"Journey to the End"

READING

 From "Letters to My Son," by Kent Nerburn:

 [Here] is why we need to travel. If we don’t offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don’t lift to the horizon; our ears don’t hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in a routine that is both comfortable and limiting. We wake up one day and find that we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days.

Don’t let yourself become one of these people. The fear of the unknown and the lure of the comfortable will conspire to keep you from taking the chances the traveler has to take. But if you take them, you will never regret your choice. To be sure, there will be moments of doubt when you stand alone on an empty road in an icy rain, or when you are ill with fever in a rented bed. But as the pains of the moment will come, so too will they fall away. In the end, you will be so much richer, so much stronger, so much clearer, so much happier, and so much better a person that all the risk and hardship will seem like nothing compared to the knowledge and wisdom you have gained.

SERMON

The journey is a spiritual metaphor with a long lineage and cross-cultural meaning. Devotees of every faith make pilgrimages. Muslims undergo the hajj, an arduous ritual visit to Mecca. Christians walk devotional miles across rugged northern Spain, climb cathedral stairs on their knees, join ailing throngs on their way to Lourdes. Hindus go to the Ganges River.

Danger and risk are often part of these travels. Epic journeys produce epic tales, such as the story of Odysseus and his harrowing ten-year trip home after the Trojan War. Jesus joined a procession to Jerusalem for Passover in the company of other pilgrims, while signs of what was to come hovered ominously over the celebration. Today is the day Christians observe as Palm Sunday, which marks Jesus’ last journey.

According to mythology, folk tales and sacred texts, no journey is easy and what we find at the end is anyone’s guess. In Arnold Lobel’s fable “The Mouse at the Seashore,” Mouse faces many challenges before arriving at his destination. The end was well worth the effort.

In the popular spiritual imagination, everyone is on a journey, all the time. Everything is a journey. We are all moving on, one way or another, pausing to greet and wish each other well as we pass. But it’s when the end is in sight that each day and each meeting take on real meaning.

Now you and I have begun that journey towards an ending. When I retire from ministry in August, we will part ways and move on in separate directions. Bringing a ministry to a close is a delicate undertaking. We have all these different feelings about it. It reminds us what the church means in our lives and what we mean to each other. Thoughts about the past and the future merge with what is happening in the present. Every ending makes us think about every other ending we’ve ever had. And so does every journey.

Not everyone has an appetite for travel or adventure. I come from a long line of cautious people. So cautious that in my family a proposal for any activity that would take us outside the home for any length of time never failed to produce the standard parental response, “Why would you want to do that?” The fear of risk and danger came more easily to my parents’ minds than the prospect of growth and joy, or so it seemed to their children.

Anxiety is hereditary, or it is in my case. And my parents’ fears were often well-founded. Why did I want to do some of the things I wanted to do?

Yet experience has taught me that whatever risks and dangers the world may offer, the unknown is not something to fear. I prefer what Kent Nerburn wrote in his “Letters” to his son. “If we don’t offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder.”

This is why we take journeys of all kinds, to exotic foreign locales and to parts of ourselves we haven’t had a chance to explore. We need to offer ourselves to the unknown. If we don’t, Nerburn adds, “the edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in a routine that is both comfortable and limiting.”

Of course, seeking the unknown can also produce some days that are very uncomfortable. I hope we don’t have them, but you never know. During my 2002 sabbatical, David and I traveled to Bali, a place filled with ritual-happy people. There is a ceremony for every imaginable life event, temples to consecrate – constantly, and offerings to leave everywhere. It is wonderful to immerse yourself in their world. The people are gracious, their customs are colorful and compelling, and they want to tell you all about them, and have you experience them yourself.

We learned that Balinese families make a pilgrimage to a major bat cave every year a loved one dies. “You have to go,” said Ketut, our guide. A little voice in my head was saying, “Why would I want to do that?” but David was eager. The trip involved driving to the other side of the island.

Once we arrived, Ketut waited with the car, we approached the cave and then, very briefly, entered it. I should say, David entered it. I hung back, because even at a distance I could tell that the bat smell was overpowering. David bolted out of the cave with a look of horror and revulsion on his face. Gasping and reeling, he pronounced the bat cave “the worst thing he had ever smelled” in his life, and we hurried back to the car.

Some journeys take you to the seashore; others to the bat caves. We cannot know unless we go. Or do more research, which might have helped us know what to expect. That’s the real lesson of the bat caves.

The journey that we now take as minister and congregation has everything an adventure should have: an interesting itinerary, a few unknowns, and a time for everyone to go home. It will bring growth and new possibilities. Yet it’s a path many others have traveled before, with good maps and guides, good will, and good faith. We will see each other in a slightly different way – awakened from the routine we have kept for nearly fifteen years. The next days will have a sense of immediacy, an awareness of the present moment, even as each of us looks separately towards the future. And we will learn what this time together has meant.

This is also the time in the life of a church when we realize that our purpose is not to make each other comfortable, to lull ourselves into familiar but limiting routines. What we are meant to do here is to put the edge back on our experience, to remember our dreams, and to offer ourselves to the unknown. We are here to learn, as Kent Nerburn wrote to this son, that “as the pains of the moment will come, so too will they fall away.”

Fifteen years ago I pondered the question of whether I should accept the invitation to become your minister. I thought about my life in Boston, where I had friendships already lasting decades, and memories everywhere I looked. I was ensconced in a comfortable but limiting routine, with few surprises left. It seemed time to take a new journey. And so I said yes to this church, yes to moving from Massachusetts to California, yes to all the changes that would require of me, and yes to the unknown.

As some of you will recall, that first year brought us the Northridge earthquake the same night as my installation ceremony. Not an auspicious beginning. Barely oriented to Los Angeles at that point, I found myself with a church that was a mess, members suffering from the crisis, and a home where I found pieces of broken glass for months afterwards. I questioned the wisdom of leaving Boston. Yet out of this adversity and the challenges that followed came the bond that allowed me to become your minister.

This is what we are here to do: to travel together, whatever the hardships and surprises. To meet each other on solid or shaky ground. To learn and grow together and when the time comes, to move on. I don’t know what the days and years ahead will bring for any of us. But the journey we have taken together so far still has a few more adventures in it – and with the end on the horizon, a sense of the present moment to savor, so rare, so exquisitely full of life.