Different Deserts

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

12.08.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 3:1-12

The story we hear today is a story of a desert faith, a story of a human being whose life was formed and shaped by the dry desolation of the wilderness, and that’s a bit of a hurdle.  Because here on the East Coast, we don’t really have a feel for the whole desert thing.

This area of the mid-Atlantic is green and moist and seasonal.  Today couldn’t feel less like desert, to be frank.  From what the Super Doppler Storm Center Nerve Center Weather Alert Action Team was telling me on the eights this morning, the official forecast for this afternoon is “Slurpee.”  I’m hoping for a mix of Berry Citrus Slam and Coca Cola Classic, although I’ll admit that cleanup could get a little bit sticky.  

Few things could seem further away than the hot arid brightness of Arizona or the Sahara.  

Earlier in the week, it did sort of feel like summer, which was bizarre given what today is like, but even at the very height of a Washington summer, it’s nothing at all like what you’d encounter in New Mexico.  Here, summer is like getting into a jacuzzi while wearing a sleeping bag. Take yourself out into the wastes, and the heat is totally dry, with strong winds that howl across the flatlands and up the sides of the arroyos with not a single molecule of H2O in them. It’s the kind of dry that greedily pulls the moisture from your mouth and throat, leaving your throat like sandstone, and your eyes like sand-crusted marbles.

Desert is a dead place, barren and empty and devoid of water, and nothing could be farther from our experience.  What little potential you find for life there holds on by the skin of the teeth of its nails, or something like that. It is the farthest thing from a place of abundance.

And our world, the world we inhabit, is a land of remarkable abundance.  Everything is big, everything is copious and bountiful and supersized.  Our food is large, our houses are large, and the vehicles we drive to go get our large food to eat in our large house as we sit in front of our large screen?  Well, they’re large too.

If deserts are dry places, our abundance is perhaps best measured in water, and we Americans really do have plenty of water.  How much water we use on a daily basis has always hornswoggled me.  The average American household uses...according to EPA data... around 300 gallons per day.  When you factor in all of the water used to create all of the food and products we consume, that translates into...per person...over seven hundred and fifty thousand gallons of water per person per year.  I can’t quite process this.

Americans do not have a desert mentality.  And yet in all of this abundance, the great river of water and product that flows through our lives, we still feel that there is something missing.  It’s a peculiar thing.  We can still feel that absence, like our lives are an empty and dry wilderness.

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 Matthew’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. It’s the ritual of the mikvah, and it’s still practiced today.  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 was the point of that moment of baptism.  God’s kingdom is present, right here, so close you can touch it.  This was at the core of what John the Baptist taught.  We hear it in chapter three, verse one, when he says “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

In Matthew’s story, this message is also the heart of the message proclaimed by Jesus, who...after being baptized by John, goes out into the desert for a time of testing and preparation.  When he returns, we hear in Matthew 4:17 that he picks up that very same cry: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

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, seeking out places where life was whittled down to its most essential.  Nothing extra, just enough to sustain the process of life.

We live in a very different place.  We live in a land where in many of the thousands of catalogs that seem to show up at my door every day, one hot selling product this year appears to be a hat with a fake knit face beard attached.  I realize that beards are awesome, obviously, but is this really a thing we need.  We live in a land where we pour our real money into virtual things, like, say, an app that was banned from the iTunes store earlier this year.  It was called “I Am Rich,” and all it did was cause a single red gem to glow in the center of your device.  Cost: Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine Dollars and Ninety Nine Cents.  Evidently, the app name “I Have More Money Than Sense” was already taken.

For all of our abundance, for all of the choking, crushing cornucopia of materialism, we are far closer to the desert than we might think.  It feels, sometimes, as if all of the stuff that pours out of the maw of consumer culture is as relentless and inhospitable as a Death Valley sun at the middle of the day.  Those possessions and the expectations they create beat down upon us, and shrivel us, and leave us parched and spiritless and dry as antelope bone.

So perhaps, perhaps we do know the desert experience.  We all have our wilderness places.

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 time of struggle with illness and mortal frailty.  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 grasping and an absurd sense of inadequacy. 

So I’ll take back what I said about how we don’t know the wilderness.  Our lives do not lack for deserts.  They’re just different deserts.  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.

Whereever your desert is, however it tests you, remember:  From that time of testing comes the possibility of deeper graces, and a stronger relation with our Creator, whose Kingdom is, truly, at hand.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.