“THE SACRED JOURNEY”

Scripture: Matthew 3:13 – 4:11

INTRODUCTION

In a Tuesday morning meeting of a men’s Bible study group I belong to, one of our members got to talking about the risks of his business, and he used a phrase I had never heard before. He said that if something goes wrong with a project - like a crack in the foundation of a building or bad drainage problems in a landscaped area or instability in the pylons of a bridge - when something goes wrong, the lawyers get involved and try to determine who’s at fault. Perhaps it was the architect or the contractor or whoever, and their culpability for a mistake is called “sole negligence.” In other words, somebody is in trouble and the man in our group said, “That’s one thing you don’t want to have happen.”

Well, I’ve been thinking about that phrase ever since and I want to adapt it today to our spiritual lives as we begin the Lenten Season. It doesn’t usually happen by design. We simply become immersed in our work, over-occupied with our plans, and get so caught up in the pressures and demands of places to go, people to see and things to do…that we lose contact with the Lord of our lives. It’s called “soul” negligence and when that happens we had better pay attention to it.

Like the husband and wife who were driving home from a dinner party. He was at the wheel and she looked across the seat and said with a sign, “You know, we used to sit close to each other when we were dating.” He smiled and replied, “Honey, I haven’t moved,” and they laughed and felt a little spark as she slid over next to him.

It can happen to any of us. In fact, it does happen to all of us at one point or another, where we neglect reading the Bible or spending time each day in prayer or attending worship on a Sunday morning or staying close to the fellowship of brothers and sisters in this church.

And that is why the season of Lent is so important, for it provides us with an opportunity to draw near to God and to sense His presence in our lives. It was Alfred Lord Tennyson who wrote:

“Speak to Him thou, for He hears,

And spirit with spirit can meet –

Closer is He than breathing,

And nearer than hands and feet”

(“The Higher Pantheism” by Alfred Lord Tennyson, from the Golden Book

of Religious Verse, compiled by Thomas Curtis Clark, Garden City

Publishing Company, Garden City, NY, 1947)

That is what we want and need and that is what we seek as we enter into this Lenten Season. And I hope and pray that the worship services and special events and daily disciplines of the next six weeks will lead us in the right direction, including our sermon series entitled “From Here to Eternity: the Stages of Life, Death and Resurrection.”

What I envision for each of us and all of us is a decision to enter into what is called “The Sacred Journey,” wherein we will commit ourselves to study, reflection and prayer, and put ourselves in a place where God can make contact with us – including right here in this sanctuary. So if you have “moved a distance” away from the Lord, I invite you to lean over toward Him. And in so doing, as we make our journey together with those first disciples who walked with the Lord, I believe that we will sense His presence among us and within us, every step of the way toward the Last Supper in the Upper Room, Good Friday’s Cross and Easter’s Empty Tomb.

It was 1982 when the Presbyterian minister and author Frederick Buechner wrote a book by the title – “The Sacred Journey.” It’s about the first half of his life, from childhood memories to his decision to enter Union Theological Seminary in New York City, spanning a time frame from 1926 until 1953.

I commend the book to you (which can be ordered through our bookstore!), and want to read some lines both from the beginning and on toward the conclusion of “The Sacred Journey.” Please listen…

“On a Saturday in late fall, my brother and I woke up around sunrise. I was ten and he not quite eight, and once we were awake, there was no going back to sleep again…(Then) our bedroom door opened a little, and somebody looked in on us. It was our father. Later on, we could not remember anything more about it than that, even when we got around to pooling our memories of it, which was not until many years later…All I know is that after a while, he disappeared, closing the door behind him…How long it was from the moment he closed the door to the moment we opened it, I no longer have any way of knowing…Up till then, the house had been still. Then, muffled by the closed door, there was a shout from downstairs…My grandmother loomed fierce and terrified in the hallway…’Something terrible has happened!’ she said, and told us to go back to our room. We went back. We looked out the window”…

And for the next few pages, Frederick Buechner describes seeing his father down in the driveway. He had asphyxiated himself with the exhaust of the car in the garage and died that morning, with his wife and mother beside him. It was many years before Buechner really wrote about that painful event which changed his life forever, and the book is “Telling Secrets,” and it is, I think, the most important of all his books. But in this book, “The Sacred Journey,” Buechner later describes how he found a deeper faith at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City, and was profoundly influenced by the preacher there named Dr. George Buttrick. Toward the conclusion, this is how Buechner describes it:

“Then there came one particular sermon with one particular phrase in it that does not even appear in the transcript…that somebody sent me more than twenty-five years later, so I can only assume that he must have dreamed it up at the last minute and ad-libbed it. And on just such foolish, tenuous, holy threads as that, I suppose, hang the destinies of us all. ‘Jesus Christ refused the crown that Satan offered Him in the wilderness,’ Buttrick said, ‘but He is king nonetheless because again and again He is crowned in the heart of the people who believe in Him. And that inward coronation takes place,’ Buttrick said, ‘among confession, and tears, and great laughter.’

It was the phrase ‘great laughter’ that did it, did whatever it was that I believe must have been hiddenly in the doing all the years of my journey up till then…Whatever it was that I had found…I had finally found Christ. Or was found…In honesty as well as in faith I am reduced to the word that is His name because no other seems to account for the experience so fully…”

And these are the words the author leaves us with this evening:

“What quickens my pulse is the stretch ahead rather than the one behind, and it is mainly for some clue to where I am going that I search through where I have been, for some hint as to who I am becoming. And it is because I believe that God walks with us, that I think of my life and of the lives of everyone who has ever lived, or will ever live, as not just journeys through time but as sacred journeys.”

(Quotations from “The Sacred Journey” by Frederick Buechner,

Harper and Row Publishers, San Francisco, 1982, pages 37-40,

109-111, 6)

II.

Well, he has a powerful story to tell, and I think Buechner has provided us with the right image for this season – a sacred journey. And as was the case with the sermon Dr. Buttrick preached in New York City years ago, the text for this communion meditation is taken from the Gospel of Matthew, chapters 3 and 4, where Jesus is baptized in the River Jordan and then led into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

That is how our Lord’s own sacred journey began, rejoicing in the glory of His baptism and in the love of His Father in heaven. The journey carried Him off into the desert where His body, mind and soul were forged in the crucible of temptation, and the shape of His ministry and mission were formed by the grace, love, peace and courage which His Father gave to Him.

And now we, all of us, begin to make the sacred journey with Him, just as Frederick Buechner has done together with all those who have gone before us in the faith. It is a journey we choose to make, reaching out to take hold of Christ’s hand and asking Him to lead us forward every step of the way. And here at this table we find bread for the wilderness and wine for the journey to strengthen us as we turn our faces toward Jerusalem with Jesus, saying “Yes Lord, we are ready to follow you.”

“I know not where the road will lead

I follow day by day, or where it ends:

I only know I walk the King’s highway.

I know not if the way is long,

And no one else can say:

But rough or smooth, up hill or down,

I walk the King’s highway.

And some I love have reached the end,

But some with me may stay,

Their faith and hope still guiding me –

I walk the King’s highway.”

(Author Unknown)

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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