Water in the Desert

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
12.07.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture: Mark 1:1-8

A while back, I had the great pleasure of presiding over the wedding of a friend. I’d known her since high school, when she and my wife were part of a circle BFFs before the word BFF even existed. It was a complete joy officiating over her union with her husband, but as I prepared for the service, I got a little bit concerned about the location.

Her parents had left the Washington metro area years back, and now lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico. It’s an absolutely gorgeous place, smack out in the middle of the desert in the Rio Grande Valley and surrounded by mountains. The plan for the wedding ceremony was to have it in a park at the base of the mountains, at an amphitheater that had towering and glorious peaks as a backdrop. When the couple showed me pictures of where they wanted to have the event, I had to agree. It was a perfect place, just radiant with the glory of God’s creation.

That didn’t make me any less nervous. I tend to be a total wuss when it comes to outdoor weddings, because as complicated and challenging as organizing a service can be, adding the randomness of weather into the mix is just more than I can stand. What if it rains? What if one of those sudden storms pop up, and the wedding party has to flee from driving winds and torrential rain?

When I arrived to check out the site the day before and to do the wedding rehearsal prep, I realized that my worry about rain was totally off. This was really and truly desert. The sun was brilliant and intense, and the light pressed down like a physical presence. But the heat you felt was totally different. It was the complete opposite of the Washington August heat, which is like getting into a jacuzzi while wearing a sleeping bag. This heat was totally dry, and the strong winds that blew off of the desert and up the sides of the mountains had not a single molecule of H2O in them. As I stared into that wind, I felt it greedily pull the moisture from my mouth and throat. After five minutes, my tongue felt like sandstone, and my eyes were like sand-crusted marbles. It’s a good thing I wasn’t going to have to do any public speaking there. Oh. Wait. I was.

The only option was water. I had to drink, and drink both regularly and constantly. Without that, my vocal cords would have dried out like parchment in a matter of minutes. Fortunately, the wedding party had provided this aplenty.

They knew, as anyone with a lick of sense knows, that there is nothing more precious in the desert than water. We kinda sorta know how important water is, but it’s easy to forget it as we trundle about our day to day lives, our Big Gulps in hand. Water is everywhere. But in the intense scarcity of the desert, our appreciation of the humble liquid that makes up around 70% of our physical forms is heightened. We need it more, and we become aware of how deeply we need it.

The desert and those wilderness places in the world have always been central to the lives of those who wanted to get down to the most essential, the most necessary, the most vital parts of their faith. Throughout the history of the people of Israel, desert places had always been the ones that had provided refuge from the distractions of the world. It was into the wilderness that monks had fled seeking escape, and it was from the wilderness that prophets came with proclamations of truths that were beyond the grasp of those who had forgotten what was truly necessary in the world.

As Mark’s Gospel begins, we heard today of a prophet who came from the wilderness, of John the Baptist. Mark’s book of the story of Christ begins by first declaring itself good news, and then gets right into a reference from the prophet Isaiah. That prophet’s poetic cry of the arrival of a messenger in the wilderness is declared a reference to John the Baptist. What John did was not too uncommon among the Hebrew people. Rituals of cleansing in water were part of the way in which Jews in the first century reclaimed themselves and recommitted themselves to their faith. In order to be ritually pure for worship in the temple, the Torah requires ritual bathing. While the process of being baptized was not quite the same, it had the same spiritual foundation.

But while there were similarities between what John did by the banks of the Jordan and what others had done before, there were some real and significant differences. What was striking about John was how intensely he pointed beyond the act that he was engaged in. While he was engaging in a ritual that had deep symbolic roots, the one who was to follow on afterwards, and who John himself was to baptize...that one would engage in an act far more potent and transforming than the ritual and symbolic cleansing of baptism by water.

The baptism by the Holy Spirit described by involves a far deeper transformation, a changing of the will through the presence of the grace of God. That sense of the presence of God, and the awareness that in some strange way God is working through you to change you...that’s the very heart and essence of the Gospel message that Jesus proclaimed.

But, you may ask, how does this work for us, today? To get a sense of the powerful presence of God’s Spirit, the prophets wandered out into the wildernesses of Judea. To know the working of God’s grace in themselves, the monks of the early Christian church isolated themselves in the deserts of North Africa. How can we get that same sense of God’s presence?

We are far closer to the desert than we might think. Not a desert as defined by the absence of water, but a desert as defined by the absence of the Spirit. Just as water brings green life and blooms and fruit, the fruits that come from the presence of the Spirit are grace and comfort and forgiveness. All of us experience areas in our lives in which those things are as hard to find as an orange tree in Death Valley.

Those broken and barren places may be a friendship that has soured. It might be a relationship where once there was love and now there is only hurt. It might be a place that should bring direction and hope, but brings only anger and confusion. It might be a season that should bring comfort and joy, but instead yields only stress and greed. Our lives do not lack for deserts, and they test us as truly as the burning sun tested the prophets. How we respond to those times and places is the measure of our faith.

We all have our deserts. And just like we need to take every opportunity to drink in the desert to keep it from drying us out like a stone, we need to take every opportunity to both seek and express the fruits of the Spirit in those desert places in our lives. There is no moment or place in your life where that cannot be expressed, where the Spirit cannot work change. It comes when you offer a word of grace instead of a cutting remark. It comes when you choose to reach out to someone who is different, or who seems to stand in opposition to you. It comes when you choose to help someone grow, instead of ignoring them or allowing them to continue to fail.

That Spirit is always there, always present, always waiting to rain down upon the dead places and to bring life to them again.

Know that truth, and drink deep.