The January 2004 edition of Trail magazine has got some 'splaining to do. Trail is a British publication that provides maps and suggests particularly beautiful or challenging hiking trials to the growing number of devoted hill-walkers throughout Great Britain.
Unfortunately if anyone had followed the seemingly precise, detailed directions given by the magazine to reach the summit of Britain's largest mountain, Ben Nevis, they would have hiked straight off a sheer cliff and ended up in a broken heap at the bottom of Gardyloo Gully. It seems Trail missed one all-important bearing mark in describing the route, an oversight that would have sent hikers straight to their death.
As you might imagine, the magazine quickly issued a correction. It virtuously touted the accuracy of the over two hundred other trails it had published. But as all mountain climbers know, it only takes one misstep to ruin your whole day. Maybe that's why Trail's editor-in-chief admitted that every good hiker carries their own maps anyway and constantly checks them along their route. In other words, he was saying, "Don't trust us only trust yourself."
Despite (or because) of the fact that so many of us are always in a raging hurry, the more leisurely pace of walking tours has grown into a huge business in the past decade. The Australians have always had their walkabout tradition. The Brits go hill-walking. But a dedicated walker can find tours stalking about anywhere from Paris to Patagonia.
Like a bus tour without the bus, these trips can last anywhere between a few days to a few weeks. You can select tours with a leisurely pace and short easy jaunts. Or you can choose an active-stride and challenging terrain for a more rigorous journey. The range of difficulty and the pure simplicity of walking tours has made them especially popular among those who, while fit, don't want to run marathons. Because all these folks are doing is walking, it's an adventure available to all ages and stages of life.
There's only one problem with all this. Walking is NOT easy. We take walking for granted because we all learned how to master this complex motion when we were just a year old. But walking upright on two legs is a remarkable accomplishment.
Just ask your dog or cat. Better yet, spend a little time observing a baby as it goes through all the stages it must master before any walking can happen. A tiny newborn infant just lays there. Yes, they are adorably cute. Yes, they can bellow at a remarkable number of decibels. Yes, they can fill a remarkable number of diapers. But the only movement they can muster is to thrash their arms and legs about weakly. If it weren't for the fact that babies always learn finally to roll over at exactly the moment you take your eyes off them, you could safely leave a tiny baby up on a high bed or changing table. They just can’t walk.
But eventually this changes. The first hint that a baby is developing its muscles needed to walk is that it learns flopping. Like the fish on the deck of Simon Peter's boat in today's Gospel reading, a baby will flop about, arch its back, swing its legs from side to side. Everyone knows that if you're going to walk you've got to crawl first. But before you can crawl you've got to flop.
Once a young baby finally masters rolling over and sitting up, there's always that day when excited parents think their beloved is just about to take off. The baby gets up on all fours and rocks back-and-forth. To us the child looks like he or she is revving up to speed forward. But they're not. Rocking is another necessary pre-walking, pre-crawling activity that gets the child used to feeling off-balance, educates its muscles to adjust and readjust to motion and the pull of gravity.
Rocking is followed by a kind of insect-like wriggling called squinching, which finally leads to full-fledged crawling. But the baby is only half-way there . . . and is still on all fours. Eventually babies do get up on two feet and learn the art of standing. Then using furniture, their brothers and sisters, the dog, and most of the breakable things in the house as guide-posts, babies quickly move on to cruising about their homes.
Finally, only after mastering all these incremental steps from thrashing, flipping, rolling, sitting, rocking, squinching, crawling, to cruising a baby learns how to maintain a state of permanent dis-equilibrium called walking. One-year-olds travel a long developmental road before they ever start walking down it.
Jesus led his soon-to-be-disciples through a similar series of incremental baby-steps on their way to confessing faithfulness. You can call it the Faith Walk.
First, Jesus directs Simon Peter to participate in his teaching mission in a simple, straight-forward way: by letting his fishing boat be used as a floating platform from which the crowd may be more easily addressed.
Next, Jesus ups the stakes. Now he instructs the fishermen to take their boat out into deep water and to set out their nets for a catch. Not surprisingly Simon stumbles a bit on this step. After all, he's the fishing expert, and Jesus' directive goes precisely against all his experience. Nevertheless Simon picks himself up and gamely points his fishing boat out into the deep water. It's not until the huge catch of fish, so weighty that it threatened to sink both fishing boats, that Simon loses his footing completely and falls to his knees. Despite his prior glimpses of Jesus' greatness as a preacher, a teacher, and a healer, Simon's fledgling faith is swamped by this catch.
This dramatic call of the first disciples isn't just some archaic, first-century fish-story. The step-by-step process into faithfulness that Jesus offers these fishermen, is the same developmental exercise all persons of faith must flex their way through. The three steps to the Faith Walk are as follows:
1) TRUST ME
The first step is Trust Me. Not having Simon Peter's first-hand experience of Jesus preaching in our home church, or coming over to supper at our house after services, or (by the way) healing a family member of a debilitating illness before dinner time, the trust issue is big for twenty-first century would-be believers.
But it's trust that plugs us into the power source that is Jesus the Christ. Proverbs 3:5 says, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not unto your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge him, and he will direct your path."
I love the story of Harry, a TV repairman, who was called to fix a television set that had neither sound nor picture. Left alone in the room, Harry spotted the cause immediately: the set was unplugged. Harry faced a dilemma: one part of him said he shouldn't charge the homeowner. The other insisted he be paid for his time. Finally, he presented the owner with a minimum-charge service bill, which read: "Restored isolated connecting cable to primary power source. $25."
You and I are isolated connecting cables that need a power source. Can we trust that power source enough to get plugged in?
2) LAUNCH INTO THE DEEP
Jesus doesn't call us to take half or half-hearted steps. Jesus calls us to launch out into the deep waters of discipleship. The walk of faith is not about safety or risk-free living. The walk of faith is all about passion and compassion. In fact, theologian Douglas John Hall insists that "Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it's delivered as easy and amusing, it's another kind of religion altogether." (Journal for Preachers, Lent 2000, as quoted in Martin E. Marty's Context, 32 [15 May 2000], 5.)
The 19th century reformer William Lloyd Garrison was told he should moderate himself and not be so outspoken in his opposition to slavery. His response?
"I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, to speak, to write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest I will not equivocate I will not excuse I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and to hasten the resurrection of the dead."
Jesus doesn't call disciples to wade in the waters. Jesus calls disciples to launch into the deep with this promise: I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me (Philippians 4:13).
3) LEAVE EVERYTHING BEHIND: GIVE GOD YOUR FUTURE.
Leave your old ways behind. Let God create in you a whole new way of being in the world.
Fuller Seminary Professor Lewis B. Smedes is an author who has influenced many Christians through his writings and lectures. In December of 2002 he died at the age of 82, having just completed the last chapter of his memoirs, My God and I. In the last chapter of this, his last book, Smedes wrote under the title of "God and an Impatient Old Man:"
"When I was young I hoped with all my heart that Christ would never come, that he would stay up in heaven where he belonged and leave me alone. Every Sunday morning as my family shuffled down to our pew in the Berean church, I was scared half to death by a biblical prayer, taken from the Book of Revelation, painted large on the front wall: Maranatha, Even So Come Quickly Lord Jesus. I countered it, each Lord's Day, with a prayer of my own: "Oh, Jesus, please take your time. Now, when I am lying in bed awake at night, I find myself humming an impatient gospel song that chilled me to the bone every time the congregation sang it, always as if we were standing at the station waiting for a tardy train that is carrying our soldier boy back from the wars.: 'Oh Lord, Jesus, how long?/How long ere we shout the glad song:/Christ returneth, Hallelujah, Amen.'
"This is where I find myself now on the journey that God and I have been on, at the station called hope, the one that comes right after gratitude and somewhere not far from journey's end. It has been 'God and I' the whole way. Not so much because he has always been pleasant company. Not because I could always feel his presence when I got up in the morning or when I was afraid to sleep at night. It was because he did not trust me to travel alone. Personally, I like the last miles of the journey better than the first. But, since I could not have the ending without first having the beginning, I thank God for getting me going and bringing me home. And sticking with me all the way."
What God has begun in you, God wants to complete in you. Will you press on in faith? Will you press on toward the mark of your high calling in Christ? Or will you keep looking back, yearning for the old you and the safe life rather than the new you and the adventurous life?