Pilgrim Journey: Leaving Home
March 1, 2020 – Rev. Daniel Ervin
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
Matthew 4:1-11
We begin a new sermon series today that will walk us through the season of Lent and on into Easter. I’m calling the series “Pilgrim Journey” – because Lent is at its heart a spiritual journey into deeper faith and deeper relationship with God—and that journey requires our attention and our participation as pilgrims.
Chances are though, that some of you are like me, and when you hear the word “pilgrim,” you wonder when we’re going to break out the big belt buckles and funny black hats and start eating turkey. Those people were a type of pilgrim, yes, but a pilgrim is simply someone who embarks on a journey to a sacred place for religious reasons.
People have been going on pilgrimages for thousands of years. Pilgrims in Jesus’ day traveled to Jerusalem. Today, pilgrims still go to sacred places like the Church built on the spot where Jesus was crucified, or to France to bathe in healing waters, praying that God might cure their illness. Others go on pilgrimage to places as exotic as Our Lady of the Snows in Belleville—all because they seek to get closer to God by going to a Holy Place where God is known to be present and working.
Of course, what pilgrims almost always discover on their journey, is that God is just a much present on the road and in the strangers you encounter—as God is present in the destination. So it’s not necessarily about literally going to a new place—pilgrimage can also mean traveling through your every day life, while keeping an eye out for God in your comings and goings.
That journey sometimes is even to an internal destination—a place inside ourselves. After all, aren’t our hearts and spirits holy places where God is working too? And can’t we can journey deeper into those places, to get a fresh understanding of ourselves and God? I think so.
This is the kind of inward Journey that Lent invites us into. You can almost think of this journey as a spiritual bootcamp—where we do the hard work of finding where God is moving within us, and where we practice flexing our spiritual muscles: growing in forgiveness, repentance, and discipleship—so that we are in a new place—or least a new place spiritually—come Easter time.
So this season of Lent, I want to invite you on this Journey with me, with God, with Jesus, with one another as we do this hard spiritual work of being pilgrims together. —Pause—
The first step in making a pilgrimage or setting out on any journey for that matter, is to make the decision to leave home in the first place. That’s where we are today on this journey: Leaving Home.
There are plenty of reasons not to want to leave where you are now and go on this pilgrim journey with us. First among them is the most obvious reason: it is always easier to keep on doing what you’ve always been doing than it is to change. You know this. I know this. Even changing the littlest of habits requires investing lots of energy and attention. Leaving Home requires not only that you trust that the destination of this journey will be better than home, it requires you to live into that and really participate in the journe.
But there are other challenges that lie ahead too that may keep you wanting to stay home. Back in the middle ages, pilgrims had to worry about robbers along the road, or entering into strange lands where they didn’t know the language or culture. So let me give you fair warning: Journeying into our own hearts can be fraught with difficulty too. When you journey deep within yourself, your faith, your doubts, your grief, your being, you may well discover something you didn’t know about yourself, or something you don’t understand or like about yourself, or a challenge you realize you are going to have to overcome. And these things are hard places to wade through—please know that’s why pilgrims usually travel together and not alone. We need one another to show that in those same deep and dark places, God is already at work. And we need one another and God to help guide us through those deep places.
But I invite you trust God, to rely on one another, and to Leave Home and make this pilgrim journey with us.
In scripture, one of the best the stories to understand the decision to leave home on this pilgrimage is our scripture passage from Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve. These are, the scriptures tell us, the first two humans to ever walk the Earth. And God has given them this spectacular home to live in and care for: The Garden of Eden. It’s quite a home, a place that neither of them, I suspect, would ever want to leave. They were together in full communion with God and one another and all creation in that home.
But something changes for them in that home. Adam and Eve sinned by eating the forbidden fruit—the one and only thing God had forbidden from doing, they did. So Adam and Eve’s perfect home: this place where they were in right relationship with God and with each other—now it was broken. And as a consequence of that sin, they had had to leave home, leave Eden, they had to set off and seek God in a new way, a more a difficult way, but still a holy way.
Now Christians disagree over whether this story literally took place in history or if it is more of a myth from which we can gain insight about our own human nature—but what is true is this: this first sin, or as others call it, the Fall, or the original sin— is part of who we are today, too. We don’t live in the Garden of Eden anymore. Our relationship with God and with one another is fundamentally flawed from the get-go, so whatever our home is—our starting point on this journey—it is not yet where God wants us to be.
And that’s ok. That’s why we’re called to set out on this journey in the first place.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. Or as many in the 12 step communities will attest to, the first step is not so much to change, as it is to realize that there is a problem in the first place, and that problem has remarkable power over you.
After Adam and Eve sin in the garden, scripture tells us that their eyes were opened, and they saw their nakedness, their shame, they saw the consequences of their sin. This is them realizing that home isn’t what it used to be anymore—that to re-enter into right relationship, means they’re going to have to travel on this journey and seek God on the way.
To decide to leave home, means we’ve got to be really honest about where we are now. And I wonder if I can give you a task to do today and this week: I wonder if you would allow your eyes to be opened…so that you can see where you are now—where home is for you. But I want you to open your eyes even wider—so that you can see why Leaving Home to go on this pilgrimage journey might just be worth it.
Think hard about what in your life as it is, is keeping you away from God and from one another? What do we need to leave behind us as we set off on this Journey together? What needs to change?
Let’s leave home on this pilgrimage together, and find God in the journey. Amen.