(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “This is The Way”, originally shared on August 26, 2021. It was the 143rd video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Roads are all around us. They are filled
with cars going places. Where are they going? How do their drivers know the
way?
Do you know where you are going? Do you need
a map to get to heaven? If so, what is the way? Today, we’ll find out.
Cars are a huge part of Southern California culture.
We measure distance by drive time, not by
miles. We give directions by freeway numbers, not by names or landmarks.
Southern California is the birthplace of the drive-thru restaurant and the
drive-in movie theatre, the drive-in church, and the drive-through mortuary.
Some people judge you by what you drive.
Car shows are a huge deal. I saw something
on the news the other day about the Pomona Car Show and Swap Meet. People who
had been waiting since 4:00 in the morning still hadn’t gotten in by 10:00 a.m.
and were giving up.
I was walking around a car show once and saw
a guy selling a 1968 Chevy Impala, I think, for $18,000.00. I looked at his
sign and said, “$18,000.00 for a USED CAR?” He didn’t even crack a smile.
People take these things very seriously. 😊
We drive on a freeway. In Boston, they call
their freeways parkways, so they drive on a parkway and park on a driveway. We
park on freeways, but we call that “traffic”.
It’s said that nobody walks in LA. People
will walk for exercise, but most people drive to get to where they are going to
walk. 😊
Freeway traffic was almost non-existent when
the pandemic had first taken hold. There were record numbers of speeding tickets
given to drivers going over 100 mph because they could. With the rise of the
variants, unfortunately, maybe traffic will be getting better.
LA is a huge place. Unlike eastern cities LA
grew when land was cheap, so it grew out instead of up. You can start at the
ocean and drive for three hours (and more) in decent traffic and still not be
out of an urban area in open country.
How do we find our way around the LA area?
Once you know the basic freeway system, it’s much easier, but you still have
city streets in dozens of cities and hundreds of neighborhoods to contend with.
I used to use a fold out map. They were free
at gas stations; later you had to pay for them. Then you could get them for
free again from AAA. Longer trips could be custom designed in a plastic bound
“Trip-Tic” flip book at a AAA office. Then I used a Thomas Brothers map book
that showed all the streets in the LA Area, page by page, bound together with a
wire binding and in full color.
Now I use the navigation feature in Google
or in a dedicated app called Waze. Software is fast and easy, but sometimes it can
be inaccurate and confused, which is a strange thing to say about electronics.
What is the way to God? Eternal life begins
when we first receive the gifts if faith and baptism. How do we get to heaven?
In the night that he was betrayed, at the
Last Supper, Jesus is speaking to his disciples, in John 14:1-7, and
says:
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe
in God, believe also in me. 2 In my Father’s
house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you
that I go to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go
and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so
that where I am, there you may be also. 4 And you
know the way to the place where I am going.” 5 Thomas
said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the
way?”
Let’s
park here a minute and reflect on Thomas’s very good question, “Lord, we do not
know where you are going. How can we know the way?” You have to know where you
are going before you can figure out a way to get there, right? And if you don’t
know where you’re going, one way is as good as another.
Jesus, I
think, is building on his culture’s expectation of giving hospitality,
especially to strangers, and using it to describe salvation. How will people
estranged from God in their Sin, be received by God? God will receive you,
Jesus says, because of Jesus. If you’ve seen Jesus, you’ve seen God. Jesus is
God. Jesus is fully a human being and fully God. He will take our punishment. His
death will prepare the way for a living relationship with God.
Let’s
continue with John 14, with verse 6:
6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth,
and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If
you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and
have seen him.”
Early on in the pandemic, I stood on the
corner of Bonita Ave. and Damien Ave., both major thruways, in La Verne and
took pictures. I think that I saw one car as far as I could see in all four
directions in the 5-minutes or so that I waited. Things have started to get somewhat
back to normal on city streets, too. Hopefully, they will stay that way.
In the Disney+ TV show, “The Mandalorian”, a
Star Wars spinoff which I’ve heard a lot about but haven’t seen, I’ve read that
when a character says, “This is the way.”, they are speaking of behavior that
is consistent with the moral code of the now exiled or dispersed residents of
the former warrior planet Mandalore.
In Christianity, if we were to say, “This is
the way.”, we would not be speaking of a moral code but of a living
relationship with the one true living God. There is no “Way of Jesus”. Jesus is
the way. Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life. He has made God known
in himself. We see God’s disposition toward humanity in bold relief at the
cross.
The cross is the opposite of a moral code,
it is redemption. God died to reconcile we who believe and are baptized with
God. This is the way. Jesus is the way. Jesus is the truth. Jesus is the life.
There is no path to God that we can find.
Jesus is the path, the path we can only receive as a gift from God. Jesus is
the way.
In fact, the Christian movement was
originally not known as “Christianity” but as “The Way”. There are many references
to the Way in the Bible’s book of The Acts of the Apostles (aka “Acts”), which
is the apostle Luke’s history of the early Christian movement.
We first encounter the apostle Paul in the
Bible when his name was Saul. He was a persecutor of The Way. We see in Acts
9:1-2, just before Saul encountered Jesus in his conversion experience on
the road to Damascus:
Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and
murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest 2 and
asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any
who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.
In both the Old and New Testament sections
of the Bible, people believed that a person’s essential self was in their name.
When people radically changed, their name had to change.
Saul’s name changed to Paul after his
conversion experience because his essential self had changed. He had been a
persecutor of the Way; he became a traveling missionary for the Way.
As a Roman citizen, Paul was given access to
travel the Roman roads. As a citizen, he was given relatively safe passage,
until his status as a Christian was known and he experienced the persecution of
both the Jewish leaders of Israel and the military/political leaders of the Roman
empire.
We read of one of his missionary journeys
outside of Israel, recorded in Acts 19:8-10:
8 He entered the synagogue and for three months
spoke out boldly, and argued persuasively about the kingdom of God. 9 When
some stubbornly refused to believe and spoke evil of the Way before the
congregation, he left them, taking the disciples with him, and argued daily in
the lecture hall of Tyrannus. 10 This continued for
two years, so that all the residents of Asia, both Jews and Greeks, heard the
word of the Lord.
On one occasion, Paul was brought before the
Roman authorities in Caesarea, in Israel, specifically before the governor
Felix, on bogus charges regarding his preaching on the resurrection, in Acts 24.
He defends himself, in Acts 24:14-15, in the words:
14 But this I admit to you, that according to the
Way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our ancestors, believing
everything laid down according to the law or written in the prophets. 15 I
have a hope in God—a hope that they themselves also accept—that there will be a
resurrection of both the righteous and the unrighteous.
Luke
makes an interesting observation about an adjournment of that trial in Acts
24:22:
22 But Felix, who was rather well informed about the
Way, adjourned the hearing with the comment, “When Lysias the tribune comes
down, I will decide your case.”
We travel on highways and byways.
Main roads with lots of traffic are sometimes called “major arteries”. That
make sense to me. They provide a way for traffic to bring life, as in a blood
stream, to our commerce, our schools, our churches, our work, and our cultural
activities.
We travel on freeways, where the far-left
lane is sometimes called the carpool lane, but the letters on the asphalt say
HOV for High Occupancy Vehicle. The minimum occupancy most cars need is one.
High Occupancy on the freeway is two.
Jesus said in Matthew 18:20, regarding
his name, his essential self:
20 For where two or three are gathered in my name, I
am there among them.”
The Church happens where at least 2 are
gathered in Jesus’ name, his essential self.
Jesus is the way, in himself.
Jesus is the way that brings reconciliation
to God.
Jesus is the way that brings us into a
living relationship with the one true living God, into God’s living presence
that begins right now in this life and is brought to perfection in the life to
come, in heaven.
Jesus, in himself, is the way.
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