"Not All Who Wander Are Lost"

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Deuteronomy 26:1-11

1When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, 2you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his name.

3You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, "Today I declare to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our ancestors to give us." 4When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the LORD your God, 5you shall make this response before the LORD your God:

"A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. 6When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, 7we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. 8The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; 9and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. 10So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me."

You shall set it down before the LORD your God and bow down before the LORD your God. 11Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house.

Sermon:

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor.”  It’s not a very glamorous statement, is it?  Perhaps if a “distant relative of the Kennedys was my ancestor” or “a long lost descendant of William Wallace was my ancestor” it would be worth noting.  But being related to a wanderer?  It’s like saying that the family trade, passed down from generation to generation, is hitchhiking.   There is no glamor about aimlessly rambling in search of some unknown home.  Realtors do not show someone a beautiful three-bedroom, 2 ½ bath home and then say, “But you might really prefer this tent!  It doesn’t have holes or anything.”

These days, the mark of success seems to be exactly the opposite: settling down, earning a good income, and owning a home.  We have no place in our society for wandering.

The reason is pretty simple: when you wander, you can’t take much with you.  When you settle, you can.  Wandering means not knowing where your next meal is going to come from.  Settling means you can predict your meals for the next month, all with the convenience of high-powered gas burners, an overstuffed freezer and an instant microwave.  I imagine the people of Israel would have been delighted with a nice, easy Stouffers lasagna every now and then.

When wandering meant those tyrant Egyptians getting drowned in a sea that they had safely passed through, the Israelites were ready to pitch their tents and enjoy the fresh desert air.  But when wandering meant limited water and food, they wanted no part of it.  They put their stomachs first.  They cried out to Moses, “Are we there yet?  We’re hungry.  Did God really bring us out here to let us starve?  I wish we were back in Egypt…”

How absurd.  To have been liberated from slavery, led by a miraculous God on a journey to a land flowing with milk and honey, only to wish, to long for, captivity because that would be the predictable path.  Oppressed, half-alive, yes, but at least they knew where their next meager meal was coming from.  We have inherited this from these ancestors of ours: The desire for a certain slavery over an uncertain journey. 

Now, you may be thinking that slavery is a part of our history, but not our present.  I beg to differ, y’all.  The slavery we experience is different, though.  It is a slavery of choice: we choose to allow things to shackle us, rather than facing the wilderness of life.  Barbara Brown Taylor describes this well:

Almost everyone uses something--if not anesthesia, then at least a favorite pacifier: murder mysteries, Facebook, reruns of Boston Legal, Pottery Barn catalogs, Bombay Sapphire gin martinis.  I'm not saying those are awful things.  I'm just saying they are distractions--things to reach for when a person is too tired, too sad, or too afraid to enter the wilderness of the present moment--to wonder what it's really about or who else is in it or maybe just to make a little bed in the sand.

The problem for most of us is that we cannot go straight from setting down the cell phone to hearing the still, small voice of God in the wilderness. 

What we have [in Lent] are forty whole days for finding out what life is like without the usual painkillers.  Once you take the headphones off, silence can be really loud.  Once you turn off the television, a night can get really long.  After a while you can start thinking that all of this quiet emptiness or, worst case, all this howling wilderness, is a sign of things gone badly wrong: devil on the loose, huge temptations, no help from the audience, God gone AWOL--not to mention your own spiritual insufficiency to deal with any of these things. 

The wilderness is a terrifying place: just ask Jesus who was not only famished but then tempted by what the people of Israel and he most longed for: food.  But how much better it is to be terrified by our own incompleteness, to be frightened by our own frailty, than to be enslaved by feeling nothing at all. 

Our genealogy from Deuteronomy this morning does not say “a slave was my ancestor.”  Though of course, as those grafted into God’s covenant with the people of Israel, this is true.  But those who came before us are remembered not by their captivity, but by their freedom from it.  By their choice to keep following an old man and his walking stick, trusting that God would provide for them, even and especially in the wilderness.  We remember their grateful worship in offering a portion of their harvest to God and sharing with the foreigners, the wanderers, among them. 

As Earnest Green, one of the nine African American students to be integrated into Little Rock Central High School in 1957, said when speaking at Sandhills last week, “There are ancestors you do not even know whose blood, sweat and tears poured so that you could be here.”  This is our heritage.

So why is it that we inherit their slavery more than their ways of wandering and worship?  Why is it that we live in such a way that many – especially those who are not a part of a faith community – see us church folk as slaves to money, theology or tradition?  Why do we live as if we are slaves, when our true identity is that of wanderers?

Perhaps if we have the courage to keep walking into the wilderness of silence and self-denial, even as our stomach growls and our ears ring in the quiet, we would discover that there is an ancient strength woven into our very being.  We would discover that we no longer need painkillers to keep us numb from life’s desert places.

Perhaps, like our sojourning Savior, we would find the courage to silence the voices of evil calling us to seek instant gratification, power and glory.

And, if we let prayer be our food and the Spirit be our breath, perhaps we will find our true selves somewhere along the way.  Not the selves we put out there for the world to admire and validate, but who we really are. 

Wandering is in our blood.  Wandering is in our faith.  If we shake off the shackles of self-focus long enough, we will find that our feet and hearts are desperate for another way.  And as my favorite theologian, J.R.R. Tolkien reminds us, “Not all those who wander are lost.”

How is God calling you to wander this Lent in search of your true self?  What chains of comfort are too heavy or distracting for that journey?  What resurrection are you longing to experience? 

If you are afraid, hungry, doubting, or uncertain about the road ahead of you, then you are most certainly on the difficult but worthwhile journey of our ancestors.  The journey leads to a promised land.  The journey leads to new life.  Let’s wander there together.  Amen.