good morning i'm grateful to allen and evan for their kind invitation to join you this morning i bring you greetings from washington community fellowship my church on capitol hill today's sermon title is standing in the crossroads and my hope and prayer is that the words of jeremiah the word of god will do the work they are intended to do with that please pray with me holy trinity let the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you come holy spirit and comfort come and convict come and lead us along the ancient paths lead us to where the good way lies that we may have rest for our souls and we say these things in the name of jesus the christ amen i was born and reared in eastern ohio the fourth of four sons when my parents were 45 and my brothers were 18 16 and 11 years old respectively my oldest brother left for college and i was born the next week what a surprise for him when he came home for thanksgiving break what is that and what is he doing here my parents were deeply committed god followers and i was reared in an evangelical quaker community learning early to worship god and living in ohio to do just about the same thing with the ohio state buckeyes thanks be to god i met jesus in a powerful way when i was 13 and in the words of my friend steve garber have been stumbling along toward grace ever since and in the words of soren kierkegaard trying to become a christian given how often i find it difficult to be one i mention my family of origin because it was there that i first learned who i was yes as a christian but even more powerfully as one of four brothers now to hear any number of people tell the story of our relationship as siblings one would think that we were as close to each other as jesus was to the disciple whom he loved but the reality was quite different our parents raised sons in the 40s 50s 60s and 70s and i can guarantee you those were not the same decades and the suns they raised were no more similar what i didn't really begin to recognize until much later in my life was this hard to identify feeling of discomfort any time i heard someone talk about how close we were as a family because from where i sat i could feel that to some degree and in many ways i felt like an outsider there were many reasons for this that i won't go into here but suffice to say that first my parents and my brothers loved me deeply in their own way and the best way they could and second our family was imperfect at loving each other and those imperfections eventually affected how i related to god but without my being very aware of this at the time and this had implications for everything which brings us to our text for this morning our passage from jeremiah is embedded in words of judgment as you may recall jeremiah was a prophet in jerusalem at the time of and soon after the sack of the city by the babylonians in 586 bc the people of jerusalem at that time were unwilling to believe that they were about to be destroyed and had no intention of paying attention to jeremiah's warnings their cultural moment was actually not that different than ours deeply religious and deeply disobedient to god imagine that they were not impressed with the possibility that a horde was about to descend and cart them off into exile but descend the horde did destroying everything in its path taking who they didn't kill on a 1 000 mile march through the desert to their new home but things could have been different which is where we pick up our text and where we pick up from what you heard last week that showing up with and in our story creates the opportunity for god's grace to change us in deeply embodied ways reading again from jeremiah 6 16 thus says the lord stand at the crossroads and look and ask for the ancient paths where the good way lies and walk in it and find rest for your souls but they said we will not walk in it in what story do you believe you're living are you curious about it the text points out that we stand at the crossroads each and every moment of our lives whether we know it or not we are at a crossroads and god is telling his people through jeremiah to stand at the crossroads most of us are just passing through life so quickly that we miss the fact that we are always in the middle of some kind of crossroads moment what are the crossroads in which you now stand or that you're passing through but god is inviting even commanding you to stand the crossroads of your identity your marriage your relationship with your children your close but soon to be not so close friends the crossroads of your work life in the pandemic aging parents your pornography addiction your intoxication with alcohol or power or your terror of powerlessness your envy of others seeming financial or relational success or are you like me simply ever and always at the crossroads of deciding to either a listen to your shame that tells you you are not enough in a million different ways or be listen to jesus voice that tells you that you are utterly illuminating and of whom he could not be more proud to have you as his younger sibling wherever we find ourselves in whatever crossroads and there may be many we are positioned to be curious and commanded first to look saint paul writes in second corinthians 4 that we look not at things that are seen but at things that are unseen for that which is seen is temporary but that which is unseen is eternal if we are to be truly curious about the things in life that matter we must be intentional our lives will not simply reveal themselves because we hope they do the inhabitants of jerusalem had developed enough social habits of injustice and idolatry that for their lives to be saved they would have to look on purpose somewhere other than where their attention had been occupied for the last several generations where have you been looking to what have you been paying attention in my work people eventually make their way into my office because in some way they are not paying attention to what they're paying attention to which means their minds and hearts can take them down whichever path that is that of the least resistance our inattentiveness our distractibility is one of evil's most important weapons and he wields it like a pro now don't get me wrong inattentiveness it's very very good for my business so knock yourselves out if you like i'll be here all day but jeremiah says look look and ask inquire growing up in my house my father who was deeply affectionate with me was otherwise disengaged when it came to topics that were important to me and my inner life can i trust that the gospel is true what are girls anyway a question i still i'm trying to discern and what is this whole sex thing about where do i want to apply to college how do i fix things around the house what do i do with all my social self-consciousness needless to say when it came to things that were deeply embedded in my soul my father was not the one who inquired of me about these things not that i knew at the time that he should have been doing that i only learned that later but it was still the case and not a small matter as it turned out who is inquiring of you when i was 15 my mother came to me and said your father asked me why it is that you will talk to me about certain things but won't talk with him i looked at her even as a 15 year old the irony not lost on me mom i said do you hear what you're asking me she admitted that indeed she did but what was so striking was that nothing ever came of that conversation neither my mother nor my father ever spoke to me about it again i share this with you to emphasize that one of the most important developmental experiences for us not only as children but that continues for us as adults is to have others inquire of us and teach us to be people who do the same but i grew up in a house where if i questioned the authority of my father or mother there would be an emotional price to pay mine was a house of obey first ask questions well don't ask questions but god is commanding his people to do just that inquire ask but ask for what the answer comes the ancient paths paths that at that time would have been considered to be those of wisdom that others have traveled previously moreover there are three additional ways three additional paths in which we can ask for those ancient ways of being first we need to be asking inquiring about searching for what the ancient story of the gospel tells us this requires our being deeply immersed in scriptures and prayer such that we grow in wisdom in what it means to be human and to develop and maintain ethics that reflect the biblical narrative the story that god is telling the story of where we have come from and where we are going and to discover how god is calling us to have to live in a culture that is increasingly like unto that that the jews and early christians were used to living in one in which they were the minority and in which their ethics would not only be different but frequently be off-putting to the culture around them this was also an ancient path in which a deeply loving god was unflinching in his demand for us to live utterly holy lives lives that put on display the fruit of the spirit of love joy peace patience kindness goodness faithfulness gentleness and self-control we are called as saint peter writes to strip off all malice hypocrisy slander envy deceit and to abstain from sinful desires that wage war against our soul the work never ends we serve a god who loves us beyond message beyond measure and who demands of us beyond measure but never without his presence or his aid this is the story we live in but if we do not ask for that ancient path we will forget it and if we forget that path other paths will take over we long to remember that ancient path of what is the story in which we believe we are living as followers of jesus in order for it to inform these other paths second the ancient paths include your family's story and not just your own personal novel as i said when i was born my parents were 45 and to be pregnant in 1962 when you're 45 is necessarily to be anxious not many women were having babies at that age and if you were pregnant you were worried about the possibility of birth defects and so long before i was a source of joy to anyone i was a source of anxiety and disappointment but that wasn't all that i in my little developing fetus was pushing against my parents each had their own histories of trauma that they brought into their marriage and that they delivered in many respects unknowingly to their sons you see we each have our own ancient generational paths that have contributed to our stories but many of us are unfamiliar with them or how they have shaped where we find ourselves what do you know of your family's history of trauma of shame of redemption inquiring of that ancient path is crucial a third ancient path is the one that lives in your own embodied mind the human brain has developed over many millennia and the oldest part of the brain the brain stem is like that of reptiles which explains many men's behavior with its flight or fight mechanism the next youngest is our limbic system out of which emerges our sense of emotion among other things this we have in common with lower mammals such as dogs cats not so much those i don't understand the youngest part of our brain is that which makes us most human our prefrontal cortex here we plan our behaviors and we plan for their consequences we write music and then we create itunes so that we can listen to it we discover petroleum and then make plastic and highways and gasoline but oddly enough the parts of our brain that are in charge of most of what we do from the time we get up to the time we go to bed are the parts that we have most in common with reptiles and dogs and so as we consider being curious about our stories we must first attend to what we fear and what we feel as humans first we sense but only then do we make sense of what we sense and if we are not paying attention there's that word again to those more ancient paths in our brains and how they are contributing to our stories we will miss crucially important parts of our story that god longs to redeem and to use to bring many sons and daughters to glory and so we have here three ancient paths that of the story of god and what it means to be human that we find in the bible that of our family's generational journey and that of our own interpersonal neurobiological pilgrimage but the text goes on we not only ask for the ancient paths but where the good way lies i essentially grew up telling myself the story quite ancient in my telling of it and in its source in my family that indeed i was not initially wanted which evolved ultimately into and remained a part of me that believed that i am actually not even wantable and i will say that i didn't necessarily know i was doing this but crafting a story i was in my ancient story before anything else i am a source of anxiety and so therefore must work really hard to make sure that people are pleased with me because certainly i am not pleasing to begin with moreover in my home my parents did not permit anger to be expressed toward them in any way nor was anxiety something that was welcomed or spoken about not that they issued a proclamation as such you just knew that you never wanted to make my father angry or my mother anxious or there would be some tax this was part of my ancient path and it deeply shaped my relationship with god my brain couldn't believe something about god very easily just because i read it in a book when i had spent so much time practicing believing something else neuroplasticity is like that those neurons that fire together wire together and once you have memorized the particular story it's difficult to unlearn it like my parents god too though i did not know it consciously at the time was someone i needed to avoid making angry or anxious he's someone i have to work to believe that i even remain in his mind if i'm not actively doing something to please him but this was not and is not where the good way lies no and therefore we need to examine our ancient paths in order for them to be informed by the good way the way of jesus our story in all of its ancient pathos and pain is to be healed and formed comforted and convicted by the story of the gospel the story of the one who has come to reveal his story who he is in all of his vulnerability in order to invite us to do the same and here we must pay attention to yet another element of the context of this passage we in the west would easily think when we read this that the words are being directed to me an individual and not that they in no way are but this was never the case for the hebrews jeremiah's words were directed to the people of god as a community not just to individuals no one individual would stand at the crossroads by themselves they were standing there together and we must see the same for ourselves the only way i stand look and ask where the good way lies is with others in the body of christ who are standing there with me over the course of my life i have had several people who have stood with me by whom i have become deeply known and received and who have been the voice of god who comes with comfort and conviction but always with curiosity just as jesus came to john's disciples when he asks them in john 1 what do you want and we do this stand at the crossroads and plant ourselves look for our ancient paths and ask where the good way lies in the presence of jesus in the presence of his embodied self which again as saint paul reminds us are those in the church with whom we are regularly and with curiosity sharing our stories in order for them to be known to be seen to be heard to be healed all of the deepest level and to be recommissioned to create those artifacts of beauty and goodness for which you were destined before the foundation of the world it is not enough for us to hear a story with our ears if we cannot believe it with our bodies this is why i must feel the empathy and mercy the comfort and conviction delight and demand of jesus in the eye contact size voices the body language of my brothers and sisters in christ along with their words in order for the good way to lead to rest for my soul we find that rest by vulnerably telling the truth about all of our ancient paths all of what we sense image feel and think and what we want to do behaviorally in the presence of our cloud of witnesses our sisters and brothers in jesus who remind us in unmistakable unforgettable ways that we were destined to become beauty and goodness even as we co-labor with jesus to create them [Applause] but do not be deceived this business of standing and looking and asking is not for cowards and to be sure some if not many of you will refuse to do so just as many refuse the words of jeremiah only to find themselves in exile let me be clear this kind of work this sanctification this way of spiritual formation will kill you or at least will kill all of your shame and your fear and your idolatry of which jesus is intent upon ridding you of such that you are liberated to live into the illumination that he knows you to be with whom will you stand look and ask with whom will you be curious about the ancient paths of god's story such that it may transform the ancient paths of your own this my friends is where transformation emerges such that jesus words from john 13 35 in his words the world will see how you love each other in this way and know that you are his disciples and the world will declare we have seen the lord and he looks like them stand look ask and find rest for your souls amen