Anyone who has travelled at
all has learned a few things. Many husbands have learned that when your wife
says that she’s hungry, it's time to stop for lunch. Many wives have learned that when
the sign says “Last rest area for 100 miles,” it’s wise to stop at the
restroom. And certainly both of them have learned that the route they choose is
very important to what their experience will be on the trip.
If you want to get somewhere
in a hurry, you might choose to take the freeway. It’s the fastest route, but
it’s also the most boring. If you see attractions along the road at all, you
fly by them at 65 or 70 miles per hour and glimpse them in your rear-view mirror. It’s an efficient way to travel, but
not terribly enriching.
Old major routes like the
Dixie Highway or Rt. 40 are slower but lots more interesting. As you travel
these roads, you might find a wonderful little ice cream parlor with vintage art
deco trim; or a great mom and pop diner that serves homemade peanut butter pie!
You’ll find everything that you need along the way of an old route – food, gas,
and rest stops – but the pace will be slower, and the sights will be more
accessible.
And then there are the back
roads, the ones that don’t even have a route number. Back roads are the roads
that lead you to completely unexpected experiences! You might travel for miles
without ever seeing more than tiny clusters of homes that the world seems to
have passed by. You might run across a rustic country store, or a old barn that
an artist has turned into a studio for stained glass. You might even end up on a
rutted dirt cow path when the road’s blacktop ends, and you have to turn around
and retrace your route! You just never know what you’re going to find when you
risk taking a back road.
When the wise men travelled
to find the newborn king of the Jews, I imagine that they were very careful to
take the best route. They probably took the Ancient Middle Eastern equivalent
of I-70 all the way from Persia to Jerusalem. It was fast, and there were
plenty of places to rest their camels and to buy food. When they got to
Jerusalem, they took the exit marked “Herod’s Palace,” and they pulled into his
parking lot to get directions. Herod sent them to Bethlehem along a main road;
but once they got there, those wise men had to risk the back roads. After all,
they didn’t really know where they
were going! All they knew was that somewhere in Bethlehem was a newborn king;
and they were determined to find him.
And they found him, all
right. And he was as unexpected as the surprises that seem to be part and
parcel of back roads. They didn’t find that newborn king in a palace, or even
in the mayor’s house; they found him in a barn. Those wise men came face to
face with the fact that this baby king didn’t look like any other baby king
that they had ever seen! His parents weren’t wealthy nobles; they were
peasants. But there was something about this child… When they offered him their
gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, he looked into their eyes with a wisdom
that babies don’t usually possess. What was
it about this child? When they were in his presence, they were unsettled and
comforted, all at the same time!
When they left the manger,
the wise men didn’t go back to Persia the same way that they got there. Matthew
tells us that they returned home “by another way,” because they had been warned
in a dream not to go back to Herod. Maybe they were warned by the same angel
who had come to Joseph so many months earlier and reassured him about his upcoming
marriage to Mary. At any rate, when they went back to Persia, they took the
bypass – the outer belt all the way around Jerusalem. When they left the
manger, they went by another way.
In this story, when Matthew
says “by another way,” he means exactly that. The wise men used a different
route out of Judea when they left the country. But it seems to me that “by
another way” also has another meaning, a deeper one. A former pastor of mine is
fond of saying, “No one who visits the manger returns home by the same way that
he got there.” Unlike Matthew, he isn’t talking about physical roads, but about
the spiritual changes that happen in our lives after we meet the Christ child.
How did you first get
to the manger? People get there by many routes. The lifelong church members
have always been at them manger. Their parents first brought them there. Others
got there through a revival meeting, a Billy Graham crusade, or a preacher on
TV. They realized one day that they weren’t
at the manger, and they got off the couch and got in the car and drove down to
the barn. Still others were invited by a friend who was concerned for their
well-being. But the route we took to get here doesn’t really matter. What matters
is the route we take when we leave.
Nowadays many of us use GPS
systems to decide what route we will use. They’re those gadgets that you can
put on your dashboard or that come in your smart phone. A GPS system calculates
the best route to take when you’re going somewhere. You just punch in the place
you want to go and the GPS tells you, step by step, how to get there. But the
problem with GPS systems is that they are centered on us. They take us the way that we
want to go. If we’re in a hurry, they direct us to freeways. If we want to see
the sights, they direct us to side roads. Some can even direct us around
traffic jams! But when we leave the manger, we should be relying on God instead
of on our GPS system. God will direct us to routes that we would never have taken if the choice were up
to us. Sometimes God takes us on the freeway; but more often, he directs us to
those back roads that surprise us with things that we never expected to find.
For example, God might route
us through a neighborhood where thin, ragged children play in the streets in
front of run-down homes with broken windows and parking lots filled with broken
glass. “Here are your brothers and sisters,” we can hear God whisper. “Now,
what are you going to do about it?” Or we might find ourselves on a road that
runs past a nursing home full of lonely residents. “Can’t we spare an extra
half hour?” God asks from the back seat. “I’ll bet that someone in there would
appreciate a visit.” And sometimes, right in the middle of all our busyness and
efficiency and productivity, God sends us up a dead-end street. There’s no
place to go – no more road! Maybe those are the times that God wants us to just
stop for a while and rest and think about where we’re going in our life. We’d
never take that time on our own.
Now, the roads that God sends
us on as we leave the manger can be a little scary. After all, we don’t know
where we are going; and we aren’t sure where we are going to find what we need.
Unlike the freeways that we choose ourselves, God’s back roads don’t have any
rest areas. But God takes care of that, too. As we leave the manger to go back
to our daily lives, God feeds us, just like he fed the Israelites in the
wilderness during the exodus. Only instead of feeding us with manna, he feeds
us with himself. The sacrament of Holy Communion that we share this morning isn’t
just a remembrance of betrayal and suffering that happened two thousand years
ago. Of course, it is that – but it
is also a reminder of the nourishment that God offers us every single day,
regardless of the road that we are taking. This table is a reminder that the
living presence of Jesus Christ is always available to give us what we need
most: acceptance, forgiveness, guidance, insight, and courage.
I don’t know what road you
are on this morning. I don’t know whether it is an easy road or one that is
difficult. I don’t know whether it is filled with joy or laden with sorrow. And
I don’t know how long you’ve been traveling on it – a few days, a few years, or
your entire life. But whatever road you are travelling, I invite you here, to
the table of the Lord, to be fed with the Bread of Life and to be refreshed
with living water. As we travel along roads that the world doesn’t even know,
this isn’t just a rest area or a way station. This is our home.
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