Sermon from January 9, 2000
On September 15, 1940, a Sunday, at about 9:15 a.m., without my being consulted in any way and in circumstances I have assiduously sought to avoid ever since, I was born the first (and last) child of Seth and Chrystine Matthews. In retrospect my potential for personal development was never again so great as it was that fine, late summer day. I could, for example, have become fluent in any language on the face of the earth, perhaps any three languages on the face of the earth simultaneously. I could have adjusted to great wealth. But no, my parents, extended family, neighbors, schools, church all insisted on speaking nothing but English, and our modest, blue collar home sustained by a modest, blue collar income deprived me of every chance of learning the art of being wealthy. All of which, I hasten to remind you, happened to me without my having a word to say about any of it.

It is clear on reflection that I was destined to be part of someone else's story whether I liked it or not – a story that had been going on for a long time before my birth. Now, it is disturbing enough when someone else's story is passed on to you, whether you like it or not; but then to learn they got part of it wrong is upsetting. I learned before long that some very influential people thought my story had got some pretty important things all wrong. I would have to change part of my story. Part of someone else's story would have to become mine, if these other people were right.

And let me tell you, changing part of your story is not easy. The people who gave you the story in the first place don't like for someone else to tell them they got part of the story wrong. They especially do not like their young telling them they got it wrong. The men in my story did one of two things when that happened. They either got silent or they got angry. I did not like either. The women took it personally and clucked. The women in my story knew how to cluck disapprovingly. I liked that even less.

Something else made it hard to change part of my story, and it had nothing to do with clucking women and silent, angry men. The truth is, I liked my story. It never crossed my mind that I had not been consulted as to the time and circumstances of my birth. I behaved as if I had made the whole thing up myself, and the idea that I had got part of it wrong offended me. That is why it took a long time (years) for me to agree that I had to change part of my story. Then came the most curious thing. I liked my revised story better than the original and defended it with the same zeal. Change is possible.

Am I the only person to experience this? Of course, I hope I am not the only one. I would like to think that many of you are like me. I mean, do you never look out on the world into which you were born and feel its strangeness and realize how little you had to do with making it or the massive forces that have irresistibly shaped your personhood? Have you never revised your story, your view of the world?

Let me go a step further. Do you never think how fascinating your little story is? Every one of you here is a hero in search of a biographer. There are no uninteresting people. I look out at you on Sunday, all silent and attentive, and remember the dramas that you embody, and I sometimes wonder why the building here does not explode from the pent-up energy of your untold stories.

So, here we are, actors in a drama that has been going on for who knows how long, and right in the middle we find that we have to make changes in our parts as we go along, or else the story might not come out right. Or, to change the figure of speech, here we are, journeying down a path we did not choose, and in the middle of the journey we find that the road we are on is taking us in a wrong direction, and we have to change course; not once or twice but several times, or else we would not find the main road that will take us to our proper destination. I learned a traveling song many years ago that I have often sung to myself. It captures some of what I mean.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

To think of your life as the story of a journey has deep roots in our common consciousness. Many of the most powerful stories we have told each other for the past 4000 years have been stories of a journey, whether The Odyssey or the Exodus, The Divine Comedy or Pilgrim's Progress, Dr. Zhivago or The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This powerful image, nestling deep in our consciousness, expresses itself prolifically in our speech. I made a hasy collection of examples of how the image of the road stipples our speech. As I list them, I would like you to see if any of them expresses where you are today on your life journey.

Here is the first one. "I know where I'm going. Turn me loose." The person who says this has set goals and made plans. The sense of purpose and focus is very strong.

Here is another. "I've lost my way." This could be someone who can't find the way out of a North Wilmington neighborhood. It expressed my predicament one day in the A.I. DuPont Hospital for Children. It may be a more serious confession that a person's life has become confused and aimless.

A variation on the first two says, "I know where I want to go, but my path forward is uncertain." People of purpose do run into obstacles that threaten to thwart their purposes. Life is full of surprises.

How about this one: "I'm at a crossroads." Not only is the path forward uncertain, but a decision is required pretty soon, and that decision is going to have far-reaching and possibly irrevocable consequences.

For impatient people who face no tough choices it is easy to say, "Let's get the show on the road." Time's a-wasting. What are we waiting for? At other times we say that in an effort to get irresolute people to stop talking and do something.

You have probably not heard people use the next expression about themselves, but you will have heard one person use it about another. "It's my way or the highway." We say it of people who, right or wrong, are going to do things their way and let you know that in no uncertain terms.

Finally, there's the phrase used by a backwoods person from Arkansas who had been asked where the road in front of his house went. He said, "I been living here 30 years, and I ain't seen this road go nowhere." It captures the sense of being trapped in a dead-end, or a backwater period of life.

Do any of these expressions tell the story of your journey right now? I want to encourage you to come here each week aware of where you are in the story of your journy through this strange and beautiful and dangerous world to your final destination. If you can do that, the story that Mark tells in his gospel wil engage you at a deeper level than you ever thought possible. Scripture encourages us to do this. Let me show you examples of scriptural encouragement to think of your life as the story of a journey.

Jeremiah, writing 600 years before Christ, spoke to a nation in extraordinary danger and with no clear vision of which way to turn. But he said there was a way, and they could find it.

This is what the LORD says:
     "Stand at the crossroads and look;
          ask for the ancient paths,
     ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
          and you will find rest for your souls," (Jer. 6:16).

The search began for Israel and begins for our world in moral uncertainty and urgency; it begins at a crossroads – the place at which a person or a nation might go off in any direction. There the Weeping Prophet says to our world at the beginning of a new millennium, "Look! Get your bearings. Give some thought before you plunge along whatever path suits your fancy. Look and ask! Don't assume you know! Don't assume any old path will do!" It is what he tells us to ask for that may cripple him.

"Ask for the ancient paths." Do you know any quicker way to be ignored than that? "Ask for the ancient paths, eh? Sure, friend. Where do I buy a horse and buggy and a wooden plow?" It sounds like a waste of time, an invitation to retrieve the irretrievable.

But things can be old in more than one way. The wooden plow is old and out-of-date. The bay channel is ancient – more ancient than the wooden plow – but every skipper reckons with it to steer his ship safely into open waters. Are there paths for the human journey that are ancient like the narrow shipping channel? From Abraham to Billy Graham, Western Civilization has proceeded on the belief that there are. These ancient paths, the good way, are not a roadmap. They are more like fixed stars by which vigilant navigators keep their proper course on the trackless oceans.

That leads nicely into a second example of scriptural encouragement to think of your life as the story of a journey. Psalm 86:11 says,

Teach me your way, O LORD,
and I will walk in your truth;
give me an undivided heart,
that I may fear your name.

Teach me your way, O LORD, I don't know it. Are you looking for how to pray for yourself in the year ahead? Psalm 86:11 may answer exactly to your heart's need.

A third scriptural encouragement to think of our life as the story of a journey brings us back to the greatest story ever told, as told by Mark in Mark 1:2-3. It is written in Isaiah the prophet:

"I will send my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way" –
"a voice of one calling in the desert,
'Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.'"

Might it be that these words of the prophets link fruitfully not only with Jesus' age, but also with the problems and processes of our post-modern age? Jeremiah said, "Ask where the good way is." Why should we not inquire further about the way prepared by John the Baptist and pursued with grace and passion by Jesus Himself? The Gospel of Mark has told memorably the story of the way He traveled. So, let's immerse ourselves in that story in the months to come, always seeking the ancient paths, always asking where the good way is.

Jesus said of Himself in John 14:6, "I am the way," and a Christian song added meaningfully, "Without Him there is no going." The Apostle John's suggestive language says in 1 John 2:6, Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did. There is a large body of wisdom in Jesus that transfers from His circumstances to ours, so that we can credibly imitate Jesus. In the language I have been using today, we can follow Him on the way. We can merge the story of our journey into the story of His journey.

You know, before we were called Christians, we had another name. Prior to Paul's conversion, Acts 9:1-2 says that he went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem. Later in a trial for treason against Judaism, he denied the treason with the following concession: "However, I admit that I worship the God of our fathers as a follower of the Way, which they call a sect," (Acts. 24:14).

Five times in the Book of Acts, Christianity is called the Way. How appropriate that the Church should be called the people of the Way. The name fell into disuse, and in our day it has been defaced by a cult; but it can still serve to identify Jesus' disciples as those who found the good way by following His Way.

I came to realize something else about the story of my journey. I wonder if you have found it to be the same. As much as I loved and defended my little story, as if I had been responsible for all of it, I kept finding that, not only did I need to revise it, but also I needed it to be part of some larger story.

From childhood, music provided that larger story for me in ways that I have never tried to analyze. Sports did that even more. But for the longest time nothing did it for me quite like patriotism. I think what happened in each case was that instead of seeing more and more of life as chapters in my little story, I came to see my little story as a chapter in the much larger story. At that point, paradoxically, my little story does not get swallowed up by the larger story. Oddly enough, the larger story did not swallow up my little story, but infused it with deeper meaning. I somehow became smaller but my significance somehow became greater.

Music and patriotism still tell larger stories in which my little story finds a home. But patriotism no longer holds pride of position. Within my soul Caesar has knelt before Christ. His story, the story of His journey on this flawed jewel we call earth, has drawn my little story into itself, and meaning washes over my life, rising like water finding its level – never more poignantly and piercingly than in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And now stretching before us like a long summer is the Gospel of Mark.