A video of this sermon is available on the Fox Valley Presbyterian Church YouTube channel.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been calling these stories where Dorothy runs into new friends and brings them along on her journey the “pick-up stories.” A bit different from pick-up lines, except that they are the origin stories of these friendships that build over the course of the movie. Origin stories like those of a couple that is married or the birth of a child are often told and retold over a lifetime, but I’d venture to guess that many of us also have origin stories for our friendships, especially those deep friendships that carry us through thick and thin.
I can remember the pick-up story of my first best friend, Alexis Kerschner, from when we were about 4 years old. My family had recently moved into a brand new town house on High Beam Court in Columbia, Maryland. While we were eating dinner one night, my sister’s eyes got huge and she pointed out the window she was facing, causing us to turn and look through it. There was a growing fire in the dumpster in the middle of the neighborhood parking lot. After calling 911 to report it our family went outside to watch the action along with a number of other families. And that’s where we met the Kerschners. Most of my early childhood memories are involve our two families together.
In adulthood I was “picked up” a best friend when she called me looking for the phone number of another friend. We had been acquaintances for a few years, with kids who were friends, but weren’t particularly close. She was going through a particularly turbulent time and knew I was friends with the Lutheran pastor in town that she had met a couple of times and was just calling to ask me how to get in touch with Pastor Kari. I knew Pastor Kari was out of town on vacation so I asked if I could help in the meantime. Well over a decade later, we couldn’t imagine journeying through life without knowing each other.
The story from Mark came right to mind when thinking about the relationship among Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion, although there was one surprising aspect to it when I moved from the memory of it in my head to the story as it actually exists in the scriptures. I don’t know if I was remembering the edited Sunday School version I learned sometime along my own journey or if I added details of my own later in life, but I was absolutely certain that the story in Mark’s gospel itself labeled the people who brought the man who was paralyzed his friends. It was, in my mind, his friends who had brought him to Jesus, his friends who were undeterred by the massive crowd, his friends who carried him on his mat up to the roof, his friends who dug through the roof and lowered him right down into the middle of the room where Jesus was, his friends who showed him utter devotion through this act of compassion.
But you know what? It doesn’t say that. It doesn’t call the people who carry him friends. And upon reflection, I think I like that even more. (Not that Jesus, or Mark, or any Bible translators or editors were asking me.) Because while many of us hopefully do have deep friendships with people for whom we would go to any length for their well-being, it’s not just friends we have known since we were 4 years old, or people we raised our kids with, or the neighbors we shared our lives with who can be our companions on our spiritual journey, on our journey
We see this in the story of Ruth and Naomi as well. Naomi is the Ruth’s mother-in-law. She and her husband, Elimelech, had left Bethlehem in Judah some years before when there was a famine in the land. Having settled in Moab with their two sons, their family grew when the young men married Orpah and Ruth. However, tragedy struck the family again, and all three men died. With no one to support her or care for her, Naomi decided to return home to Bethlehem to live our her days. She encouraged her daughters-in-law, both Moabites, to stay I their homeland, return to their families, and find new husbands. Both of them resisted this idea, but eventually Orpah obeyed. But Ruth did not and, pledging her loyalty beautifully as we just heard, she stayed with Naomi on the journey to her new home and a new life.
In their patriarchal culture, Ruth and Naomi are unlikely companions. Without husbands or fathers or even brothers as their protectors and authorities, they really have no standing on their own, and they really aren’t any safer together as they travel. It’s not until they arrive in Bethlehem and are able to attract the attention of Boaz that they can breathe a sign of relief and trust that their futures are secure.
There are not a whole lot of solitary spiritual journeys in scripture. There are not a whole lot of stories where a follower of Jesus or a worshiper of God goes the road alone. I’m hesitating to say there aren’t any at all, but I’ll be honest, I can’t think of any. Jesus himself gathers a group of disciples to walk with him, and when he sends them out to minister in his name, he sends them in pairs. Paul has different companions on different stages of his evangelistic journeys – Silas and Timothy are two. Moses and Aaron and Miriam work together through the exodus and leading the Hebrew people out of Egypt. David and Jonathan formed a covenant with each other, such that their souls were were knit together. Ruth and Naomi. The women who journey to Jesus’ tomb together, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and others. At the creation of human beings, the divine one themself, declares, “It is not good that the human should be alone.”
The spiritual journey, the movement through life that includes a movement toward the divine will, the process of growing more deeply and fully into the people God has created us to be, the walk toward living as God calls us to live, toward fulfilling the deepest longing of our spirits to be united with our creator, to belong, to be home, it is not meant to be undertaken alone. It is too big for that, too important, to rich. For one, it is good simply to have company with whom to share our stories. But beyond that, it’s because we actually need each other. We need the gifts, empathy, insight, and perspective of others that we just don’t have for ourself, or that we haven’t discovered yet.
A little later on in the journey to the Wizard of Oz, after Dorothy and the Scarecrow have picked up their other two companions, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion, the four are finally getting to meet the Wizard for the first time. They have made it to the Emerald City and have been gussied up at a salon. They made it past the guard who is reluctant to let them through the enormous green door that leads to the Wizard’s hall. As the four walk down the endless emerald hallway, the Lion is getting predictably scared.
“I really don’t want to see the wizard this much,” he says.
Dorothy reminds him, “Don’t you know the wizard’s going to give you some courage?”
“I’d be too scared to ask him for it!” The Lion whimpers.
“Well, then we’ll ask him for you,” Dorothy promises.
“We’ll carry you,” the people in his life said to the man they took to Jesus.
“Where you go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”
We all need companions on our spiritual journeys. Have you thought about who yours might be? They may be the friends we met in childhood. They may be family members we are related to by blood or by covenant. But they may be people who don’t fit these more expected categories. They may be people we pick-up unexpectedly along the way – someone we meet while working on a committee together, the person working the serving line with us at the community dinner. Our spiritual companions aren’t necessarily the people we are most like or have the most fun with or have spent the most years with.
The key to a spiritual companion is not really how long you have known them or how similar your lives and your needs are. The key seems to be a willingness to be vulnerable with each other, to be honest about our deep longings and to care as much about another’s deep longing as much as we care about our own. They are people to whom we are deeply loyal because we see in them the same kinds of longing for completion, and wholeness, and abundant life that we ourselves seek, even if our particular needs are different. With our spiritual companions we are willing to go to any length – to the Emerald City, the wizard’s hall, and the witch’s castle; or through the roof, across the desert, to a foreign land; or in prayer in the depths of grief, to scary questions for which we don’t know the answers, on new adventures in service and sacrifice – knowing that in the journey, in the relationship, and in the presence of Jesus together we can be changed for good.
For Some Reason 