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"God’s Hoboes?" | Hebrews 11:1-3; 8-16 | August 8, 2004 |
It was a time when one out of five able bodied persons was out of work. My uncle was among the 250,000 teenagers who “rode the rails” in the dark days of the depression. Back in the 1990s two documentary film makers put an ad in the AARP magazine asking anyone who had been hoboes in the 30s to write to them. They got 3,000 responses. One estimate claims that over two million men and 8,000 women became hoboes. Hoboes would tell you there was a distinction among bums, tramps and hoboes. “Bums loaf and sit,” explained a hobo, “a tramp loafs and walks. But a hobo moves and works. And he gets clean when he can.” Justice Douglas wrote, “I rode the rails, not as a sightseer, but to get to places where I hoped to find work.” Hoboes harvested crops in the Kansas wheat fields and the orchards of Washington state. They worked the oil fields of Texas and the vegetable fields of California. During the boom years of manual labor in grain harvesting, robbers, called yeggs, formed gangs to reap money from hoboes who were departing jobs in the wheat fields. Art Linkletter recalled that two such men held up him and a friend in a boxcar in Washington state and came within a trigger-pull of killing them both. It was a dangerous life. Even getting on to a moving train and staying on were dangerous tasks. At the peak of the depression, 6,500 were killed or injured in a single year. Charlie Chaplin’s character ‘the little tramp’ and the clown Emmit Kelly made the hobo a sympathetic character.
Carl Sandburg even composed some additional verses to the Hobo song “Hallelujah I’m a Bum,”
I went to a house,
And I knocked on the door;
A lady came out, says,
"You been here before."
I went to a house,
And I asked for a piece of bread;
A lady came out, says,
"The baker is dead."
CHORUS:
Hallelujah, I'm a bum,
Hallelujah, bum again,
Hallelujah, give us a handout
To revive us again.
The majority of those transients were not just looking for a handout. They took a leap onto a boxcar, or rode on the undercarriage of a train to get to that place where there was work. They believed there were times and better places ahead.
Sandburg also wrote after his trek riding the rails, “Away deep in my heart now I had hope as never before. Struggles lay ahead, I was sure, but whatever they were I would not be afraid of them.”
This is where we connect with today’s scripture reading. Hebrews 11 verse 8: “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance, and he set out, not knowing where he was going.” Abraham, God’s hobo. The rest of the 11th chapter of Hebrews is like a grand march of ordinary people who put on their walking shoes to follow God even when they did not know where they were going.
Hebrews 11 is the story of the hoboes of God, people who dared to believe, and to wrestle with their scepticism, people who got up and walked with God into a new place, a promised land or an experience of newness and opportunity and hope for a better future.
Human history has always known migrations, people who in ones, and twos or families or whole tribes moved out into the unknown, pioneers filled with equal measures of elation and apprehension. Most of us in this room have ancestors who migrated and our stories are against the background of forebearers who traveled into the unknown or barely known.
Arlene today is playing Swedish music to honor her grandparents who came from Sweden. During the period 1820 and 1920 over 1,000,000 people from Sweden emigrated to the United States. A survey carried out in 1890 revealed that one in four Swedes in the United States were engaged in farming. It was estimated that by the 20th century they owned over 12,000,000 acres in the United States. This was a much higher figure than most other immigrant groups. However, large numbers lived in cities and by 1900 there were 150,000 first or second generation Swedes living in Chicago-- more than any town or city in Sweden except Stockholm.
I used to love to hear my grandmother tell of coming to southern Missouri from Illinois in a covered wagon with her family looking for work.
Many of us in this room started our life elsewhere (both geographically and spiritually) and have come here through pilgrimages that involved moving into the unknown or barely known. So we know something of "going out not knowing."
Actually we know a lot about it. We go out not knowing every day, all the time. It is the only way we can live. We make our plans, have our destinations but we don't know what will happen. And we treasure the Abraham story because he is a fellow pilgrim.
Naomi H. Rosenblatt in her book Wrestling with Angels says, ". . .Abraham and Sarah remain such fitting role models for us today. They were born to a Babylonian culture not unlike our own--one that worships materialism and neglects the life of the spirit.
But having exhausted the limits of materialism and rejected it for a more meaningful spiritual life, Abraham and Sarah do not take vows of poverty and asceticism. When they go forth from the towered cities to build a new life for their people, Abraham and Sarah take their worldly goods with them. Because they are unencumbered by the baggage of materialism, they are free to integrate their spiritual aspirations into a worldly life. . . What God gives this first family of Genesis is a vision of the future they can journey toward."
Like all the patriarchs of Genesis, Abraham is a seeker. I am particularly fond of that image of people of faith. I know many who want to define “faith” as asserting and assenting to a set of beliefs, or having a kind of certainty about spiritual matters. But I relate more to the notion of faith as ongoing discovery, a journey, a pilgrimage which rests comfortably with “Things not seen” and “things hoped for. We all go into a future of exploration and discovery. Faith in the future is--for all of us--constantly doing battle with fear of the future. We see Abraham as a hero of faith because he trusted and depended on God. Can we do that?
A young man who had been raised on a family farm in South Carolina and who had always lived on this ancestral land became engaged to marry a woman whose family had moved many times in her childhood. The young man, for whom the land meant stability and permanence, asked his fiancee, "Since you moved so many times, what is home to you?"
She thought for a moment and then replied, "The furniture."
He knew what she meant. No matter how many moves they made, how many towns they lived in, the furniture was always there. It was the symbol of the love and care of her parents, the security she needed, we all need, to go into the new unknown.
But not everyone has something physical to symbolize who they are. The hoboes didn’t. Abraham didn’t. Jesus, the wandering itinerant preacher said, “Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
His followers also became wanderers carrying only their faith with them. The letter to the Hebrews encourages Christian pilgrims to keep on living by faith, “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
Sir Francis Chichester wanted to be the first to fly across the Atlantic, but when Lindbergh beat him to it he decided to be the first to fly across the Tasmanian Sea from New Zealand to Australia. In his book, The Lonely Sea and the Sky he relates the chilling story of that flight. His small monoplane could not carry enough fuel for the entire flight so it would be necessary to refuel at the tiny mile wide Norfolk Island. Finding such a small place in the vast sea would be no mean accomplishment in itself; if he failed to find it he would perish at sea. Shortly after take off he encountered a storm and knew he had been blown off course. He found a break in the clouds, flew into it, held the plane’s stick between his knees, took out his sextant, got his bearings for a corrected course and set off again in what he hoped would be a direct line toward Norfolk Island.
The same thing happened again, and again and yet again. But amazingly he found the tiny island.
That story is a parable for the pilgrimage of many of us. Life is not always orderly. The writer of Hebrews seems to be saying, among other things, that faith is like that kind of adventure, or the adventure of a wilderness road, winding and turning through mountains and valleys, with occasional places where the road seems to disappear completely, making us sometimes wonder if we were foolish to make the journey. So the writer of Hebrews encourages us to keep on traveling.
So we can say with the son of Swedish immigrant parents, the hobo
Carl Sandburg -
I shall foot it
Down the roadway in the dusk,
Where shapes of hunger wander
And the fugitives of pain go by.
I shall foot it
In the silence of the morning,
See the night slur into dawn,
Hear the slow great winds arise
Where tall trees flank the way
And shoulder toward the sky.
The broken boulders by the road
Shall not commemorate my ruin.
Regret shall be the gravel under foot.
I shall watch for
Slim birds swift of wing
That go where wind and ranks of thunder
Drive the wild processionals of rain.
The dust of the traveled road
Shall touch my hands and face.
(The Road and the End)
Amen
Joe Dunham
| Copyright © 2004 by Joe Dunham. All rights reserved. |