Care-full on the Scenic Route

“Care-full on the Scenic Route”

Psalm 111            Ephesians 5:15-20         John 6:51-58

Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, August 15, 2021

First Presbyterian Church, Sandpoint, Idaho

Andy Kennaly, Pastor

          I sat down to write my sermon the other day and my computer had a big software update going on the background that made it excruciatingly slow.  I gave up on the computer and went to sit in my other chair.  I read through the scriptures that we just shared, and then sat in silence.  After a time of Centering Prayer, I pulled out my writer’s pad, opened to a blank piece of paper, grabbed my pen, and started writing.  This is what came from that as scripture mingled with my life and past, present, and future came together in healing and hope.  I’d like to share what I wrote as a way to share the lessons of this morning’s texts in a way that’s not necessarily cognitive.  I’ll share of experience rather than facts and data and theological doctrines.  Speaking from my heart to yours, this is called, Care-full on the Scenic Route.

Care-full on the Scenic Route                             August 12, 2021

When I drove into town, I took the scenic route.  In Minnesota, we lived at a church camp 20 miles out of town, east of Brainerd, in the central part of the state.  A gently rolling but largely flat landscape dotted with lakes and slow, meandering streams is checker-boarded with patches of forest, farm plots, and pastures.  Vacation homes nestle along shorelines, mixed in with a few families that stay year-round, envied by the weekend warriors who drive up from the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul for their escape to “cabin country” in a line of traffic heading north on Friday and south on Sunday.

The view is not very expansive in that area and line of sight only goes as far as the shore across the lake, the woods framing the field, or the next bend just ahead on the road.  I took a scenic route, came to a corn field, just a few acres in a square plot encompassed by forest.  The corn was cut, and the rusty-brown soil looked tired under broken stalks.  The low clouds and cool day declared summer was over and fall well underway with winter looming as days got shorter.

It was a dirt road with no other cars around, so I stopped.  My gaze across the field was stunted in a terrestrial way, limited by the edges of the field.  I couldn’t see beyond the spent plot in front of me.  “As far as the eye can see” didn’t mean much in the middle of my flat commute.  I looked up, but the clouds created a low ceiling.  Now I knew what people meant when they say they have claustrophobia, the fear of confined spaces.

But it was more than that.  It was existential angst, an anxiety I felt, an inner wrestling with finitude, limits, and a sense of smallness.  In my mind, I pictured the stars, the vast sky reaching into the solar system, galaxy, and beyond.  I envisioned the entire Earth, a sphere with texture and connection and movement.  Usually, these types of thoughts were helpful, expansive as they broadened perspective and reminded me of how blessed I am to be part of a greater wholeness.  But not that day.  Instead, a wave of isolation slammed into me like a breaker on the beach knocking me off my feet, to smother, choke, and drown.  I felt marooned, like a pin-point on a map, stuck in a vastness that doesn’t notice its overwhelming, nor does it care.  The roof of the car started feeling lower, like I was closed up in a tin can, put on a dark shelf and forgotten when the pantry door closed.

I was no longer young, but not old either.  My kids weren’t small anymore, but not grown up yet.  The western vistas and mountain ranges were out of touch, blocked by the Great Plains that took days to cross by land, but the east coast was just as far.  I was near the beginning of the Mississippi River, but a long way from its mighty end.  I was stuck; and felt small and limited.  After a while, I started to drive on that unfamiliar backroad, not really knowing where I was going.

Maybe some people would call that a mid-life crisis.  Big questions, like “What am I really doing with my life?” or “How did I get here, anyway?” or more honestly, “What the hell am I going to do now?”  Those questions seem to fit raw moments like that.  Experiencing smallness, limitations, powerlessness, and isolation wafting the decay of loneliness is very humbling.

Humility seems like a healthier version of flat-out depression, but maybe I had both, a strange mix of despairing futility and hope.  This hope trusts, even when what is trusted can’t be identified or defined.  Humility claims the smallness but holds on to one’s place in the vastness.  Depression forgets about the vastness, like crawling deeper and deeper into a cave.  Humility holds onto a light, while depression wonders if that light will ever be seen again and doubts it will be recognized if it does come back.  I had both on the edge of a field in Minnesota, but my seatbelt was on, so I kept driving.

I went into town, drove over the bridge straddling that river, did my shopping, then took a different way home.  The highways have numbers, the county roads, letters.  The grid pattern of properties marks north, south, east, and west, complicated by meandering roads linking one lake after another in curvy chains of post-glaciation meltwater.  Ancient moraines and scarred striations from ice flows long gone are disguised by stream beds and wooded hillsides as the Earth takes a warm breath between eras.

I had an epoch drive, added my carbon footprint to time’s flow as something within me called Life kept going in a relentless effort of expression.  Eternity intersected with the particular as I drove to everywhere and stopped at now-here.  My false self was lost in multiple ways.  Limited perspectives, clinging to only the familiar, feeling separate.  But also exposed like the gig was up as True Self emerged to say, “Hello.”  My life shifted, as imperceptibly as the continent I was in the middle of, but with as much consequence as magma flowing out new life that cannot be stopped or rerouted.  The Spirit, at work in my soul, ushered forth in a new way.

Living bread came down from heaven.  This is the life of the world.  Flesh and blood abiding in Divine Life, this is true food, true drink.  Inter-abiding; the Christ, the Spirit, the Father, the life of the world given not to fix a fall but to reveal full-fillment.

From the edge of a tired field, the maps I’d used to get me to that point in life wouldn’t work anymore.  Venturing into uncharted territory, I was called to take another step deeper into Wisdom.  Eternity invited me to make the most of time, and rather than divide or measure, to unite and overflow as matter and Spirit merge and the Great “I am” is re-membered through my life hidden in God through Christ.

My whole heart gives thanks to God for helping me through that day.  I have been fortunate to learn wisdom ways of knowing, to invite mindfulness that is not boxed in by limitations of traditional teachings or doctrines that only go so far.  Humility continues in epoch ways and in my better moments I stand under God’s will, held in Mercy that majestically transforms fallowed fields into trustworthy plantings of faithfulness, kernels of wisdom grounded in God’s goodness and love.

Thanks be to God for Wisdom that helps us see through the world, from the edge of our field, as the view opens from within.