Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from February 13, 2005

“Into the Wilderness”

Rev. Patricia L. Liberty

Scriptures:

Romans 5:12-19

Matthew 4:1-11

“Do not bother looking for Lent in your Bible Dictionary, because there was no such thing back then.”  So writes Barbara Brown Taylor in her wonderfully acerbic interpretation of the Church’s invention of Lent.

She continues, “There is some evidence that early Christians fasted forty hours between Good Friday and Easter, but the custom of spending forty days in prayer … did not arise until later when the initial rush of Christian adrenaline was over and believers had gotten very ho-hum about their faith.  When the world did not end as Jesus himself had said it would, his followers stopped expecting so much from God or from themselves.  Hearing that, the church decided it was time to call believers back to their senses.”  (Home by Another Way, Barbara Brown Taylor)

The witness of Scripture offered several models for that.  Israel spent forty years in the wilderness learning to trust God; Moses spent forty days on the mountain listening and waiting for God to give the Law; and Elijah spent forty days on that same mountain waiting until the still small voice of God spoke in the quiet after the storm. 

There’s a biblical pattern that is continued in the accounts of Jesus’ temptation time  in the wilderness.  Like the accounts of his baptism, the temptation story is recorded in all the synoptic gospels which suggests that it was central to the development of the gospel witness.  Matthew places it immediately after Jesus’ baptism.

Wilderness is the place where all the stuff of life is stripped away and we are left naked before God.  In the wilderness, Jesus was left to wrestle with all that stood in the way of his ability to do God’s bidding in his life.  In the wilderness, Jesus came face to face with his greatest fears and deepest temptations. 

Wilderness (the word in ancient language is midbar) is the place where no thing, nothing, is.  In ancient times, it was the desert that was the symbol of the wilderness.  As one raised here in the Northeast, my own images of wilderness are shaped by time in the deep woods, where there is shade and shelter and water, and when carefully selected, more than enough food.  As a four-season wilderness camper, it is the place where I have learned to survive and even to thrive. 

It wasn’t until we camped in the desert in Arizona that I began to see wilderness in a more Biblical light.  In desert wilderness, sand blew across acres of open landscape and stung my skin like millions of tiny needles.  It was a barren place with no water, no shade, no place to escape the relentless sun that burned my skin and parched my mouth in a thirst unlike any I have every known.  At night, temperatures plunged as much as 70 degrees and excruciating heat was replaced by bone-penetrating cold.  Desert wilderness was the place where I learned that all of my self-sufficient notions about surviving on my own dissolved into the realization that what I knew would not save me and the best I could do would not protect me in this hostile yet beautiful place.

I guess that is the meaning of wilderness—that place where what we know will not save us; where our illusions of self sufficiency give way to the realization that we are, indeed, dependent on a life force beyond our own.  Whether a real wilderness or a spiritual wilderness, these are the times when we come face to face with God; when the stuff of our life is cleared away; and we are left, for want of a better term, “naked” before God.

Most of the time we can, at least, skirt the fantasy that we are pretty much in charge of our lives.  We choose the work we will do, how we will spend our money, who we will relate to, how children will be raised, what kind of car to buy, where to live, what church to go to, what we like to do for fun.  But wilderness is the place where those things are stripped away and we are left face to face with God because God is all that’s left.  It is not a place to which one willingly goes. 

But Matthew’s account tells us that Jesus was led into the wilderness, and he followed.  I have to say I like Mark’s account better because Mark says that Jesus was driven in to the wilderness.  Whether driven or led, it is here that Jesus faced temptation, battled his demons, and fought with Satan. 

Now, I don’t know about you but as a post-modern liberal-type Christian, that fighting with Satan is a phrase that gives me just a little bit of anxiety.  Images of Bible-thumping preachers, hell, fire-and-brimstone ranting and personifications of evil that look like monsters and devils running around with pitchforks come to mind in a rather disconcerting way.  The truth is that Hollywood and Dante, not to mention the Religious Right, have done more to shape our images of Satan than Scripture.

So if you’ll bear with me for just a moment, I want to ground this text from Matthew in a larger Biblical framework.  I begin with a passage from Deuteronomy.  Those of you who were here last night for worship heard Julie read it:  “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one … “  It is known as the Shema and it is recited by Jews every week when they come to worship in the synagogue.  It is the cornerstone of our Judeo-Christian tradition.  What it means in this particular context is that Satan, or the devil, is not an independent or absolute power of evil over and against god.  Only God is absolute; all other powers are subordinate.  In the Biblical tradition then, God continued to be associated even with events that tested human beings.

We see this most clearly in the Book of Job.  You may remember the story of Job who is tested by Satan through the loss of all his worldly possessions and, yet, remains a faithful witness to Yahweh.   It is the Book of Job that introduces us to Satan as one of God’s angels; yes, a worker of God. 

In the Judaic tradition, Satan was understood to be part of God’s cadre of helpers.  It was Satan’s job to wrest out hypocrisy and false faith from the fold.  Satan’s job was not to tempt people to evil, but to spot the evil in people—there’s a big difference.  (David Robertson, “The Book of Job, a Literary Study”)  Satan is sent to Job to help him clarify his relationship with God.  If you remember the story, Job’s wilderness experience ended up in his reaffirmation of his faith in God despite the counsel of his unfaithful friends who, somehow, wanted to blame Job for his own troubles.

So, the Satan figure that appears with Jesus in the wilderness is not the ultimate manifestation of evil, but, rather, a presence that leads Jesus to struggle with his faith and his call.  It is the one who called Jesus to wrestle with the deepest truths about himself in preparation for his work. 

That is what the wilderness is really all about.  Wilderness moments are those times when we come face to face with the truth of who we are and whose we are and all that stands in the way of living out that truth.  It was for Jesus, and it is for us, the sum total of our humanness, our deepest fears, our longest-held secrets, our oldest grudges, our most broken relationships, our pettiest judgments, our most blatant prejudice, and our deepest yearnings.  The temptation to do things easily, to have power, to get control is as much a part of our human journey as it was Jesus’.

In the Harry Potter series, there is a scene where Harry comes across a magic mirror.  When he looks in it, he sees not only his own reflection, but that of his dead parents as well.  In the animation of the magic mirror, his long-departed parents smile at him and put their arms around him and Harry longs to go with them in the image of the mirror.  It is his mentor, Professor Dumbledore, who explains to Harry that whoever looks in the mirror sees in it’s the reflection of that for which he longs the most.  The power and the danger of the mirror lie in the same truth:  that we can be either freed or bound by our greatest longings.  Wilderness is the place where we make that choice—will we be freed by our greatest longings or will we be bound by them.  

The wilderness is  where we come to the wounded essence of our life, our shattered dreams and greatest disappointments, the ways that others have failed us and we have failed them.  In the wilderness, we find our testimony to the truth that we are formed by a tender and violent process.  And as we gaze into that truth we are can be either freed or forever bound. 

Jesus was freed.  That moment became the ground of his ministry.  The witness from him, I believe is true for us as well, as painful as it may be, those moments are the ground of all authentic ministry and faith.  True witness begins in the deepest places of our being, that place where God lays claim to our life.  It is not about how much we know.  It is not about how much we have.  It’s not about eloquence or perfection.  Discipleship is about authenticity and groundedness; the life long journey of scraping away the stuff that stands in the way of an honest relationship with God, and, by definition, with others.  Times in the wilderness is about sorting it all out.

Matthew concludes his story by saying, “…and suddenly angels came and waited on him.”  It’s a bit of a quirky ending to the stark and shocking images.  Somehow, the presence of angels softens the horror of it all even though our images of angels are as distorted as our images of Satan—little cherubic creatures with haloes and wings and wands flitting around from place to place zapping away the garbage du jour.  The angel-craze of the last few years has cemented the image firmly in our mind.  Now, I don’t really know what they look like but there are some other images besides haloes and wings that might be helpful.

The contemporary musical “Wise Women” is a historical revision of the Epiphany journey of the Wise Men to Bethlehem.  In the opening scene, the Wise Men are arguing with their wives about following the star and how the women should remain home to keep the household intact.  Finally, the women persuade their husbands to let them come along, convincing them that they would be a great asset.  The story unfolds with lots of humor, wisdom and insight in a most delightful way.  Toward the end of the story, when they finally get to Bethlehem and the angels appear at the manger just as they do in the text of Matthew.  However, rather than cherubic creatures playing lutes and harps, they are dressed as custodians wielding brooms and mops.  Rather than angels who magically fix whatever is wrong, these are angels who roll up their sleeves, aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty and do the work that no one else values or wants to do.

I like that image of angels—not as magicians, but as custodians of our woundedness who aren’t afraid to be known in the wrenching places of life; as those who wait upon us, with us and for us as we wrestle our demons on the way to deeper faithfulness. 

It’s comforting to think that Jesus, in the midst of his own wrenching self-examination, had companions who were willing to enter that pain with him rather than poof it all away.  I do not know what form those angels took, but I guess I’d like to think that they were schlepping brooms rather than sporting wands.

In my own wilderness times, the angels who have best ministered to me are those who have not tried to fix it, but simply offered to share it; those who witnessed to God’s love when I felt anything but loveable; those who believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself; those who somehow managed to remind me that the wilderness wasn’t forever but just for now.  Angels are those who interpret for us the language of being beloved of God.  While they may not make the wilderness disappear, they certainly make it manageable.

So, welcome to Lent, the season of wilderness—a time to pay attention to all that stands in the way of seeing ourselves as the beloved of God, and needed by God for the loving, life-giving, life-wrenching work of building the kingdom.  Lent is a time to journey to places we seldom visit, a time to be challenged by truths we might rather avoid, and a time to meet God in the presence of angels who will companion us in the wilderness. 

Peace to you in the wilderness. Amen.