Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
Psalm 27
Philippians 3:17-4:1
Luke 13:31-35
The practice of pilgrimage features
in all of the world’s great religion.
Charles Foster in his book, Sacred
Journey, notes that the desire
for pilgrimage among human beings is unstoppable. “Each year,” he writes,
“about 3 million Muslims make the Hajj [to Mecca and the birthplace of
Mohammed], 5 million Christians go to Lourdes [in France], 20 million Hindus
visit the 1,800 sacred sites in India.”
Jews too, before the destruction of the Temple, were expected to visit
Jerusalem at least once in their lives.
Today many still travel to Israel to inform and affirm their Jewish
identity. Every faith, seems to have its
sacred sites, its places of veneration, its places where extraordinary events
have taken place and which over the years have gained the status of “holy”
among believers. Every faith has it
places where through years of welcoming pilgrims’ feet and pilgrims’ prayers,
prayer itself, in the words of T.S Eliot, “has been made valid”. Every faith seems to have its own – what the
Celtic Christians called – “thin places”, “locales where the
distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of
the divine, or the transcendent.” And
through the ages, the drive has been for the faithful to make their way to them.
This unstoppable urge for
pilgrimage, however seems more basic than simply a desire to visit holy
sites. It seems grounded in the very
nature of our humanity. Human beings are
walkers. The writers of the Encyclopedia
Britannica – of all things – make this observation: “Whereas most other
mammalian bipeds hop or waddle, we stride.
Homo sapiens is the only
mammal that is adapted exclusively to bipedal striding.” But more than “walkers’ or “striders”, we are
wanderers. As a species, we wandered out
of the African continent “down the Nile and across the Sinai land bridge into
Europe and Asia”, and eventually via the Bering Strait into the American
continent. It is human wandering that
populated the earth; and for Jews and Christians particularly it is also human
wandering that populated our religious landscape, charted our religious
geography.
Wandering seems inextricably linked
to our religious identity and origins.
Last week in the Hebrew Scriptures the Jews were enjoined to remind
themselves before God that “a wandering Aramean was
my ancestor”
(Deuteronomy 26:5), and today in the same we meet that “wandering Aramean”,
Abraham, whom God called to wander into a journey – a pilgrimage, if you will –
the destination of which he would never see.
And the fact the he would not see it, never move into the promised land,
highlights one of the unique aspects of the Judeao-Christian tradition when it
comes to pilgrimage and wandering: the
journey matters. It’s not so much about
the destination, but about how we are transformed on the way, as we travel, as
we wander. If we think about Abraham, we
come to understand that it is the wandering that made him. And if we think about the Hebrew slaves who
left Egypt, we can see how it was their forty years wandering in Sinai that
formed them into a nation. Conversely,
we can see how many of their troubles began when they settled down. Settling down bred in them complacency and
self-satisfaction, the very antithesis of the dependence on God which they had
to live day by day in the desert wilderness.
Jesus too was a wanderer. Even from the time before his birth we are
told how he traveled in Mary’s womb from Nazareth to a “Judean town in the hill
country” (Luke 1:39) as she made her way
to the home of her cousin Elizabeth, and how later she carried him within her
to Bethlehem. In fact, he was born
“on the go”. Soon afterwards, political
conditions forced him and his parents to journey to Egypt; and the only story
we have of him as a child, is one of pilgrimage – when he traveled with his
parents to Jerusalem to keep the Passover.
Jesus was a traveler. His entire
ministry is comprised of his traveling, traveling here and there, traveling
through the Judean countryside and cities; sometimes to teach and sometimes to
avoid persecution. “Today, tomorrow, and
the next day”, he says, “I must be on my way.” (Luke 13:33a) When he begins to gather disciples around him
he calls them to travel – to wander –
bidding them with these words “Come, follow me.” He enjoins them, “Leave behind your nets, leave behind your
counting house, leave behind who you think you are and what you thought you
would or should be, and come, wander with me.”
Jesus’ wandering afforded him no established placed to live: “Foxes have
holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay
his head.” (Matthew 8:20) Jesus was a
walker. His journey took him to walk the
way of the cross, and when we encounter him after his resurrection he is
walking still; his first post-resurrection appearance away from the tomb is on
a journey, walking unrecognized with two of his disciples on the road from
Jerusalem to Emmaus, and it is on the journey that these two come to see this
“stranger” for who he is, the Lord himself.
With all this, it is hardly surprising that the earliest name for this
new movement of Jesus-followers was simply, “the Way” and the first Christians
were not called Christians at all, but the “People of the Way”. They were people who followed Jesus, and
lived as he did on the edges of life, the edges of society. By any conventional standards, they lived
transiently, but also purposefully and meaningfully. They lived the reality presented by the
writer of Hebrews when she or he wrote: “For here we have no lasting city, but
we are looking for the city that is to come.” (Hebrews 13:12-14) In the Judeao-Christian tradition, settling
down means settling, compromising; and it can hardly be argued that when we
stop, a particular kind of atrophy can set in.
We find that it becomes much more difficult to do the work of a God who
always on the move, when we are keen to set down roots.
For all these reasons the image of
pilgrimage and journey are important ones to keep in the forefront of our
communal life and also of our personal lives, particularly during Lent when so
many resonances of journey come our way in the Church’s lectionary and
liturgies. One of the effects that
pilgrimage and journey have on us is that they keep us permeable, they keep us
open and able to respond to situations in potentially new ways. Like the “thin places” of Celtic
Christianity, our conscious journeying transforms us into “thin places”
ourselves, so that in our lives the world may witness the meeting of the human
and the divine, the breaking down of the boundary between the heavenly and the
earthly. Equally, responding to
journey’s call allows us also to appreciate that so many things which appear or
feel very permanent, including ourselves, are only “passing through.” As we journey, we come to trust less in this
seeming permanence, because what we grasp is the transience at the heart of all
things, and that there are really only two realities, two choices – movement
and atrophy. Movement affirms we are
alive, and as we move we are transformed into new creations. Journeying is the way God shapes us into his
people, in the same way he shaped Abraham, the freed Hebrew slaves, and so many
others. Moreover, when one travels the
pilgrim’s way, the practice of journey, we become more at home with
incompleteness, with the provisional, and so we are more able to accept the
extent to which we only ever see in part.
And knowing this, we can sit more lightly to things like “truth”, aware
that we only “move” into it step by step, and that the moment we think we have
arrived at its home, it slips away from us, in fact we become less grounded in
it.
By nature (it would seem) and by
confession we are creatures on the move, wanderers, walkers. This Lent, at least, make some provision to
walk – physically and spiritually – and to travel lightly. Be faithful to the Lenten journey and thus
allow it, like all well-walked journeys do, to work its effective transforming
power. May each step ground you more
firmly in who are, but also in who God is calling you to become. May each step free you more surely from the
need for simple certainty, from the temptation to settle. We are made for walking and we are called
to walk. May our steps lead us ever
towards the wandering traveler whom we seek to follow.
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