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The Rev. Frank
Logue On this Sunday, King of Peace swapped pastors with
Saint Paul's Episcopal Church
in Jesup, Georgia. The Way to Walk March 2, 1988, I stood atop Springer Mountain in North Georgia. I had a 45-pound backpack on my back. Beside me stood my wife, Victoria, with a 40-pound pack on her own back. In those packs, we had a week’s worth of food and all the other gear we needed. We had little idea where our next food or even water would come from. We started walking north on the Appalachian Trail. We trekked on for months in drizzling rain and driving snow, freezing cold and blazing heat. We hiked north for more than 2,100 miles to Katahdin in western Maine. Along the way, we learned that the secret to long distance hiking is staying with the journey. You don’t have to worry about arriving at the end. You just concern yourself with making the next few steps. Take rest when you need it, but always make just a few more miles. Some days you’ll cover a lot of distance. Some days you’ll make little ground. Some days you’ll need to stay put. But always focus on the goal of moving northward and enjoy the journey itself. Along the way there were more than a few surprises. One April morning in Tennessee, we awoke to a blizzard. More than a foot of snow would fall, accompanied by a hard wind that drove the snow with weapon-like force. In Virginia in May, my old backpack broke—no practically disintegrated—off my back. That old pack had weathered many miles of hiking, lots of air miles and too many baggage handlers before we started the A.T. The high-tech plastic frame pack had enough fatigue to break in five places at once and fall off my back and to the ground. Then in New Jersey, the miles took their toll and I got shin splints and needed to rest for a week. In Massachusetts, we hiked through a drought and the springs we counted on for water were non-existent and the once flowing streams were more like stagnant pools, with a tiny trickle of water. Of course, there were the good surprises too. In that snowstorm in Tennessee, a hunting dog came up to us as we hiked out of the snow. Back forth it ran up and down the trail leading us. You see, the Appalachian Trail is well marked and easy to follow. The marks are white paint marks on trees, but in a storm that has pelted the sides of trees with snow, those blazes were not the best indicator of the trail. We would have surely gotten lost, but for the hunting dog that unerringly kept us on the path. In Virginia, when my pack broke, we wanted to throw in the towel and give up. Victoria’s father and stepmother bought me a new pack, drove it to us and we were on the A.T. again within 24 hours. When my shin splint problems flared up in New Jersey a fellow hiker arranged for us to stay with his parents. We were to stay at a rustic cabin they had in the woods, but ended up in their home, well cared for as I healed. One day in Massachusetts, with no water in our canteens and a thirst that threatened to consume us, we walked off the trail at a road crossing. Just around a bend, we saw a house—more importantly we saw a water spigot on the outside of the house, by the garage. Water, and lots of it! We knocked at the door, hoping no one would be home, so that we could quickly get at the spigot. Instead, we were greeted warmly, by the couple who didn’t even know their house was by the Appalachian Trail, much less had they considered how the lack of rain would affect hikers. But they were quick to see the problem and jump to our aid. The couple gave us lemonade and fresh baked cookies. They filled our canteens and gave us a fresh hope. I could go on and on. But this is a sermon and it is not exactly a sermon about the Appalachian Trail. It is a sermon about how our lessons learned in long distance hiking might speak to another walk that we are all on. Walking. That is a favorite expression in the Old Testament for a relationship with God. We walk in God’s ways. We walk by faith. We walk with God. This idea of walking is such a part of Old Testament thought that Jews call their moral and ethical code halachah, which means “the way to walk.” For Jews, the main consideration in terms of ethics is how we walk. Walking. It had deep roots in the culture of the Jews. They began as a nomadic people. The essential Jewish statement of history begins, “A wandering Aramean was my father…” Abraham left the home of his father and wandered out into the desert to follow God. In the process Abraham learned how to walk with God. In our reading from Micah for this morning, the prophet tells the people how they area to act. He begins by asking if God is pleased with religion alone. The answer is “No.” This, by the way, is an ongoing theme in scripture—God has little interest in religion. The religion of that time was a sacrificial system and God showed no interest in sacrifices in and of themselves. The content of a person’s heart was what mattered to God then and now. Micah wrote of the possible ways to approach God in an ascending scale, With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” The implied answer is, “No.” Offerings to God will not win God to your side. God does not want you to come to one big religious moment of making things all better and then get on with the rest of your life. God wants the rest of your life. Not just your Sunday morning either. God wants an ongoing relationship that is more about the journey than the destination. Micah put it like this, He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Faith is not head knowledge alone. Faith is a journey and a relationship that results in some clear actions in response to that relationship. Faith should be active. In response to our belief in God, we are to do justice. In all our dealings, we should be fair, giving the justice to others we want to receive. We are also, Micah says, to love kindness. The word translated here as kindness is the Hebrew word Chesed. Notoriously difficult to translate into a single word, Chesed is a word that describes the love that God has for all people. Chesed is a faithful love that will remain true even when the person loved proves unworthy. Chesed is the sort of love God showed in dealing with the people of Israel, that’s why some scholars translate chesed as “covenant loyalty” for in this love God has for us God is faithful to the promises found in scripture. We see this same chesed love that God has for us in the love Jesus showed us all on the cross when as he was dying he prayed for those who were killing him, saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” It is that love of God that we are to love. We are to honor the chesed of God by humbling walking with our God. We don’t walk for God, to impress God. We walk with God. It is an ongoing relationship with God alongside you at every turn in the path. This is the key to understanding this passage from Micah. Micah asks, “Is God impressed with your religiosity? N! is the reply. God will not be impressed with church attendance alone, no matter how often you come to St. Paul’s. The content of your heart matters to God. God will not care if you tithe, or if you give God 90% and live on the 10%. At least God does not care about that alone. What God wants is to walk with you. Then going to church and tithing flow naturally, not from trying to buy or earn your way into God’s good graces, but from that daily walk with God. This is where the lessons from the Appalachian Trail come back in. A spiritual journey takes just as much perseverance. To walk with God daily, you’ll have to commit yourself to the trek. You don’t need to worry about the destination. Just keep making a few more steps. You may feel like your time reading the Bible is not teaching you anything on a given day. Just keep reading. If you haven’t been reading the Bible, then you already know why you don’t feel like you are making any headway. You are not walking alone. You are walking with God and scripture is one way to be more aware of your traveling companion. Prayer is another. Some days you will feel like your prayers are bouncing off the ceiling. Keep praying. God is walking with you, listening. God is more faithful than your feelings. Just keep praying for there will be other days when you feel like obstacles fall before you in your path and that doesn’t happen without the prayer. Finally, there is worship. Some weeks you’ll come to St. Paul’s and feel like you spent a little time in heaven. Some weeks you’ll wonder if it was worth the struggle to get the family up and dressed and in the car. Keep coming. Keep worshipping. Once again, God is more faithful than your feelings. Your walk of faith is a journey. And with perseverance comes great rewards that can’t be experienced by the folks who never make the walk. September 1, 1988, my wife Victoria and I stood atop Katahdin, with another hiker, Peter Scal. Those last miles to the top of that final mountain were hiked in the pre-dawn darkness. When we reached Thoreau Spring, one mile from the northern end of the Appalachian Trail, the top of the mountain was enshrouded in a cloud. We were torn. We had hiked in the darkness to reach the mountaintop at sunrise. We didn’t want to end our hike in a fog. But yet, we did want to keep hiking and not wait out the sunrise below the peak. So we all decided to march on. Our pace quickened in that last mile, we climbed the treeless peak watching as wind blew the cloud apart, shattering the fog over the summit. On we hiked, reaching the rough wood sign marking the end of our quest just before the sun topped the horizon, lighting the peak with a shaft of red light. As the sun continued to rise, the surrounding Maine lake country basked in an amber glow that caused the many ponds below us to sparkle in the sunlight. It was glorious. Words fail to capture the feeling. Yet, we never would have reached that peak without the miles of hiking in mud. We would not have gotten there without the eight days of straight hard rain in Virginia. We wouldn’t have made it without the trips and falls on the path or any of the other difficulties overcome. It took perseverance to make it to that fall sunrise. You are on a journey no less demanding heading toward a destination far more glorious. And you won’t make it there by focusing on the end of the quest either. It’s a walk. A long walk. Even a rewarding walk. But a walk. God doesn’t ask you to move heaven and earth. God doesn’t want you to impress, barter or buy your way into heaven. For, He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? And God will not leave you alone along the path, but will be there with you every step of the way. Amen.
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