When Dead Ends Become Fresh Starts - a Sermon preached on May 22, 2022 at the First Pres-byterian Church of Clarks Summit, PA, based on Acts 16. 6-15

We begin this morning tagging along on the Lewis & Clark Expedition. Meriwether Lewis is at the source of the Missouri River.  Our guide for the next few moments is Tod Bol-singer, who captures the moment in these excerpts from his book entitled, Canoeing the Mountains. Tod tells the story better than I ever could. So here goes.

            “He dipped his hands into the icy water and took a long drink. Fifteen months of hard travel, a seemingly endless string of days of backbreaking upstream slogging had led to this moment…

            But he was here.

            Lewis and a small scouting party had…followed a small trail up a creek and now were at the spring itself. This little trickle was the source of the mighty Missouri River. This water would flow all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. They had found what no person of European descent had before them. And the most challenging obstacle on their journey from what was then the United States to the Pacific Ocean was now behind them.

            Or so he thought…

            …Lewis, slaking his thirst from that little stream meant that he was about to realize the dream of centuries of pioneers, to fulfill the ambition of his president and to enter into the pantheon of explorers. His name and his Corps would be remembered as the discoverers of the highly prized Northwest Passage. Lewis believed that he would walk up the hill, look down a gentle slope that would take his men half a day to cross with their canoes on their backs, and then they would see the Columbia River. After fifteen months of going upstream they looked forward to letting the current swiftly whisk them to the Pacific Ocean. They would crest the hill, find the stream and coast to the finish line.

            They could not have been more disappointed.

            What Lewis actually discovered was that three hundred years of experts had all been completely and utterly wrong. In front of him was not a gentle slope down to a navigable river running to the Pacific Ocean but the Rocky Mountains. Stretching out for miles and miles as far as the eyes could see was one set of peaks after another…

            At that moment everything that Meriwether Lewis assumed about his journey changed.  He was planning on exploring the new world by boat.  He was a river explorer. They planned on rowing, and they thought the hardest part was behind them. But in truth everything they had accomplished was only a prelude to what was in front of them.

            Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery were about to go off the map and into uncharted territory. They would have to change plans, give up expectations, even reframe their entire mission. What lay before them was nothing like what was behind them…  The true adventure—their real discovery—was just be-ginning.”[i]

            Long years ago the Apostle Paul thought he knew where he was going.  He was making his way from Asia Minor toward the vast continent beyond…but he too encountered a journey changing obsta-cle. Luke, the author of Acts, provides a short travelogue of Paul’s attempts to plot his own course, only to be thwarted by the ultimate travel agent: “They went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, hav-ing been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. When they had come opposite Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them; so, passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas.”[ii]

            Troas is a coastal town on the Aegean Sea. That is where Paul’s dead end turned into a fresh start. He had a vision in the night of a man who invited him to cross the blue waters of the sea and be-gin to help those who lived at the southeastern edge of Europe. Having been thwarted at every turn as he plotted his own course, now, led by the Spirit he journeys unimpeded, hop over to Samothrace, a skip through Neapolis and a jump to Philippi. There, within days, on the Sabbath, Paul gets to help. The work of the Spirit is again revealed with a surprise twist: though the plea to come help in Macedonia had been voiced by a man, the people Paul encountered there were women, most notably a rich woman named Lydia.

            Ronald Cole-Turner, a professor from our Presbyterian Seminary across the state in Pitts-burgh writes of the meeting between Paul and Lydia on the outskirts of Philippi:          

            “It almost didn’t happen, this meeting of the businesswoman and the missionaries, and it surely would not have happened were it not for the inexplicable convergence of human faithfulness and divine guidance. Paul and Lydia and the Holy Spirit all work together in this event, this ‘chance’ encounter by the river.  Paul would not have been guided to this place at this moment, were he not first of all at God’s disposal, open to being guided, sensitively attuned to being steered in one direction and away from all others.  Lydia would not have arrived at this place or time, had she not first of all been a worshipper of God, a seeker already on her way.”[iii]

            Getting to the heart of the matter, the professor continues: “Paul does his part and Lydia hers, but it is God who guides all things and works in and through all things, not just for good but for what would otherwise be impossible. It is the Spirit who brings Lydia to Paul so that she can hear the Gospel.”[iv]

            “However that is only half of what is required,” says the professor, who adds: “True, Lydia must first hear the words of good news, and to do that she must meet Paul. She also must hear the words as truth, as gospel, as the answer to her search.  It is the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ that prepares Lydia’s heart to hear, receive, and understand.”[v] Luke described it this way: “The Lord opened her heart to give heed to what was said by Paul.” (v.14).

            The professor would have us see this as the center of the story. He calls it a “moment of inter-section between human obedience and divine initiative.  Longing and grace meet there on the river bank. The longing heart of a faithful woman is opened by the gracious impulse of a faith-giving God in an action that, like the incarnation itself, is at once fully human and fully divine.”[vi] It is, if you think about it, a moment that is both ordinary and extraordinary.  I like the way Ron describes it.

            “She came to the riverside, to a secluded place of prayer. Perhaps she expected to meet other women, Jewish women or Gentile seekers for prayer together. Perhaps she came regularly. What she did not know was that on this particular day outside the city gates, she would be met by Paul and his com-panions, missionaries looking for anyone who was seeking God in this hidden place of prayer. There at the riverside, Lydia found the God who was finding her.”[vii]

            The openness of Paul to hop a boat on the basis of his nighttime vision, combined with Lydia’s openness to hear and heed the word of God provides much for us to contemplate.  How much room do we give God to break into our dreams with a bit of direction?  How deliberately do we seek to eagerly discover what God has to say to us?  How responsive are we when God does get a word in edgewise? Will we be willing to cross a boundary or break through a barrier when the Spirit invites and encour-ages us to move?

            These Easter Season weeks as we’ve heard stories from the early church, the boundaries keep expanding and previously observe barriers continue to fall.  Marianne Blickenstaff points out that “The detail that they (Paul and his traveling partners) went ‘outside the city gates’ is important. City gates protected the people inside, so that Paul and his company are crossing another boundary into unknown and potentially dangerous territory.”[viii]

            Among the lesser dangers was the risk that those gathered at the place of prayer would not be open to hearing what Paul had to say. Yet when we step out in faith, we do so remembering that we do not go it alone.  Says Marianne: “The detail that God was the one who opened Lydia’s heart is an  im-portant reminder that it is God who inspires faith through the workings of the Holy Spirit. Paul and his entourage preach the good news, but the opening of hearts is God’s doing. We sometimes need to be reminded of this when we talk about ‘our’ ministry. When we become discouraged, we can remember with gratitude and trust that it is the Holy Spirit’s power, not ours, that opens hearts.”[ix]

            The dead ends Paul experienced trying to take his mission to Asia led to a fresh start in Europe.  The Spirit makes such things happen all the time.

            Back in the Spring of 2011 the congregation of the First United Presbyterian Church of West Pittston and I had a pretty good sense that God’s Spirit was at work amongst us.  Some new, young families with children decided they needed to be part of our faith community.  We hosted a concert where a certain piano playing pastor and his jazz quartet launched their latest compact disk.  We were grateful that God’s Spirit was opening hearts to hear the word and hands to serve others in the name of Christ. 

            Then the summer ended with the double whammy of a tropical storm and a hurricane that saturated the Susquehanna River watershed.  The river came out of its banks and flooded over 800 homes and businesses, and three church buildings, including ours.  A few days later some of you helped lug soggy carpets, pew cushions, hymnals and the most treasured books in this pas-tor’s library and toss them in a heap outside.  The cleanup went on for months.

            Even before all the muck had been cleared so the professionals could come in a month later with disinfectants, industrial dehumidifiers, air scrubbers, our Session and Trustees were meeting weekly to plot our congregation’s course.  We worshiped with our daughter church for three weeks, and some thought that would be a good solution, but it was not to be.  We did some repairs to the foundation, hired an architect and began figuring out how to rebuild a 19^th century building from the inside out.  A multimillion dollar price tag ended that dream.

By then we began what ended up as a four year sojourn as renters in an underused Roman Cath-olic Church.  It was part of a parish in the process of consolidation, so some thought making a deal to buy it was the answer. A seven-figure price tag shut that door. When another Catholic Church with a huge rectory and a separate parish hall came on the market at a reasonable price, we got the same message as Paul when he wanted to go to Asia. No way!

            Then the Spirit opened our hearts and those of the Wyoming Presbyterian Church to be-gin a partnership that enabled God’s love to be shared in new ways. The old building in West Pittston finally sold.  Wyoming’s church building and their old schoolhouse became home to two congregations engag-ing the surrounding communities in fresh ways. The doors were thrown open for monthly educational events for the community.  A neighborhood needs assessment inspired a tutoring program for kids in the local school district whose families could not afford to hire such help. The two congregations began to worship together on special occasions, and when I retired, they began the process of calling one pastor to serve both churches. In two weeks, on Pentecost Sunday, Jan and I have been invited to a celebration of the merger of those two congregations.  The dead end brought by the flood eventually yielded a fresh start, and the Holy Spirit was behind it all the way, opening eyes, ears, hearts and hands.

            In many ways the Covid pandemic has seemed like a dead end.  Cherished programs within and beyond the church came to a grinding halt.  Some have started up again. Others have not. And so we join Lydia in prayer.  We pray that our own hearts will be opened to hear God’s call on our lives.  We pray that God will open the hearts of those who come in contact with the members of this church en-gaged in mission and ministry whether within or beyond these walls.  And we pray that when we have a Lewis and Clark moment when old plans become useless, we’ll be open to God’s redirection.

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            We end this morning as we began, with Meriwether Lewis looking West toward the Pacific Ocean he could not see on the other side of those Rocky Mountain peaks. Again, I am reading the account provided by Tod Bolsinger, whose book is subtitled: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory:   

            “As he stepped off the map into uncharted territory, Meriwether Lewis discovered that what was in front of him was nothing like what was behind him, and that what had brought him to this point in the journey would take him no farther. Lewis faced a daunting decision: What would he do now? Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery were looking for a water route, but now they had run out of  water. How do you canoe over mountains?

            You don’t. If you want to go forward, you change. You adapt. Meriwether Lewis looked at the miles and miles of snow-covered peaks and knew that to continue his journey he would have to change his entire approach. The same is true for all of us who are called to lead beyond the boundaries of what is known… We go from being river rats to mountain climbers. We keep on course with the same goal, but change absolutely everything required to make it through this uncharted territory…You let go, you learn as you go and you keep going, no matter what.”[x]

            Like Paul, we remain open to the Spirit of God as it reroutes our journey.  Like Lydia, we pray and listen eagerly for a word from the God we worship.  Then, we step out in faith, trading our canoe paddles for walking sticks.

[i] Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains, Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory, (Downers Grove, IL, InterVarsity Press, 2015), pp. 24-27
[ii] Acts 16. 6-8
[iii] Ronald Cole-Turner, Feasting on the Word, Year C, Vol. 3, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), p. 476
[iv] ibid.
[v] ibid.
[vi] ibid.
[vii] ibid.
[viii] Marianne Blickenstaff, Connections-A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year C, Vol. 2, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018), p. 269
[ix] ibid.
[x] ibid., Bolsinger, p. 34