It is such a great honor to be here. I have so many connections with this church. Now preaching here for the very first time. It’s very strange because I knew John Jeffers. I knew Tripp’s grandfather when I was in South Georgia. He was a dear friend and have known Tripp for many years. I know Dale Peterson and my daughter, my youngest daughter, Katie was a student at Auburn and this was her church.

And she went through Auburn, as so many do. The first year, they are looking around for a place to belong and every now and then attending St. Mattress on Sunday morning. But she landed here and this became her church. She worked with the youth part of the time here. She became buddies with Wayne Flynt. They are still friends to this day. And so many of you in this church loved her and cared for her. And as parents, there’s nothing greater in the world than a church that loves your child.

I loved seeing these children here this morning. What a great achievement they had raising funds for something very important. Katie is now, she left here and found herself in New York City and is a vice principal at a middle school. She’s married and has a four-year-old. daughter and a one-year-old son, our first grandson. We’re going up to see shortly.

We were there not long ago and my granddaughter, who’s four, loves to play hairdresser and so grandmother and I will sit in a big chair and she’ll crawl up on the top of the chair and put her legs over our shoulders and do our hair for us. And this is important if you’re a grandparent. And one day she was fussing with my hair and she said, your hair is gray, Papa. I said, it used to be brown. It did. Yes. When you get older, your hair turns gray. She looked at mine. She said, so men’s hair turns gray. And she looked at her grandmother and said, and grandmother’s hair turns blonde. And being the smart man that I am, said, yes, that is exactly what happens.

It is so wonderful to know this church because of who you are and the kind of people that you are. The world’s a bit crazy right now. Don’t know if you know this. There’s a lot of insanity across our culture and across this world. But it’s going to fall apart into something else as insanity always does.

It was interesting to not long ago come and teach for the OLLI program here and some of my friends from that program are here today. And I taught on the First Amendment and religion and we had a grand time sailing through American history and finding out that America has gone crazy at regular intervals over the years. And always we are in search of finding a center.

And today I was thinking about us, and as we navigate these strange times, are you a tourist or a pilgrim in your faith journey? That’s my question for you today. Now I’ve been both, how about you? There’s a difference between being a tourist and a pilgrim.

Now I was a tourist on three tour groups to Israel. I led one, but the first two that I went to were with a company that’s now broke. But they, at that time, would try to get preachers to come to Israel so they could bring back laypeople who had money the next time. So for $660, we could get a round trip tour to Israel in 1982 from New York. We had to get to New York, but then we’d fly to, so this first tour group I was on, was all preachers.

You talk about crazy. We were liberals, fundamentalists, and some I couldn’t classify. And we were all stuck on a bus together for two weeks. It was quite interesting. had all sorts of things happen, and we were moving fast to see everything. They didn’t give us a lot of time. We often said, we ran today where Jesus walked. snapped pictures like goofy tourists overwhelmed by the place and all the things that we saw, but it ran so fast, it just sort of all melted together.

There were lots of things, I won’t bore you with a lot of details, like the night that some of us who took the added on part of going to Cairo stayed up all night to go to the midnight show at the Holiday Inn pyramids to see the most famous belly dancer in Egypt. We consider that to be a cultural event that we should not miss. And we had two liberals, two fundamentalists, and a moderate, but we were all as one that night.

One fellow brought all the clothes from the 70s that he wanted to get rid of, including white paisley ties and the whole nine yards. And instead of giving tips, he gave his clothes away. So he would have a suitcase empty to put all of his trinkets in as he went back. So today you will see badly dressed Arabs and Israelis all over that country with clothes from the 70s that he gave.

There was a fundamentalist preacher from Oklahoma that stood up on the bus as we drove up to the Golden Gate and clapped his hands together and said, praise God, boys, there’s where he’s gonna land. Jesus will land right there when he’s coming back. And a fellow who was a Yale graduate looked over at me and said, what on earth is he talking about? And I had to explain it to him.

But it got serious after that. By the sixth or seventh day, we were dividing. The wine sippers had been ostracized by the true believers, holy and righteous to the extent that they wouldn’t take communion with the rest of the group. We divided over eschatology between pre-tribs, post-tribs, mid-tribs, and no-tribs. We had fought over inerrancy, archaeological evidence, ecclesiastical issues, and preaching styles. We were the Church of today.

I do believe that when we get to heaven, Jesus will take everyone in except the preachers who will be sent to a side room for a long remedial course in following Jesus. I’m not sure the Church, as we have made it, is what He had in mind. I like that I see and feel much of what that’s supposed to be in you. Are you a pilgrim or a tourist?

In 1992, a Catholic theologian named Doris Donnelly wrote an article about that as pilgrim and tourist as a conflicting picture image or metaphor for the Christian journey to God. She said there are some differences between those two. First of all, pilgrims see that there is an internal dimension to the pilgrimage. That is, we are going for something very important. While tourists are more concerned with the outward, we’re going to see things, we’re going to buy things, we’re going to do things, and we want to learn things, but we essentially intend, hopefully, to return safely and pretty much like we left, except that we’ve had an experience. Nothing wrong with that.

Secondly, pilgrims invest themselves while tourists avoid too much personal commitment along the way. I mean, you don’t want to wind up in a foreign ER somewhere or having some trauma happen, but pilgrims go and they walk and worship and they move more intentionally and slowly because there is something there to be found in the journey.

Thirdly, she said, The pilgrim wants to be changed by the pilgrimage. The tourist wants to avoid too much change happening along that way. Now, we are changed whenever we travel. It’s a good thing. But mostly we want things that we can go back and in the old days, before we had digital cameras, we could make slides and show them for three hours to all of our friends and relatives with long descriptions of each place we went and how significant it was.

Now, she said fourthly, both the journey and the arrival are what matters for the Pilgrim. The tourist wants to go there and to see it, but they’ve got to come back and their life will resume as it was.

fifth thing that’s very important, she said, is that the community is formed for the pilgrim. Well, that’s not necessarily something the tourist wants. Many of you have probably gone on cruises or you’ve gone on tours where you made some friends while you were there. Vicki and I went in 2005, I was on sabbatical and we were in Scotland and we had bought a ticket to go diagonally across the country and one day and back to Glasgow on a bus with people we’d never met before. We all just assembled, got on the bus, and we discovered we were the only people on the bus that spoke English. And so, other than the tour guide, who was an enthusiastic Scot, he pointed out all the famous sites and all the beautiful places, but most of all, he showed to us the vast number of distilleries that they have. in Scotland. was impressed in a different way.

But when we got back, we got off, never saw those people again and didn’t really feel disappointed in that. But if you are traveling with others as a pilgrim, you are traveling in a community that is going to deepen on that journey.

And all I want to say is this, that it is a possibility for us to live life here today, now, as either a pilgrim or a tourist. You can live your life just as though you’re just sort of passing by and that you are here. but not engaged in a way that takes you to a different kind of place. But if you go as a pilgrim through life, you are seeing things with different eyes and you are listening more closely and you are praying unexpectedly and you are listening past the surface.

Now it’s rather interesting to look at old Abram here. I did not read the 11th chapter, but if we had, we’d realize that God didn’t just start talking to Abram all of a sudden and he got up and moved, you know, it is often, and I’ve done this, to teach that it’s extraordinary that here’s a man that left everything he knew and took everything he had and went to a place he had never seen. But in fact, if we look at it, there was a lot going on before that. His father had had some chaos going on, one son had already died, and now Abram was helping to raise the nephew. His father had moved them toward the land of Canaan and they had stopped in Haran. He wanted to go there but he finally came to a place and said, we’ll just settle here.

Have you ever found yourself at a place where you had just settled and you said, you know, I’m tired, I need something to be normal? Well, I kind of feel that way about the entire world right now. But the desire to find that place of settling down. You know, when we came in, my wife very wisely asked your dear minister of music, where can we sit that we will not be in someone else’s pew? Now that I’ve retired, I have a place at my church where I sit every Sunday and if somebody’s there when I get there for just a minute, I’m irked. We just have this thing of settling down.

And that’s not a terrible thing. Stability is good. But it may make us settle for less than life still has to give us. Do you see what I’m saying? We can settle that I’ve got so much pain in my joints now, or I’ve got so many problems, or I’m so worried about the money, or I’m so, so, so, so many times, it can become a very brittle place. where spiritually it’s hard to move anymore.

Dogmatism is a great place to settle down, where you already know all the answers. As I heard a preacher say once, you’ve been to the far side of God and brought back pictures, and you know everything there is to know. And there are plenty of pseudo-Christian versions of the faith that offer that to you now. All you have to do is believe these five things. You’ve got it. Let me tell you something, you don’t got it. It is an adventure of faith.

Jesus modeled it. He lived it in front of his disciples. And even after three years walking right with the incarnate Son of God, they still didn’t get it. So the best way is just in faith, keep trusting, and don’t be afraid to keep going forward.

I will tell you that at 71, almost 72, the next part of life is the most intimidating I think I’ve ever seen. because life is going a little bit like this. Not as much as it used to be. Costs more. You worry about things you didn’t used to worry about. How many times we need to stop and go to the restroom before we get there.

All of that. In all my years of pastoral work, I heard a lot of people say, I never thought I’d be raising children at this age. Or I never thought my life would turn out this way. or I didn’t imagine I would have to deal with blank, because we didn’t prepare for life as it would be, just how we thought it ought to be.

Garrison Keillor said he was a father of a young child. He was a much older person when he remarried, and he thought he ought to read books about parenting so he could be a good parent. And he said he thought he was gonna write another book now called It Doesn’t Work. Your kids don’t turn out the way you planned for them to live. That’s part of college, is they’re going and finding their way, their voice, who they are, and who God called them to be. You took them to Haran, and they took your money and went on to college. But they have to find the rest of the way. And now you have to do it a different way.

I told my children there was a three-fold test of maturity. that you’re out of school, you’re out of my house, and you’re out of my money. And my middle daughter said, two out of three is not bad, Dad.

It’s a bumpy road, that transition, handing the baton. But if Abram is right and not his father, Terah, we should try not to settle. His disciples probably would have said, Look, if it’s so bad on the other side of that garden, why don’t we just stay here and wait it out? But he knew they had to go on. And that’s the world we’re in now. And if anything is gonna get to where it needs to be, we need to not be afraid. Go on. Even though all Abram had was that voice saying, there, it’ll work out, don’t worry about it. How about a little more detail? At least a brochure or a map or something.

Wendy Wright, a wonderful Catholic writer, once gave a lecture about the Christians who went to the desert that I heard, and she said, you know, the desert monks were not escaping the world. They were protesting it. Because when Constantine and those after him Christianized the Roman Empire and domesticated it into the culture of that time, they were sort of Roman nationalists, if you will. And when they did that, They were saying, look, we’ll take care of everything. You’re all just going about having your church. And the monks went out to the desert and said, this is not the gospel. The gospel is 100 % Jesus and nobody owns it and nobody controls it. And so they went out to protest it and they purified themselves and they formed communities.

But most of all, she said the desert was a place in which there was silence. They didn’t have any devices and phones and iPads and computers, none of the noise of the Romans, just listening to their own hearts. listening for the voice that tells us most truly who we are. And if we ever get down there, there is a chance to become a pilgrim, where we listen in a way that is listening down below our own noisy voices. What a friend of mine once called that crazy monkey mind we walk around with all the time that can never be still.

This undoing throws us to a coming to ourselves. But if we go there, we are able as churches, as people, to suddenly find ourselves in a new place. And amazing things can happen.

You know, I took a third group to Israel many years ago from Vestavia Hills Baptist Church. We had a wonderful tour group. There was one rich fellow there that went with us and just got down to the hospital, and so he hired this poor. young Arab fellow to, and he was probably 125 pounds, to push him around on the cobblestones of Jerusalem in the streets in a wheelchair when he got tired.

And he was a very impatient fellow. He’d always been used to making the world run the way it was supposed to. so they bounced around and we were going down the Via Dolorosa and he just kept bouncing and bouncing and bouncing. And finally he got so mad and he uttered a few words that I can’t share here, but. He just jumped up and he said, blankety blank, he said, I’ll just walk. And he got up out of the chair and started walking and there was a tour group coming along from Oklahoma about that time and they all stopped and this woman’s eyes got wide and she said, praise God, he did it again. Right here on the Via Dolorosa. We didn’t tell them.

But on the last time I went, I went with a group of preachers. Your pastor may have gone on one of these tour groups. They were really pilgrimages. We stayed in two places in two weeks. We would go out part of the day, but we would come back and spend time thinking about what we saw. And we saw the Arab quarter walled off and the guard towers and the graffiti and the anger. We saw the beautiful sights. We really pondered. the pain and the beauty and the wonder of that place.

One day when we were about to head out, we stayed at the Catholic retreat center. The pope has a place down there. If y’all need to go sometime, it’s right across from the New Gate, and I’m sure you could get in if you tell him I sent you.

And the guy that was the head there at that time took us up, he said, meet me on the roof at. at sunrise, about 515, something like that. So we went up there at 515 in the morning and the sun was beginning to come up over the Mount of Olives. It was orange.

And he began from that rooftop to walk us through the last week of Jesus’ life in a straight line from the top of that mountain down the Mount of Olives across the Valley of Kidron leading right up to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher where the crucifixion probably took place. And he said to us, we were all, we were men and women. He said, people. You are not here to see things. You are here to experience the risen Christ. And I thought it was good that a Catholic priest could lecture all of us Protestants on what we needed to be looking for.

There are a lot of choices in this time. But I hope that we will go to whatever monastic pilgrimage we need to pass the noise that is clattering to tell us who we ought to be and what we ought to do. And listen deep, keep listening way down deep to who it is that you actually are. And once you hear it, don’t stop until you get there.

Would you bow with me in prayer? Bless this wonderful family of faith, O God, and all of us who want to follow you in our hearts and lives. And we pray that every day as the distractions mount around us, we could come aside and resume the pilgrimage that leads us to you. Through Christ our Lord, Amen.