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| On the Road Again For many pastors and people, the summer months are a time for travel. I’ve done a fair amount of traveling in the past year, thanks to a convergence of opportunities: the Netherlands, China, Western China twice (once to visit some churches of the Lisu people), Hong Kong, Taiwan, Israel and Vietnam. My wife also visited the Republic of Texas. As I travel, I’m always thinking of you, dear Homiletics readers, for whom I’ve been your editor going on 12 years now. I look for homiletical approaches, applications and metaphors, and write about stuff from Banyan trees to the Palm Sunday services at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Hanoi. Of course, I’m not alone. You may be reading this on the road yourself. Americans love to travel. In 2008, more than 42 million of us took to the skies for leisure purposes. In a given year, the travel industry generates $246 billion in spending and 2.3 million American jobs — and that’s just business travel. All this traveling has led me to think about the concept of journey. As Americans, the travel motif is hard-wired into our national psyche. Our country was birthed by forefathers and foremothers who traveled across the Pond for one reason or another. We’re often called a nation of immigrants. We traveled to get here, and we’ve generally opened our arms to the weary and tired travelers who seek to get to our shore. We’re fond of thinking that, as Christians, we’re on a journey. This arises naturally out of Scripture itself, which is full of journeys taken by both the righteous and the unrighteous: Adam’s journey from paradise to problems, Abraham’s peregrinations from home to a destination unknown, the Israelites’ journey from Egypt to wilderness to the promised land, Paul’s missionary journeys, and, in this year’s Cycle C of the Revised Common Lectionary, we’re reading Luke’s travel narratives, following Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem. Also in Luke, the parable of the Prodigal Son describes a journey into depravity and back to wholeness and redemption. The journey motif is abundantly illustrated in literature. Dissertations have been written on the subject. As Homer’s The Odyssey opens, Odysseus is in prison, longing to return home. He sets out to return but is distracted by his desire to again be king of Ithaca and loses sight of his destination. In John Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian struggles through various pitfalls and temptations en route to his eternal home. Or think of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Finn takes off on a raft down the Mississippi and takes up with Jim, a black boy. They drift down the river on what becomes not only a journey of self-discovery but an excursion into a world of corruption, moral decay and intellectual impoverishment. Consider Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road — which became the sacred writing for first a beatnik generation and then a generation of boomers. For them, the car and motorcycle became a means of exploration, protest and rebellion. Thus the “road films” of the late ’60s and ’70s, in which the road becomes a symbol for the trajectory of life. Life brings unending and surprising opportunities while the hero-traveler becomes enlightened, learning something about the world, the nature of humankind or God, or the nature of good and evil. What really stimulated me to write this column, however, was an experience I had in Southwestern China en route to Hanoi. Some colleagues and I had just visited the Lisu people of Yunnan province, many of whom are Christians. We visited their churches, their homes, a training center and a Bible college in Baoshan. We spent most of the time in Fugong, a small town about a seven-hour bus ride up the Nu River. (It used to be known as the Salween River when missionaries Isobel Kuhn and James Fraser were active there about 80 years ago.) I was alone and had a day to kill in Kunming before catching a flight to Hanoi. Suddenly I was inexplicably tired, weary and depressed. I wanted to cancel my flight. I just wanted to go home. My wife was in the States attending a wedding. I missed her. I was lonely. I was tired of traveling. But here I was at the airport, waiting to catch a plane I didn’t want to take. I tried whistling Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” but that didn’t help. As I was moping, a couple of young chaps in cargo pants and dirty sweaters plopped themselves and their packs beside me. They started to chat. They were on their way to Katmandu and had been traveling for a couple of months. One guy was from Finland, the other from the UK. They had just met a couple of weeks earlier and decided to travel together for a while. We talked about our adventures — the highs and the lows — and had some good laughs. After about 45 minutes of conversation, it was time for me to check in, so I bade farewell. As I left, I realized how much better I felt. I realized then the importance of conversation and community when one is on a journey. It’s very difficult to travel alone and so helpful when you have someone with whom to share the experience, to support you emotionally and to connect with your own spirit and soul along the way. Likewise, it isn’t easy, nigh impossible, to be a Christian in isolation. The journey is so rigorous and so long; companions, community and conversation are critical. I’ve noticed that Christians who live as ex-pats in a foreign country are ardent churchgoers. They’ll find a church or group of Christians and faithfully attend worship. They have a stronger sense of what it means to be a sojourner in a strange land, which is how the writer of Hebrews describes people of faith. Conversation is important on the journey. But the destination is also important. It’s almost trite to observe that the journey is as important as the destination. We’re advised not to become so focused on destination as not to enjoy the journey. It’s good advice, but I wonder whether we don’t sometimes lose sight of the destination. Enjoy the journey, but if you have the wrong destination, one’s joy quickly turns to ashes. Someone once said, “If you board the wrong train, it’s no use running along the corridor in the other direction.” This seems to describe a lot of people these days: running fast up the corridor of a train headed the wrong way. I’m not sure the question of whether he was enjoying the journey occurred to Jesus, or to the apostle Paul, or to Mother Teresa or to Martin Luther King Jr. For these people, the outcome, the destination, the goal was crucial. Paul put it this way: “Not that I … have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own … this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:12-14). My prayer for you is that you might have conversation and community on your journey, and that you may be certain of your destination — and arrive safely. Amen.
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