“Taking the Long Way Around”
The Reverend Tom Steffen
28 February 2010

Readings: Philippians 3:17-4:1

Luke 13:31-35

In Sue Monk Kidd’s book When the Heart Waits, she tells the story of the time when a woman by the name of Sweet, who looked after Sue, her brothers and the house in which she was raised, pointed out a wheelbarrow full of rain water that was somewhere on her grandmother’s property. Swimming through the rain water were hundreds of tadpoles. Sue and her brothers raced inside and asked Sweet for three jars. As she was handing them out, the grandmother appeared in the door. “Girls don’t catch tadpoles,” she said with a laugh. “Sue, you come along with me, and I’ll teach you to play ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano.” And her brothers dashed off to the wheelbarrow, and Sue ended up at the piano bench.

A few days later, Sue and Sweet were out for their frequent walk to the city park about four blocks from her house. But that day Sweet took her hand and started in the wrong direction. “We’re taking the long way round,” she said. The long way? About six blocks into the long way around, Sweet stopped beside a ditch swollen with water and tadpoles. She pulled a Mason jar from her pocket, one with nail holes in the lid. “Now aren’t you glad we took the long way around?” she said. “Ain’t no tadpoles the short way.” Kidd writes: “Inside my head I heard my grandmother’s words: “Only boys catch tadpoles.” Only boys. I hesitated, but Sweet nudged me with the jar. Soon I was elbow deep in the brown water, chasing after the rich, darting life before me. I was reveling in a new universe, and it was one of the grander times of my girlhood. It was the day I learned to challenge the tight, tidy categories of what was expected and possible in my world. Like the tadpoles, I was molting into a new being.” (Page 18, 19)

I don’t know what words from your past echo in your head, but they have something to do with the confusion of face we were talking about last week. Remember? And I don’t know the tight and tidy categories that more or less imprison you, but I know mine. But above the words that seem to limit us, a Voice calls us to take “the long way around.”

The lectionary readings assigned to this Sunday in Lent remind us of the importance of the long way around. The First Testament reading we did not read is Genesis, Chapter 15, and it concerns Abraham’s and Sarah’s long way from Iraq to Palestine. The epistle lesson (Philippians 3:17-4:1) we heard reminds us that our citizenship is in heaven, which I don’t think means that our future mailing address is a dozen light years away from King County. But it does mean, St. Paul states, “that we are part of a long and mysterious process of transformation, from humiliation to glory,” whatever that means. But whatever it means, it sounds something like what you might find in a wheelbarrow or ditch swollen with water and tadpoles, mysterious life worth capturing in a jar for adoration if you could. “Stand firm” in this long process, says Paul, because there ain’t no life the short way.

The long way, it turns out, is the way of the Christ. “I must be on my way,” He says, “because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.” I don’t know what that means, exactly, but I know the meaning of His next line: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! Oh, how often have I desired to gather you together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing.” (Luke 13:34) Brooding, taking the long way around, waiting, whatever describes it best for you, this is the best way to travel.

Noah, you’ll remember, waits for the flood to recede. Daniel waits through the night in a den of lions as dangerous as a killer whale. Sarah broods in her barrenness in the hope she might become a hen. Israel waits and walks and wanders in Egypt and then in the desert, and then Babylonia, and, as far as I can tell, she is still waiting. The Psalms are filled with waiting and hen-like brooding. The ten maidens in Jesus’ parable wait and watch, and my favorite – perhaps yours as well – describes a father who waits as one of his sons takes the long way home. During a long waiting period in her life, Kidd writes: “In the Bible I glimpsed the portrait of a patient God who enters into the experience of those who wait.” And I think she’s right.

This is what we know of Jesus, which leads us to call him the Christ, I think. The waiting, the brooding Hen. The one who takes the long way around to Jerusalem. The one who longs to enter our own waiting to pull us in under His wings. Thoreau once wrote: “Nothing can be more useful to us than a determination not to be hurried.” Now, that’s not an excuse to be lazy or to sleep walk one’s way through life. You can occasionally use that line when your mate or parent asks you if you’ve finished the list of chores you were assigned. But use it when demanding people are demanding you to hurry.

What Thoreau had in mind, I think, was that the long way is not determined by distance but by intention. In his journal dated February 8, 1857, Thoreau wrote: “You think I am impoverishing myself by withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature.” We must walk with our eyes wide open, and our hearts as well, and walk slowly whenever we can, just in case, just in case you see a bunch of tadpoles or maybe a cocoon.

I had just decided to give today’s sermon the title of “The Long Way Around.” It was Wednesday afternoon while I was listening to one of the instructors end her lecture. I’ll confess it, I had been daydreaming about this sermon during her talk. She sounded the bell that signaled two hours of silence would begin. On my way out of the room, I stopped by the tables covered with books for sale – hard to resist – and spent the next several minutes dipping in and out of the ones I thought I might purchase. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a woman moving back and forth and in front and behind a room divider. I watched for about a minute until I couldn’t any longer. I moved to her, tapped her on the shoulder and said: “Can I help?” And she replied: “Please, I’m kind of lost.” So I walked her about 100 feet or so and she said, “OK, I can take it from here.” She had a couple of things in her hands, so I said, “I’ll call the elevator down; it’s right here.” And she replied: “That’s OK, I’ll take the steps.” And so, before I returned to the book table, I watched her move to the door that would lead her to a staircase that ascended three stories. It was the long way around to get out of the lecture room and back to wherever she wanted to go. And it was the scary way around, because being blind she would be in danger if she didn’t walk slowly and with real intention. And so that’s how she walked those steps, several times a day, for the entire week.

If a seventy-something-year-old blind woman can take the stairs, the long way around, so can I and so can you. Isn’t that right?

I am grateful to Reva Allington, friend and member of St. Peter’s UMC who edits my sermons.