas is still in the rear view mirror. The only thing is that supports the early season is that during the last week we have had warm Lent type weather.  Lent among others things stands for a spiritual re-centering, a shedding of things and habits and foods and attitudes that are redundant in our lives.  This is done by imagining ourselves on a journey to Jerusalem with Jesus, tagging along with Him as He swerves through the pitfalls and dangers of His ministry. It is also about facing ourselves in the mirror.

In the past months or so we raised several themes about who we are as human beings and Christians that come out of our lectionary readings.   One is the idea of being a stranger, the idea that it is important to admit that at points in our lives we can feel like a complete stranger, even among the people we are supposed to feel most comfortable with.  Then last week we talked how we are kind of stuck between being comfortable in the place we call home and we like he routine of things while at the same time striving to have great spiritual experience, stuck in a sense between heaven and earth.  The realization of those two themes I believe is crucial to our spiritual growth. Today the theme is “The wanderer” and the point I want to make is that admitting that there is a wanderer in each of us is also necessary to becoming spiritually complete.

Friends,  the American West is a very large canvas, a very large canvas not just for Americans, but for the world.  Film makers over nearly a century have used it to paint the images of wanderers.  Because of its sheer size and the imposing nature of its multicolored landscape we have seen people wander through, on foot, on horseback, on covered wagons and in stage coaches and on trains, in silence, in black and white, in technicolor and in Dolby surround sound.  The latest one is the Revenant.  But there have been the Searchers, the Unforgiven, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, the list goes on and on.  Someone scours the land for revenge, forgiveness, redemption, oblivion, escape or a lost loved one.  Somehow we think of the East and South of the US as a place where immigrant communities came and got rooted and where the nation fought itself.  Of course this is not entirely true.  This nation has always been in constant motion. Even the Native Americans who came here first were almost always on the move.  We forget that most of the African Americans in Chicago and Oakland came from the South as far back 1916. Oakland has a lot of people from Louisiana. Emmitt Till was from a transplant family and so were some of the young people killed in the Midwestern city recently. They were trying to get away from the oppression and hardship of the post civil war south.   For whatever reason, people have always wandered, trying to get way from something and going toward something.   Even if there never was the necessity to do so, people still did it.  Somehow inside of us there seems to be a wandering soul.  The Bible text says very clearly: “A wandering Aramean was my father.”  This is an important phrase in the Jewish faith.  “A wandering  Aramean was my father.”  And no people has wandered more than the Jews.  They are saying that wandering is in the blood, in the DNA.  In Romans Paul reminds us that there is no difference between Jew and Greek what it comes down to us.  “Greek” here can be seen as an umbrella designation for all who are not Jewish.

Friends, think what you will.  Think you are here in this place and this place is yours and will be forever.  Of course you know this is true.  But this thinking gets us into trouble spiritually, because it is an illusion.  It gets us into this anti-immigrant thinking.  It gets us into this anti-refugee thinking.  This idea that others wander, but we don’t or we at least have stopped wandering,  that we are set.  And being set means being set in our ways.   I have seen so many times:  seniors who are set, thinking they are never eve going to move who suddenly find themselves, because of their body’s limitations, in a new situation that breaks their heart, at least initially.  Just because we plant ourselves, it doesn’t mean we stop wandering.  Wandering is part of the human condition.  One text we did not read today but which included in the lectionary readings is that of Jesus wandering into the desert and finding Himself tempted by Evil to become someone  Who is eternally powerful.  He refuses and He wanders on, through the landscape of the Mideast, into the hands of the ruthlessly powerful, onto the cross and then into our lives and into our hearts.  Because Jesus wanders on, we never wander alone.

Friends, this leads us to the church.  Because congregations to a large degree think of themselves as buildings, there is this static idea, there is something immutable and permanent.  This of course is also an illusion. There are a lot of beautiful, old church buildings across the Western world that stand empty.  No, the church can only keep vital if it keeps moving, keeps wandering, restless and searching for the next new mission. Thanks be to God!