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The Journey Is the Reward

A Sermon on Mark 8: 27-38 Richard A. Wing ith great pleasure I dedicate this sermon to the faithful work over the long haul of Don and Marge Reisinger. Marge is a bright star shining to family and friends and to all whose pleasure it is to know her. Don knows that his ability to do all he has done has been by the power of her grace, her love and her commitment to the work he has done.

No one has referred to his work as a journey more than Don. He has been faithful in naming what is happening "at this point in time" and knowing that to be fully aware and present in the moment is by far the greatest gift rather than the dream of a destination. Implicit in the life of Jesus, and written in the Tao before Jesus, are the words of the title of this sermon: The Journey is the Reward. And, Dr. Don, our faithful friend and companion on the path, we salute you as the most worthy and wonderful of travelers with us. What an embarrassment of riches has been ours to travel with you until "this point in time" and to know that there are many more points of grace to be known in your life. Our lives have been graced because of you, companion and friend, Don. At "this point in time" and at the place of destination, you will never be forgotten in our hearts and lives. Peace to you.

Introduction Jesus is on a journey with careless companions. How do I know they were careless? Tony Camplo said they must have been because they were always "mending their torn nets." When Jesus said, "Follow me and I will make you fish for people," it did not take them more than a minute to say, "Anything would be better than snagging and mending these nets all day. Let's go boys!"

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The first miracle in the Gospel of Mark is that Jesus commanded these uneducated fishermen to follow, and they did. Hold that scene in your memory because you will see that moment as the last these disciples got an instruction right. After that they were in the clouds most of the time and clueless about what Jesus was about. Their proximity to Jesus did not automatically bring clarity. If Jesus went the way of full disclosure he should have said, "Follow me and I will leave you breathless from the many places I demand you go with me." Scripture records Jesus saying something or doing something and then "immediately" Jesus goes to the next place, disappears or is seeking quiet. Jesus is always moving. On the sea one night, Jesus is strolling by the disciples' boat. "Wait," they say, "Hey, where are you going?" Jesus simply passes them by. The end comes. Jesus is dead. A woman is at the tomb. "Jesus? Sorry, you just missed him. He is going before you into Galilee. Hurry, catch up with him." Jesus burst out of the tomb like an open field runner off to some new mysterious destination. The disciples are breathless again. In life and after death, Jesus leaves his followers breathless and clueless. One time Jesus reportedly said, "You know the way I am going." I can see Thomas shaking his head "no" in exasperation and saying, "Jesus, we do NOT know where you are going and where your journey will take us." In time the disciples conclude that they know little about the place where Jesus is going, but they trust the spirit and heart of the one who prepares that place, and that finally is all they need to know. Enter with me into what the journey after the life of Jesus demanded of the disciples and of us. I. The Journey Demands Awareness Rabbi Lawrence Kushner reminds us that the burning bush that stood before Moses was NOT a miracle, but a test. God wanted to find out whether or

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not Moses could pay attention to something for more than a few minutes. The question with Moses and the challenge of Jesus is this: can you behold a miracle without falling asleep. There is another world right here within this one, which comes into view when we pay attention. Recently I was out on a lake in a nearby state on a pontoon boat with friends I have known over the past twenty years. The day was calm. The sun was bright. Some were sunning, some were fishing and for a moment everyone was quiet. In that quietness, for some reason they all were transformed before my eyes. I looked at each of them. I started numbering all the burdens and losses that we have shared together. I remembered the funeral for this woman's husband when he was thirty-six; I remember the faces of three children now young women as I announced the death of their father; I remember the funeral for that couple's daughter who was twentytwo; I remembered the funeral for this young man's mother and discovered that he had met his father only once and still suffered from that; I looked at young lives trying to make relationships work. Right before me I was aware of the fact that our losses are the common thread that bind our hearts and lives. Such awareness should make us want to place a sign over the door of every church: "Be kind to one another because everyone in this / place is carrying something heavy." I saw clearly this truth which Jesus identified with the kingdom: There is another world right here within this one, which comes into view when we pay attention. Rabbi Kushner tells the story of a man who went to his doctor's office that was just across the street from the psychiatric hospital. One day, as he had regularly done for a few years, he walked down the street to his car in front of the hospital when he heard blood-chilling screams from the building rooftop. He mentioned that fact to his doctor. "You mean you just now heard it?" asked the doctor. "After all these years?" In fact, the screamers had been screaming every day he came to therapy for years. From that day on he could hear the screams and concluded: "The screams are all around us, waiting for our ears and eyes and hands." Awareness is the difference between hearing and not hearing shouts of pain and cries of joy on the journey.

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The one with whom we journey seeks to get us to see that God's voice is always speaking. God is always with us. And with our penchant desire for Muzak, we drown out the voice of God. God, in God's persistent and consistent pursuit of our lives turns on the Dolby switch occasionally and eliminates the hiss of our world and lets us hear his voice clearly. God is always speaking and mostly we are unaware. The journey demands awareness. And II. The Journey Gives Relationship I remember the day a young man called me in crisis. I had done his wedding the year previously and he told me there was a crisis. He announced in my office, "I don't feel the same way about her as I did the day we got married." I said, "Congratulations, that is where your marriage begins. I hope I didn't fail to tell you that marriage begins the moment romantic love ends." He was silent. They got counseling. They are doing well. Most of the time when I buy something I first read the manual, or drive the product around the block before buying it. With marriage you do the opposite. You buy into it without knowing what you are getting and without knowing where you are going. I had someone come to me recently who declared that you can not really know someone until after you have lived with them for twenty years. Promises of marriage and life-long commitment are made in the church precisely because you don't know where they will take you, which is just like the disciples who left their torn nets to run breathlessly after one who could not be contained by convention nor bought by flattery. Albert Schweitzer described the not-knowingness of where we are going or who it is we go with when he said, "Jesus comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: 'Follow me!' and sets us to the tasks that He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him... He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable

The Journey Is the Reward mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is."

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The journey promised by Jesus takes you away from nothing in this life and comes with a promise that Jesus will be with you through it all. That companionship makes all the difference. Robert Capon said, "Jesus comes to us in the brokenness of our health; in the shipwreck of our family lives, in the loss of all possible peace of mind, even in the very thick of our poor choices. Jesus saves us in our disasters, noi from them ... He meets us all in our endless and inescapable (losses)." Often people say that God is not near. Many of those people need to be asked, "And guess who moved?" Tony Camplo tells about the couple that was married for 40 years. They were driving down the street and saw a young couple sitting close to each other in a car with her arm around the guy driving. The woman began to complain. "Remember when we were like that. Whatever happened?" The man said, "Guess who moved?" Jacob complained of the absence of God. In the night came a dream and a wrestling with God. In the aftermath Jacob said, "God was in this place (the place where I complained of God's absence), and I, I did not know it." He concludes that if God was in the very place of his complaint of God's absence, then God must surely be present in many other places that I have not found him. Jacob leaves limping and blessed because he has the gift of awareness and the knowledge that God is present in the very places we claim God is not. And now one last aspect of the journey, III. The Journey Moves from Abstract to Specific You are right in asking, "When are we going to go beyond all this prelude to the text itself?" Let us wait no longer. The central question of our text moves from the abstract to the specific. When Jesus says, "Who do people say that I am?"-that fits into my comfort zone. We all like talking about what "they say." "They say a freeway is going right through our church property." Really? "They say if we let

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outside groups use the church we could get sued if someone falls on the walk." Really? "They say you can't grow a church unless you are funda mentalist." Really? Anytime we allow the abstract to dominate the way we follow Jesus then we can spend all our time dominated by fear and marked with inaction. But Jesus goes to the weightier question when he says, "But who do you say that I am?" Be very careful how you answer that question and what that question might demand of your life. As . T. Wright said, when you answer that question, suddenly your jour ney can neither be private nor self-centered.... To continue the journey means to join in with God's work of healing and love in the world ... those who find themselves drawn into the love of this God must themselves join in God's work of reconciliation. Recently I revisited the life and work of Albert Schweitzer. He wrote the first long and scholarly work on the life of Jesus in the 20th Century. Then he pushed the abstract, long, scholarly work aside and let the call of Jesus become specific in his life. The specific text that transformed his life was this: "Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him." When the general call of Jesus became specific in his life, he left everything to serve the poorest of the poor in Africa. I remember when Rudy joined the church and asked to see me in my office. He came to stay "just a moment." He told me of an artificial limb that he wore. He told me of a serious case of diabetes that he had. He told me of the temptation to feel sorry for himself. He told me that he decided not to let the general malaise of his diabetes rule him. He told me that he decided to use his illness to help others. "I go to hospitals regularly and give encouragement to those who are going to have the same operation that I had." Why? Because the love of Christ leaves him no choice but to love, serve and encourage those who are walking the same path with a slight limp, just like him. "Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him."

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Just before he died, Rudy told me that death would be for him a victory. Rudy belonged to Christ. Rudy had the gift of awareness, the knowledge of who traveled with him and the joy of taking the gospel's general demand and making it specific in his life. Conclusion People who followed Jesus for a reward were mistaken. What they got was a journey. The Tao says, "The journey is the reward." And in looking back on what Jesus calls us to on the journey, we realize that the journey is the reward. We realize, looking back, we were never alone on the journey. We realize, looking back, that we were made new when we stopped making generalizations out of God's call and let God's call become specific. In the late 1930's in Munich, under the rule of Nazis, there was a young Jewish girl by the name of Sussie riding on a bus home from work sitting next to a total stranger. Suddenly, the bus was called to a halt. The SS soldiers boarded and started examining the documents of the people on the bus. Jews >vere being told to leave the bus and get into the truck around the corner. Sussie watched the soldiers come closer and she began to cry. The man next to her asked why. She said she didn't have the papers he had and that she was Jewish and would be taken. Suddenly, the man stood up and exploded. "You stupid woman," he yelled. "I can't stand being near you!" The SS men asked what the yelling was about. The man, still swearing, said angrily, "My wife has forgotten her papers again! I'm so fed up. She always does this!" The soldiers laughed and left. Sussie never saw the man again, the one who saved her life. She never knew his name. Once there was a Christian man riding on a bus next to a stranger. Up to that moment his faith was abstract and was never called to become specific, until that day.

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May God help us to translate the general notions of faith into specific action for good to any human face that needs us and receives us. In so doing, we will realize one day that the journey of doing specific goodness was the reward we have looked for in all the wrong places until now. Amen.

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