Broadway Christian Church ? Columbia, Missouri
Morning Worship ? April 27, 2008
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Prayer of the Day
Gracious and Loving God, we give you thanks that, in the stillness of our prayers, worship, and daily activities, we hear your voice speaking to us. You are the one who calls us to follow you. Through Christ, we pray together. Amen.
Scripture
2 Corinthians 3:18
And all of us, with unveiled faces seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
Message
The Art of Becoming
Jacob Thorne
Perhaps some of you have read A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. As a self-admitted tenderfoot, who, at the time of this book, had been away in Europe for the past 20 years, Bryson decides one New Year’s Eve, almost on a whim, to return to the United States and hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail – all 2,141 miles. It is the granddaddy of the through trails. In the first words of his book, written in an effort to convey his experiences on the trail, it demonstrates, from the very beginning, that Bryson has undertaken a huge, romantic journey of which he has no idea what to expect.
The opening pages state:
It was terrible. First days on hiking trips always are. I was hopelessly out of shape, hopelessly. The pack weighed too much (way too much). I had never encountered anything so hard for which I was so ill prepared. Every step was a struggle. The hardest part was coming to terms with a constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. Each time you haul yourself up to what you think must surely be the crest, you find that there is, in fact, more hill beyond, sloped at an angle that kept it from view before. And when you reach the top of that hill, you find that the pattern repeats itself. Perhaps it is also raining, a cold slanting, merciless rain with thunder and lightening playing on a neighboring hill. Perhaps a troop of Eagle Scouts come by at a depressingly fast trot. Perhaps you are cold, and hungry, and smell so bad that you can hardly smell yourself. Perhaps you want to lie down and be like the lichen on the trees, not dead exactly, but just very still for a long time. But of course, I had all of this ahead of me.
You see, when Bill Bryson wrote these words, he had barely just left the trailhead. He had yet to make it past the first two hours of the trail. So, in an interview conducted several months after the book was finished and long after Bryson abandoned the trail – he didn’t make it all the way; he didn’t even come close to making it all the way – Bryson reflected on his journey.
When asked the question, “What was it like?” Bryson responded that on the trail, he found himself to be extremely vulnerable. He was lonely, even though he had a hiking partner. There wasn’t a lot of conversation. At the end of the day, they were too tired to talk. Bill Bryson said that 98.8% of the time, he hated his experience on the Appalachian Trail, but when asked if he would do it again, he said without a pause in his answer, “Of course.” Because even though he spent most of his time being cold, wet, miserable, and uncomfortable, it was worth the experience for what he learned about himself. In many ways, Bryson’s journey on the Appalachian Trail likely parallels our own journey.
This morning we celebrate the upcoming graduation of our high school seniors. Soon these individuals will enter a new journey. Graduation, jobs, new relationships, and college all lie in the future. When we think about the future, not only for our high school seniors but for all of us here this morning, we can’t help but ask the question, as we did just moments ago, “What are you going to do? What are your future plans?”
Thinking about their upcoming graduation, for the past several weeks in youth group, we have been discussing what the future holds for each of us, and how we determine our future. I shared with our youth, at the beginning of the series, I really do not like the question, “What are you going to be, or what are you going to do when you grow up?”
Rather, we should be asking our youth and each other, “Who are you becoming?” This question goes beyond asking an individual to simply ponder his/her future. Instead, it really gets to the heart of the spiritual discipline of discernment, an intentional practice of discovering who God is calling us to be, and how we are called to be part of God’s mission in the world.
So often, we ask youth what job they plan to have some day, and where are they going to college, and how much money do they hope to make? How often do we sit down and ask for each of us, “What do you think God wants of your life?” So, I ask each of you this morning, “What do you think God wants of your life? Who are you becoming? What is God doing through you?”
The early Christian Church had the same basic, fundamental question. Our Scripture this morning was taken from Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth. Nowhere else in the epistles is Paul’s relationship to a church made so transparent. We know, for certain, Paul had a long-established relationship with the Corinthian believers for a number of years. We know, for certain, Paul and the Corinthian church exchanged a number of letters, at least five. We know, for certain, Paul’s relationship with the Corinthians ranged from good times to times not so good.
The second letter to the Corinthians is full of personal relations, modest goals, big goals, and a number of petty matters that eventually end up leading to grand theological arguments. But a clear, overarching purpose in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is that Paul presents himself as a spiritual guide and leader to the people of Corinth. In doing this, Paul repeatedly states that the Corinthian church needs to focus on the present and the way in which they are living their lives to the fullest.
At one point in his life, Paul had a profound spiritual experience and transformation. For years, scholars have debated exactly what took place. Nobody knows for sure, but what we do know is that however Paul encountered God, it transformed his life completely. After his transformation, Paul was so moved from whatever he experienced with God that he went from town to town planting churches and sharing his story of what he had encountered through God and Jesus Christ.
Paul is what we call a church planner. He attempted to start so many churches and communities of faith, because he believed those who follow Christ and seek a relationship with God become works in progress. For Paul, believers, as part of God’s creation, are works in progress. God is working to transform God’s believers from one degree of glory to another. I truly believe if Paul were writing us letters today, he would be asking each of us, “Who are you becoming? Who is God calling you to be at this very moment? How are you part of God’s mission in the world?”
As I was preparing for this morning and thinking about Bill Bryson, I couldn’t help but think of another book I read by Steve Callahan, entitled Adrift – 76 Days Lost at Sea.
In Adrift, Steve recounts the story of what happened when, at the wise and mature age of 26, he set off on a sailboat journey. One night, unexpectedly, his sailboat hit some type of shipping container, and it sank west of the Canary Islands. Suddenly Steve found himself adrift in the Atlantic Ocean in a five-and- a-half-foot, emergency, inflatable raft. He had three pounds of food and eight pints of water.
As he drifted alone in the sea, Steve was pounded by storms. He was broiled by the tropical sun, and he was buffeted by sharks that attacked his raft. Steve drifted for two weeks, and after two weeks he spotted his first ship. Upon seeing the ship, he thought to himself, “Thank God I am going to be saved.” The ship was coming toward Steve, so he took his flares from the emergency package, and he sent up one flare, and then another, and then another, and then another. The ship started coming toward Steve, so he used three more of the flares.
Eventually he realized he had used six of the eight flares he had. The ship kept coming closer, and then all of a sudden, it turned. In a moment of sheer panic and anxiety, that maybe we have never experienced, or never will experience, or even want to experience, he realized the ship was not coming to save him.
As the weeks wore on, more and more ships passed by Steve. He used the rest of his flares. The ships would always come so close, but he was so small in his five-and-a-half-foot inflatable raft that the large cargo ships could not see him. Eventually, after he had used all of his flares, and he was no longer in the shipping lanes, he decided his only hope of survival was to try to float to the Canary Islands.
He built a makeshift spear to hunt fish. He distilled water by the spoonful with a primitive still. The raft leaked badly. He was constantly bailing out water. One time he tried to pull in a fish, and the fish ended up puncturing the raft, creating a large hole. After several weeks floating and drinking part salt water, he developed terrible boils and sores. On a sparse diet of raw fish, his weight dropped dramatically.
On the 75th day at sea, Steve spotted land. The next day he was picked up by fishermen out on their morning rounds, 60 miles away from his original destination. In 76 days at sea, Steve Callahan had drifted 1,800 miles. He is the only person in history to have survived more than a month alone in an inflatable raft at sea.
The first time I read Steve’s story, I was impressed by his survival skills and his ingenuity. On an even deeper level, however, I was more impressed by the ways in which he understood his experience to be a spiritual journey. It was a journey of transformation and renewal. In the introduction of his book, Steve shares some reflections taken from his journal written within days after his rescue. He writes:
I wish I could describe the feeling of being alone at sea – the anguish, frustration, and fear, the beauty that accompanies threatening spectacles, the spiritual communion with creatures in whose domain I sail. For me, to go to sea is to get a glimpse of the face of God. At sea, I’m reminded of my insignificance, of all people’s insignificance. It was a wonderful feeling to be so humbled.
What Steve discovered, and what Bill Bryson discovered, and what people have discovered for thousands of year is that when you are alone on a journey, you are faced with your own insecurities, your own fears, and your own mistrust. When you are alone, you have no one to distract you. I think this is why so many of us – me included – find ways to become distracted and never be alone.
In today’s world, we are constantly accompanied by distractions: music, television, people, and our daily activities. They all prevent us from spending time to ourselves and focusing on what God is calling us to do at this very moment. But the Word of God was born out of eternal silence.
In the early Christian Church, society was regarded by the desert fathers, the monastic brothers, as a shipwreck from which each single individual had to swim for his/her life. These individuals believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of society as they knew it, was purely and simply a disaster. All we have to do to understand what the desert fathers were talking about is to look at our own daily schedules. We have so many meetings, agendas, assignments, and social engagements. But as long as we keep busy, so busy that we rarely have the opportunity to slow down, we will rarely have the opportunity to hear the voice of God who speaks to us in silence.
My message this morning, to both the graduating seniors and to each of us, is to slow down and to find ways to take our own spiritual journey away from the distractions of our daily lives. As a minister, I believe one of my primary responsibilities is not to add more programs to keep people busy, but rather to find ways to keep individuals from being so busy they can’t hear the voice of God and focus on who they are becoming.
In Paul’s letter to the Romans, Paul says do not model yourself on the behavior of the world around you, but let your behavior change, modeled by your new mind. This is the only way to discover the will of God and know what is good, what it is that God wants, and what is the perfect thing to do.
So, are we all called to float across the ocean, hike the Appalachian Trail, or flee to the desert? Of course not. Such actions are not necessary for us to discover where God is leading us and where God is calling us. We are called, however, to practice spiritual discernment. Some of the main practices of spiritual discernment are prayer, silence, and solitude.
The work of silence is a work of gently saying “no” to the endless stream of thoughts and feelings that make up our world, in order to listen for and say “yes” to the thoughts and feelings that are the voice of God. In the coming days and months, I encourage each one of us to notice times in our lives when silence occurs naturally during the day. Even those of us who are incredibly busy have moments when we are alone, when nothing is happening. Usually we ignore these moments or find ways to fill them. Instead, let’s find ways to appreciate these moments and to savor them. We can use these times to turn inward, in tune to our feelings.
Next time you are in the car try something different. Turn off the radio, silence your cell phone, and tell God you intend to use this time to pray, to just be quiet. Then see what happens. Watch the thoughts and feelings that arise. Notice your own distractions. What is the state of your mind? What is the state of your heart? Are you at peace? Are you angry, sad, or perhaps confused? Have you thought about God yet that day?
When you arrive at your destination, thank God for the time together, no matter what has happened. If you haven’t had a good experience, don’t get discouraged and upset. You can try it again. Perhaps, eventually, as you become more comfortable, you can try this exercise several different times of the day in different places. Once you begin to ask these questions and notice these answers, you will cultivate a sense of curiosity about your inner life. You will start to listen to the state of your inner being. Silence becomes permissible, not an enemy, but a friend.
This morning we pray that God will be with our seniors as they begin their next journey in life, and we pray we may all find the courage to live fully, and to listen to the voice of God.
Through Christ we say together… “Amen.”
Benediction
Creator God, thank you for making us who we are. Thank you for a church family to help shape us in your love. Give us a burning desire to give life to you and live life for you, through the work of our hands and the work of our hearts. Amen.
