“Are We There Yet?”

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, October 31, 2021, the twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost. “Prepare the Table with Justice and Joy” series. 

  Texts: Psalm 23:1-3, Mark 12:28-34

We are taking our time on our journey through the 23rd Psalm. Two and a half verses have taken us 4 weeks and we’ll get through the final three verses by Thanksgiving. Today, we are in the middle of the journey, verse 3b: “God leads me in right paths for His name’s sake.”

 

We live in a culture that isn’t always so good at taking our time. Waiting is generally not high on our “favorite things to do” lists. The path we tend to want is one that gets us where we are going as soon as possible. I think about how excited I am when my navigation app interrupts regularly-scheduled programming to announce I could save 4 minutes by taking a different route! Yes! Of course I want to do that! 

I often wish God was more like my navigation app. I wish I could plug in my preferred destination in life and get not only turn-by-turn guidance, but an ETA. Over the course of the pandemic, I reflected much about the extreme disorientation caused by not knowing how long a thing is going to last. Early on it was how long do we have to stay in quarantine and when will there be a vaccine? Then how long until we can safely gather in worship? When will it be safe to sing without masks? How long until our children will finally be vaccinated? Added to that, of course, are the questions about when our nation might finally grow the collective moral spine to put into policy and practice the high ideals we profess in our words. How long will it take to not just talk about but truly live “liberty and justice for ALL?” 

 

If God the good shepherd is leading us on a path, I want both the illustrated picture with turn-by-turn guidance AND an estimated time for when we’ll reach the longed-for destination. Whether the uncertainty and waiting is related to pandemics or relationships or vocation or clarity of direction or spiritual growth or health or whatever, the not knowing how long is beyond difficult. …I hear my brother, sister, and me as children in the back seat on one of our many trips to Arkansas or Texas to see our grandparents—you know the refrain: Are we there yet? How much longer?

 

Where is God with the directions for how to accomplish what we’re trying so hard to do and to get us to the finish line? Where is God with the time-saving option to get us where we want to be? Because we want to get there NOW.

 

Rabbi Harold Kushner says, “There is a story in the Talmud about the traveler who asks a child, ‘Is there a shortcut to such-and-such a village?’ The child answers, ‘There is a shortcut that is long and a long way that is short.’” Kushner then shares that the Hebrew phrase in verse 3b is more complex than can be easily captured in translation. He says “right paths” “literally means ‘roundabout ways that end up in the right direction.’” So, as the child says, there may be shortcuts or “easier” paths to our destination, but they could end up taking longer, being harder, and costing more in the end. 

 

I was curious about Kushner’s translation of “right paths” and discovered that the Hebrew word translated “path” (בְמַעְגְּלֵי־—ma’aglei –mah-gaw lah) literally means a circumvallation, an entrenchment—or figuratively, a wagon track. And the word shows up in biblical stories as the “circle of the camp.” Some resources translate the word simply “in circles.” Kushner’s nuanced Hebrew helps us understand that the “path” is not a straight line from point A to point B. It has a circular tendency, is a “roundabout way that ends up in the right direction.” It is “dug in”—not in the sense of stubbornness, but of being an intentional path, a worn path, a path with a purpose. //

 

Today we celebrate Holy Baptism. This is not the beginning of God’s love in Lillian-Pierce’s life, but it the beginning of an intentio