Traveling Light: Beef Jerky and Malt Tablets
Mark 1:1-8
Isaiah 40:1-11
Sermon by Judy Cayot, Youth Director
Epworth United Methodist Church

The summer before I entered high school, my sister Carole and I signed up to attend a Methodist Pioneer Camp – it was to be our first backpacking experience. As part of our preparation, we were instructed to read a little book entitled, Going Light With Backpack or Burro. The name struck a funny note and we joked about it. It had corny illustrations and seemed old-fashioned to my “worldly” 14 year old self. Yet something about it captured my attention and stayed with me.

In preparing for today, I found out the author of that little book was David Brower, the same David Brower who was the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club, founder of Friends of the Earth and the Earth Island Institute, and three-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. My sister, Linda, also told me the book is used at the University level in forestry and land management classes. You might call it the Backpackers’ Bible. [Who knew?] The full title of the book is Going Light With Backpack or Burro: How to Get Along on Wilderness Trails.

If you have ever backpacked, you know the importance of weight and size…you want the lightest, warmest, most compact sleeping bag you can get. Many of us have used our shoes as pillows, and learned to live a week or more with only one or two pair of underwear. Some even leave behind the toothbrush and use their finger! Every ounce matters.

In 1970, when Linda and I were planning a 10 day trip on the John Muir trail, we weighed every item of clothing, every bag of food, every utensil and pan. “Getting along on the wilderness trail,” meant packing enough to stay safe and healthy, but not so much that you couldn’t carry the weight. Being young, foolish, and low-of-income, we did not take a tent with us – the cost and the weight made it “expendable” in our minds. Ponchos, but no tent. A frying pan to cook the fish we didn’t catch, but no tent. Fortunately, during the entire 10 days in the wilderness, we had about 5 minutes of rain. Lucky - not wise.

One August, some years later, I was a leader on a youth backpacking trip that did not fare as well. We had tents – but that wasn’t enough. Our second night out, it started to snow. The next day we walked through rain and snow – spent another night in the rain – by this time many of our bags and most of our clothes were wet. On the fourth day…well, here’s what I wrote:

“Raining again as we started hiking toward Thousand Island Lake. About 2 miles along – into heavy snow. Conferred and decided to hike out – returning to Rush Creek and heading up to Donahue Pass – snowing all the way. Eerie nothingness, forging ahead toward the pass – hoping no one would lose the trail. Slippery and muddy going down steep side of pass toward Lyle Canyon. Snow turned to rain then stopped but everyone soaked through by now. Last of the group arrived Tuolomne Meadows at 8 pm. Called parents, ate dinner, started home – arrived in Berkeley - 5 am. 20 mile hike in rain and snow for 5 hours – 11,000 foot pass – what a day!”

What is it about the wilderness that calls us back to it – despite these experiences of discomfort and danger?

Over Thanksgiving our family was at Asilomar – the State Park and Conference Center set on the coast near Monterey Bay. Walking a path to the ocean, I saw a sign warning about mountain lions in the area that said, “On occasion you may be fortunate enough to experience a brief encounter with some wildlife. By exercising due caution, these encounters can be an exciting and memorable adventure.” An exciting and memorable adventure.

Wilderness. I noticed a subtle difference between the Isaiah passage in the lectionary for today – and the echo of it in Mark. In Isaiah we read, “a voice cries out: …in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.” Not “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness” No. “A voice cries out: in the wilderness prepare the way!

The voice urges: Go to the wilderness, be at home in the wilderness – that is where you connect with yourself, with what is essential. As my daughter, Heather, the amateur astronomer reminds me – it is in the darkest night that you see the most stars. Where better, than in the wilderness to prepare to see God?

Wilderness – whether, desert or mountain top, sea shore or open water – can be a place to renew, restore, repair ourselves, a place to reconnect with the source of all life. Surrounded by “natural resources” we become re-source-ful – Full of Source.

John the Baptist, whose story we heard this morning, is often portrayed as an eccentric – why else would he be in the desert wearing camel’s hair and surviving on locusts and wild honey? I prefer to see him as a man who is traveling light. He went to into the desert, returned to “source”, the best place from which to prepare for the presence of god in this world. He carried only a leather belt and ate locusts and wild honey. Locusts and wild honey – - - -beef jerky and malt tablets - food for the journey.

Okay, you say, I get the beef jerky - but malt tablets? Surely that’s a non-essential – a thing to be left behind – when you weigh and measure.

In one of my most vivid memories of that hike over Donahue Pass I stand at a bend in the trail, in my poncho, pack on my back, feet soaked, unable to see more than 5 feet in front of me, handing out malt tablets as the youth pass by – reward and encouragement on a hard trek. I don’t know how much those youth were helped by my malt tablets, but I do know the act of giving them away helped me get along on the trail. For those moments, I didn’t think about my soaked and freezing feet, or the weight of the wet pack on my back, or my own fears. Malt tablets – instruments of grace and magic.

Beef jerky and malt tablets – food for the journey / instruments of grace.

Nancy Pullen shared with me a passage from her Upper Room book of reflections – in it Paul Minear wrote: “Few pictures are more ancient, more archetypal, than the picture of the pilgrim. None better expresses inner restlessness and outer uncertainty, the sense of continual movement and the ache of fatigue. A pilgrim is incomplete without his packsack into which is stuffed whatever is most precious, most essential….Each day, the pilgrim must ask again: what am I able to take along? What must I take? So whenever we think of ourselves as pilgrims, we begin instinctively to choose and to reject, to weigh and to measure, whatever is to go with us.”

Weigh and measure – what to take, what to leave behind?

In her book, Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott has a wonderful chapter called, “Why I Make Sam Go To Church.” In it she says, “The main reason is that I want to give him what I found in the world, which is to say a path and a little light to see by. Most of the people I know who have what I want – which is to say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy- are people with a deep sense of spirituality. They are people in community who pray, or practice their faith….people banding together to work on themselves and for human rights. They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle; they are part of something beautiful.”

Purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy – now there’s a list to put in your backpack!

On Dec. 18th at 5 pm you will have an opportunity to travel the sacred path in a solitary and communal way – at the same time. The youth and I are hosting an Advent/Solstice Labyrinth walk – here at Epworth. The more I work with labyrinths, the more I see truth in the saying - everything with the labyrinth is a metaphor. In her book, Way of The Winding Path, Eve Eschner Hogan writes, “The labyrinth is a laboratory in which we can practice choosing our actions from a place of resourcefulness……By mastering the skills of self-observation, divine alignment, and the magic of metaphor on the labyrinth, we are then able to transfer that mastery to life. We then recognize that rather than seeking God at some point in time or at some place in the world……the goal of this journey is to see God – the Divine, Grace – everywhere, now.”

She goes on to say, “Our lives are a labyrinthine journey. If we take a moment to …align our actions with our spirits, no matter which way the winding path turns, it always brings us back home, to love. Our task is to keep the experience of the pilgrimage alive.”

I experience the labyrinth walk, in the same way I do a mountain trail, as grace-filled. One of my favorite parts of the walk is the way in which the solitary and the communal coincide, overlap, and dance a dance with each other. If you walk it with a community of folk, the experience is very different than if you walk with no one else around. Both have value. I encourage you to come, walk with us.

Whether you walk the labyrinth, go on a pilgrimage, hike a mountain trail, or sit by the fire in your home, the journey is the same. Exercise due caution, weigh and measure, be wise, not lucky, and an exciting and memorable adventure may be at hand.

I invite you to prepare, once again, for the journey through Advent - the journey to love, to God-with-us. Consider what is essential, what opens you to grace and magic, what is life sustaining for you and for the world. Every ounce matters.

A Bay Area radio personality always signs off his show with the same phrase, “Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.” I suggest we all, “lighten up!”

Purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy. What is in your back pack?