The Road Is Made By Walking, with Rev. Dr. Ken Hood.

The Road Is Made By Walking, with Rev. Dr. Ken Hood. Series: Life as Pilgrimage, Lent 2026 A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon. Scripture: Matthew 3.

They didn’t have a roadmap, an itinerary. There is no such thing.
As much as we’d like to think there’s a certain way life should be…there just isn’t. As painful as it is to lose a child, it’s even more painful when we tell ourselves a story like: “This shouldn’t happen. A parent should never have to bury their child. It’s not fair.” Well… It’s not something we choose. It’s not something welcome. But it also happens. All the time. There is no “this isn’t the way the world should be”…for there’s no such thing. This is frightening but liberating as well.
Equanimity is the practice of allowing what is…simply because it’s what’s here. We are almost always subtly resisting what’s happening around us. We wish we felt different or that the world was different, and we push against it inwardly or are pulling towards the world being some other way. But what’s here is what’s here. This isn’t a giving up. This is an acceptance such that, facing what is, we can finally decide how to be and how to act.
Machado’s personal story is really challenging. He and his brother had it all in Spain until the revolution came, and they lost everything. So not fair. But it’s what was. They struck out, penniless, and having to find their own way. There is no way, the road is made by walking…

About the Series, Life as Pilgrimage, Lent 2026: Our sacred stories are filled with journeys from the familiar into the unknown. This season invites us to become pilgrims, open to being changed along the way. Through shared workshops, contemplative practices, creative expression, and time on the trail, we will make space to listen deeply and be gently transformed by the spacious love of God.

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At First Presbyterian, you will meet people at many different places theologically and spiritually. And we love it that way. We want to be a place where our diversity brings us together and where conversation takes us all deeper in our understanding of God.

We call this kind of faith “Spacious Christianity.” We don’t ask anyone to sign creeds or statements of belief. The life of faith is about a way of being in the world and a faith that shows itself in love.

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Keywords:

Pilgrimage, Lent, Holy Family, Anthony Machado, Spanish Civil War, wilderness hiking, Timberline trail, Sandy River, cairns, dreams, visions, Holy Spirit, navigation, unconventional family, escape., presbyterian, church, online worship, bend, oregon

Featuring:

Rev. Dr. Steven Koski, Rev. Sharon Edwards, Becca Ellis, Brave of Heart, Guests

Transcript

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You announcer, welcome to worship at First Presbyterian. We, at First Presbyterian, practice a spacious Christianity, which means, no matter where you are in your faith journey, you belong, and there is space for you at the table, there is space for your doubts and questions. We believe doubts and questions are a gift that invite us into deeper conversations and a more authentic faith. We believe diversity is a strength. Every story is sacred and everybody matters. We do our best to live the spacious and radical love of Jesus so that all might have a chance to flourish in this world. We are so glad to connect with you in this way. We would also love to worship with you in person, if you're ever in the neighborhood on Sunday mornings at 830 or 10am and never hesitate to reach out to us to learn more about us or how we might support You. I hope you enjoy This worship service. Welcome. a reading from Matthew two listen for God's word to you now after they the wise men had left. And an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, Get up, take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child to destroy him. Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet Out of Egypt I have called my son. When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under according to the time that he had learned from the wise men, then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet. Jeremiah, a voice was heard in Ramah, wailing in loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children. She refused to be consoled because they are no more. When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel. For those who were seeking the child's life are dead. And Joseph got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in place of his father, Herod, he was afraid to go there, and After being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee. There, he made his home in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled. He will be called a Nazarene. Hear these words from Anthony Machado, traveler, your footsteps are the road. Your footsteps are the road. There is nothing more. Traveler, there is no road. The road is made by walking. By walking, we make the road, and if you turn around, you only see the path you cannot trod again. Traveler, there is no road only a foam trail, a foam trail upon the sea. You in this third week of Lent, we explore what it means to pilgrimage to travel without maps. This is my third and final week with you all. I have been really grateful to be here our first week, we explored the pilgrimage of Adam and Eve as they left the infancy of Eden and they headed into the harsh adult world and that transformation, that change. And I gave you a map, a map from the Hudson Institute of coaching about how to navigate change. And then last week, we traveled with Abram and Sarah as they were called, to leave everything they had ever known, everyone they'd ever loved, and to let it all go. And we explored the power of unlearning, of examining the beliefs that are no longer working for us and setting them down. And this final week, we're going to be traveling with the Holy Family as they're escaping violence. And we're going to be exploring what it means to travel in places where there are no maps at all, where there are, where there is, as Machado says, no, no road. I can remember the first time that I experienced this in a very physical, visceral way. Before I came to Oregon, 22 years ago, I had done a lot of hiking and camping. I grew up in Texas, and I have hiked all over there. Big Bend, amazing. I lived in New Jersey, and have hiked much of the Appalachian Trail there and in Pennsylvania, went and climbed a little bit in the mountains in Maine and New Hampshire, and I did a Student Conservation Association project in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I'd been outdoors a lot, but until I came to Oregon, I had never really hiked in honest to goodness, wilderness, you know, wilderness like you get around these parts. And I discovered this the hard way. I went with a friend of mine, who learned I liked hiking. And he said, Oh, let's go do the Timberline trail. And I thought, how great this 48 miles looping around majestic Mount Hood. How fantastic. So it was him, me and my dog, Rigby, my black lab, and we set off. And there's a trail for much of it. As you're, as you're starting out, we were, we were going around clockwise, starting from. Them from the lodge and and the first great crossing, though, that you come to, the first really big crossing, is the Sandy River Crossing. And what I didn't know, what they don't tell you, in Oregon and the West, is around, especially around river crossings. There's about a half mile on either side where, because the river is flooding and ebbing and flooding and ebbing, there is no trail. There's just no trail at all. And I wasn't prepared for this. So I'm hiking with my buddy. He's out a fair ways ahead of me. We're separated, and all of a sudden I'm like walking, and I can't find trail, and there's no trail to be to be found, and it's an unsettling experience after you've been walking all day and you feel like you're in the middle of nowhere to not even have trail at all. I found my friend. We connected, and he could tell I was a bit spooked, and I was like, Could we just can we just pause? I'm not used to this? And he says, yeah, it's, it's pretty different out here, in this kind of a place, isn't it? And it is, isn't it, when we're when we find ourselves, when we stepped out of all that we've known and our sense of who we are, and we haven't yet come to a new sense of who we're going to be, a new road yet when we're in between and there is no map, it's a it's an unsettling place to be. That's where Machado was when he wrote this poem. Anthony Machado was a Spanish poet, and he grew up in luxury and privilege. His father was a professor of literature, and they grew up with a huge home and assets, and they had this beautiful plan for their lives. Everything was going to be great, and then the Spanish Civil War broke out with Franco and his family's estate was seized and taken and Anthony Machado and his brother, they survived all of this, but they survived and almost overnight, almost over overnight, they went from having this incredible future and all these assets and plans To being penniless vagrants just wandering without any road, any sense of future at all. And the most astonishing thing to me is that Machado, in this in this state, doesn't complain. I mean, maybe he did complain, but we don't know about it, he doesn't complain. He doesn't say, hey, it's not fair this. I had all these plans, and they were taken from me. He just seems to go, you know what? This is how life is sometimes, sometimes we are living in a place where we have maps and things make sense and we can plan, but sometimes we live at a time when everything feels like it's falling apart and there is no map for where we are, and there is no road. The road is only made by by walking. This is where we meet, the Holy Family. This morning. The Holy Family is so far outside of maps and any thing that makes sense. First off, just by the type of family they are, we have a father and a young mother only the child that was in her womb and is now out in the world, the child is not his. The child is not his. This is an unconventional family today in our own land, it was an incredibly unconventional family back then, there was there was no plan, there was no roadmap for how to be a family like that, but they were figuring it out. And then, as hard as that would have been, just by itself, then violence erupts, and all of a sudden, a paranoid leader is worried about their child taking over, and the state comes with violence and puts to death infants, male infants under the age of two. And you don't have time to plan when things like that happen. You know they don't. You don't have time to get the maps out and figure out which roads you're going to take and where to go. You just go. You just You just have to flee. And that's what the Holy Family does. They escape. They flee down to Egypt without any sense of what they're doing or where they're going. And then when they're in Egypt for a time. At some point, they decide, You know what, maybe, maybe we'll try going back. But even when they go back, things aren't really working out the way they they felt safe with and so they wound up going somewhere entirely different. There was no plan for any of this. They were just figuring it out. On the way without any maps. It's, it's, it takes effort to learn how to navigate when you do have a map that makes sense. You know, when you have a map and a compass, it takes effort to learn how to put these together. You have to learn about declination, the difference between magnetic north and true north, and it's a big, different big deal out here in the Pacific Northwest. You have to learn how to navigate with a map, but we also have to learn how to navigate when we don't have any maps. We have to learn how to be with ourselves and navigate when we're living in in the dark, as it were, I remember, after I calmed down with my friend outside of the Sandy River, we we just sat there for a moment. I collected myself. He didn't seem worried at all, of course. And and then when I was a little bit calmer, had a little bit of a snack, I was able to open my eyes a little bit more, and I could see a little bit more what was going on and and I noticed these little stacks of stones. These little stacks of stones, if you've made a river crossing in Oregon or Washington, you've seen this. They're little stone Cairns. They're little stones that other travelers have have placed there. It's not a map, per se, it's not a trail, but they're little, little signs to let you know that other people have been here before that you're okay, right? And these Karen's became just a gift to me. I thought about the kindness of countless strangers taking time out of their day to help mark these, these passages when there was no road, when there was no trail, when we are navigating our lives and we stepped out of everything we've known, or we've been pushed out of everything we've known, and we haven't yet come to the new person, the new story that's going to make sense for us, and we're in this in between place, we wind up having to navigate using other means. We have to navigate often by signs, by dreams, by visions, by things that ordinary people often laugh at, and they laugh at because they don't need them. You know, if you have a map, if you have a plan, follow it, use it as well as you can. But when you don't have that, when you're in the middle of of a wilderness and you don't know where you're going or really who you are, you have to become attentive and open to any sign, any communication, that could be useful for for Joseph, it was dreams. I love that Joseph at every moment he's not quite sure what to do, where to go with his family, and then he has a dream, and an angel pops in and says, Go and take your family here. Now, if Joseph were to try to explain that to someone, you know, he wakes up, and we're going to go here, we're going to go to Egypt. And they say, why? He says, Well, I had a dream. I mean, a rational person, right? We might be like, really, that's what we're going to base this on. If you have a map and a compass, and you can plan, by all means do that. But when we're in a place without maps, without anything to go off of, we find ourselves having to be open to the other ways that God does and will communicate to us, in Joseph's case, through dreams. I remember at the first my first job was I started a church outside of Austin, Texas, a church that still go in the Presbyterian Church of Lake Travis. And there was a woman there when I was starting, and she was a very powerful woman, a very conservative, traditional woman, and I didn't much care for her, and she didn't much care for me, and she let me know that in some ways, but then, when it became clear we were gonna have to work together, she melted, softened a little, and she invited me to her home, And she set out some tea before me, and some some cakes and, and she said she looked very serious. She said, I have had a story I need to share with you. And, and I could tell that this was important. This was something serious. And she told me about how close she had been with her mother, and that her mother, in her later years had just been she had been really going through it. There were so many physical and emotional and mental challenges, and she was caring for her mother, and it was exhausting, but it was also kind of a call for her, but it was. Exhausting. And there was one night, she said, and she was just bone tired, but at around three or so in the morning, she had this weird feeling, a very weird feeling she couldn't place, and she kind of woke up, and she sat up, and on the edge of her bed, she said, she saw her mother, an image of her mother sitting on her bed and looking at her face and just shaking her head no. And this member, she reached out to touch this vision of her mother when the phone rang and she picked it up, and it was the place where her mother was calling to let this woman know that her mother had died. And she got a little bit closer, and she looked right in my eyes, and she said, What do you make of my experience? And she knew that I was very theological and I was very scientific. I do love science and, and I sometimes interpret the Bible with with some scientific methods and and, and she needed, she needed to know what I thought. And I thank goodness I was very young. I think I was 28 or 27 at the time I was I was very young, but I was wise enough to say, Wow, I don't entirely understand what happened in this story that you shared with me, but I can tell that this was very powerful and very real and very meaningful for you. I'm curious what it means for you. And she could tell that I meant that she could tell that I genuinely understood, even if I didn't completely understand, the vision that this was a life changing moment for her, and we spent the rest of that afternoon with her, exploring what that meant and what it meant for her Faith, and I found myself profoundly grateful to be in a tradition with scriptures that are full of God coming to us in these non rational ways and dreams and visions. These dreams and visions, they don't always make sense to other people, right? They don't always make sense to others. It's because they weren't given to them, they were given to you, they were given to me, they were given to us. And they even if they don't have meaning to other people or they're confusing or troubling, they still very well may have meaning for us, and it's how we sometimes have to navigate when we're in a place without maps, if you're in a place in your life where everything's making sense and you're just executing on the plan, yes, that's the best place to be. But you know, and and I know that it just takes one phone call, takes one text, it takes a conversation with a doctor, and all of a sudden, the maps that you were living by, they don't make any sense. But even when that happens, even when there is no map, we are not alone. We are not alone. We have the Holy Spirit, the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and we have our ability to keep walking. Traveler, your footsteps are the road. There's nothing more. Traveler, there is no road. The road is made by walking. By walking, we make the road, and if you turn around, you only see the path you cannot trod again. Traveler, there is no road. There is no road, only sea foam upon the trail, the sea. Amen. friends, as you live your lives, know that God is before us and God is behind us, that Christ is above us and Christ is beneath us, and that the spirit is beside us and the Spirit lives within us. Thanks be to God. Thank you so much for joining us, and we hope you enjoyed this worship service. If you would like to make a donation helping make these broadcasts possible or support the many ways, first, Presbyterian seeks to serve our community, you can make a financial gift online at bend fp.org, every week, we hear from someone thanking us for the gift of these broadcasts and what a difference they make. Your support makes that possible. Our church is committed to reach beyond our walls, bringing hope where there is despair and love where it is needed the most. Your generous support helps us to be generous in love. Go to our website, bend fp.org, and click on the link. Give online. Your support is really appreciated and makes a difference in people's lives. Thanks again. I hope to see you next week. You you.