Sermon Illustrations on Walking



Background

Every Journey a Pilgrimage

Unimpeded walking is one of life’s most ordinary, least expensive, and deeply rewarding pleasures. With little effort, putting one foot in front of the other and going forward can provide a foretaste of heaven.

One of the people I learned this from was Dorothy Day. She saw every journey, even the most local, in terms of pilgrimage. Though living in a derelict part of Manhattan that most New Yorkers took pains to avoid, Dorothy had an endless ability to discover beauty in unlikely places. She rejoiced at the sight of grass breaking through cracks in the pavement, was exultant at the smell of garlic escaping a kitchen, and gazed joyfully at flowers blooming in a tenement window.

One of the early turning points in Dorothy’s life was linked with walks she took on the west side of Chicago when she was in her early teens. The inspiration to do so came from reading Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle. The west side was an area packed with immigrants, stock yards and meat-processing plants. She walked for miles, pushing her baby brother in his carriage, while exploring “interminable grey streets, fascinating in their dreary sameness, past tavern after tavern.”

She found beauty in the midst of desolation:

There were tiny flower gardens and vegetable patches in the yards. Often there were rows of corn, stunted but still recognizable, a few tomato plants, and always the vegetables were bordered by flowers, often grateful marigolds, all sizes and shades with their pungent odor. The odor of geranium leaves, tomato plants, marigolds; the smell of lumber, of tar, of roasting coffee; the smell of good bread and rolls and coffee cake coming from the small German bakeries. Here was enough beauty to satisfy me.

Her long walks in the slums were truly eye-opening experiences. She could no longer look on the poor as shiftless, worthless people whose sufferings were no one’s fault but their own. “Walking such streets as a fifteen year old, she pondered the poor and the workers and felt “that from then on my life was to be linked to theirs, their interests were to be mine: I had received a call, a vocation, a direction in my life.”

Jim Forest, The Road to Emmaus: Pilgrimage as a Way of Life, Orbis, 2007.

The Path We Tread

From valley to valley out over the hilltops, From sunshine to fog like the darkest of night; So we follow the Lord down life’s winding pathway, And walk much by faith and little by sight.

It would be easy to see were His presence like lightning, And easy to hear if like thunder His voice; But He leads in the quiet by the voice of the Spirit, And we follow in love for we’ve made Him our choice.

The path that we tread by the cross is o’er shadowed, And the glory at times by pain is made dim; Temptations assail and the spirit grows weary, Yet we’re ever sustained by the vision of Him.

The years of our lives be they few or be many, will soon pass away as dreams of the night; Then we’ll step through the portals on eternity’s morning, And greet Him in glory as faith turns to sight.

Richard L. Baxter

Walking Towards Unity

Some marches are not against anyone or anything. They are marches for something or someone. Jesus. Peace. Hope. Unity. In a town where I lived for many years, a few of us organized an annual Walk of the Nations. It wasn’t against anything. It was a sign of unity.

We called upon the community—schools, churches, business, government, First Nations leaders, clubs, and all and any individuals—to walk together. Hundreds responded. We walked together as a sign that, whatever the differences between us, we were neighbors.

We all loved our children and our parents. We all wanted a community that was safe and flourishing. We all wanted to live without fear, hunger, hate. So we walked. As far as I know, that community still gathers every year to do this.

This kind of walking—walking as a sign of unity—has a deep echo in the twenty-five Psalms, from 120 to 134, called the Songs of Ascents. These songs were sung by pilgrims making their way to Jerusalem, to the temple, to gather and to worship and to feast.

…Rich and poor, old and young, male and female, slave and free, every tribe and tongue and nation—all walk together to the same place and sing as they go. The singing, as the walking, helps level differences. It declares shared cause and shared faith and shared humanity. I wonder what it would look like to recover something of this in our churches. In liturgical churches, a form of the Ascent Psalms is preserved in processionals, where the community sings as the officiants march into the sanctuary, holding the Scriptures aloft. I dream of being part of a church that does this. We walk together singing. We invite onlookers to join us.

… For your next walk, consider inviting along two or three fellow church members. Find something that will unify you—a cause, a prayer, a penitence, or a praise—and enact your oneness in a walk.

Mark Buchanan, God Walk: Moving at the Speed of Your Soul, Zondervan, 2020.

Stories

Who Am I?

One of the great philosophers Immanuel Kant was taking long summer walks as he often did. Immanuel Kant was walking in his neighborhood, stopped in a park, sat on a bench for several hours, and just sat there. And a policeman saw him and walked over to him and wanted to know what he’s doing. He says, “what are you doing?”

And Kant said, I’m thinking. A policeman inquired further and said, who are you?” And Immanuel Kant, that great philosopher, turned to the police officer and said, “that’s precisely the problem that I’ve been thinking about. Who am I?”

Source Unknown

Analogies

Sleepwalking in a Dark Wood

For many of us, life can easily become disorienting and discouraging. Existential questions often emerge that never have before. As stressful as modern life can be, it is somewhat comforting to know that we are not the only ones who have experienced the bewildering nature of life itself. The thirteenth century poet and philosopher Dante Alighieri experienced the messiness of life more than most, and when he sat down to write his magnum opus, The Divine Comedy, this is how he began:

In the middle of the journey of our life

I found myself astray in a dark wood

where the straight road had been lost sight of.

How hard it is to say what it was like

in the thick of thickets, in a wood so dense

and gnarled

the very thought of it renews my panic.

It is bitter almost as death itself is bitter.

But to rehearse the good it also brought me

I will speak about the other things I saw there.

How I got into it I cannot clearly say

for I was moving like a sleepwalker

Dante Alighieri, Dante’s Inferno: Translations by 20 Contemporary Poets, ed. Daniel Halpern, Translated by Seamus Heaney, Ecco Press, 1993.

Some very Old Footsteps

In 1976, in Laetoli, Tanzania, Africa, Mary Leakey and her team of paleontologists stumbled—that’s the word the Smithsonian uses—upon animal tracks that, two years later, led to the discovery of two pairs of hominin footprints, fossilized in volcanic ash. The footprints mark a brief segment of a journey of two (or perhaps three) people striding.

The hardened ash dates to 3.6 million years ago, making these footprints the oldest evidence we have for bipedalism—walking on two limbs, not four.

The footprints are not of equal size or span. One of the walkers is much smaller than the other and lags behind. She is hurrying to keep up. Where have they been? Where are they going? Why are they out and afoot? Is it a mother and her child, fleeing a terrible man? Have they been gathering brushwood or berries, things needed for survival, and now are bundling them back to their shelter? Are they visiting a relative? A friend? Are they seeking something beyond themselves, bigger than themselves, someone to thank, to seek consolation from, maybe to worship? All we know is they walked.

Mark Buchanan, God Walk: Moving at the Speed of Your Soul, Zondervan, 2020.

Humor

Who Am I?

One of the great philosophers Immanuel Kant was taking long summer walks as he often did. Immanuel Kant was walking in his neighborhood, stopped in a park, sat on a bench for several hours, and just sat there. And a policeman saw him and walked over to him and wanted to know what he’s doing. He says, “what are you doing?”

And Kant said, I’m thinking. A policeman inquired further and said, who are you?” And Immanuel Kant, that great philosopher, turned to the police officer and said, “that’s precisely the problem that I’ve been thinking about. Who am I?”

Source Unknown