The Oregon Trail: The Way of Christ

A sermon on Mark 1.29-39, preached at Rejoice Lutheran Church in Erie, Colorado. 

When I was in elementary school, I would race to get ready each morning. As soon as I woke up I’d cast off the covers, throw on some clothes, grab a quick breakfast, and be out the door and on my way in just minutes. When I arrived at school, I’d cautiously straddle the fine line between a quick shuffle and full on running, somewhere right around olympic speed walking, as I made my way down the covered sidewalks and linoleum floors of the fourth and fifth grade hall. The classroom at the end of this hall, the last room on the right, just before the principal’s office, cast a warm, yellow glow out into the hall and emitted a continual, reverberating hum that shook the whole of each student’s existence.

This room was the computer lab, the room filled with the most advanced technology my juvenile eyes had ever seen and was without a doubt the coolest place in the entire school. As I turned the corner, a room filled with iPads loaded with an endless supply of games awaited me...or...wait...no, it was a room full of Apple IIe’s, equipped with two 5 inch floppy disk options. One was ‘Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?’ and the other was “The Oregon Trail.’ Since Carmen San Diego required a physical copy of Frommer’s Travel Guide, which was perpetually lost, I became intimately familiar with the computer game classic, ‘The Oregon Trail.” As we head into the later half of the academic year on campus in Boulder, I am becoming convinced that the college experience is a lot like The Oregon Trail. 

The Oregon Trail is a cult classic, in the game players begin as pioneers on the shores of the Missouri River, hoping to travel all the way past the Columbia to paradise in Oregon. The beginning of the game is the most critical part. In Missouri, pioneers make the decisions which will give shape to the long journey ahead. At the beginning one must determine how many oxen to buy, which route to take, and who to take with you. It’s not too unlike summer orientation for students just before they enroll in college. There they sit down with an advisor for the first time, and while they don’t pick out oxen or mules, they do declare a major, are assigned roommates, and plan in detail the four year journey that awaits, all with hope of reaching the Columbia and the degree that lies on its golden shores. 

But the exciting part of the game and of college and really of life in general is that things rarely, if ever, go according to the plans we have made, even with the best of intentions. Along the Oregon Trail wagons breaks down, there are rivers which must be crossed, and much to the delight of giggling school children you might lose some of your traveling partners to dysentery or another fascinating ailment of the old west. 

Students, too, lay out extravagant plans and while dysentery on campus is quite rare, they do sometimes find themselves more passionate about tropical marine ecology than finance, or even that they care much more about finance than about tropical marine ecology. Students look around and realize they are walking down the five year path rather than the planned four. Or they spend their summers working for peanuts at a camp rather than in a lucrative internship or immersed in a summer of late night research shooting lasers into the heavens rather than singing songs towards those same stars. Students, like all of us who struggle to walk the roads strewn between the shores of the Missouri, the Columbia, and the Jordan, continually find themselves on new and unexpected paths. 

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus is walking a similar road. His journey, begun in the waters of the Jordan, will lead him quickly to Jerusalem and the cross. But the first steps down this path are not the ones we might expect. If anything, Jesus’ path through this first chapter of Mark might best be described as erratic. 

Jesus is baptized in the Jordan by John. Immediately, Jesus is driven out into the wilderness for forty days. Afterwards Jesus comes back to Galilee where he calls and gathers his disciples, telling them to, “Follow me.” But from Galilee’s shores they immediately leave and go into the synagogue in Capernaum, where he casts out an unclean spirit. Jesus and the disciples follow suite and quickly go out of the synagogue and into our reading for today where this erratic path continues...

Jesus and the disciples leave the synagogue and go right into the house of Simon & Andrew. There Simon’s mother-in-law is ill and Jesus lifts her up and the fever leaves. That evening, everyone came to the house where the sick were cured and demons sent away. But then, Jesus doesn’t hang around very long, early in the morning he is up and at it and back out the door. The crowds and disciples, always just behind the curve, find him missing in the morning and they too go out searching for Jesus in the deserted places. And when they finally find him, Jesus tells them, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there; for that is what I came to do.” And so they go, on and on. 

Just one chapter into Mark’s gospel and Jesus is running all over the place like an third grader scampering around, looking for a computer lab. Out and in, away and back, up and down, and on and on Jesus goes. The disciples and crowds, called to follow him, are drug all over the Galilean countryside. 

To those of us whose lives are not lived along straight and narrow paths this is good news. Because rather than take the interstate from the river Jordan to Jerusalem, rather than take a direct flight from Kansas City to Portland, Jesus takes the scattered path that leads directly to us, directly to where we are. This morning we hear that Jesus takes whatever route necessary to find us and pulls us on around the next bend, on to the neighboring town for that, that is what Jesus comes to do. 

And, no doubt, the places Jesus goes and takes us to are scary. The way of Christ leads through the places where we are faced with the reality of who we are; the reality sickness and death, of the places haunted by demons, and the reality we can never get it all figured out and executed perfectly to plan. 

While we cannot predict the winding path along which Jesus moves and the Spirit blows, there is one way God moves on which we can depend. Jesus’ path takes him to demons, sickness, and eventually to death itself. But at each step along the way, Jesus brings us through these things and into life. Demons are sent away, fevers leave, the sick are healed, and from the cross life springs forth. 

It is this constant, powerful action of God that pulls us through the river at our baptism and pushes us on across the Columbia and into the life God holds for us. It is this God who empowers us, in college or in life, to dive all the way into the rivers and paths stretching out across the landscape of our lives, trusting that along them Jesus will pull us around the bend and into life once more. Amen.