There is a well-known pilgrimage path known as the Camino de Santiago de Compostella, or the way of St. James. It begins in France and ends in Spain at the historic site of the Church of St. James, thought to be our patron's burial site.

Each year thousands of pilgrims make all or part of the nearly 500-mile trek over the Pyrenees to the site where the bones of St. James reside.

One of the priests in our diocese traveled the Camino during her sabbatical. She walked the nearly 500 miles of it by herself, stopping at the pilgrim huts along the way, making sure that she left at dawn each morning so that she would get to the next rest stop early enough to get a decent place to sleep for the night.

That kind of arduous pilgrimage requires the kind of stubborn determination that will stop at nothing in order to achieve one's goal. The same kind of determination, in fact, exhibited by Jesus in today's gospel. Luke writes that Jesus "set his face" toward Jerusalem and nothing was going to get in his way.

But, like anyone who sets out on a pilgrimage, Jesus ran into a number of setbacks.

Today, we see the first: Since he was going to Jerusalem from Galilee, the simplest way to get there would have been to go through Samaria.

But the Samaritans and the Jews had a long-standing feud about the proper place to worship God. One of the ways they acted out their hostility was to bar the other group from travel in their territory.

So the Jewish prophet Jesus and his disciples were not allowed to pass through Samaria. The border patrol turned them away, and they were forced to take a different, and longer, route.

In spite of this, Jesus was unwavering in his goal to get to Jerusalem. He knew that destiny awaited him.

So he continued down the long road, followed by 12 disciples and who knows how many hangers-on, most of whom weren't quite as determined as he was.

No doubt you have all experienced, and may be experiencing now, times when you have had a goal, either in your business or in your personal life, and nothing would sway you from it.

You would try to tell those who worked with you about the importance of what you were doing and you hoped that they would understand and set their face to achieve the goal with the same determination, but all the time you knew that they were just in half-hearted support, not really recognizing why this thing you desired to achieve was so important.

So it was with Jesus - destiny called, Jerusalem was his goal, and his disciples listened and nodded, and followed… and missed the point altogether.

Not surprising really. I think we forget that many of the stories in the gospels have a tongue-in-cheek humor. Often in Luke's gospel, the disciples function as the comic relief team of the New Testament: the 12 stooges, the original Larry Moe and Curly. The ancestors of Mel Brooks and Ben Stiller. Bumbling along behind their leader, "Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to consume those crummy Samaritans?"

You can almost hear Jesus sigh. No, that isn't necessary, thank you.

Jesus' walk to Jerusalem wasn't as long as the Way of St. James. Yet this fairly short journey covers several chapters in Luke, as Jesus stops along the road for one adventure or another. We will travel along with him and the disciples over the next several weeks.

The practice of pilgrimage is an ancient one. And of course the Camino de Santiago, or even the road to Jerusalem, is not the only road traveled by many each year.

There is the traditional road to Canterbury in England, and there are a plethora of pilgrim paths to Rome.

Pilgrimage differs from normal tourism in that there is a spiritual intention in the travel. One doesn't go just to see a holy site, but to offer prayers, or receive forgiveness, or give thanks.

It is a practice that can be deeply moving.

For those of us who want to experience it, there is a pilgrimage site not far from here. I speak of the National Cathedral in DC.

You can spend an entire day perusing the many different chapels, praying in the Center for Prayer and Pilgrimage, attending Eucharist and Evensong.

You can even arrange to make a pilgrimage of more than one day, meeting with others who have come on the same path.

Even closer is our labyrinth across the street.

For those unable to travel, the labyrinth embodies the pilgrim experience - we come to our destination carrying our concerns and prayers; we leave having been given grace for another day.

In that way, Pilgrimage is a symbol of our own relationship to God, and so this journey with Jesus to Jerusalem functions as a metaphor for us. We travel the road with Christ, but our road doesn't lead to a particular location. Instead it leads us to transformation.

Like the disciples, we often bumble along, with no clear idea of where our destiny lies.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing. As Buddhist philosophy points out, in the journey is the destination.

In other words, the fact that we are walking in the way of Christ is the goal itself.

As we travel along the spiritual journey, we are meant to be conformed more and more to the image of Christ.

Our goal is to live by the Spirit, as the Apostle Paul taught - so that over time the fruit of the spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control are cultivated in our lives.

Like any pilgrim path, each of ours is filled with both opportunities and difficulties.

Most of us find that the daily living out of our faith is a three-steps-forward, two-steps back experience.

One day we are making choices in keeping with faithful living; the next day we fail miserably.

Yet even in these setbacks we can rejoice.

For, as those writings of St. Paul have reminded us, it is not our own efforts that will save us; it is only the grace of Christ that does that, given to us through his death on this cross.

Now we live, not in fear of God's wrath, but in the joy of God's generosity, because God has made us holy through Christ.

If you're not sure that God can do such things with you, just look at the 12 disciples.

That inept comic relief team that bumbled along behind Jesus later became known as the 12 apostles - a group of men who literally changed the world's paradigm forever. Filled with the Holy Spirit, they introduced Christianity to most of the known world.

If God could change them, imagine what God can do with us.