Choosing the Path (Week 1)

Deut. 30:15-20 

Luke 14:25-33 

The series graphic on the front of your bulletin is an image I took with my phone at Lake Logan Retreat Center near Asheville, NC.  I flew into Asheville, met up with a group of other pastors from around the country, then loaded up in a van for the drive to the retreat center.  The main campus of the retreat center included a cluster of buildings beside a gorgeous lake.  We all got registered and then were to get settled into our cabins.

Several cabins were part of that main cluster of buildings.  So most of our group grabbed their roller bags and backpacks and walked towards one of the nearby cabins.  There were more cabins, we were told, on the other side of the lake.  Guess where my cabin was?  A few of us piled back into the van to go across to the other side of the lake.  We dropped off one person, then another.  But I was still in the van, because my cabin was all the way at the end of the road on the far side of the lake.  Now my cabin was adorable.  And I had it all to myself, which makes the situation even better.  The only problem was that my cabin was as far as you could be from the main buildings where we would meet everyday.  It was about a half-mile walk. 

The lake was beautiful.  The cabin was picturesque.  But still, I found myself wondering why I was the one who got stuck so far from the action.  I would have to wake up a half hour earlier just to get to breakfast.  And our activities each day went well into the night.  So I would be walking back in the dark.  Plus, on that very day I saw on Twitter that a jogger had been mauled by a mountain lion running on a trail in the woods.  Would they even come look for my remains when I failed to show up at that first breakfast?

That long walk loomed before me as a burdensome obligation to my week.  Wouldn’t it be nice, I mused to myself, to have a cabin right next to the refectory and the classrooms?  But on that first cool morning walk along this trail by the lake, the sun was coming up and the lake was covered in fog.  I hadn’t noticed before, but there were lamp-posts all along the trail, casting a soft light.  The truth is that what I dreaded – the long walk, the winding path – became my favorite part of every day at the retreat.

The Scripture passages we’ll read this month are about roads, pathways, and pilgrimage.  They’re invitations to set out from what we know and trek towards something new.  Through these readings, God’s Spirit calls us into fresh adventures.  All of us are already on a path.  But every once in awhile, God’s grace places us in a position to choose a new way.  And these next several weeks can be that opportunity for us to choose again the direction of our lives.

We begin, today, with a message about “choosing the path.”  Then we turn next week to the danger of “losing the path.”  In week three we’ll talk about the work of “staying on the path.”  And in the final week of the series we’ll look at why it’s so important to be “on the path together.” 

Today: choosing the path.  If you google “the most complicated highway interchange,” what you’ll see is a confusing knot of roads just outside the city of Chongqing, in South-Western China.  It’s a gnarled tangle of highways going every which way.  This interchange has five layers, twenty ramps, and goes in eight different directions.  There are stories from about motorists who lost entire days by taking the wrong ramp or exit!  The tension for us today is that we feel God’s call to follow the way of Jesus.  But we also feel pulled in many other directions, and towards many other loyalties.  Sometimes it’s hard to sort out what’s really shaping our lives at the deepest level.

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

Our Deuteronomy reading is a warning from Moses to Israel, given just when they’re ready to cross the Jordan River into the land God has promised them.  So the forty years of wilderness wandering is behind them.  They’ve come a long way.  They’ve been through a lot.  And now they’re on the verge of something new.   And it’s at this pivotal moment that they are addressed with a new word from the Lord.

Their freedom from Egypt, their survival in the desert, their new land – all of it is a gift from the God who has already given them everything.  But they are now at a critical turning point.  Here is the hinge point where God cannot choose for them.  They themselves will have to choose between life and death, blessings and curses.

We might do well to imagine ourselves at a critical point too.  No, we don’t have forty years of wandering behind us, but we have been on our own journey.  And it hasn’t always been easy.  We may not be moving, geographically speaking, into new territory.  But who can deny that life is always presenting us with openings, thresholds, possibilities for something fresh and different?

One of the reasons I come to church is so that I can be reminded to loosen my grip; to pause; to stop and look around; to ask myself whether I want to keep walking in the same direction or whether I need a different path.  And I need the experience of worship with others so that God’s Spirit can give me enough freedom from all my loyalties so that I can reconsider.  God’s Spirit can open a doorway that I can move through if my current path isn’t life-giving.  Both for Israel and for us, the crisis is a matter of the heart.  Is my heart soft, open, listening for God’s leading into life and joy with others?  Do I need to make some different choices, name some new priorities, so that I can put myself in a posture to receive God’s blessings?

Luke 14:25-33

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus warns us to count the cost of being his disciples.  He teaches us to be reasonable about what we’re willing to undertake before we set out on the journey of baptism and faith.

Jesus specifically mentions our family connections and our possessions.  Perhaps these are two commitments that keep people from fully welcoming his announcement of God’s new kingdom.  It’s as if Jesus is giving us a chance to back out, to take our names off the list, to decline the invitation after all. 

If your life is so invested in your family ties that you can’t imagine making choices against the grain of your family’s expectations, then you’ll be better off not signing up to be a disciple of Jesus.  That is, if your identity, your sense of worth and sense of belonging is so deeply tied to your family networks that you can’t imagine a new allegiance, then you’re better off not even pretending to be a follower of Jesus.

Or on the matter of possessions: if your primary commitment is to maintaining a comfortable lifestyle, a certain kind of home or cars or clothes or size of retirement account, then you’re better off getting out now.  If you are so deeply shaped by capitalism and American consumer culture that your primary allegiance is to a life of acquiring things, acquiring experiences, protecting yourself against financial loss, then you might as well not even bother with Jesus’ other teachings. 

According to Jesus, those wanting to learn his way of life have to give up “all” their possessions (a term indicating everything of value to us).  Now it’s hard to know whether Jesus meant this to be taken literally.  I suppose if we’re addicted to money and wealth and things, giving all or most of it away might be the only path to sanity and freedom and joy.  We can object, of course.  If I literally give everything away, then I just become dependent on others for my needs.  But however we hear this challenging news today, none of us can doubt that as disciples of Jesus we should travel lightly; we should avoid comparing ourselves to others in terms of possessions and wealth; we should stay flexible and generous. 

And outside of family networks and possessions, if there’s anything else keeping us from following Jesus, we will have to leave it behind.  This could involve any number of things, including our political loyalties, attitudes involving racial/ethnic superiority and separateness, the avoidance of messy involvement with the needs of others, and on and on.

We’re all traveling already.  We’ve loaded ourselves up with a variety of commitments and values and we’ve set off in a particular direction.  If that path is life-giving for you and those around you, then let me cheer you on.  Keep going.  But for some of us the path might not feel like that.  We might feel blocked, or trapped, or stuck, or lost.  And if that’s you, then I want you to hear these Scripture readings today as God’s gracious invitation to begin again.  If you’re willing, God’s Spirit will help you move in new directions.  You can stop and pivot.  You might even need to move in directions that will confuse and upset the people closest to you.

When we lived in New York, some friends of ours invited us to go on a hike.  They wanted to spend the day hiking the trails in Palisades Park, which is in New Jersey just across the George Washington Bridge from New York City.  I remember looking at the hiking trails on a map, thinking, “This should be a lovely day, hiking along the Hudson River with great views of the city.  What’s the big deal about an eight mile hike?”

It turns out that I hadn’t read the altitude changes on the map very closely.  The Palisades are basically the cliff faces leading down to the Hudson River.  Nor had I fully factored in that Remy was four, with legs about eighteen inches long.  Actually, he hiked more miles than we could have hoped.  But I had to do the last couple of miles of trail with Remy on my back.  Now I’m an amazing athlete, but still, that was hard.  The moral of the story is that you can’t really trust a map.  That’s just an abstraction from way up high.  You have to take the trail.  You have to go on the journey, and live it at ground level.  And when you do, you’ll discover that even a hard slog can be full of joy when you travel with others.

Choosing the best path is counter-intuitive.  It might seem that we want the easy path, or the comfortable path, or the familiar path, or the most pleasurable path.  But that’s a trick.  That’s not really the path we want.  The path we really want is full of pain.  Because pain and joy go together.  You can’t get the joy without the pain.  It’s a two-for-one special.  The most deeply satisfying life is a costly life.  Jesus has at least been clear with us on that score.

There’s something over the next hill.  There’s some challenge before you.  There’s some new discovery just across the river.  There’s some freeing insight.  There’s some meaningful ministry for you.  But you can’t stay here.  You can’t stay where you are.  You can’t get so comfortable with where you are and who you are that you grow complacent.  So let’s go.  The path might look different for you than it does for me.  But there is a path for all of us that leads from here into a whole new world of possibilities, a whole new world of grace and light and joy.