University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

LESSONS FROM A LONG DRIVE

Psalm 90:1-10, 12

Romans 8:31-35, 37-39

A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

September 9, 2007

            Before his death a decade ago, Henri Nouwen was a Dutch Catholic priest, a theologian with a particular understanding of the spiritual dimensions of human life, and, for many, a teacher of extraordinary power.   I encountered him a number of years ago during a stay at Yale Divinity School.  Henri was a speaker in great demand, and so traveled a great deal; but he often lamented that, as a priest, he frequently found himself traveling alone.  There were so many places and experiences he longed to share, but enjoyed only in solitude.  There was no one to meet him at the airport when he returned from his trips.  He took photographs, indeed was a fine photographer, and his apartment was decorated with them, but again he lamented that he had no one with whom he could share the photos of his travels.

            “When I think of heaven,” Henri once said, “I imagine St. Peter meeting me at the gate, and saying, ‘Ah, Henri, we've been expecting you.  I hope you've had a good trip.  Come in, and let us see your slides.’  That would be heaven.”

            I thought of Henri Nouwen's words yesterday while flying back from the West Coast. I had spent some time last week driving from here to there, traveling with our daughter Leah on her way to begin graduate school in Irvine, California. We had a wonderful time on that long drive, and I do have some photographs, but let me assure you that I'm not going to take advantage of your status as a captive audience this morning to pass the photos around or to describe in any detail the various nuances of our trip.  Still, I do want to share with you just a little bit about what we saw, because this trip, like all the trips I have taken to the American West, led me into some serious theological reflection.

            We did a lot of driving, about 2,700 miles worth.  We traveled west virtually the entire length of I-40, through the Smokies and Tennessee, on through Arkansas and the Ozarks. We drove the length of Oklahoma and across the panhandle of Texas, into the high desert of New Mexico and the mesas of Arizona. We stopped one night at the Grand Canyon and then drove into the desert of southeastern California, before turning southwest at Barstow to make our final descent into that other Orange County. It was a long drive.  There is no question that travel to the West is made easier by flying to some regional destination, but there is also something of value to be found in driving across the landscape of this remarkable country, sampling its variety of terrain, climate and people. 

            On this trip we did what we normally try not to do. We drove the interstate highways almost exclusively, except for the little side excursion to the Grand Canyon. On other trips we have avoided the interstates, preferring to travel instead on what William Least Heat Moon once called the "blue highways," the less-traveled roads.  One sees more from those roadways, and the landscape seems to take on a more manageable scale.  But it was still a remarkable trip. We had a lot of time in the car for good conversation and laughter, but through the long silences, I also found a lot of time for reflection.

            It is the reflection rather than the travelogue that I want to share with you today, for among the lessons I learned or re-learned, there are two that struck me with great force.  I'm a bit nervous about sharing them, because they were so tied to the experience of the trip.  I know that there are a number of you who have not had the good fortune to travel where we traveled.  Indeed, I know there are some of you who have not had a real vacation for a long time.  There are others who have spent much time in the West, and for you the lessons will perhaps seem so obvious.  But bear with me, if you will, for these few moments, as I distill the trip down to two particular lessons I re-learned...two Biblical truths that came again into much sharper focus.

Lesson One

            The first lesson struck me more than a few times.  It came first in the vastness of the prairies and grasslands of western Oklahoma, where the horizon is visible in all directions, and one can literally see for miles.  I sensed it again during the long drive through New Mexico and northern Arizona, driving across miles and miles of desert, when we drove for long stretches and passed only a few simple dwellings.  And it came thundering back to mind as I stood at sunset on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, knowing how that remarkable vista had been shaped and sanded by the wind and rain and rivers of hundreds of thousands of years.  And the lesson was this: that a single human life is but one minute blip in the larger scope of things… that our lives really are so small in time and space compared to the vastness of God's creation. 

            Sometimes in the East, where our horizons are limited, and we are surrounded by people who interact with us on a daily basis, where we can take charge at least of our immediate environment, we may be able to convince ourselves of our own importance and significance.  We live in a community where something new is happening every day – new construction, new ideas, new discoveries, new people moving in next door.  We live here by watches and Blackberries and Treos and appointments.  We may have hundreds of MySpace and Facebook friends. And history here, as we conceive of it, goes back only a couple of years, or a couple of hundred if we are really reflective.  In such a perspective, our own opinions and our own understandings seem to accrue much greater worth, and our own lives seem very important.  We can even convince ourselves for a while that we are in control of our lives.

            In the West it surely must be harder to live by such convictions.  Our lives pale by contrast with the ages of geologic shifting and shaping, even by the sheer vastness of the landscape. The novelist Leif Enger grew up aware of such vastness in the Midwestern plains. He said once in an interview, “I grew up squinting from the back seat at gently rolling hills and true flatlands, where you top a rise and see a tractor raising dust three miles away. So much world and sky is visible it’s hard to put much stock in your own influence – it’s a perfect landscape for cultivating gratitude.”[1] In such a landscape, time takes on a different dimension.  Walking along the Canyon rim, or driving west through the Mojave Desert, one couldn’t help but think about the hundreds of centuries behind such vistas. But it’s hard to fathom. After all, most of us don't have an aeon hand on our watches.  Most of the time we live without any consciousness of the vastness of time or space.

            The psalmist said it somewhat differently in addressing the Creator; this time hear the words from a Catholic translation called The Psalter:

            Before the mountains existed,

              before the earth was born,

              from age to age You are God.

            You return us to dust,

              children of earth back to earth.

            For in Your eyes a thousand years

              are like a single day:

              they pass with the swiftness of sleep. (Ps. 90:2-4)

On our long drive west, face-to-face with time and space more immense than I usually experience, I re-learned those words from the Psalms... re-learned the limitations and the contingencies and the impermanence of my own life, and its miniscule place in the larger scheme of things.  In the West, I think, such lessons are more plain and conspicuous than they are here in the East.

Lesson Two

            When I tell you the other lesson I learned on our trip it may well seem like a paradox, and I suppose it is.  Unlike the first lesson, which was hammered home mile after mile, day by day in driving, the second lesson was taught in one particular spot.  It happened along an isolated stretch of I-40 a few miles north of the small railroad town of Yucca, Arizona.  

            Yucca is just a dot on the Arizona map, not too far south of Kingman, in a stretch of I-40 where the highway runs north-south rather than east-west, a desolate stretch of road that runs between the Hualapai Mountains of Arizona and the Sacramento Mountains at the California border.  What beauty there is along that particular stretch of highway lies mostly in its starkness.  But what struck me that day was not some scenic attraction.  In fact, what I saw was outstanding only in its garishness, and in the fact that it seemed conspicuously out-of-place.  What I saw was a white cross, sculpted from styrofoam, and decorated with plastic flowers, and a name in black plastic letters: Nicolas.

            One didn't have to exercise too much imagination to envision a car out of control, speeding off the highway, and rolling down an embankment in a moment witnessed by no one, and the untimely death of a young man named Nicolas who was surely loved deeply by someone.  How sad, I thought, to die out here in the middle of nowhere!  Unseen.  How long had it been until someone happened upon the accident?

            But that wasn't the only thought I had as we drove on toward the Mojave Desert.  From somewhere deep inside me I remembered also the confident words of the apostle Paul, and the reminder addressed to the Romans that in Jesus Christ nothing is ever finally lost, and no one is ever finally unseen, unremembered, unloved. And thinking of Nicolas and his tragic death, I began to say to myself that familiar refrain:

Who can separate us from the love of Christ?  Can trouble, pain or persecution?  Can lack of clothes and food, danger to life and limb, the threat of force of arms?

No, in all these things we win an overwhelming victory through him who has proved his love for us.

I have become absolutely convinced that neither death nor life, neither messenger of Heaven nor monarch of earth, neither what happens today nor what may happen tomorrow, neither a power from on high nor a power from below, nor anything else in God's whole world has any power to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:35-39, J.B. Phillips)

            I also remembered a poem by the American poet Mary Oliver, called “The Summer Day:”

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?[2]

            What I thought about, remembering that poem, was how fragile are such plans in the vastness of God’s creation, yet how important those plans are to God. What I re-membered from the desert and all its vastness of space and time (and from that singular moment and that solitary cross near Yucca, Arizona) was that there is no place where one is hidden from God, no circumstance where we are unseen and unvalued by the One who created us in love.  The lesson was that somehow in the midst of all this vastness and all this time, God has found our individual lives of ultimate worth... worth enough that no life is expendable... so that even those who die along a lonely stretch of highway are seen and embraced by God.  And the reminder that day was a cross.

            It is still our reminder, whether it be carved from a block of styrofoam and planted by a highway, or forged of precious metal and set in a place of honor in the church, or formed with water and traced upon a baby's brow.   The cross is our most vivid reminder that while our lives may seem terribly insignificant or pitifully transient in the vastness of time and space, those same lives... yours and mine... are precious in God's sight, and loved so much that God would come and dwell among us... loved so much that nothing can stand in the way of God's redemptive love.   Thus begins the wise numbering of our days in this world.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?