(Note:
This blog entry is based on the text for “Railroads and Reinvention”, originally
shared on June 24, 2021. It was the 125th video for our YouTube
Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Have you ever wanted to start over? To begin
a new life? As the pandemic retracts and we take cautious steps into the New
Normal, some people have realized that they don’t want to do what they were
doing before the isolation started. They want to do something new with their
lives. But suppose you wanted something more. Suppose you wanted to start over
as a new person. Today, we’re going to consider just how to do that.
When the railroads came to the United
States, they brought speed and volume to largely horse-driven trans-continental
commerce. You could send goods across the country and not have to take them by
ship around South America. The Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869.
The Panama Canal didn’t open until 1904, and then you had to go through and
around Central America.
Trains brought raw materials and consumer
goods to towns large and small. They provided a practical means to sell
products way beyond a local community. They brought materials and markets.
And they brought something even more
important. They brought possibilities. They brought fuel for the imaginations
of people whose world had been very small. They sold inexpensive long-range
travel. They brought better lives and new starts. A lot of people came to
California.
California is seen by many as a place where
people come to reinvent themselves, but how many of our grandparents and great-grandparents
came here to do that same thing? My favorite California real estate story, and
I think that we all know a lot of them, came from a colleague who was a 6th
generation Californian. She said that her grandfather had come to California
building the railroad lines. He was working in what is now Long Beach during a
time of intense real estate speculation. A fellow-worker offered to sell him 40
acres of what is now downtown Long Beach for $.50 an acre, and her grandfather
got mad at him for trying to cheat him. “Who would pay $.50 an acre for that
sandy land?”, he said.
Reinvention, in our culture, has a romantic
quality. If you’ve ever lived near a railroad and you’ve heard that train
whistle flying by, you know what I’m talking about. That train had people on it
and that train was going somewhere. Maybe it was only a freight train; but
there might be open cars and you could jump into one. At least at one time you
could.
Trains meant escape. They meant life in
places you had only seen in your imagination. Trains meant mobility and a
chance to start over.
The Christian life brings something almost
similar. It brings not just new circumstances but new life. Not a new start but
a new creation. Not a chance to live but a chance to be born again.
In Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, in
the gospel of John, the 3rd chapter starting with verse 5, we read,
*John
3:5-8
5 Jesus answered,
“Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born
of water and Spirit. 6 What is born of the flesh is
flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do
not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ 8 The
wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not
know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born
of the Spirit.”
Streams of living water is a metaphor for
the Holy Spirit found in both the Old and the New Testament. It means that God
is within us. How can the holy God, the one true living God, the creator of all
that exists out of nothing, be within us, our sinful selves, unless God has
first made of us something new, a new birth?
I worked for the Soo Line Railroad for
several summers in college and seminary, maintaining and repairing rails in and
outside of my hometown in Wisconsin. We serviced a 17-mile stretch of rails,
one that had been maintained by three crews when railroad use was at its
height.
We used the same tools that had been used
for 100 years: Picks and shovels, prybars and jacks. Automation was just
starting to come into play where we were. Now rail maintenance is done almost
entirely by machines.
We traveled to work sites by a truck that
could drive on roads or on the railroad tracks by lowering lower little
railroad car wheels to keep it from sliding off.
We even had one of those handcars that you
pump to move one or two people over the lines, though our foreman mainly used
it to inspect the rails.
Our foreman was a guy named Art, though the
assistant foreman did most of the immediate supervision. Art was really old. I
think he was around 70. Younger than I am now. But he could drive a spike into
a tie from his hip, and he almost never missed. When he did, he would speak to
himself sternly. He would work all day on a half a sandwich.
We used a spike maul, or spiking hammer, to
drive spikes. It had a long narrow hammer at the top. If you didn’t hit the
spike right on the center, it could spring out of the tie where it had been set
and hurt somebody, though I only saw it scare people when that happened. If you
missed the spike entirely, you could break its wooden handle on the rail and
the assistant foreman might speak to you sternly.
We used giant wrenches to tighten screws to
bolts threaded through metal plates to hold sections of rail together. We used
metal tongs to lift new sections of rail where they had been left in the weeds
and into their place on the rail bed when whole sections needed to be replaced.
I learned from the old timers that if you lifted your side of the tongs higher
than the other guy’s, the center of gravity shifted to the other guy, and he
would have to carry most of the weight. And if he saw that happening, he might
speak to you sternly.
When my last summer there ended, the crew
gave me some spikes, nuts and bolts and some highly prized dating nails that
had been removed from ties laid down in the early days of the railroad.
My wife Rev. Sally Welch went to Julliard
and was a professional dancer in an opera ballet company for a time. I tell
people that I, too, was a dancer. I was a “Gandy dancer”. The foreman or
assistant foreman would spot low points in the rail and a jack was used to lift
it to the right height. Then the men would stab gravel under the tie, then
stand on the shovel and rock it in order to tamp the gravel tightly in place.
The shovels used by the railroad in the early days were made by the Gandy
Shovel Company of Boston, Massachusetts, and the standing, rocking, tamping
motion was known as “Gandy dancing”.
The railroad right of way had never been
farmed, and the old timers knew where to find wild strawberries, wild peas, and
wildflowers.
In the same way, the Christian life requires
a lot of maintenance. The difference is that God does all the heavy lifting to
reinvent us, and God does the maintenance work that shows us the way. We tend to
want to go our own way and we tend to mess things up, but when we depend on God
and get out of God’s way, God is strong in us, as Paul says in his second
letter to the Corinthians, the 12th chapter starting in the 7th
verse:
*2
Corinthians 12:7b-10
Therefore, to
keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a
messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. 8 Three
times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, 9 but
he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect
in weakness.” So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that
the power of Christ may dwell in me. 10 Therefore I
am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities
for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.
The railroad has long been associated with
new life in all kinds of popular music, from Johnny Cash’s heartbreaking
“Folsom Prison Blues” to the dual meaning of earthly liberation and eternal
salvation in the Impressions’ “People Get Ready”.
But new life does not come from longing for
a better life or from seeking a better life ourselves.
We can’t really reinvent ourselves. We just
move the pieces around. We are sinners, that is we are separated from God by
our sin, and that sin leads to death in every sense. We don’t even need to get
better. What we need is a savior.
That is the Good News. The good news is that
we have been given a savior in Jesus Christ, whose death on the cross made it
possible for us to live a new life in Him. God reinvents us through the cross.
He paid the price. Jesus. Fully God and fully human being. His blood is our
salvation.
In Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians,
the 5th chapter, the 16th and 17th verses, he
writes
*2
Corinthians 5:16-17
16 From now on, therefore,
we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew
Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that
way. 17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new
creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
Our ticket to Heaven has already been
purchased and has been stamped “Paid in Full”, not by our efforts but by the
work of Jesus Christ on the Cross. All we need to “do” is to open our hearts,
our truest selves, and repent, turn away from the old life and turn toward the
new life though faith, in a living relationship with the one true living God.
All we need to do is respond in faith to God’s, “All aboard!”.
Here’s how reinvention works.
In Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, the
6th chapter starting at the 3rd verse:
*Romans
6:3-5
3 Do you not know that all of us who
have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 Therefore
we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was
raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in
newness of life. 5 For if we have been united with him
in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection
like his.
We walk in newness of life because we have
been baptized, an act of God. We have died with Christ in our baptisms and just
as Jesus rose from the dead, our resurrection has already begun in Him.
Paul explains this as he continues in the 6th
chapter, with the 6th verse:
6 We know that our
old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and
we might no longer be enslaved to sin. 7 For
whoever has died is freed from sin. 8 But if we
have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 We
know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no
longer has dominion over him. 10 The death he died,
he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. 11 So
you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
This is who we are as the Church, the Body
of Christ.
In his first letter, chapter 2, verses 9 and
10, Peter writes:
9 But you are a chosen race, a royal
priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people in order that you may proclaim
the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
10 Once you were not a people,
but now you are God’s people;
once you had not received mercy,
but now you have received mercy.
We have been reinvented. God has reinvented us, from darkness into God’s light. Let us live, therefore, as reinvented people, as the children of God.
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