Wilderness Times 3-9-25
Wilderness Times
Deut 26:1-11; Luke 4:1-13
Deut 26:1-11
When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his name. You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, “Today I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.” When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord your God, you shall make this response before the Lord your God: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.” You shall set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.
Luke 4:1-13
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’” Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.
Prayer - Lord you are the one who called Jesus the Beloved – and we believe that we too are your Beloved Children. As we begin our journey towards Jerusalem and the cross, we are aware that much of that journey will take us into the wilderness. Help us to remain faithful even in the wilderness times, just as Jesus was faithful so long ago – amen.
Every year in the springtime a familiar ritual is repeated. Hundreds of grown men who have played baseball all their lives head to warmer climates in Florida and Arizona to practice the fundamentals of baseball for about six weeks. Men who grew up with a bat and glove have instructors who teach them again how to bat, throw, pitch and field the ball. Day after day, for weeks on end, these men get paid lots of money to play the game of baseball. Hitting, fielding and running the bases – all the things that would seem like second nature to the players get their renewed attention. Every phase of the game is studied all over again. To some folks, spring training seems like a waste of time. If they’ve played baseball all their lives, why don’t they just take to the field, have someone sing the National Anthem, have the umpire yell, “Play ball” and get started? Why spring training every year? If you ask the players why they head to spring training every year they will assure you it’s not because they’ve forgotten what to do. It is so they will get better at what baseball players do. It’s return to the basics to get them ready for the long season ahead; so they’ll be prepared; so they’ll be able to give their best at what they’ve devoted their lives to doing; so when the dog days of summer arrive, they can push through the wilderness of game after game.
In the church, every year as spring approaches we begin the Lenten journey to Jerusalem once again. And every year Lent begins with Jesus in the wilderness, confronted by the devil, perhaps just as we wrestle with our demons when we find ourselves in the wilderness. There are a lot of reasons why folks like us find ourselves in the wilderness; and right now, I imagine if feels pretty crowded. We are in the midst of a shift in the Church and in our country that has resulted in many of us here, outside the city gates, exhausted and scared, sad and angry, and curious what we might discover while out here in the wilderness.
Before Jesus began his work, before his miracles, before the crowds, before the cross, he walked alone into the wilderness, led by the Spirit. He was hungry. He was tested. He wrestled with every lie the world offered; that power would save him, that control would protect him, and that he had to prove who he was to be worthy of love. And for forty days, he refused to be defined by those lies.
Perhaps part of the good news is that we don’t have it all figured out right now. We aren’t required to have all the answers we seek when we aren’t even quite certain of our own questions yet. We certainly don’t need to know where we will end up by the end of the journey. Being willing to begin takes great courage, especially when our hearts are a bit battered and broken, when our story hasn’t worked out the way we thought it would.
It is ironic that I as a white male in our country has always found something intriguing and metaphorical about the wilderness. It just seems to fit with what I understand of the world and my place in it. If the city is a metaphor for certainty and belonging, then the wilderness is for questions and seeking our truth. I’m much more comfortable with wrestling with questions and avoiding certitude.
As each of you know to a degree or two, the wilderness can be a strange and disorienting and lonely place for a soul. It can be filled with danger and loss. But along the way, at least in my experience, we find others who, like us, are questioning and searching. And together, we learn a little bit about each other, the world and perhaps even the Divine as the devil did when he encountered Jesus in the wilderness.
I don’t know what led you to the wilderness and embarking on this journey. Some of us, like myself, very consciously left the city and entered into the wilderness because of questions, doubts and all of those ‘but what about questions.’ Others of us were never welcome in the city to begin with; the wilderness has always been a primary address for as long as one can remember. But there is one thing I love about the wilderness is that when we look up at night, we can see the stars out here in a way you never could while inside the city gates. May we indeed need darkness in order to see the light.
One of my adventures in the wilderness occurred while working as a hospital chaplain. It seemed that the longer I encountered incredible suffering the more questions begin to rise within my soul. I heard so many of those toxic theological comments coming out of the mouths of family members, church pastors, nurses and other chaplains that I felt the bile rising in my mouth – phrases such as “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle,” or “God needed another angel in heaven,” or “It was God’s plan.” Those comments were empty platitudes that only made the speaker feel better and had little to say about a God who wept with the death of a friend. I found myself in a theological wilderness – thinking and feeling that I needed to figure out something or I could never survive in the wilderness of the human suffering I encountered virtually every day as a chaplain.
As I began to give myself permission and even grace to wrestle in the wilderness, I felt like my first glimpse of something true. I had thought God was absent as I struggled in my theological wilderness, and it turned out that a wilderness isn’t and wasn’t an absence of God. I found the wilderness to be an invitation to a new path of intimacy and depth, growth and evolution. The wilderness wasn’t something to fear; God was always there, making a way. When my old sacred spaces felt desecrated, I found that God was inviting my on a different journey not stuck in the wilderness but through the wilderness.
The temptation when we find ourselves in the wilderness is to run for the nearest shelter of certainty we can find. These shelters may be online communities, new friendships, maybe even new churches. We are uneasy in the wilderness, we are afraid, desperate for answers to make sure we indeed aren’t lost, looking always for a way to prove our faithfulness.
In so many ways, when we find ourselves in the wilderness, we’re urgently hustling to escape again. So we look for guides who promise us certainty and healing. There is no shortage of experts in the wilderness with quick fixes – like the devil in our gospel passage. There are even a few carnival barkers out there, right Mr. Devil – promising short cuts and quick fixes selling superiority out of the back of a van. Be suspicious of this as Jesus was. The wilderness invitation was never going to be to a chipper plan, goal-setting worksheet, positive affirmations and do-better mantras that fit into an Instagram square. It’s always been about the love of God, for and in you, and also for and in this beautiful tragedy of the world.
I shared with many of you about my time of ‘deconstruction’ that came about during my wilderness experiences. Perhaps it was less about deconstruction and more about evolving faith – taking apart accepted ideas to explore its evolving truth, complexity and meaning. Many of you, like me may have pulled at your constructed faith, trying to see what is underneath it. Hopefully this led to a reconstructed or evolving faith, stronger and more robust, inclusive and loving across the spectrum of life and faith. As evangelical Rachel Held Evans said of her own theological wilderness times, “an evolving faith is simply faith that has adapted in order to survive.”
My wilderness experiences led me to an evolving faith and not just a deconstructed faith. I love the questions, he curiosity, the ongoing reckoning of a robust, honest faith. An evolving faith brings the new ideas and ancient paths together. It’s about rebuilding and reimagining a faith that works not only for me but perhaps for the whole messy, wide, beautiful world. For me, this has proven to be deeply centered in the radical good news of Jesus that nothing can separate us from God’s love. An evolving faith is sacramental, ecumenical, embodied generous, spirit-filled, truthful, and rooted in the unconditional, never-ending grace and love of God. An evolving faith is a resilient and stubborn form of faithfulness that is well acquainted with the presence of God in our loneliest places and deepest questions. An evolving faith has room for all the paths and not just one path.
So if you find yourself in the wilderness because of the entangling of faith and politics resulting in one particular ideology, then welcome; if you find yourself in the wilderness because of innumerable unanswered prayers, then welcome; if you find yourself in the wilderness because of trauma suffered with all of the scare tactics to get you ‘saved’ a minimum of six times just in case the first five didn’t count, then welcome; if you find yourself in the wilderness because you did everything right and yet everything went wrong because it turns out that life isn’t a recipe to follow and someone else’s interpretation of scripture isn’t a blueprint and prayer isn’t a vending machine and faith isn’t a synonym for control, then welcome.
Welcome to those of us who didn’t so much ‘cross a threshold into the wilderness’ as much as fell, body and soul, into the wasteland of an illness, a divorce, a graveside or a church committee. We are often told that only those of us who are faithless end up in the wilderness, that if you were a true believer you wouldn’t have found yourself here or that this is an elaborate scheme to justify ‘sinful behavior.’ Beloved, nothing could be further from the truth. As poet Christian Wiman wrote, “Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms.”
I believe that wilderness times are an invitation from the Holy Spirit, remember it was the Spirit that led Jesus to the wilderness to encounter the devil. This can be a gorgeous, rowdy invitation to a life you never dreamed possible, a more-welcoming sort of party with a few quiet corners for good conversation. It seems to me that perhaps all of us are desperate for some gentleness, compassion, wide-open spaces and kindness. May God bless your wilderness times as God did mine – you will find your faith evolving and transforming in ways that you can’t even begin to imagine – just ask Jesus about his wilderness times – thanks be to God – amen.