The Last Sunday after the Epiphany

Wendell Berry says that the character of American civilization was greatly shaped by two kinds of people.

One group were the "boomers," those who set their faces toward the frontier, who were always on the lookout for the next boom town, always searching for a quick buck in gold or gambling, always using the topsoil and the water from the streams and ready to move on again when the topsoil blew away or the stream dried up, those never a stranger to adventure.

The other group were the "settlers" or "nesters," those who started a ranch or a farm, built the church and the school and the town, opened a bank or a general store, dug the wells and sought to conserve the land, those who preferred the apparent security of settled community life to the uncertainties and hardships of the road.

My favorite theology textbook makes a similar observation. The book is entitled, Western Theology. "Western," that is, as in the Wild West. In it, Wes Seeliger says that there are two kinds of theology, settler theology and pioneer theology.

In settler theology, the Church is the courthouse, which stands in the middle of the town square. In settler theology, God is the mayor, whose office is on the second floor of the courthouse. Jesus is the sheriff. His job is to make sure all the laws are obeyed. The Holy Spirit is the saloon girl, who gives a special performance every Wednesday night and has a different dancing costume for every season: green, purple, red and white. The priest is the bank teller, whose main job is to receive deposits. And the bishop is the bank president, who keeps all the accounts and locks the bank at night.

Things are different in pioneer theology. In pioneer theology, the Church is the wagon train. God is the trail boss, who rides hard and drinks his whiskey straight and has size 13 feet. Jesus is the scout, whose job is to ride ahead to find out which way the pioneers should go. The Holy Spirit is Wild Red the buffalo hunter, who is the biggest man in camp and whose clothes smell like the critters he hunts. The priest is the cook, whose job is to dish up meat for the hungry pioneers out on the trail. And the bishop is the dishwasher, who is the cook's helper and who, between meals, lends a hand to everyone on the wagon train.

In settler theology, the most important things are to maintain law and order in town, to keep courthouse records up to date, to wipe your feet before entering the courthouse, and to tell the old, old stories about the exciting adventures of days gone by.

In pioneer theology, the most important things are to keep your eyes peeled on the horizon, to ford the next river, to pull the wagons out of the mud, and to travel today's road with as much vision and faith and grit as the folks of yesteryear traveled theirs with.

Life is like that, isn't it? Some of us prefer the settled life. Some of us are drawn to the adventure of the road. Many are pulled in both directions at once.

I love to travel. I love airports and train stations, the push and pull of crowds, the smell of diesel fuel, new sights and different cultures, the challenge of buying things in an unknown language, the sound of donkeys and roosters outside my tent in a night as black as pitch.

I even love that incredible non-road I used to travel in Haiti. It is a road that requires a good four-wheel vehicle to travel the 80 or so miles from Port-au-Prince to Petit Trou de Nippes in seven to ten hours, a road that fords a river a hundred yards wide where the water comes up over the windshield when you splash into it, a road on which, where it is paved, you literally add miles to your trip by zigzagging back and forth across the road just to miss the potholes, and where others pass you on both the right and the left going the opposite direction trying to miss the same potholes, a road on which, where it is not paved, you crawl through mud holes so wide and deep that, if you stop, you risk being stuck forever.

I have to admit, however, that after seven or eight nights of sleeping on the ground and changing clothes and showering while tiptoeing on a cement block, it was always good to get back to the hotel in Port-au-Prince and to a hot shower and a rum punch, and even better to get back to my own home and bed and parish, where life has some semblance of routine and you know where things are and the electricity is dependable. Home offers familiarity and a sense of stability and security, which is why Frodo and Sam so frequently longed for the Shire on their journeys.

Many of you have seen the first episode of The Lord of the Rings, or have read the book. Frodo, you'll remember, carries a grave responsibility. The world is mired in a struggle between good and evil. The evil power of Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor, has been temporarily checked by the fact that he has lost his Ring, the Ring of Power with which he sought to rule the world. Years ago, the Elven-kings, Gil-galad and Elendil, overthrew Sauron, and they captured Sauron's Ring in battle. But Elendil was killed in the battle, and later his son Isildur, who had inherited the Ring from his father, was ambushed by Orcs, and when Isildur leapt into the River Anduin to escape the Orcs, the Ring slipped from his finger and was lost.

Evil Sauron survived and was still strong, but without his Ring of Power he was frustrated in his plan to rule the world, so he enlisted the Orcs and all the evil forces of the world to help him find it, so that he could resume his treacherous plan of domination.

On his journey to The Lonely Mountain, Frodo's cousin Bilbo finds the Ring, and Gandalf knows that the only way to keep the Evil Lord from ruling the world forever is to destroy the Ring. And the only way to destroy the Ring is to take it back to Mordor, to the land of wicked Sauron himself, and there to melt it right in the very home of the Evil One, in the only fire hot enough to destroy it.

Bilbo grows old, and Frodo inherits the Ring from him and assumes the responsibility for returning it to Mordor in the hope that the evil that overshadows the world might be defeated. Frodo and his fellowship -- four hobbits, two men, an elf, a dwarf, and a wizard -- undertake the dangerous journey. And at the end of the first episode, we find them sailing down the Great River, where they know they will soon come to a crossroad, to a place of decision. At the crossroad, each of them will have to decide whether to turn away from the dangerous path toward Mordor and take instead an easier trail west to Gondor in search of possible allies or to take the more difficult and dangerous road directly into the heart of the Enemy to try to destroy the Ring and the power of the Evil Lord.

At the crossroad, all of them, but especially Frodo, are tempted by the apparent ease and safety of the less difficult road. Two powers strive in Frodo. "Think of all the good we could do if we kept the Ring," Boromir the Tempter pleads. "You and I would use the Ring's power only for good."

But Frodo, who has himself worn the Ring and has personally experienced its pull toward evil, overcomes his fear, resists the temptation of the easier path, and chooses to stick with what has become his vocation and responsibility. He decides to go to Mordor, but to go alone rather than to put his friends to the test. But his faithful friend Sam will not abandon his master, and the first part of the journey ends with Frodo and Sam setting out with the Ring for the Land of Shadow and Evil, with their fate uncertain but with the assurance that it is the road they are called to take.

Moses, and later Jesus and his disciples, are at the same crossroad today. Tired of their wilderness journey with Moses, the people want to settle down, spiritually as well as physically. Those early pioneers of the Bible had set out from Egypt with the trail boss leading the way and urging them on. They were happy, at first, to be on the road, which is what the word "exodus" means. They were happy to leave their slavery behind, excited to be on the way to a promising future in a promising land. But life on the road was hard. When night came in the wilderness, it came suddenly and completely. Water and food were scarce. Some found their traveling companions insufferable, and they began to complain. "Life was a lot better back in Egypt," they said. "Even if we were slaves there, at least we had enough to eat and drink. What good is it to be free, if we're just going to die out here on the road?"

Even Moses the cook, when he went up the mountain to talk with the trail boss, complained to God. He was pleased, of course, when the trail boss gave him some assurances to take back to the people. But they were kind of "iffy" assurances. Moses couldn't even get the trail boss to tell him his name, and all he got for directions was that they were to follow the clouds by day and the fire by night. It was, really, just a promise, a promise that life lay ahead of them on the road, because only slavery and death lay behind.

So when the people finally reached the Promised Land, they heaved a sigh of relief and settled down. They were ready for a hot shower and a rum punch, glad to build some houses to live in, glad to have some settled rules to live by. Theirs became a tabernacled life and a tabernacled religion, a life and religion of place. It was reassuring to know that God would be in his courthouse when they needed him, at home in the ark. It was reassuring to know that when they sinned, a lamb or a goat could be sacrificed to atone.

In time, they even built God a permanent house, a magnificent Temple in Jerusalem, which became the place to worship, the place to find God. Life was finally free, they thought, of the uncertainties of the road. Life now was settled and dependable, they thought. The trail boss had become a mayor, they thought. God had settled down and now lived in his Temple, they thought. And the people presumed a new self-assurance about God and his relationship with them, and about their relationship to God, a presumed self-assurance that St. Paul would describe to those later people of the road in Philippi: "I had it all," he said. "I was settled. I had been circumcised on the eighth day, an Israelite by race, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born and bred. In my practice of the law I was a pharisee, and by the law's standard of righteousness, I was without fault. My relationship to God was complete, and my knowledge of God secure."

It was a similar self-assurance, a similar certainty, that Peter and James and John carried to their own crossroad on the Mount of Transfiguration. It was a self-assurance they wanted to capture and keep forever. "Lord, we've been on the road for years now. Can't we settle down here? This is good!" Peter said. "We've seen the glory of God shine in you, Lord, the way it once shown through Moses, and we know now that you are the Son of God. Let's stay here. We'll build you a place to live, a tabernacle. And we'll build one for Moses and Elijah, too, shelters for you to live in, a place for all of you to be at home and enjoy your splendor and use your power. Why, up here there are lots of stones to turn into bread, so we'd have plenty to eat. And from this mountain, you can see and rule all the kingdoms of the world!"

"Surely this is better than all the roaming from town to town we've been doing," Peter adds, "and it's certainly better than the suffering and death you've been talking about recently down on the road. You don't have to go to the Mountain of Doom, Jesus. We don't need to go down to Jerusalem to face all the dangers and troubles and evil of the world. We know now that you really are the Son of God, so let's just stop here and settle down."

But before long the cloud and the splendor that had enveloped Jesus evaporated. It moved on, as clouds do, and they saw only Jesus, and he was packing for his trip back down the mountain. And he spoke of his exodus, of his need to go to Jerusalem, his need to follow his vocation and to defeat the Evil One, to destroy him in his own territory, right in his own home town. He spoke of the road that had to be taken, the road to the Cross and to his death. Like the pillar of cloud in the wilderness, the cloud of the Mount of Transfiguration moved on, and it led Jesus and his disciples back onto the road through the wilderness, the only road to resurrection and life.

The transfiguration, as I see it, is the Bible's way of confirming the Exodus as the central story of life, the Bible's way of saying that God is, finally, a God of the road, a trail boss, not a mayor, and that Jesus is a scout, not a sheriff, because life is an adventure, an active experience of walking a road, a road from birth to death and beyond.

The gift the disciples received at the Mount of Transfiguration was not the gift of certainty. The gift they received was not spiritual insurance, but the gift of hope, the hope that if they followed Jesus back down the mountain onto the road of the wilderness of everyday life, with all its bumps and bruises, they would surely reach the land of life and promise, just as the people of Moses' day had reached the Promised Land when they followed the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night through their wilderness. It was not the assurance that God was always at home in the Temple, but the promise that he would always be with them wherever they went, even if, especially if, they walked the way of the Cross with him.

A Samaritan woman once asked Jesus where God was to be found. "Sir," she said, "our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews say that the place where God must be worshipped is in Jerusalem." And Jesus replied, "Believe me, the time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. The time is coming, indeed it is already here, when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth."

This became Paul's assurance, too: "I once had it all," he said. "I was settled in. I had been circumcised on the eighth day, an Israelite by race, a Hebrew born and bred, by the law's standard of righteousness without fault. I knew who God was and where he was to be found. But all such assets and assurances I have written off because of Christ. I forfeit it all as so much rubbish for the sake of gaining Christ, with no righteousness of my own based on the law and nothing but the righteousness which comes from faith in Christ. My one desire is to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and to share his sufferings in growing conformity with his death. My one desire is to walk the road of life with Christ in hope of somehow attaining the resurrection from the dead. So forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."

This is the hope of the road, the hope of life. It is the hope of the road of Lent, the road through the wilderness of the Cross and death to resurrection.

For we know, finally, that all settlement fails us. Whatever the virtues and apparent certainties of the settled life, they ultimately provide no assurance, no security. The Golden Rings of the world, the Rings of Wealth, the Rings of Power, even the Rings of Religion, all of them fail in the end. For when God calls us, as he certainly does, it is a call back to the road and the wilderness, to the Mount of Transfiguration and to its crossroad that leads back down to Jerusalem, to the way of Lent and Calvary, to Gethsemane and the Cross, where good and evil, death and life, intersect.

We can try to avoid it for a while. We build our houses, our temples, and our armies. And, for a while, we move our pawns of wealth and power. But, in the end, we will have to hit the road again and move on. For there is one crossroad we cannot avoid. And when death calls us, as it certainly will, it is a call back to the road, where we must walk the wilderness again and where the only assurance is the assurance of faith, the trust and hope that the God of the road who walked it before us will see us through.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.