"Another Road"
A Sermon Preached by The
Rev. Thomas C. Leinbach
January 6, 2008 - Harwich, Massachusetts

Preaching Text: "And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road." (Matthew 2:12)

In pondering this morning's passage from Matthew, Søren Kierkegaard, the 19th century Danish theologian, wrote this:

"Although the scribes could explain where the Messiah should be born, they remained quite unperturbed in Jerusalem. They did not accompany the Wise Men to seek [Jesus]. Similarly, we may know the whole of Christianity, yet make no movement.

"What a difference! The three kings had only a rumor to go by. But it moved them to make that long journey. The scribes were much better informed, much better versed. They sat and studied the Scriptures like so many dons, but it did not make them move. Who had more truth? The three kings who followed a rumor, or the scribes who remained sitting with all their knowledge…?"

That's a pretty good question, don't you think? Particularly for us pastors. After all, we're the ones who go to seminary to gain knowledge about the faith. It's we who sit around studying. We're also the ones called upon to speak authoritatively about the faith, just like the scribes.

I had a professor in seminary whose specialty was Kierkegaard. And he always used to talk about the distinction between speaking about Christianity versus speaking of Christianity.

What's the difference?

He used to give this example. Take a sugar cube. You can study it, measure it, figure out its chemical properties. You can learn everything about it. But the only way you'll ever truly know what it is of is to put it in your mouth and taste it. In that way, you experience directly its true essence and purpose.

Christianity is the same way. You can study it, analyze it, look it over every-which-way, upside-and-down, and still miss its character, its essence, its purpose. The only way to understand Christianity properly is to live it.

Now as I've said many times, Christianity is not primarily, at its core, a field of study, a philosophy or even set of moral proscriptions. Rather, it is primarily about our relationship with God, a relationship initiated by God in Christ.

In the same way we can know somebody from afar and still not truly know them, God can be known superficially as well. Unless we actively are engaged in an ongoing, minute-to-minute relationship with God, we will never really know God. Nor will we ever know the real power of God's love, which Christianity assumes to be the essence of everything.

The scribes knew all kinds of things about God, yet they missed the main thing: the vital, intuitive, ongoing relationship with God, the same God, it must be said, who seeks, in every single moment - even now - to act palpably in our day-to-day lives.

Except that most of the time, we aren't paying much attention.

Paying attention. Listening. Watching. I think this is what the scribes forgot to do. And what we forget to do. I don't think the scribes were so much ungodly as they were caught up in what they were doing, so much so that they allowed their preoccupations to crowd out everything else going on within them and around them.

Just the way we do. We too get so caught up in our doing that we simply forget to pay attention to our lives. As such, we miss so much of what God seeks to do in our lives.

One of the occupational hazards of being a pastor is 'talking the talk' and not always 'walking the walk.' All throughout Advent, I was telling people to take time to be with God during their busy preparations for Christmas. Only I found it hard to take my own advice. By the time Christmas Eve came around, I was exhausted, physically as well as spiritually. Nevertheless, I still was being called upon to speak and act in a spiritual way, as is required during that most holy time.

But the fact is, you can get so caught up in the mechanics of daily life that you end up spinning your wheels. It was only as I began to relax on Christmas Day and the days following that it hit me…the awareness that I was talking about God more than I actually was experiencing God!

It's so easy to get preoccupied with our lives, even the good things we do, that we miss the more important, even essential things. The scribes worked diligently on the things pertaining to God. But in their obsessive preoccupations they actually stopped looking or listening for and to God - so much so that they missed it when God made known the magical and wonderful thing about to happen in Bethlehem, which, it must be said, the three kings grasped without the advantage of knowledge, prophecy or tradition.

Years ago, in my early twenties, I walked to the top of Overlook Mountain just outside of Woodstock, NY, where one of my brothers was living at the time. It was winter and the mountain was covered with snow. After the long trek up to the top, huffing and puffing all the way, I finally stood high above the horizon. Stretching out far below me was the Hudson River Valley with its mighty river running through it. The expanse was exhilarating.

But what I remember most about it was its silence. There was no sound at all. None. It was only years later did I experience this again on Lake Siljan, in the remote woods of central Sweden.

Back in college, some friends and I visited yet another friend in rural Kansas. It was night and we drove out onto a dirt road that wound through the red clay, up and down the gentle sweeping slopes of the American prairie, past creeks and wooded groves and then onto treeless heights. We stopped eventually at one of these higher places and got out of the car.

It was springtime and the subtle beauty of the prairie took me by surprise. It was so different from New England, with wide-open skies illumined by large, bright stars, stars so much brighter than anything I'd ever seen.

Yet what struck me most was that, as we stood there in the soft nighttime breeze, not a single man-made light could be seen anywhere! For 360º, as far as the eye could see, there were simply no lights, not on the horizon, not on the ground! There was nothing. I could imagine life as it might have been centuries ago, before the so very commonplace distortions of the electric light.

In all these moments, on Overlook Mountain, on Lake Siljan and on a hill outside Great Bend, Kansas, I had that almost eerie experience of life without distractions. And without the distractions, one suddenly becomes aware of oneself in a different way. It's probably not all that dissimilar to those moments of extended quiet prayer, when the busy-ness of our inner selves is stilled, if but for a moment, in order that we might attend to the still, small voice of God. These occasions were perhaps just as unsettling - and as revelatory.

Kierkegaard once said something else I've never forgotten. He said that God calls us to "repent back into history." Which seems, on the face of it, a fairly odd statement. What he meant, I think, is that it's so very easy to get distracted in this life, even by things otherwise good. It's easy to get caught up in our doing, to the point where we forget about our deepest self; where we forget about God; where we end up, in effect, somewhere outside of ourselves, as if orbiting out in space.

When we repent of this, a word that means to "change our minds," when we stop our orbiting, if you will, we descend back in time into ourselves, and we remember once again who we really are. Suddenly we see things we've been missing and hear things we've shut out of awareness. When we stop, look and listen, we see and hear things we've been oblivious to, not the least of which is God.

Only then, in connecting with our true inner selves, do we realize our desperate need of God, as well as our desperate of others. Only then do we begin to sense God in the midst of everything.

Minus that, we spend our time mostly spinning our wheels, running in place, pushed and pulled by outward distractions and obsessions, unable to be truly present with ourselves or others, removed at a distance from life's most important things, stress being the natural outcome.

But with the calming spirit of Jesus Christ, we re-discover the sacred center of our lives, which allows us, among other things, to handle outward stresses with greater clarity and calm. Such heightened awareness ushers forth greater competence as well.

Without all the anxieties that push and pull us out beyond ourselves, we pay closer attention to what is going on within us and around us. In repenting back into our selves, we not only become more aware of what it is that's preventing us from living life more fully, but we allow ourselves the opportunity to be present with that One who alone has the power to heal us and make us whole.

My New Year's resolution this year is to take more time to be present to myself, to others and, most importantly, to God in Christ.

Having traveled to the manger and celebrated God's gift to us in Christ, of life abundant, I plan to return from the manger down another road, a different road, as did the Wise Men years ago, a road that takes us away from busy distraction and self-preoccupation that otherwise produces only estrangement and confusion. I choose instead to travel down that other road that leads directly towards the sacred center, to the gracious heart of God.

Amen.