Sermon for Palm/Passion Sunday—Holy Highway

Do you remember the days when we had to read maps and memorized the layout of our cities? In some parts of rural America roads didn’t have names, and one had to know the landscape and the landmarks in order to know who lived where. Today with GPS, we input the address or fire number and off we go. The little woman or man in the box tells us when to turn and how long it is going to take to get there. It is more difficult to get lost, but it can be done. Yet some of the joy is gone from driving—some of the risk and adventure is absent. (I am not saying that this is necessarily bad, but that things have changed.)

On a trip to Nebraska twenty years ago, I made a wrong turn. Ahead there was a road that was black topped and so I reasoned it must go somewhere, and maybe I could save myself twenty miles of driving if I just turned south and connected with the highway I needed.

As I drove down the road I noticed a vehicle in front of me moving slowly. I started to slow down too—not fast enough. I was following a fertilizer spreader that was overly full and overflowing some as it hit the bumps in the road. I was going to pass, but the road was getting narrower and then we hit gravel. A quarter mile down the road, the gravel ran out and we were on dirt. The spreader turned off. I kept heading south. Off in the distance, I could see the highway I needed to be on. I started to feel pretty proud of myself. My truck didn’t smell so good, but I could live with that, I had saved myself twenty miles of driving and a gallon of gasoline.

Then I noticed the pile of dirt in the middle of the road. I slammed on the brakes and slid a little sideways in the road. I stopped just short of a ditch, four feet deep and five or six feet wide right in the middle of the road. The pile of dirt was on the other side of the ditch. I heaved a sigh of relief because I hadn’t gone into the ditch. I stood there and looked at the ditch for awhile. Then I backed the truck up a quarter of a mile because there wasn’t room to turn around and found my way back to the place I had started.

Where were the signs I had missed along the way? I fumed about the poor signage along the road. When I got back to the intersection where I had missed the turn in the first place I saw this huge sign: several 4x8 sheets of plywood, painted white with foot high letters announced the turn. I must not have been paying attention. I was preoccupied by the scenery, or my thoughts, or something else. Whatever it had been, I was not paying attention to the road. The sign said, “Last road connecting with highway 2 for 30 miles. Culvert construction on most roads.”

I found my way to my friend’s house, but I was an hour or so late. Later we looked at my manure decorated truck and laughed. “Well,” my friend said, “You look like you fit right in. Now you just need a little more mud and people will think you live here.”