Making It Up

Making It Up

Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Luke 4:1-13

March 10, 2019

I have a good friend and colleague who begins each day with a slow reading of the daily lectionary’s psalm of the day. He’s been reading the psalms daily for years now. Sometimes he recasts them in his own words and posts them online.

Recently in his reading he’s come to wonder if Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, was simply riffing on the psalms. In particular, he noted the similarity in the wording of Psalm 37 – which says, among many other things, “the meek shall inherit the land” – and then said, with a smile, “I’m pretty sure nothing Jesus said was original.”

I’m not sure my friend is wrong. Further, I’m pretty sure that “being original” is vastly overrated anyway. Being authentic, for example, seems more important, as does being honest, and being kind trumps them all.

On the other hand, as Spanish poet Antonio Machado said, “the path is made by walking.” That is to say, we make the way by walking it. We’re all just making it up as we go along.

To be human, in fact, is to be making it up as we go. There is no script for life, just its beginning and its ending. In between, we make it up as we go.

We are all, in some sense, descended from wanderers, and we come before God saying “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor.” Abraham was making it up as he went along.

Like father Abraham, Jesus was a wanderer, and, as happens to such folks, he found himself alone in the wilderness. He found himself alone in the wilderness because he was, like each of us, human.

We all wander, and we all find ourselves sometimes alone in a wilderness that we cannot comprehend searching for a path only to find that the only path is the one we make by walking.

That’s all metaphorical and poetic, so what does it look like in real life? Have you ever found yourself in a job that was crushing your soul? Have you been in a relationship that was manipulative and destructive? Have you been in a class and felt completely lost and confused? Have you struggled with an addiction or with another disease that left you feeling like you had no control over the next step? Have you ever just plain been lost – literally, lost and did not know what direction your next step should be?

Most of us have been in one or more of these or countless other such situations where we felt lost and alone and did not know with any clarity what we should do next. That is all part of being human.

And this shared aspect of our humanity suggests three things to me that, I believe, are important for us as church and, in particular, important if church is to be generative, creative, and moving toward something authentic, honest, and kind in the world – and, perhaps, something, if not new, then re-newed and renewing. So, three things:

First, as noted, we walk – or meander, or wander – our own path through our own wilderness. We do this as individuals endowed by our Creator with the freedom to choose the next step or, at the very least, to choose how we shall approach the next step. That is to say, sometimes, there is no next step. Sometimes the test results tell us that we have arrived at the end of the journey, yet even there we get to choose how we shall face that ending, and, ultimately, that choice is ours alone to make. We do make the path with our own steps.

But, secondly, if we can so quickly and easily recognize so many of the various human experiences of wandering in the wilderness then we ought also to recognize that we have sojourners – fellow travelers on this journey of life. We do make the path with our own steps, but we do not walk alone. Our paths cross those of many others, and we have so much to gain from those crossings – inspiration, education, companionship, community, love, and patterns and practices that sustain life.

Which suggests, thirdly, the fundamental necessity of this enterprise we call church. The church, as an institution in the world, is completely unnecessary, but the church as a gathering of hearts and minds and souls bent on reflecting the love of God back into and along each and every path trod by human beings – well, that is foundational and essential.

It is foundational and essential in order that the practices that sustain life are practices that sustain all life – that is to say, the gathering of hearts and minds and souls bent on reflecting the love of God back into the world is necessary in order that the patterns and practices of life that people create in community are just, for love is the foundation of justice.

The temptation that Jesus faced – and that each of us faces along our own paths – is to believe that we can go it alone, to believe, in essence, that the path that I make by walking it is the only path that matters.

“You’re hungry,” the tempter says to Jesus. “You’ve been out here alone for a long time. If you’re such hot stuff, turn this stone into bread and feed yourself.”

But one does not live on bread. Alone. And, alone, you cannot make bread. It takes wheat and salt and water. No matter where you have trod, no matter what path your feet have carved out, you cannot create the stuff of bread alone.

To begin with, you can’t create water. Oh, and to the rocket scientists among you, you have to first create your own oxygen and hydrogen out of thin … well, not air. We simply do not exist alone, and though we all will experience loneliness along our paths, there are always others on other paths nearby.

And, where paths cross and pilgrims gather, they create community. Inevitably, across all cultures, they make some basic form of bread. Together.

The other temptations are similar: they are about power and control and, as such, they mock the God of sovereign love. “I will give you all the power,” the tempter says to Jesus. “You, alone, will control your destiny and the destiny of the nations, and they will worship you. Alone.”

But you shall worship only God – the God who said, in the beginning, way back in the second chapter of Genesis, back at the beginning of being generative, that God who said, “it is not good for the human to be alone; let’s make more.”

God was making it up; God is still making it up. God is not finished with the making, and God invites us to join in the making. A world defined by love and justice, by beauty and compassion, by kindness and by peace remains to be made. Let’s make it up together. Amen.