I took a few days off last week for a quick vacation in Washington, DC. I lived in DC for a few years before seminary and it is one of my very favorite places in the world. And one of my very favorite things to do in DC is wander. On Tuesday, I started the day wandering through at Arlington National Cemetery. It’s a pretty big place, but I didn’t think much of the long, rambling route I took, until one of the rangers stopped me, “Didn’t I see you over on the other side earlier? Did you walk all the way over here? We have shuttle tours, you know. Maybe next time you come, you could take one.” From there I had a 1 pm ticket to the new African American Museum and even though there is a metro line that connects the two spots, it was a nice day so I decided, of course, to walk to the museum. I then walked all over the museum, one exhibit, per the guide boasted over a mile of display route. I did take the metro back from the museum to a friend’s apartment for dinner, and then walked from her place to back to my hotel, even though, once again, there was a metro line connecting the two. All told, I was on my feet from about 10 am until 8 pm, and by the time I got back to the hotel, those feet were informing me that that much walking was not the best way to recover from the marathon I’d run the weekend before. But did I learn my lesson? Of course not! On Thursday, even though it rained the entire day, I did basically the same thing. I went for an easy jog yesterday and I have to tell you, I am still a bit paying the price for all that walking.
I love walking, and especially walking in DC, because it forces me into a slower pace of life. I am by nature a pretty hard-driving, goal-oriented person. I like to know where I’m going, have a detailed map of every step and turn along the way, and plot out the fastest, best, most efficient path to get there. But when I’m in DC, I just wander. This freedom provides space for me to see things I would have missed, if I had stayed focused on a fixed goal. On Thursday, in the rain, I discovered the Old Post Office tower, one of my favorite views of the city, now located in the Trump hotel, is once again open for visitors. On the elevator ride up, I chatted with a park ranger and we reminisced about the old food court that used to be located in the atrium of the building, now replaced by a gaudy and rather ostentatious bar. “A bit overdone, if you ask me,” remarked the ranger. “And gross, because there’s a bird that lives up here. Last thing you want is a bird flying over your over-priced cocktail.” It’s moments like that, that I miss when I’m goal-orientedly charging through life, over-anxious if I cannot see fifteen steps ahead. Time spent wandering helps me reorient myself, remind myself I can only one or two steps ahead, because the path can change rapidly and if I’m looking too far out, I am liable to miss the turn and end up in the wrong place anyway.
What makes this possible for me in DC is not just that I’m on vacation and don’t have a fixed time schedule, but that I know the city. I lived there long enough to have an internal sense of where I am and what’s around me at all times. I’ve been on vacation in places I am unfamiliar, and I cannot settle into wandering if I don’t know where I am, if I don’t have a touch point to guide me. If I’m afraid I might get lost, I become beholden to a map, to a schedule, to a precise set of instructions. In unfamiliar territory I want to know exactly where I am, where I’m going, and exactly how to get there. But in the familiarity of the DC grid system I have the confidence to take risks and know I will find my way back again. It took me years to find this familiarity and to trust it. And having been away from the city for a while, it can sometimes take me a while to find it again. But once I sink into the rhythm of the city, I find that I don’t need to know how to get to where I’m going, it is enough to know where I am.
Our Gospel reading for this morning is once again from the Farewell Discourse, from Jesus’ final words to his disciples before he headed out to be crucified. The disciples don’t know at this point what is to come, though with how clearly Jesus had spelled out his impending death they probably should have, but even in their ignorance, they could certainly sense that the meal, and Jesus, had taken on a more somber tone.
“Do not let your hearts be troubled,” our reading opened this morning. Which is the sort of line that immediately makes your heart troubled. It’s like when someone comes up to you and says, “Don’t worry but…” What are you immediately beginning to do? Worry, right? Because nothing good ever follows, “don’t worry but…”
To set the scene, Jesus and his disciples were sitting around a table after a meal. It was the day before Passover, they were in Jerusalem, they’re relaxed, they’re happy, and suddenly Jesus was all, “do not let your hearts be troubled.” So of course, immediately, their hearts began to feel a bit troubled. They hadn’t been thinking about feeling troubled before he said it but now that you mentioned it, yeah, feeling a little bit troubled. Jesus went on and said some weird things about his Father’s house, which in the Hebrew scriptures is often a metaphor for heaven, and preparing a place for them, “and you know the way to the place where I am going.” To which Thomas, good old calls it like it is Thomas, piped up, um, Jesus, what are you talking about. “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” To which Jesus answered, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Which is not an answer to the question at all. Thomas was like, “give us directions,” and Jesus responded like a bad self-help book, “follow your zen.” Completely unhelpful. What even is zen, and if I knew how to follow it, I wouldn’t be reading this book in the first place. And then Jesus went on down the rabbit hole, talking in seemingly more confusing riddles, “no one gets to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him, and have seen him.”
This time it was Philip who was like, wait. “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Give us a hint here Jesus, a sense of direction, a focus, a purpose. Give us a road map for where you want us to go, and how we are to get there, and we will do it. I always give the disciples a lot of flack for their cluelessness in the Gospels, but that’s mainly because I relate to them so much. I think the disciples could sense that Jesus had something really important he was trying to tell them, but they just could not figure out what he was saying. They felt lost and confused, and especially with that whole bit about how he was going to the Father’s house, which could not possibly mean what they thought it meant, because how could he possibly be talking about dying, and so they were begging him, just tell us what you want us to do.
And what’s ironic is so often this passage gets read just like that. Like a roadmap for how to live. Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one gets to the Father except through me.” This line gets held up as the criteria for salvation. Jesus said no one gets to the Father except through him, so you better have gone through Jesus. Now hear me out, because I’m not saying that Jesus is not the way to salvation, what I’m saying is this phrase “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” is not actually a helpful road map for how to get there. A road map is head knowledge, but I am the way, and the truth, and the life, is heart knowledge. It is the sort of thing you cannot know so much as feel. It’s like air, all around us, it’s what gives us life, but if we try to hold on too tightly, it slips through our grasp. If nothing else, Thomas and Philip’s questions show us that even those closest to him, those who had spent by this point almost three years following him, sitting at his feet, hanging on to his every word, even they, when presented with this weird I Am statement were like, huh?
The thing about discipleship with Jesus is it is less about rules than it is about relationship. Jesus wasn’t giving the disciples and us a guidebook for how to get to heaven, he was giving them the promise of relationship, an internal sense of who they were and whose they were, so that wherever they wandered, they might find their way home again. This internal sense of self that Jesus had demonstrated in his own ministry, a confidence that allowed him to break social conventions and wander into Samaria to speak with a Samaritan woman, to heal on the Sabbath and bring sight to a man born blind, to call out to a dead man and bring him back to life, and eventually to defeat death through death on a cross, it was this same internal confidence that Jesus was giving to his disciples. From now on, Jesus was saying to them, you won’t be able to see me, to follow me with your eyes and your ears, so you will have to follow me with your heart and your soul. But because I am in the Father and the Father is in me, then you too are in me and in the Father, and yes it makes no sense when you try to reason it out, so just trust yourself. Trust your instincts, trust the promise, trust the internal sense of me in you that I am leading and guiding and molding and shaping you. Will you get lost, will you take wrong turns and end up wandering out of the way sometimes. Yep, that happens. But forgiveness is present and grace is boundless, and many great things will take place along the way. So put aside your need for a map, and enter into the wandering dance of relationship. Thanks be to God. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment