Dubuque
May 18, 1996
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicaga
John M, Buchanan, Pastor
Scripture
Mark 1:16-20
Joshua 1:1-11

There is no greater honor than being invited to share ina ;
family’s or community’s intimate and holy moments. Sue and I are
honored and blessed to have been invited to be part of this very
significant occasion in the life of this community -~ and your
lives. And we share the joy of your families and friends and we
add our congratulations, prayers, hopes and love to each of you
on your graduation

Moses is dead. After forty years of wandering in the wilderness
the people of Israel have arrived at a river. On the other side
they can see, for the first time, their destination, the Promised
Land. Joshua sends officers through the encampment: to the
anxious people they announce:

"Prepare your provisions, for in three days you are to
cross over the Jordan, to go in to take possession of
the land that the Lord your God gives you to possess."
{Joshua 1:11]

You may not identify with much in the bible. You may not ever
have seen a burning bush, and the voice of God may never have
spoken directly to you, and told you what to do next. And you
may have concluded that whatever it is that the Bible is about,
it is about things that happen to other people.

However ... there is not a one of us who cannot identify with
those people gathered on the banks of the Jordan River, all their
belongings, all their traditions, all their history behind then,
peering through morning mist into the future, the Promised Land.

In fact, those people at that moment and place in their journey,
remind me a lot of this moment and this place and this particular
encampment not far from the banks of another river.

How are they feeling that morning, forty years of nomadic
wandering about to come to an end ... four decades of a routine
they had long ago accommodated, about to confront a radically new
future? My quess is that they are anxious, scared. They feel
like going back, and if that is not possible, they are seriously
considering going no further. They are talking about stopping
right there -~ "on the verge of Jordan" ~-- as the old hymn puts
it. Which is to say, they are feeling a lot like you may feel
this morning and although it didn’t take any of you forty years.

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I do remember a few references to six, eight, ten years last
evening, and someone did mention something about being around
here Long enough to have earned tenure.

Whe can’t identify with them? In Stephen Ambrose’s fine new
book, Undaunted Courage, a chronicle of the Lewis and Clark
expedition, there is an account of Merriwether Lewis’ writing an
eloquent and poignant entry in his journal on the night of April
7, 1805. He was in his buffalo skin tepee, in the what is now
central North Dakota, where the Knife River joins the Missouri.
That day his tiny expedition headed into a wilderness no European
American had ever seen before. A large keel boat, which had
served to carry supplies, weapons, ammunition, food and a secure
place from attack, was turned around and sent back down the river
to St. Louis. The little band would head for the Pacific Ocean
alone.

Lewis wrote:

"Our vessels consisted of six small canoes (and two
larger row boats). This little fleet, altho’ not quite
so rispectable (sic) as those of Columbus, or Captain
Cook, were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as
those diservedly (sic) famed adventures ever suffered
theirs: and I dare say with as much anxiety for their
safety and preservation. We were now about te
penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in
width, on which the foot of civilized men had never
trodden: the good or evil it had in store for us was
for experience to determine, and these little vessels
contained every article by which we were to expect to
subsist or defend ourselves."

And then Lewis became reflective, writing by candle light in his
tepee on the edge of the unknown:

"The picture which now presented itself to me was a
most pleasing one, entertaining as I do, the most
confident hope of succeading (sic) in a voyage which
had formed a darling project of mine for the last ten
years, I could but esteem this moment of my departure
as among the most happy of my life." [Stephen E.
Ambrose, Undaunted Courage, New York, Simon and
Schuster, NY, 1996, p. 212]

Lewis should have been scared to death. It is hard to imagine a
more fragile or vulnerable project. What impressed me about his
journal entry is its expression of pleasure. Lewis was happy

watching all visible means of support, all security, all contact
with the worid, sail down the river. It’s almost as if he knew
that it was the defining moment in his life: a convergence of

huge dynamics -- his particular gifts, and a specific situation,

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a need, a challenge, which required his gifts. It’s almost as if
Lewis knew that his being there, leading the exploring party into
the new Louisiana Purchase on behalf of Thomas Jefferson and the
American government was why he had been born, the very purpose of
his life. It’s almost as if Lewis knew, in that moment of
radical abandonment, radical trust, knew his calling, his
vocation. "I could esteem this moment as among the most happy of
my life."

My proposal this morning is that the life of faithfulness is a
journey, a moving from place to place literally sometimes, but
also intellectually, spiritually, that this experience -- so very
common in life itself -- becomes religious, becomes an experience
of God’s presence, God’s leading, God’s grace for us, far more
frequently than burning bushes, or voices out of the blue giving
us specific instructions.

It is one of the most consistent motifs in the tradition of
Judeo-Christian religion, the Biblical tradition.

The story is about people moving from security to freedom, from
certainty to riskiness, from predictability to happiness, from
safety to salvation. That’s the story from the beginning.

Think of it, the prototypes, Adam and Eve, mother and father of
us all, get Kicked out of the garden, where everything is safe
and secure and predictable. Human history starts when their
security ends. Now traditionally that story is evidence of God’s
displeasure at their disobedience, but the best of our
theologians have always suspected that there isn’t room in the
Garden of Eden for human history: that human beings have to take
charge, start making decisions -~ including some very bad ones;
have to be thrown out of paradise before they can be whole and
happy and saved. God, the old story reminds us, not only throws
them out, God knits them garments for life outside paradise.

And then, in what Biblical scholarship knows is the primal Bible
story, Abraham and Sarah, elderly, settled, stable, hear a voice
which, in the story, is a lot more clear than I’11 bet it was for
them, that says something preposterous: "Go from your country
and your kindred, and your parents’ house to the land I will show
you."

Can you imagine the day they tried to explain that to the
neighbors? Abraham is seventy-five. He and Sarah have no
children. They have lived in one place for fifty years. They
are comfortable: up at 7:00 for coffee and the newspaper at
7:30; walk the dog at 8:00, lunch, nap, cocktails, dinner, TV
till bedtime, the buffet at the club on Thursday. Can you
imagine the day Sarah and Abraham tell their neighbors they are
selling their place, having a garage sale, cashing in their
c.B.’s and leaving?

- "Where are you going, Abraham? To a retirement village?"

- "Well, actually not. Actually we don’t know where
we're going. We’re headed for the promised land, but
we really don’t know where it is. So we‘’re trusting
God to show us and to provide for us. And we hate to
bring it up, but we‘re expecting that sometime soon,
Sarah’s going to be pregnant. So we’ll be parents, not
just of a child, but an entire nation. That’s a whole
other story! Anyway, we're out-of here."

Think about what that primal story is saying about human life and
about God and about what we really need for the journey.

Think about the assertion -- the breathtaking assertion -- that
the creator God, the one who calls being out of nothingness, form
out of chaos, penetrates history and human enterprise and calls
people to get up and move; the assertion that God’s reality is
accessible not merely in history -~ tradition -- custom -- but
the future; that God’s reality is not pushing us from behind, but
out ahead, pulling us into the future. Think about that
incredible theological assertion that God is making new and
unlikely things happen: that God expects people not to be too
settled, to be mobile enough to respond. This is, the story will
tell us, a peculiar God who prefers tents to buildings; a God who
is suspicious of temples and religion because temple religion has
a way of becoming so tied up in its traditions, it forgets about
God, a God who likes to be on the way -- in the wilderness with
the people; a God who promises to provide love and courage
sufficient enough for the journey.

It emerges again, in the Exodus, and in the Exile when God calls
the people to break out of the oppressive routine of Babylonia
Captivity.

"No not remember the former things" God says through the voice of

the prophet.

"Do not consider the things of old, I am about to do a new thing.
Do you not perceive it. I will make a way in the desert ..."

The strong implication being that the new thing, the way in the
desert, is actually a highway, upon which God’s people are to
walk, to move.

And, of course, there is the chapter of the story to which we
have our closest affinity which begins when a man walks by a
group of fishermen mending their nets and says:

"Come, follow me."

A friend of mine describes his ending up in ministry as God
pulling him across 1,000 miles of prairie, his heels dug in,
plowing up a pair of furrows from Colorado right up to the front
door of McCormick Theological Seminary."

Sometimes it seems that the opposite of faith in the Bible is not
sin or heresy but the refusal to get up and move. Dr. Seuss put
it this way:

"You can get so confused

that you’1i start in to race
toward a most useless place --
The Waiting Place

for people just waiting

for a train to go

or a bus to come,

or a plane to go

or the mail to come,

or the rain to ga,

or the phone to ring

or the snow to snow

or waiting for their hair to grow."

Alvin Toffler taught us that in a time of rapid social change,
when everything is moving and nothing is pinned down you and I
are inclined to create for ourselves what Toffler called
“personal security zones," areas of life that are stable,
unchahging, often nostalgically, based on the past. And one of
the most popular "personal stability zones," I submit, is
religion.

Regardless of the fact that faith in the Bible is described as a

journey, a moving from here to there, we want stability. "Give
me that old time religion. "If it was good enough for Moses,
it’s good enough for me." We don’t want to follow Jesus into a

new future. We want him to come to us and walk in a garden where
the dew is on the roses and he can tell us that we are his and he
is ours alone. Did I detect that that is one of the favorite
hymns around here -- particularly of your professor of worship?

Martin Marty, in a now famous quip, once said that the seven last
words of the institutional church will be,

"We never did it that way before."
The story is told of a little girl watching her mother -- or her
father -- prepare to bake a ham. At the end of the process, just
before placing the ham in the baking pan, she cut a small section
off each end.

"Why do you do that, Mommy?" the little girl asked.
"Why did you cut the ends of the ham?"

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It often seems that moving, traveling, getting up and going
somewhere new is what faithfulness means in the Bible. And it is
always an experience of exhilaration and energy ultimately, but
first it is an experience of anxiety and fear and reluctance.

In fact sometimes it seems that the opposite of faith in the
Bible is not sin or unbelief, but the refusal to move.

The title of this speech comes from a distinguished man of
letters; a commentator on modern life, the late Dr. Seuss. Dr.
Seuss wrote wonderful children’s books which somehow also managed
to be wonderfully adult books. One of the disadvantages of not
having little children in your life is that you no longer have a
socially acceptable reason for reading The Cat in the Hat, Green
Eggs & Ham, Yertlie the Turtle, out loud. Although among the
wonderful bonuses of grandparenting is that you can get them out
and start all over again. Oh, the Places You’1l1 Go is a book for
graduates or for anyone about to move into a new future. I found
in it, a word for those people peering through the mist of the
river into the Promised Land, and a word to this congregation of
God’s people as it prepares to launch into a new future, and a
personal word for each of us.

"Congratulations!

Today is your day.

You're off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!

You have brains in your head
You have feet in your shoes
You can steer yourself

any direction you choose.
You’re on your own.

And you know what you know.
And you are the guy who’1ll decide where to go."

There are some risks. Dr. Seuss warns that the going will not
always be smooth or easy.

"Im sorry to say so
but sadly, it’s true
that Bang-ups

and Hang-ups

can happen to you.

"You will come to a place where
the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted.

But mostly they’re dark.

A place you could sprain

both your elbow and chin.

Do you dare stay out?

Do you dare go in?"

Her mother answered:
"That’s how my mother did it. Let’s ask her."

So they called on the grandmother and asked her why she cut the
ends off the ham and she responded,

"Why, I‘m not sure I know. That’s how my mother did
it."

So, off they went to see great-grandmother, and they asked her
why she cut the ends off the ham before baking it. And the old
woman, in her nineties, thought for a long time and finally said,

"I remember now. I cut the ends off the ham because my
baking pan was too small."

Sometimes the Christian church does that sort of thing. Lyle
Schaller, one of the very best thinkers about how churches live
in this culture, asked recentiy, "What is the number one issue
facing Christian organizations on the North American continent?
Dwindling numbers? Money? Social justice? Leadership?
Television? Sexuality?" After three decades of study, he wrote,

"This observer places a one sentence issue at the top

of that list -- the need to initiate and implement
planned change from within." [Strategies for Change,
p- 10}

It is a critical time for the churches in ovr culture,
particularly those of us who call curselves mainline or
mainstream. We continue to decline in numbers and in presence in
the cities and rural towns and villages. We prosper in urban
cathedrical situations and vigorous and growing suburban
neighborhoods. If we do not think anew we will simply disappear
before a generation or two from those places where we used to be
strong, but because of massive change in population, in
demographics, in economics, we are now fighting for survival. We
need to learn how to be a church in a new way. The old model
which served us well for several centuries doesn’t work anymore,
is not working. We -- you -- must be courageous and faithful
enough to leave the security of the old parish-neighborhood model
which depends on an expensive piece of real estate, and a
building constructed to respond to realities which haven’t been
seen for a century.

It is a very critical time for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.),
a time I believe God is calling us to think anew, to leave old
securities. Maybe even to leave what, for all the world, feels
like our institutional codependence on discussions of human
sexuality which have been absorbing all of our corporate energy,
intelligence and imagination and re-imagination for 20 years --

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to extricate ourselves from this place we have been encamped
Since 1978, to cross the river, and get on with being a faithful
church of Jesus Christ in a new century.

One day at the beginning of the story, he was walking beside the
Sea of Galilee. He saw two men casting their net. Their names

were Simon and Andrew. He said to them, "Follow me." And that

is what they did ... laid down their nets and followed. He saw

two more, James and John, mending their gear, with their father

sitting in their fishing boat. He said, "Follow me." And that

is what they did.

We wish there were more to it than that. We wish we knew about
them and their lives and what made them so ready to move, so
willing to accept the risks and uncertainties and insecurities
implied in walking away from job and family and tradition, into
an unknown future. We wish we knew that they knew him and had
reason for confidence in him, knew where he was leading then.
But we don’t. The account startles me every time I read it with
its leanness: invitation -- command -~ response. And I have
concluded that this is what the Bible wants to say and that this
is a word from the Lord to me and to the church and to all of
God’s people -- to ali of us and each of us. To live your life
faithfully begins with a summons to follow, and continues ina
life which is moving always more deeply into the life of the
world, a journey that can end up at the cross; a pilgrimage
characterized by living for others, by Loving the world for
Christ’s sake, by giving one’s resources, skills, passion, love
and life itself -- to the cause of Christ.

Jesus called his disciples to get up from what they were doing
and to follow him. He promised them new life. He said they
would actually find their lives when they got up from what they
were doing and moved into a new future, characterized by giving
life away.

That is our secret. The promise is adventure, surprise,
challenge, and through it all -- life.

"Out there things can happen

and frequently do

to people as brainy

and footsy as you." Dr. Seuss advises.
“And when things start to happen,

don’t worry. Don’t stew.

Just go right along.

You’1l1 start happening too.!

Oh, the places you will go! Like Dr. Seuss, the British poet, W.
H. Auden thought about the journey and at the end of his
"Christmas Oratorio," wrote what I think are among the most
hauntingly beautiful lines ...

"He is the way

Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness
You will see rare beasts,

and have unique adventures.

"He is the truth.

Seek him in the kingdom of anxiety,

You will come to a great city

that has expected your return for years.
"He is the life.

Love Him in the world of the flesh.

And at your marriage all its

occasions shall dance with joy."

Jesus said, "Come: Follow me" women and men of the graduating
class the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary.

"Prepare your provisions, for in three days you are to
cross over the Jordan, to go in to take possession of

the land that the Lord your God gives you to possess."
[Joshua 1:11]

Go in peace and courage. Go in full confidence that the one who
called you and brought you this far, will be out ahead of you,
and will provide for you and will bless you on your way. Thanks
be to God.