Grace and peace to you from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The text on which this morning's message is based comes from our Gospel lesson (John 14: 1-12) read earlier.

A pastor friend of mine tells this story about himself that his family has voted their third favorite family story of all time. Dean Nadasdy is a gifted pastor, now in Minnesota, but in Oregon years ago. One December day he decided to surprise his family by going out into the woods of the Oregon mountains to find the perfect Christmas tree. He didn't tell anyone where he was going or what he was doing that afternoon. He wanted to make it a complete surprise. He drove out deep into the mountains and parked along this gravel road. He got out of his car and started into the woods to find that perfect tree. He didn't find perfection in the first 100 yards or so, so he pressed on deeper. Rev. Nadasdy is a gifted pastor, but he knew he was no backwoodsman. But he wasn't afraid of becoming lost. He was actually on a path that several others had taken. He and they had left footprints in the mountain snow, footprints he knew he could follow back to his car.

Finally, after enjoying the beauty of the mountains for an hour and finally finding that perfect tree, he began to cut it down -- when the snow began to fall. He didn't pay much attention. The snow was rather lovely. But before he finished with his saw, the snow became heavier. He tied a rope onto the tree and began to drag it back out of the forest, following the footsteps that were now filling quickly with snow. He quickened his pace, but after another 20 minutes of walking, he came to a fork in the path of trees, a fork that now had about 8 inches of smooth, new fallen snow – with no footprints in it.

There he was, sitting alone in the Sierra mountains, all by himself. No one would miss him for several more hours and even when they did, they would have no idea where he was. No one in his family would even guess that he was lost in the mountains, let alone where he might have gone. The snow was continuing to fall and night would be coming on soon. Then the temperature would drop and the winds would pick-up with this winter storm. He was not wearing heavy winter clothing, only something warm enough for the mild 30-degree weather he had come up for. Rev. Nadasdy stopped and sat down on a fallen log. He realized that he was in dire straits, truly a life-and-death situation. He might not survive through the night, let alone the several days it might take before someone would find his car and begin looking for him in those woods.

He was truly lost and dying. He had no idea which decision to make, which way to go on this path. If he took the wrong one now, who knows what direction he might be heading. And even if he took the right one at this juncture, how many more forks in the path would he face before he got to his car, any one of which would lead him in the wrong direction. Pastor Nadasdy began to pray: Lord, guide me down the correct path. May your Holy Spirit lead me so that I can return to my home, my family, my church safely. Lord, please be with me along my way.

Pastor Nadasdy sat for a few more minutes then decided it was time for action. He headed, with his tree still in tow, down the left-hand fork in the way. As he got just a few feet down that path, he heard a voice behind him call out "Pastor Nadasdy, is that you?" At first he thought the voice might be that of an angel, but then he looked back up the path and saw one of his own congregation members walking toward him. "Pastor Nadasdy, is that you? Where are you going?" "Well, he said, I was trying to find the way back to my car". "Well Pastor, the road is down this other path here. That path you're on now will take you back around the other side of the mountain. Come along, follow me and I'll take you back to your car." Pastor Nadasdy asked no questions, expressed no doubts, he simply trusted his parishioner's word and confidently followed him to safety and life. Spiritually, on our own, we are all in the same predicament as Pastor Nadasdy in the woods: Lost, helpless, dying. Left to ourselves, we would choose from a multitude of wrong paths, get ourselves even more lost than we were before, and never find our way home to our God. But Jesus came and showed the Way. Jesus came and became the Way. Jesus told his disciples "You know the Way to the place where I am going. Thomas (like any good Bible class member, admits his lack of understanding and seeks clarification) (Thomas) said to him, "Lord, we don't know where you are going, so how can we know the way? Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." In some of my travels this week I saw one of those "God message" billboards, perhaps you've seen, plain black background with white lettering. This one said "Don't make me come down there! Signed God." When looked at through the perspective of God's law, and how frequently we his children and the rest of the world break his law, those are scary words: Don't make me come down there! The Bible often talks about the Lord "visiting" his people (e.g., Exodus 4: 31, Isaiah 26: 14, Luke 1: 68), and when they have been willfully sinning against their God, that visit is a frightening, painful thing. We spend so much of our lives looking for ways other than his ways, for truth apart from his truth. We spend so much of our life looking for life and, to quote the song, looking for love in all the wrong places.

But in another sense, God did choose to come down here, not to punish those who broke his Law, but to be punished for them. "He hath visited and redeemed his people" (KJV, Luke 1: 68). We didn't "make" him come down here, He came of his own volition, because He loves us. He came to not only show us the way to God, but to be that way, that truth, that life that would be sacrificed to ransom us from our lost and hopeless condition. He came to die on the cross for us and then to conquer death through his resurrection. He will come again, and for those of us who trust him as God's only Way, who receive His forgiveness as theirs, He will take us to be with him in heaven. Karl Barth, the renowned German theologian of the 1900's was lecturing to a group of students at Princeton. One student asked him "Sir, don't you think that God has revealed himself in other religions and not only in Christianity?" Barth's answer stunned the crowd. With a modest thunder he answered, "No, God has not revealed himself in any religion, including Christianity. He has revealed himself in his Son." (John Pavelko, "Avoiding a Troubled Heart") The world and our sinful hearts look at these words and question: Who does this guy Jesus think He is to make such claims? Jesus doesn't just claim to show the way to God. He IS the way to God. He is God incarnate, man divine.

C.S. Lewis, the former agnostic Cambridge professor turned Christian, wrote: "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about [Jesus like] 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse… Let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." (Mere Christianity, 1952, p. 55-56). Many people get very excited about whether or not "extra-terrestrials" have ever landed on earth from other planets. We can say with confidence that one "extra-terrestrial" has landed, but not a humanoid from another planet. God himself, the creator of suns and planets, has landed on this earth in human form, lived, died and rose again for us. Like Pastor Nadasdy, we are lost, dying and alone. But Jesus Christ came to be our Way, our Truth, our Life. Thanks be to God.

Note: The story from Rev. Dean Nadasdy comes from a true story he related in a sermon at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis in 1999. The details of the story, for example the wording of his prayer, may not be entirely accurate, but the main focus of the story is to the best of my memory.