THE JOURNEY

Exodus 14:5-18, Mark 1:16-20
September 8, 1985, 11:00 a.m.

John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicgo

",..it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the
wilderness,"

Recently having packed all our belongings, said goodbye to friends, and left what
had become home for an uncertain future, I find that I am unusually sensitive to
Stories like the one we heard in the Old Testament Lesson this morning.

it happens back on the edge of recorded history. Under the cover of darkness a
group of semitic tribes packs up and leaves Egypt of the Pharohs to begin a four
decade sojourn in the desert.

It wasn't forty years of wandering in the wilderness for us of course, but in a
sense we have been involved with you since a day last Spring when a friend who knows
you and me suggested that I might at least be aware of this Church. It goes much
Further back than that really. For me, it goes as far back as I can remember, to my
eacly fascination and love for the city. Lt was New York then because I had never
been west of Pittsburgh, and New York had Joe Dimagio and Leonard Bernstein and the
Empire State Building and subways. But it was in Chicago, as a student, that what

i might be inclined one day to call a divine agitation in my soul began...There were
Many sources..,from being stunned by beauty, when one time love overcame reason and
we spent a fortune for Chicago Symphony tickets to hear Beethoven: and from being
transfixed when one day we walked, totally innocent and unprepared -- into the Art
Institute and stumbled into the Impressionists. And it came from our first exper-—
ience of being nurtured by the Church, a church we didn't know much and eertainly
didn't know us, the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, Its co-pastor, Ulysses
Blakely, came to our South Side apartment to visit us and our new baby and was the
first person other than her mother and me to hold her. He wag black, part of an
integrated pastorate in an integrated congregation that not only nurtured us, but
enthralled me with its hopefulness and its almost naive modeling of what could be
and must be but is not yet among all of God's children.

It came from a growing sense, always deep within me even before I could articulate

it, that what transpires in the cities is critically important for the general welfare
o£ the nation, the civilization even. Here we are at our best and worst, our strongest
and weakest, our most noble and most trivial. Here beauty and ugliness, the sublime
and the ridiculous, hope and despair, mingle daily in a colorful, vital tapestry

_of cur common humanity that I have never been able to ignore or resist, and distance
from which has always left me feeling as if I am missing something important.

When we left Lafayette, Indiana for Columbus, Ohio, we came to Chicago for one last
look around, and to make sure our children knew. It was 4 lovely day, I recall.

We visited the acquarium, Field Museum, walked around the fountain, parked somewhere
in this neighborhood, peeked into this church and then went to the top of the Hancock
Bullding -- which one son was forever building in his room with Lego blocks. As if
it were yesterday I remember looking down at the surprising symmetry of Fourth Church

~?2?-

and thinking to myself -- in God's providence would it be possible -- is it possible -~
that I might someday be involved with a church like that? My twenty year old remembers
me saying it, he told me the other day.

Tt hasn't been forty years, but it has been a long time, It haa been twelve months
since the formal correspondence with the committee began, and nine months since the
conversation took a serious turn, and about six months since we realized that it was,
in fact, a possibility, and four months since you met and elected me, and it has been
two months since the moving van pulled away from our home in Columbus and stopped
traffic on Michigan Avenue the next day.

L am Biblical scholar enough to know that Israel had to fight her way into Canaan
after a very reluctant and recalcitrant four decades in the wilderness, and to recall
that Moses never did make it but had to be content with a look from the far side of
the river; and I am honest enough, I think, to become uncomfortable whenever the
pracher sees his or her own experience too precisely reflected in the stories of the
Bible, and above ali, I am realist enough not to identify any church, any job, any
place, as the Kingdom of God on earth, or the Promised Land, nevertheless Sue and

I feel this morning that we have been a long time coming and we are very giad to be
here.

tt is with no little intentionality that we heard a piece of that other story this
morning, that primal tale of God's people on the move, in which we can see so much
of our story, each of us, that it is astonishing, almost eery sometimes.

The original is marvelous. Under the cover of darkness, the children of Istaci paca
up and leave Egypt. A series of plagues and calamaties, and some tough negotiating
with Moses has convinced Pharch finally that things will be quieter in his Kingdom
if these Hebrew tribes go away. And so at night the order is issued: "Go. Pack

up and leave. Take your cattle, your herds of sheep, your belongings, and get out
of here." So they left, loaded down with unleavened dough and jewelry they had
taken from the Egyptians on their way out. They strapped their kneading bowls to
their backs, got the children and the grandparents organized, rounded up the goats
and the sheep and the cat and dog, looked around at the old neighborhood one last
time and walked inte -- the wilderness.

Promised land? Not for forty years. For an entire generation it's going to be
homelessness, lostness, wilderness. They didn't take the available Philistine

roads, the most direct route. Instead Moses headed South, on a torturous circuitous
route, "by way of the wilderness" to the Red Sea, and the sense of it is that the
journey itself is the point. It's not simply the quickest, most convenient way to
get from slavery to freedom. There is growing, deepening, becoming which must happen
on the journey.

As they make camp at one of those places with an unpronounceable name, the people
back at Pharoh's palace are beginning to have second thoughts. If you have ever
‘acted spontaneously and then after sleeping on it wondered how you could have left

your senses so totally, you know about this dynamic. In the distilled light of
morning Pharoh's advisers are overheard saying things like "What in the world came
over us? We let the slaves go last night. There went the labor force. Think of
the economic implications, the consumer price index, inflation, deficits.”

—~3-

So Pharoh mobilizes, gathers his chariots and infantry, heads south and his advance
parties report a large encampment at Pi-hahiroth, near the Sea of Reeds.

Meanwhile, in the camp, the Hebrews are just beginning to deal with the enormity of
the step they are taking. They had been living in Egypt for a Long time, several
centuries in fact. It was home, And here they are on the edge of the wilderness.
There are no houses, no food, no water. There is nothing in the wilderness that
resembles the accoutrements of the civilization they enjoyed in Egypt. Just as the
enormity of all that was beginning to sink in, they saw dust on the horizon. Other
than a great wind, there was only one thing that made a dust cloud like that —-- the
horses and chariots and marching feet of an advancing army. Imagine how that must
have been! Imagine the terror, the dry tightness in the throat and chest. Imagine
the fathers, the mothers, the ones who had thade the fateful commitment for their
families, who had roused sleeping children and made it sound like an adventure, and
shaken awake their aging parents and said "Now -- it's happening...what you've prayed
for. We're going home. You're not going to die in an Egyptian bed and be buried
in Egyptian soil."

I can feel the intensity: the anger and fear and rage when they saw the ominous
cloud of dust. I can understand the bitterness of what they said to Moses: “were
there no graves in Egypt, that you should have brought us to die in the wilderness?
See what you have done to us...We would rather be slaves than die in the wilderness."
And there is no more brave, nor perhaps foolish, answer than what Moses said..."Fear
not: stand firm. See the salvation of the Lord which he will work for you today.”
What comes uext, of course, is the unlikely escape, the zrczsing of the Sea of Reade
and the commencement of the wilderness wandering. I like this part of the story
best, however -~ the part at the beginning when the enormity of life's decisions
becomes suddenly clear; when everybody starts having second thoughts...Pharoh about
letting them ga, the Israelites about going...and with their backs to the sea and
the army advancing the people make the simple observation that life was a lot safer
back in slavery than it is out here in the detached freedom of the wilderness.

I like this part of the story because of its humanness. We may not be able to
identify with everything in the Bible, You and I may never know what it means to
have a burning bush religious experience. We may never stand in a moment of shin-
ing theological clarity on some Mt. Sinai. But we know what these poople were
feeling. We know about the riskiness of the journey and the complaining in the
wilderness.

I like it because in the story the unsettling, disturbing, fermenting power is coming
from God, God agitates for their freedom, makes the people unsatisfied with their
bondage, leads them out:of slavery and inte the wilderness, There...in the wilder-
ness, on the Journey, God apprehends them, comes to them, finds them, loves, judges
them, gives order and structure to their life and molds them into the people, the
nation, he wants them to be.

"The process of living life is a journey, the destination of which none of us really
knows, The first major life task each ef us undertakes is launching out and away

from the security of our mother's womb and for the next two decades or so the tasks

of preparing for life apart from the security of our parents occupies us totally.
Psychiatrist Bruno Bettlieheim, in a wonderful book, The Uses of Enchantment, points
out that it is a major motif in children's stories and fairy tales. “He works..-being
pushed out of the home stands for having to become oneself, Self-realization requires
leaving the orbit of the home, an excruciatingly painful experience." (P79)

&

~ 4 ~

Among the more painful experiences I can recall are the days when my parents
abandoned me in the room of a college dormitory, helped me move in and then got
back into the Dodge and actually drove away without me -- and the days three

decades later when I did the same thing. God's providence is implicated in the
leaving, the journey, the painful process of separation. At our best we know and
affirm the wisdom of it, even though it hurts -- both as young person and as parent.

Life is a journey. Taking a new position, assuming new responsibilities, moving to
a hew community, involves the anxiety of leaving a job one knows, a community one
has come to call home, and friends one has come to love dearly. Something Like one
American in five does it every year,

What risky traveling to choose, at 21 or 22, our life's work. Who knows where it
will lead or even if we're on the right road. What more hazardous journey is there
than to stand here in our early twenties and promise to Love, honor and respect this
woman or man who I don't really know, and whose growing into whatever she will become
is every bit as much of a mystery as mine is? Who knows at 25 if you're going to love
the person that bride will become in two decades?

Every growing, every becoming, is something of a journey into a new wilderness, cut
off from old security. Every intellectual or spiritual growing is accompanied by a
sense of uneasiness, fear even, because it means leaving behind what used ta be a
secure and safe certainty. Whether the topic is that the world is round, not flat
as everyone used to know it was, or that God has created all people equally in the
divine image, or that women are as capable of professional expertise as men, or that
every popular revolution is ic ipsy acto Marxist, or every cry for economic and
vacial justice a threat to our natural security, we need to hear the intriguing
affirmation in this old story that God wants us to grow, and sometimes that means
leaving some safe security behind -~ that he is the one leading us on the journey,
that che uncertainty of the wilderness is part of. the plan and also the place where
God will find us.

Sometimes the journey does not seem to fit any plan. Sometimes the wilderness makes
no sense and we feel ourselves literally dragged into it, by forces over which we
have no control and from which God seems disturbingly absent. A spouse dies without
warning and without reason, and one day suddenly we are in a wilderness of aloneness
cut off from every familiar structure of joy and meaning...or the position for which
we have been preparing, readying,opens and passes before our eyes and is given to
Someone else and we are in a deep wilderness of disappointment and seif-doubt.,..or
our youngest child graduates and leaves and our universe of meaning, the tasks which
commanded our attention, summoned our strength and gave reason to our living, are

at an end...or social cocktails have become a twice daily ritual, and we keep denying
what we know about addiction and cannot summon the fortitude to call this wilderness
alcoholism...or it is a divorce we didn't intend.,..or the slow atrophy of a once
lively and ecstatis love...or the Sunday morning suspicion that the atheists in
history knew more than the people of faith and, although we are far from life in
full revolt or even declaring God's death, once adequate faith has turned brittle in

this dry new wilderness.

None of us will avoid all of those wildernesses, and when we are there it is good,
redeeming even, to recall that people in the Bible end up in the wilderness and
complain about being there and that the journey away From the safe secure certainties
is precisely the place where God comes to his people and loves them and saves them.

- 3} #

The life which intends to be Christian will be a gourney. It has been so since

Jesus of Nazareth walked by the Sea of Galilee and called Simon and Andrew, James

and John to discipleship. Even though we are inclined to define religion as believing
certain ideas about God to be true, Jesus defined it as a journey, as getting up from
where you are sitting and following, as leaving behind the safety and security and
comfortable predictability of fishing nets and traveling with him...or in nearer
terms, as letting go of the ideologies, the ideas, the political certainties, the
social customs and even the heavy financial traditions and following along behind

the Lord Christ. We Presbyterians need to recover that. Our faith is expressed

in our theologyzing and theorizing about the human condition, our orderly traditions
and our liturgical dignity. But faith ultimately is that singular act of getting up
and leaving something behind, following Jesus on the journey of discipleship.

We'd like to know the destination. We are careful people. Our prudence dnd caution
and conservatism serves us well mostly. It also makes us suspicious of a religious
zealotry that contemplates walking away from the good life to serve humanity. We
might even do that if we had intellectual clarity. We'd Like to know who is leading
us. We like to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is a God, that Jesus

is his son, that this business has a life-time watranty and an eternal guarantee.

4nd the mystery of it all is that on the journey God apprehends his people. All he
does with them ahead of time is make them restless. When they follow into the wild-
erness, when they leave the security of their fishing net behind and follow, he
apprehends them, comes to them, judges them, loves them,

The theologians have understood it, none more poignantly than Deitrich Bonhoeffer
who helped us see that you don't believe in Jesus until you obey him, follow him.
The mystics, at their best, have experienced it and written about it eloquently.
God comes, God saves. God is -- as we sojorn in the wilderness of solitude. And
we have known. God has come, God will continue to come to love us, encourage us,
Strengthen us, save us —- on the journey. ,

In the words of the old hymn

“When I tread the verge of Jordan

Bid my anxious fears subside.

Death of death and hell's destruction
Land me safe on Canaan's side..."

Now to the One, who by the power at work within us, is able to do far more abudantly
than ali we ask or think, to God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus, to all
generations for ever and ever. Amen,