September 28, 2025 - Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost: Healing: Leave-taking and Travelling Light

September 28, 2025  Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Genesis 12:1-4
“Healing: Leave-taking and Travelling Light
Douglas T. King

“On the Road there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars...”  “Sal, we gotta go and never stop going 'till we get there.''Where we going, man?''I don't know but we gotta go.”  “As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, "Pass here and go on, you're on the road to heaven.”  “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”

Anybody hazard a guess as to the novel being quoted?  Here’s a hint, the opening and closing quotes included the title.

Yes, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac.  A formative book for me in my younger years as I and my backpack were making our way from New York to California, to Mexico, to Canada, and back across the continent to New York and then Princeton.  For those of you unfamiliar with the novel it is a romanticized tale of a vagabond’s life travelling the country. It is a fine example of Beat literature, which is known for celebrating leave-taking and traveling light.
 
The poem on the cover of our bulletin, by the brilliant Polish poet, Anna Kamienska, speaks to the challenge of travelling light.

I carry from childhood all this baggage:

Father’s violin in a black case,
A wooden plate with an inscription
To break bread with friends is best,
One narrow road
With a passing shadow of a horse and cart,
A wall marked with mold,
A child’s folding bed,
A vase painted with doves,
Objects
More durable than life,
A stuffed bird
On top of a beat-up cupboard,
Ah, and this huge
Pyramid of stairs and doors.
It’s not easy
To carry so much.
And I know until the end
I won’t dispose of a single piece.
Until my wise mother
Comes from nowhere to nowhere
And says,
“Give it up my darling daughter.
It makes no sense.”

In this fourth sermon in our series on healing we are considering how leave-taking and traveling light are essential to the process of healing. Our scripture lesson from the book of Genesis provides us with the opening salvo in the remarkable tale of Abram, soon to be Abraham, and Sarai, soon to be Sarah.  If this were a movie it would be nearly a sudden jump-cut.  It all happens so quickly we could easily miss the significance.
 
Abram, who as far as we know, is minding his own business, receives a pronouncement from God.  “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you…”  God goes on to make a bunch of promises about Abram becoming a great nation.  But let us not miss the first step in all of this.  Seventy-five-year-old Abram and his wife are being asked to leave behind everything they know and journey into the great unknown.  If Abram wants to be in relationship with God, if he wants to receive divine blessings he must step into what is beyond himself and his routines.  

And Abram is not the only one.  Jacob does not encounter the divine until he is on the run from his brother.  Moses does not encounter the divine until he travels out beyond the wilderness.  Joseph does not comprehend his divine purpose until he finds himself far from home, in Egypt.  Rabbi Alan Lew writes, “All this is because the Torah is trying to communicate to us that leave-taking is extremely significant.  It is the prerequisite to any encounter with God…God is never encountered in either convention or habit.  God is encountered in reality, precisely the ground of being—the present moment reality that convention and habit obscure.  When we leave home, when we leave our habitual relationship to the world, we see things freshly, we become flush with our lives…
(Lew, pp.15-16)

When we are seeking to be healed, whether in body, mind, or spirit, it always entails stepping beyond where we are now.  Healing is always a process of moving forward.  And this reality dovetails with the ways in which we can and will encounter the divine.  When we have been hurt or wounded in some way, it is far too easy for us to dwell in that moment and focus our energy on reliving that moment.  Sometimes we face the same challenges with our relationship with the divine.  We can dwell on how we have experienced God in the past and believe that is the only way to experience God.  But our God is always stepping into the future.  If we wish to experience the healing only God can provide we need to move with the divine into that future.
 
Unfortunately, we all know people who are trapped in the past.  They spent far too much time rehearsing and re-rehearsing all the ways they have been hurt before.  They carry grudges. They live as if every way they have ever been hurt is happening once more on each new day. They are burdened by what has come before.  And with that burden they cannot find a way to step forward into a future that allows them to heal.  

The biblical witness is clear. Our God is a God of the future.  While some may fear the future we are called to welcome it.  We have received the promise that our destination is in God’s everlasting arms.  And that future includes being completely healed and made whole.  If we want to share in God’s blessings, if we want to be healed, we are called to step forward into that future as well.

When I hear the words at the conclusion of Anna Kamienska’s poem,  

“It’s not easy
To carry so much.
And I know until the end
I won’t dispose of a single piece.
Until my wise mother
Comes from nowhere to nowhere
And says,
“Give it up my darling daughter.
It makes no sense.”

I hear the words of Jesus, “Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

When I hear the words of Jack Kerouac, “Sal, we gotta go and never stop going 'till we get there.'”  I also hear the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John, “’…you know the place to where I am going.’  Thomas said to him, ‘Lord we do not know where you are going.  How can we know the way?’  Jesus said, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life…”

Let us lay down the burdens of our past and step into our redeemed and restored future with the divine.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.  


Lew, Allen, Be Still and Get Going, Little, Brown and Company
 New York, 2005.