These wildernesses were preserved as a recognition that even with minimal human interaction, they nonetheless have value in and of themselves as habitats for animals, as places of inspiring beauty in and of themselves, uncommercialized. These places are not viewed as resources to be exploited, but as a gift that cannot be replaced or remade once they are gone.
These diverse wildernesses were protected from disturbance, and for people to enjoy-- so long as those people abide by the wilderness ethics code, which requires human visitors to “Leave No Trace.” It also begins with the expectation to “plan ahead and prepare.” The wilderness can be a place of danger, but it can also be a place of spiritual purification and awakening. As noted author Terry Tempest Williams describes it, “A blank spot on the map is an invitation to encounter the natural world, where one's character will be shaped by the landscape. To enter wilderness is to court risk, and risk favors the senses, enabling one to live well. The landscapes we know and return to become places of solace. We are drawn to them because of the stories they tell, because of the memories they hold, or simply because of the sheer beauty that calls us back again and again. (Williams, Refuge, loc 3550/4534)
The wilderness, in scripture, was a place of extremes of heat and cold, of arid landscapes occasionally interrupted by flash floods that suddenly created short-lived rivers and streams, animals who would suddenly appear out of holes in the ground. It was a place of danger. But it was also the place where one encountered God. The place where the covenant was sealed between God and Abraham. The place where Jacob dreamed of his ladder reaching to heaven. Moses and the Burning Bush. The giving of the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai. The wanderings through the Wilderness of Sin—yes, it is actually named that—where the Israelites during their exodus grumbled against God when they got hungry. The place where David hid from Saul and Elijah hid from Ahab. The place where wild-eyed prophets roamed, either fasted or ate bugs, and contended with their God.
For here is another truth: the wilderness is the place where promises are made and kept by God.
Our scriptures underscore the reminder that the wilderness is a place for exploration of the self as much as exploration of a landscape. These are also places that can call us to question the unwritten stories that often operate to support the things we do unquestioningly. It is a place of self-examination, and a place of turning. Unfortunately, for too many of us, the wilderness is a place to be avoided. It is a place that lacks creature comforts. It is harsh and unforgiving, we think. And so we create negative associations and shun the experiences that true wilderness can bring out of us. But the wilderness whether inside us or outside us, is a place where God faithfully fulfils the promise of salvation.
On Friday we went to hear Handel’s Messiah Oratorio performed at Powell Symphony Hall—the very opposite of a wilderness you can imagine. The place was decked out to the nines. There were gigantic wreaths and ribbons everywhere. There were twinkly lights hung on those wreaths and on the garlands arranged like a huge smile beneath them.
We settled back into our comfortable seats, and for two and a half hours we listened to the choir and the harpsichords and the organ and the strings and the lone bassoon and oboe and the two trumpets and especially the four soloists. The music rolled over us in waves. The words were projected up on a screen as they were sung.
And being the Biblical nerd that I am, I noticed the scriptures that made up the first half of the oratorio were almost all from prophetic books, especially Isaiah. Isaiah, the prophet most quoted by Jesus and about Jesus in the New Testament, as we saw in our gospel today. And so, sitting in that grand building, I was left to contemplate the contradiction between the idea of the wilderness and the artful music that resonated all around the audience.
From our reading in Isaiah to our passage from Matthew’s gospel, we see descriptions of wilderness. In fact, in our gospel from Matthew, we hear a prophecy from Isaiah 40—much later in the book we attribute to that prophet. But Isaiah speaks of a king sprouting up from a tree trunk that has been struck down, and that king’s reign leading to not just a restoration of justice and but a restoration of creation in which wild animals no longer prey on tame ones, and there is no longer any need for one to suffer and die for the feeding of another. Wilderness becomes a restored garden of Eden. Most importantly, the wilderness is a place where true community and working together for the common good becomes reality.
Then Matthew describes John the Baptizer as a wild man, but a wild man with a voice. “A voice cries out from the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord; make his pathways straight.”
And how does one do that, in the place where there ARE no pathways? John answers that too, by calling those he encounters there to repentance. And there’s a word from which many of us recoil, instantly. Calls for repentance are too often associated with feelings of shame, of accusation, of being considered wrong and broken. John’s own words and description here are part of that problem, in fact. But we also get a hint that John himself may have inserted his own preferences here. Jesus will defy even John’s expectations. That is why later John will be shown as questioning whether Jesus is the actual Messiah or not. With Jesus, there was a LOT less smiting and burning than John expected, and a whole lot more healing and reconciliation.
For Jesus, repentance is about healing. It’s a place where promises are made and kept by God from tender compassion and mercy. All that repentance really means is to take time to examine our lives, and where our choices and stubbornness are not serving us, to make a decision to turn. And in this way, we are being asked to understand the wilderness not as something internal, but as something that lies within us all. All that repentance really means is to have faith in the faithful love of God for us, rather than in our own shallow, misspent scrabbling after the illusion of our own insatiable appetites for more, more, more.
Too many of us fear that wilderness within us too—or at least fear really exploring it, much less acknowledging where we might need some realignment. And this awakening to our own waywardness, our own privilege—that has become such a loaded word but it is a word that MUST be spoken if we are ever to move to reconciliation and healing in our world. That acceptance of our own benefit from injustice is there, and it must become visible by looking at life through the perspectives of others when they offer us their truth. The call to repentance is a starting point for accepting the relief of God’s incomprehensible grace.
But if we do dare to be brave enough to explore the wilderness within us, we can learn that it’s not just a place of danger, impulse, and brutality. It is also a place that calls us to contemplation of who we are as people and what our actions tell others about us and our character. The wilderness inside us is a gift, because it is a place of restoration, of purification. It is a place where we get to know our true selves. It is also the place within us that God most seeks to dwell in—if only we are brave enough to invite God in, to embrace the promise of God’s abundant love for us, yes, but also the transformative gift of living by God’s abundant economy, of straightening the pathways to our hearts to let in our savior.
Externally or internally, the wilderness is no barrier to God-- God loves the wilderness just the way it is. And God spends a lot of time in the wilderness with us. It is us who want the wilderness leveled, not God. Since when does God see the wilderness and respond with a construction crew and truck full of asphalt? God’s time is NOT our time, and God’s schedule is not our schedule. God likes to take the long way home, reminding us once again that God’s home is everywhere, wherever God is but not limited to one place.
It is in the midst of the wilderness that the people are urged to faith. And the kind of faith the people are being urged to embrace is not an easy faith. It is faith that seems to fly in the face of all evidence. The wilderness is where God’s word will be proclaimed, by Isaiah and by John the Baptist and Jesus. It’s a place that strips us bare of all our illusions and vanities and pretended pride. It’s a place where our defenses against admitting our wrongdoing are shredded, but not so that we can be punished. So that we can be moved to repentance—to the turning joyfully to a new life that is more pure and truer to God’s commandments, yes, but more importantly, to a life that is truer to God’s PROMISES.
The readings we explore during the season of Advent are meant to remind us of the glorious promises which are our inheritance as people of faith. We also begin the ingathering of your promises made to support this parish and help it to flourish and to grow in its mission of being the light of Christ in the world. Nothing more, nothing less.
In the darkness and cold of winter, we are reminded of promises made and promises kept. We are reminded that Christ came to call us to unity, not division, and certainly not fear. Confident in God’s abundant plans for our flourishing, amy we make straight the pathway of Christ into our hearts.
Amen.
Readings:
Citations:
Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, loc. 3550/4534, kindle edition.
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