A Fourth Church Sermon by John Wilkinson

October 8, 2000 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Children of the Pioneer

John Wilkinson
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Hebrews 2:5–18

“It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through their sufferings.”

Hebrews 2:10 (NRSV)

Without becoming too touchy-feely for our sense of what it means to be Presbyterian, I would invite you to imagine, to conjure up in your mind, an image of wilderness. Go ahead. Imagine.

Perhaps it is something like Willa Cather’s portrait from O Pioneers!

Winter has settled down over the Divide again; the season in which Nature recuperates. . . . The birds have gone. The teeming life that goes on down in the long grass is exterminated. The prairie-dog keeps his hole. The rabbits run shivering from one frozen garden-patch to another. . . . At night the coyotes roam the wintry waste, howling for food. The variegated fields are all one color now; the pastures, the stubble, the roads, the sky are the same leaden gray. The hedgerows and trees are scarcely perceptible against the bare earth, whose slaty hue they have taken on. (p. 119)

Or perhaps your wilderness is something closer to T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”:

Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road /
The road winding above among the mountains / Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink / Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand / If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit / Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains / But dry sterile thunder without rain . . .

Or perhaps your wilderness is something like that of C. S. Lewis:

I had always wanted, above all things, not to be “interfered with.” I had wanted “to call my soul my own.” I had been far more anxious to avoid suffering than to achieve delight. I had always aimed at limited liabilities. Even my recent attempt to live my philosophy had secretly been hedged round by all sorts of reservations. I had pretty well known that my ideal of virtue would never be allowed to lead me into anything intolerably painful. I would be reasonable. (From Surprised by Joy)

Growing up, I was schooled on the notion of wilderness—pioneers in covered wagons journeying across the prairie; explorers venturing down rivers armed to the teeth, poised for attack, blazing trails through mountains and across prairies. Someone asked me this week about this morning’s sermon, and I mentioned the word pioneer, and that very same image was conjured in their mind.

Here is one more image: “He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts” (Mark 1:13).

The wilderness might be physical: a matter of navigating new territory, new terrain, new landscape. More than likely, however, the wildernesses into which we journey now, in this technologically advanced brave new world, are more nuanced, more subtle, threatening in different ways. Emotional or relational or spiritual. A sea change in life’s circumstances. A relationship falling apart. The deepening reliance on some thing, some substance, some pattern, that provides temporary and minor navigational clarity but that ultimately impedes the invitation to live the life fully intended for us. Perhaps your wilderness reflects a health concern, a vocational crisis. You know what it is for you. I know what it is for me. Together, we know what they are for each other, and for the world.

The story we share is about just this, from its very beginning. A people wandering, journeying, leaving home in order to find true home. At times, that true home is a place, but that place is never separated from a deeper sense of home, of being and belonging, of meaning, of welcome.

The ancient Israelites longed for a place, a land, but they also carried home with them, in the form of the covenant, a symbol of relationship that preceded place. And in the coming of Jesus, that relationship took on human form, that wilderness wandering became flesh and blood and wandered with us and to us and always for us, always for us. “Jesus walked the lonesome valley,” we would sing in the Lenten season, and he did, but he did it for us, and for the world he loved.

And so when the book of Hebrews speaks of Jesus as pioneer, we are startled by the imagery, for a moment, and then we are embraced by it. The book of Hebrews is a particular biblical form: it doesn’t so much tell a story or address itself to a known community. It makes a case. The case is straightforward and simple, though never easy or simplistic. God has spoken to humanity through Jesus, whom we would say in the classic theological formula is fully human and fully God. Fully human and fully God. Fully God and fully us.

And we cling to both. We cling to both because by so doing we know that we will have a partner, a fellow traveler, as we journey through the wilderness and we will know that the journey will have meaning and purpose. And we will know that the wilderness is not our destination.

And so when the book of Hebrews speaks of Jesus as pioneer, we are startled by the imagery, we are embraced by it, and then we are given hope. God has spoken through this incarnate word, this Jesus, this man, whose birth was real, whose life was real, whose pleasure was real, whose pain was real, whose death was real. And his entrance into the realness of it all allows our journey through it to be more real, more authentic, and always more hopeful.

The premise is straightforward and clear: Jesus has walked the walk, as they say. He has traveled that lonesome valley; he has been a pioneer in the wilderness. And because he faced suffering and death and emerged on the resurrection side of the journey, we, too, might face that journey with hope, with hope that we are not defined by suffering, by wilderness, but rather by the relationship that leads us through and beyond into something new and transformed.

In his very helpful commentary on Hebrews, Thomas Long considers this word pioneer. It occurs only twice in the New Testament, both in the book of Hebrews, both in reference to Jesus. Long writes that the Greek word is a multifaceted one: it can mean hero or champion or guide or scout. It has almost a military quality about it: Jesus as the one who breaks us out of our captivity, a liberator, Exodus revisited. Not romantically or nostalgically, but in the face of real life, real living. The pioneer of the book of Hebrews understands, it would seem, understands life.

Thomas Long writes that “anyone who has ever fought an addiction, wept over a troubled child, discovered a malignancy, cried out for justice, wondered where to find enough food to make it through another day, faced the end of a loving relationship, spent a cold night sleeping under a freeway bridge, coped with a disability, or stood in grief at a graveside knows that life is a demanding, fevered struggle” (p. 26).

Jesus knows that. His ministry demonstrated that. Look at his audience. Look at those who congregated around him, with him. The Jesus we know in the Gospel stories is one who suffers, real, human pain, so that when he sees one who is suffering he sees that person as a brother or a sister and not an object, not a test case, but a fellow traveler. That is his vocation, not simply to stand in the gap between God and us, but to stand fully in God’s life and fully in human life. Pioneer.

Karl Barth spoke of the incarnation, this flesh and blood announcement of God’s love, in terms of the journey of Christ into “a far country.“ We know that to be true. We know that we need such a pioneer to lead us through the wilderness, and we recognize this incarnate one, this Jesus of Nazareth, who for a little while was lower than the angels, we recognize this one as the one, the pioneer, that we ourselves may become such pioneers, may ourselves live into our vocations, may ourselves lean on and rely on and dwell in our baptism promise.

Pioneers are never simply the ones written into history books. You know them and I know them, and you know the faith that has sustained them. It is sometimes difficult to imagine Presbyterian ministers as pioneers, but there are some: Margaret Towner, the first women ordained as a Presbyterian minister; John Fife, who believed so clearly in his righteous cause that he was arrested for harboring refugees. Sports figures, even, who transcend the trivia of the games to blaze trails, with names like Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson and now Cathy Freeman, who in one glorious moment transformed the history of two peoples and carried the future of her country along with her as she ran swiftly and courageously.

Vocational pioneers: teachers and doctors and scientists and environmentalists and politicians even who understand the nature of the wilderness and more so the destination of the journey. Pioneers in the Middle East and in Yugoslavia—living in the spirit of the one whom we call the Prince of Peace—whose heart aches in the face of violence and children dying and whose heart rejoices in the advent of freedom and justice.

And everyday people like you and me, perhaps even you and me. I think of grandparents who hopped trains to gain better lives for their families. Or saints who persevered through difficult situations and through their perseverance modeled hope and courage. Think of those people in your life and what they have meant to you.

Think of those who face the wilderness bravely and who minister to us even in their own suffering. We know them—this church has known them over the past months: friends, good friends, leaders among us, facing death too early and too quickly, whose deaths even have been pioneer experiences because they have reflected the grace of that one who journeys with them. Those who now dwell at some frontier that calls us ahead. Home, true home.

And because Jesus is that pioneer, we can become as pioneers in our living and become so for others, a community of pioneers, blazing trails, navigating the wilderness, leading as we follow, following as we lead, bearing one another in our suffering because we know that suffering is not our final destination.

I don’t know if we can always find it comforting to know that someone walked this walk before us and that same one walks the walk with us. Ultimately that is the invitation: to connect with that journey because the journey seeks to connect with us. The journey seeks to lead us beyond the journey into a new place, a new relationship, through the new wilderness into a new promised land.

It can sound like pie in the sky, but it is not. It can provide comfort for this moment, I would submit, comfort because we believe that this Jesus experienced the fullest that humanity has to offer, because God’s good intention is to live in solidarity with us and to lead us home.

Anne Lamott writes intensely and painfully of a crisis in her life—a sad episode, followed by drugs and drinking and sleeplessness and self-disgust:

I got in bed shaky and sad. . . . And after a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in my corner. . . . The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there—of course there wasn’t. But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus. I felt him as surely as I feel my dog lying nearby as I write this. . . . I felt him just sitting there on his haunches in the corner of my sleeping loft, watching me with patience and love.” (Traveling Mercies, p. 49)

And we are gripped by the story not for its piety, but for its reality, for its sense of wilderness and of her grudging knowledge that at that very moment she was a child of the pioneer.

Later in Hebrews, we are called “strangers and exiles.” Robert McAfee Brown writes that “we are strangers and pilgrims seeking a city, in the company of a band of pilgrims who have been given directions, who have been joined by the builder of the city and who are freed to live as his servants” (The Spirit of Protestantism, p. 223). And the builder of the city has taken a name and has taken the long, hard road of becoming human so that we can walk with him (p. 225).

So imagine the wilderness. Imagine the cold and dryness and wild beasts and hardness. Imagine the wilderness. And then imagine people wandering with you, in friendship and solidarity, and know that those are the people sitting next to you—next to you throughout centuries, next to you in these very pews. And finally, imagine that one who is leading the way, who has led the way, who will lead the way, hunkered down in your corner. And imagine your whispering his name, singing, faintly, his name, and imagine your arrival home.

“We shall not cease from exploration,” Eliot wrote.
We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.

So imagine, and hold on, and listen for the voice, and follow, follow the voice, the voice that leads us, you, me, through the wilderness, the voice that says, with love, “Welcome home.” Amen.