March 8, 2009 Des
Moines
Second in a series on Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing
TEXT: Mark 8:31-38
Prone to Wander
Bilbo Baggins, the central character of
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and
progenitor of all that transpires in the
Lord of the Rings trilogy, steps out the door of his house in the Shire one
day and begins to sing:
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.
Because, as Bilbo had already observed, “the road
goes ever on.” There is always another
road.
In the fly pages at the beginning of
William Least Heat Moon’s bestselling book Blue
Highways, the author explains that:
On the old highway maps of America, the main routes
were red and the back roads blue. Now
even the colors are changing. But in
those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk – times neither day
nor night – the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast
of blue, and it’s that time when the mysterious pull of the blue highway is
strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a
man can lose himself. [1]
Or “get lost,” we might add; for that
open road allure – the addiction to that particular shade of blue – and the
distance it subsequently carries us from anything like home has seemingly woven
itself into our very DNA. “Wanderlust” –
what the dictionary defines as “a strong,
innate desire to rove or travel about”, has become, at our worst, a
substitute for imagination; the best we can do when we don’t know what else to
do. Least Heat Moon took to the blue
highways when he was laid off at work and his wife divorced him. When football players don’t get enough
playing time they lobby to be traded.
When preachers get to the bottom of their sermon barrel, they move to
another church. Relationally, a new
phrase has become common place: “starter
marriages.” When the thrill is gone, we
just move on.
That’s sort of how Ben Rumson saw it –
Ben, the gruff and wizened old miner played by Lee Marvin in Lerner and Loewe’s
wonderful musical Paint Your Wagon. How long had it been before it all came
crashing down? A year? Surely longer than that. Long enough at least for the gold so
wonderfully, so serendipitously found in the bottom of a hastily dug grave to
mushroom into the crowded and raucous mining town known as “No Name City.” Had it been two years? Five?
Perhaps, but surely no more than that.
And by the time it all came unraveled in a comic disaster of mud and
bull fight and petticoats and collapsing saloons, Ben had had enough. And as he trudged his way out of town, he
started to sing:
I was born under a wanderin’ star
I was born under a wanderin’ star
Wheels are made for rollin’
Mules are made to pack
I never seen a sight that didn’t look better looking back.
I was born under a wanderin’ star
Do I know where hell is?
Hell is in Hello
Heaven is good-bye forever
It’s time for me to go
I was born under a wanderin’ star
A wanderin’ wanderin’ star
When I get to heaven
Tie me to a tree
Or I’ll begin to roam
And soon you know where I will be
I was born under a wanderin’ star
A wanderin’ wanderin’ star [2]
“There's two kinds of people,” Ben once
said: “them goin' somewhere and them
goin' nowhere. And that's what's true.”
And we can’t stand the thought of going
nowhere. Wanderlust is sometimes, then,
a solution, but it has also become our affliction – spiritually, at least, if
not always physically. We like to move
along.
Why,
we have pondered for countless generations, did the chicken cross the
road? All kinds of answers have been
ventured, but they all boil down to the conclusion that where it was going had
more allure than where it had been. The
illusion of greener grass. The scent of
cooler water. A glint of a better
view. More, or more popular, better
looking chickens over there – or
fewer. The hope of a few more grains of
feed.
Jesus told a parable about 99 sheep
wandering off away from the herd, and how the Good Shepherd would leave the one
that had remained and go off in search of the drifters. The story doesn’t say what the 99 found so appealing
off in that other direction, but it doesn’t require much of an
imagination. Who has ever heard of
leaving a good thing because of an appetite for something worse. “Worse,” of course, is often what we wind up
with – wolves or cliffs or any number of desperate pitfalls – but the incentive
always seems appealing. And so we keep
crossing roads. And traveling them. So we keep on wandering.
As
the prophet Isaiah put it stingingly, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray.”
Sometimes, of course, the move is less
about getting to something and more about pushing something else away. Peter, in the story read earlier, liked the
sound of divinity – “You are the Christ, the son of God,” he had said with such
conviction. But then Jesus...
began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great
suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed, and after three days rise again. And Peter took him aside and
began to rebuke him.
“Stop talking like that,” he said in so
many words. “Nobody signed on for that!”
But
turning and looking at his disciples, Jesus rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind
me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human
things. “If any want to become my followers,
let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who
want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my
sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”
Hmmm.
Do I know where hell is?
Hell is in Hello
Heaven is good-bye forever
It’s time for me to go.
Sounds
like “wand’rin’ star” time to me.
But not quite. The truth is, having gotten Jesus into our
systems, we can’t imagine how empty we would be if we got him out. While we like to keep moving, deep down we
want to follow where he is leading, and our drifting only leads us away. And the absence creates an ache that is
shutteringly palpable.
Prone
to wander, sings the writer of the
hymn that is guiding us throughout this Lenten season. Prone
to wander; Lord I feel it. And we
can scarcely survive the sensation. My
guess is that most of us can feel it; most of us find ourselves, from time to
time, wandering far afield from the path on which God would have us walk. And we would walk in a different direction.
And so in
these Lenten days we sharpen our prayer practices, we renew spiritual
disciplines, and we do our best to pay better attention to where God is and
what God is doing and how God would have us follow along. But all that holy work is less about climbing
the lofty peaks of the saintly, and more about simply finding our way back
home.
In
the last chapter of The Hobbit, at the end of his long journey back to
the Shire, Bilbo reprises his traveling song, but this time with a different
spin. Coming to the top of a rise and
seeing his home in the distance, he stops and hums a sentiment warm enough to
make the heavens smile:
Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Home. Come,
thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace.