If you ever plan to motor west // Travel my way, take the highway that is best // Get your kicks on route sixty-six // It winds from Chicago to LA // More than two thousand miles all the way. // Get your kicks on route sixty-six // Now you go through saint looey // Joplin, Missouri // and Oklahoma City is mighty pretty // You see Amarillo // Gallup,  New Mexico // Flagstaff, Arizona // Don’t forget Winona // Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino. // Won’t you get hip to this timely tip…

Route 66, Booby Troup, 1946

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Recently, as I marked another trip around the sun, my wife, somewhat sardonically, noted that I had transitioned from being the speed limit to that of a US Highway – Route 66. Funny, lady my Beth.

In this case, I could find some solace in knowing that this is, and has been, a highway memorialized in song by Bobby Troup in 1946 and covered by some of our greatest artists for many decades. Great song…But that and a dollar will get me a plain bagel in the morning.

It did get me thinking about routes, roadways, roads and all of the iterations of meaning they can take. In particular, a route can be a means of access – the route to the bagel store. As a transitive verb, route can mean a diversion in a specified direction. Or it can convey a ‘way’ or ‘course,’ as in the road to peace – or the road to life.

Where have I heard that before?

“Don’t be troubled. Trust in God. Trust also in me. My Father’s house has room to spare. If that weren’t the case, would I have told you that I’m going to prepare a place for you? When I go to prepare a place for you, I will return and take you to be with me so that where I am you will be too. You know the way to the place I’m going.” Thomas asked, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus answered, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

Jesus is the route we follow to reach the Father and he has invited us to be the routes to him.

In Matthew 28 we read:  Jesus came near and spoke to them, “I’ve received all authority in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I’ve commanded you. Look, I myself will be with you every day until the end of this present age.”

This is the great commission and it begins with an astonishing claim:

All authority has been given to me, so go out there, baptize and disciple.

Jesus has been given universal authority and the disciples have now been given universal marching orders to bring all nations to the school of Jesus. Can you hear him? I keep getting the picture of the platoon leader exhorting the troops to get up, move out. It’s time to disciple; it’s time to baptize; it’s time to teach. But this is much more than an order to get moving. The great commission is an invitation to be disciples of Jesus, united to him in the waters of baptism by the power of the Spirit, and part of the God’s great work of renewal. The great commission is about becoming the gathered people of God so we can  do these things for the life of the world.

Baptize

It’s Christian evangelism. The thunderclap shattering the grave on Easter morning was not simply an announcement that your ticket to heaven was getting punched. It was not about a flight from the decaying world so you can flit around on fluffy clouds having a private party somewhere far away. No. It was the dawn of new creation, the renewal of all things. In baptism, we are joined with Jesus by the power of the Spirit and through our baptism, God has extended an invitation to us to have the cosmic renewal that was begun in Jesus, happen in our lives. We also are to extend that invitation.

Disciple

Most importantly, being part of Team Jesus is the means by which cosmic renewal happens through our lives as well. It happens when our character, our very ethic, is clothed in the values of the kingdom, when our way of being is an effortless and automatic extension of sincere love of other that brings justice to the disenfranchised, healing for the sick, and comfort for those who mourn. That’s being a disciple and the pathway for the discipleship of others. So get out out there and invite someone to travel with you as their route to the only road that matters.