Finding Roots

              Finding Roots
Script: Luke 13:22-30
Intro: Summer time is for vacations, new experiences, and a dramatic break
with daily routine. For my wife and me it has been a summer of unexpected
surprises and new insights. For four weeks we were enrolled at the
Ecumenical Institute for Advanced Theological Studies at Tantur, Israel,
followed by two weeks in Switzerland.
To actually stand in the places where our story of faith was originated
and developed was astonishing. At Shechem I stood where Joshua did
and charged the people of Israel to remember the Covenant God had created
between them. Just beyond that spot were the hills of Samaria to which
Jesus referred at a much later time. The rolling sparse hills of Tekoa
where Amos had shepherded a flock and was called by God to become a prophet
is much like it was in the eighth century B.C.
In Upper Galilee during the evening we sat at a table located on the
shores of the Sea of Galilee. Talking with a waiter we learned how quickly
a storm can come up, and were reminded that it was this sea that Jesus
calmed, and the one his disciples fished from. Nazareth, Cana, to Peter's
house at Capernaum where Jesus had been a guest many times, were places
that took events about which I had read and placed them on real turf.
We walked the grounds of the Essene community at Qumran with Joseph Saad
who had been responsible for excavations of the Dead Sea Scrolls. On the
hottest day in Jericho's history we hiked down into Wadi Kelt and understood
something of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.
One begins to have a sense of roots. To sit down and hear scholars from
Hebrew University and the Albright Institute speak of the latest archaeo­logical
finds dating into the 3rd millennium B.C., shocks one into a new
sense of time, and a sense of roots. Walking the walls of the city of
Jerusalem one could not help but be caught up with the importance of Juda­ism
for any insightful understanding of the Christian faith, and a sense of
roots.
I. Roots are important to all of us these days. Alex Haley's book by that
title has triggered a latent need within each of us to find our identity.
To locate the time, place and events of our lives. These roots hold fast
to that ground from which they spring, just as Prime Minister Begin leads
the Jews to hold fiercely to what they consider to be their roots.
A. Where do you come from? Is a probing question, and answers to it
are revealing.
1. If we were to answer that we might do so in a variety of ways.
I ' ve come from my home, it is lonely. I've come from a week in the
operating room, says a surgeon, I don't think I did much good. I've
come from vacation with my family and we are much closer now. I've
come from grief into new life sparkles a widow.
2. The younger generation thinks of this phrase in a psychological