In the Wilderness A Way

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

12.07.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 1:1-8

There’s this tendency we have, ensconced in the comfort of our homes and our neatly managed lives, to think about wilderness in romantic ways.  We look to the moon and stars, to the loveliness of the trees and the flowing of brooks.  We imagine ourselves at one with nature, cavorting through the woodland, dancing with the llamas and the majestic moose.  We are part of the beauty of nature, we tell ourselves, dreamily.  This tends to end up with us being eaten by bears.

Or we imagine ourselves to be mighty adventurers, powerful individuals, a loner and a rebel.  We see the wilderness as a challenge to be sought, something that we in our big mighty man strength will overcome.  We’re a true nature’s child, born, born to be wild.  This also tends to end up with us being eaten by bears.  

Wilderness is rather less forgiving of our romantic notions about it.  Once we step outside of the bounds of our carefully managed relationship with its wild, chaotic creativity...even just a tiny little bit...we discover that it isn’t forgiving at all, and that we are small, fragile, and taste just like chicken.

It doesn’t take much to remind us of the power of the wild.

Years ago, when I was a scrawny young twenty-something, I was travelling with my parents and brother in Nigeria, journeying down from their compound in Ibadan to a resort on the Abraka river in the southern Delta province.  The Abraka is an unusual river.  The water is deep and spring fed, pouring from the earth at the base of a sacred tree.  The spring water is crystal clear, so clear you can see perfectly all the way to the bottom, which ranges from three to five meters in depth.

Quick math for Americans...how many feet is that?  Answer: plenty.

We were staying at a little resort on the river, which offered a unique opportunity.  Rent an inner tube, go up to the bridge, and ride on the sacred waters through beautiful, untouched jungle.  It sounded cool, so we rented the tubes...big black rubber truck-tire inner tubes...loaded them into the back of the uparmored Chevy Suburban that was assigned to my parents as part of the diplomatic corps, and asked our driver to take us to the bridge.  He checked his map, and drove us along dirt roads for several miles, until we reached a large bridge at a nearby road.

We unloaded the ‘burban, put the tubes in the water, and headed downriver.  The water was as advertised.  Clear as crystal, clear as air, with fish swimming twenty feet below us, looking so close you could touch them.  In a minute, the bridge was behind us.  There was no evidence of humanity.  No houses, no cars, no passing aircraft.  Nothing.

Around us, it was beautiful, lush, and unspoiled, the branches of the trees hanging down into the water, animals dancing furtively in the trees, just out of sight.  We drifted and paddled about, chattering and pointing out beautiful things.

The river got narrower, and faster.  And then narrower still, snaking back and forth, and we found we were having to paddle fiercely, awkwardly, just to stay in the flow.  We began to wonder.

Five minutes passed, then ten, then fifteen.

We passed a bend...and the river disappeared entirely, spreading out, flowing swiftly into thick jungle, not swamp but jungle, trees reaching down three meters into the water.  And we were in it, flowing through sharp-edged razor grass and dense thickets of thorny vines.  We were lost, in a jungle, in deep cold fast-flowing water.

It was thickening, and we worked together, to avoid trees and tangles.  We started to get cut up, a large slash across my father’s arm, the thorny vines poking holes in not just us, but the thick rubber of our flotation,  my brother’s inner tube hissing.  As we fought our way around another dense thicket, mine exploded, sinking rapidly away into the water.  Littering is bad, but at that moment I wasn’t worried about it.

I paddled around, staying away from vines, hanging on to one family member’s tube after another, helping get unstuck and untangled.  We stuck together, worked together, helped one another out, and stayed in the flow.

Fifteen minutes later, we were out, as the river opened up again.  Ten minutes after that, we passed a little tiny footbridge, just five hundred yards from the hotel.  This, as it turns out, was the bridge we were supposed to have started from.

Wildness, real wildness, even just for half an hour, is considerably less fun than we pretend.

Here John the Baptist was not in the wilderness for his health, or out of any dreamy idea about the beauty of the Judean desert.  He was not a tourist, or an adventurer, or a romantic. For the people of ancient Israel, the desert was a place where you could stand in direct encounter with the I Am That I Am, which in and of itself was a shattering, shaking experience.  It was not a place you entered lightly. What he sought there wasn’t solace, or comfort, or distraction, but an experience that would fundamentally shake him.

The wilderness was neither tame nor safe.  In Judea, it was desert scrubland, harsh and hot and merciless.  You could live there, but you could also much more easily die there.  For those who journeyed through what the prophets called ba midbar, which among its many meanings can be translated as the space beyond, it was both a dangerous realm and a place of liberation.

Wilderness is the place that received the people of Israel when they fled from Egypt, the place that hid the prophets when they were struggling with the powers that tore at their lives.  It was the place evoked by the prophet Isaiah, who looked at the mess of the world that he encountered, and proclaimed that there was, within that chaos, the possibility of a new way of being.

We are far closer to the wilderness than we might think.  And it is far closer to us, though we might try to manage it and contain it and control it.  Here in the seeming solidity of our suburban lives, there’s a surprising amount of wildness.

Those wild, chaotic, shattering places can take many forms. It might be a place of loss that refuses to heal. It might be a season that should bring comfort and joy, but instead yields only isolation, stress, or anxiety.  It could be the churning, snarling chaos of our culture, red in tooth and claw, where truth seems forever out of our reach, and all of our energies seem turned towards attacking one another.  Our lives do not lack for wildernesses, 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.

The key words there are “we” and “our.”  Because in a wilderness season, whatever it might be, finding the way out on our own is a recipe for endless struggle.  Here, together, in this place and in this little community, what we are doing is that Way.  Seeking that way, making it, building it?  That’s not something we have to do on our own.

But...that’s a Way for the Lord, you might say.  That’s a path for God to travel.  When I visualize what Isaiah proclaimed, and what John proclaimed again, I always think of a red carpet, rolled out across the desert.  It’s easy to see Jesus pulling up in his stretched Escalade, wandering down that carpet to the flashing bulbs of paparrazzi, while we struggle to catch a glimpse from behind the ropes.

This is not how the Way works.  Jesus invites us in, to walk that Way with him, all of us together.

In the wilderness, in all of our wildernesses, there is a way.  It is something we are called to make together, and to walk together with our God.

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