New Testament Reading—Luke 9: 1-9
(This sermon is largely adapted from Peter Jenkin’s book A Walk Across America. Quotation marks indicate direct quotes from the book.)
Hello, my name is Peter Jenkins. I’m walking across the United States. I started in upper New York state in October of 1973. I walked 475 miles to Washington, D.C., and then headed through Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and finally Louisiana. I’m now in New Orleans, and I’m halfway through my journey. I’ve been on the road now for over two years, and I’d like to share with you the story of my journey thus far. Perhaps, I should say “our journey” because I’ve been with Cooper, my 95-pound, half-Alaskan Malamute dog. As you can see, he’s ferocious.
Cooper and I prepared hard for our walk. Everyday we jogged for miles around the hills of New York, but I’ll admit that when I started on our journey I had trouble explaining why I was walking. One might say that part of the reason lies in my spiritually deprived and deformed childhood. I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. Perhaps, you have heard of it. “It is a town with a lot of money.” It’s the place where the corporate hotshots of New York City live.
“In Greenwich, you never see a house trailer, mostly just huge, perfectly manicured homes and country clubs.” In Greenwich, “I never saw a pickup truck unless it belonged to one of the Italian families who had a gardening business. In my hometown, you were considered a greaser if you drove a Corvette or had a Harley Davidson motorcycle. So most people drove Country Squire Wagons or BMW’s. To be hip, it was important to have a Porsche—not a new one but an old vintage model. If you owned a ’57 Chevy, you were out of it.”
“When I was a young boy, what mattered was not how fast you could swim across the local swimming hole, but whether you were winning medals on the country-club team. It wasn’t important that you could ride your bike faster than everyone else; [but whether you had] a brand-new Raleigh with high handlebars.” Growing up “I had the feeling I would never really make it in life if I didn’t attend Yale or Harvard.” We all grow up in different places, and Greenwhich was my place to grow up.
I thought life would get better later on, but the truth was that I always felt a painful “hollowness deep down inside of me.” In my senior year of high school, I went to my generation’s version of a revival, Woodstock, but “being on my own [away from home only] made the hollowness intensify.” I went to college at Alfred University in New York. “After wild parties” and “after the…booze or drugs wore off,” the hollowness was still there.
In college, you would not have known my Greenwich roots as I lambasted “capitalist pig warmongers” in my diatribes against the state of the world. Or, perhaps this was in fact the clearest indication of my roots. I wanted to distance myself from them as fast and as far as possible. With the war in Vietnam, our country was a mess, and I threatened to leave. I wanted to go on a Che Guevera-style motorcycle ride from Alaska to the southern tip of Chile, but then Stu Wigent changed my mind. Stu was a security guard at Alfred, and he made me realize that maybe I needed to get to know my own country a bit better. What our government did in Vietnam was one thing, but then there were all the ordinary people out there whose lives were hidden from me. I felt an urge to get to know them. Little did I know how much they would be the key to my own spiritual awakening.
Cooper and I left for our walk across the United States with nothing but this 60-pound pack. In here, I have got “thick socks to comfort my sore feet.” I’ve got “plenty of cotton underwear, double-thickness T-shirts, four pairs of…gym shorts…sweat pants…, and [a pair of] blue jeans. No American in his right mind would dare consider walking across [the United States] without blue jeans!” At the start of my trip, I took “a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks,” but my plan was to earn most of the money I needed along the way. “Calling home for help was out” of the question. Along our walk, I wouldn’t be staying at any hotels either. I would either sleep in my tent or accept the hospitality of strangers. As I walked from one place to the next, I wasn’t living completely as one of Jesus’s disciples who traveled from village to village with nothing but the tunic they were wearing, but I was coming close. When it came to being a disciple, Cooper with his one coat of fur was probably closer to the real thing.
I was unable to explain the true purpose of my walk until I met a man named Homer. Homer lives on his mountain just outside Chattam Hill, Virginia. In Chattam Hill, a young schoolteacher befriended me in a general store and invited me to his place for the night. He informed me that if I wanted “to meet somebody real,” a true character, than I had to meet “Homer Davenport, the greatest mountain man alive!” Getting up to Homer’s place on top of his mountain was a hard hike, but at last, I stood before Homer’s mansion. “It didn’t look much like the mansions I was used to in Connecticut, but it was a mansion. The dirt yard had a few trees, with a bunch chickens and turkeys scratching and rooting around. The building itself was made of hand-hewn logs and roughly cut bare boards. The front was shingled with old metal saltine boxes that had been beaten flat.” Homer’s house was part of a giant natural kingdom. The glories of the mountain around it were soaked in “pure reverence.” There were the giant boulders, the tall pines, and the “diamond-sparking stream” running through it all. A trip to Homer’s made one feel as if one was crossing through paradise.
Homer himself was “an ageless old man” who had “laserlike blue eyes” with “flowing white hair” and a white “beard [that] glowed with life.” Despite some initial hesitations Homer and I hit off real good. Homer gave me a tour of his place which consisted of two rooms with dirt floors and a fireplace hollowed out of the earth. I remember Homer caught me staring at his bed. It was made out of “thick carved ash” that had been lashed together. Homer told me he believed “in sleepin’ on a real hard bed” in order to stay “strong and straight.” As I looked around Homer’s place and saw his “smoke-colored sheepskin blankets” and the “quarters of meat hanging from the rafters,” it occurred to me that Homer’s place “was perfect.” It had everything he wanted and needed.
Homer sat me down on one of his hand-carved stools as he made dinner for us. As he put it together, he showed me a giant yellow beet that was unlike anything I had ever seen before. He bragged that he grew it right outside “in the best soil in the world.” The main course that night was lamb cooked on coat hangers. “What Homer didn’t know was that I had been a vegetarian for the past three years,” yet on this mountaintop, Homer’s 100% natural homegrown meals introduced me to a dazzling array of smells and tastes my suburban lifestyle had never known. Cooking in a pot that first night was something with a sweet smell that I was sure was dessert. Before I gave myself a serving, Homer fortunately informed me it was for Cooper. It was a fresh batch of raccoon stew.
Over the coming days, Homer and I became close as I lived in his mansion and learned his ways. It seemed as if I was destined to be the Elisha to his Elijah. With tears in his eyes, Homer confided to me that he wanted me to stay and one day inherit his land. He was worried what would happen to it once he died. He feared that the timber business and the hunters would come up there and hurt his place. As much as I wanted to stay, however, I knew I would have to go. It broke my heart, but I knew my journey was not yet complete. I still had more to learn and experience as I met the people of this country, but Homer did make me realize that people like him were the reason I went on my walk.
Unfortunately, not everything on my walk was joyful and pretty. There was the time I almost got lynched in Robbinsville, North Carolina. I was guilty for the crime of being a stranger. A couple of law enforcement officers informed me that I needed to get out town by sun down or I would find myself hanging from a pine tree. Needless to day, I got out of town by sundown. Still, the ugliness I saw here and there didn’t compare with the beauty I saw. There was the simple kindness of the stranger who gave Cooper and I five red apples. For our hungry stomachs, it seemed like “the fruit of heaven.” Then, there was the black family in Murphy, North Carolina who nicknamed me Albino and took me in as one of their own. There were countless other people whom I encountered. Some were literally saviors to me while many others altered my path for the better through their gestures of kindness.
I don’t want to pat myself on the back for what I have done, but if you asked me what I have learned from my walk thus far, I would say that I learned how none of the joys I have experienced would have been possible if I had I not made myself vulnerable, had I not been willing to live with the poor and share in their lives. I realize not everyone in this world can simply quit whatever they are doing and walk across the country with only a backpack and their dog. Still, I like to think the disciples realized this as well. They knew that their budding movement needed not only those willing to be vulnerable and cross the lines of society, but also those who would be willing to support others, who would be willing to open their hearts and homes in a spirit of genuine hospitality.
Well, I have told you about my walk halfway across this country, but I have not told you about the change in my life that took place after arriving here in New Orleans. It’s a change that will permanently alter the rest of my journey. I had stopped here to visit a friend living in a seminary, and it occurred to me that this quiet place of study and devotion would be the perfect place to write about the first leg of my journey so I could send it off to National Geographic. Little did I realize that my thoughts would soon become completely preoccupied by another subject altogether. That other subject was named Barbara Pennell. From the moment, I laid eyes on her, I knew she was the one for me. It would take her some time to realize that I was likewise the one for her, but it would happen. At first, she didn’t know if she wanted to walk across the rest of the United States with me. Still, with a little help from the divine, she had her revelation.
Now, for the rest of my journey, I have a companion to share in all the joys and wonders to be discovered among the common people who labor and live all across this country. Amen.