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We are embarking now on our first full week of Lent, having started the season this past Wednesday with the sign of death smeared across our faces, and straight away we follow Jesus into the wilderness, the wild lands, the uncharted territory beyond our known borders. This might well be THE best place to encounter God.
Wilderness is a place beyond words. It's uncivilized, unpredictable, dangerous, and it seems to me that anyone who has really been there either has a story to tell or has been moved beyond the point of describing it. Metaphors run short on wilderness experiences. Poetry tries to grasp at it. Even our favorite stories only barely touch on communicating wilderness fully. The Chronicles of Narnia portray a majestic lion, Aslan, as both gentle and strong with the two sons of Adam and two daughters of Eve, but also remind us again and again that Aslan is ‘not a tame lion.’ Wilderness is not tame. Neither is God.
We may or may not have great plans for Lent this year. Some take it as a second shot at new year resolutions, giving up chocolate or trying to pray five additional minutes a day for these forty days, and there are good reasons and not so good reasons to make an honest attempt at self-discipline. But Lent isn’t so much about what we can do as it is about what God can do. What God does, actively and outside of our control.
I mentioned we may not have the best reasons for our Lenten disciplines. I don't just mean we might give up chocolate for the hope of fitting into those jeans again or swearing off meat on Fridays to lower our cholesterol. I also mean when we treat God as though She is another sort of Santa Claus who will repay us for good behavior, and if we pray an extra five minutes a day, or give more to charity this season, we will suddenly deserve a special favor from God that we can call in whenever we’d like a winning lottery ticket or something.
We fast, and pray, and give with special intention this season, or we don’t, and it is entirely for our own benefit. God doesn’t need our money or our hunger or our charity. God’s people do, but God doesn’t. And God isn’t waiting for us to get faith ‘right’ before curing that illness or bringing back to us a repentant lover. The Accuser, also called Satan, works on Jesus in today's Gospel very much the way we do. After all, if God really is all-powerful, why not turn stones into bread and feed the multitudes? Except, we can already feed the world with what we have, it’s stony hearts that get in the way. But if God really is all-knowing, why not stop the crime before it happens? Except, we know what injustice looks like, and choose to remain ignorant of our neighbors. And if God really is all good, why let bad things happen to good people? Except, we are all of us mortal, we all will die, and we only each have so much time to work with.
We want a God whose will matches our own, don’t we? Whatever miracle we demand, we want God to fix us according to our own vision of what ‘fixed’ and ‘broken’ seem to be. Don’t get me wrong, our prayer must involve a measure of telling God what we want, or it just isn’t honest, and God gave us the gift of prayer so we can build that relationship which requires absolute honesty. But we shout our prayers into the whirlwind of Job from time to time, and miss the bigger picture.
God’s wild places are where creation was born, is being born, will continue to be born. The uncharted seas stir up unexpected storms, try our strength and skill, require us to hold on tight or even tie ourselves to the mast of the ship while the boat seems to be breaking apart. This is precisely where God meets us, while the wind howls and the salt water stings and the stars may not even be visible. When our ancestors in the faith were slaves in Egypt, they cried to God for deliverance, and the waters turned to blood, and the locusts devoured the crops, and boils broke out on the bodies of their slavers, and every firstborn of the Egyptians, human or beast of burden, died in the night, so that hearts of stone might turn to flesh just long enough that they might escape into the wilderness, across the sea, and through forty years of wandering into a new land where they could worship God freely. Not only is our faith built on the foundation of a wandering and alien people, but these people are the people of a wild God of wilderness unpredictability.
Paul might have been most unsettled by this wild nature of God when he was called to minister to Gentiles, to us, who were never part of that cult of Adonai, but who were grafted into the open wounds of Christ while he died upon that tree, on the hill called “the place of the skull.” To graft a branch onto a tree, there must be deep cuts made, so the well-rooted tree can bleed into the new plant, and so God’s heart was shown torn open to the world, and Paul was a tool in bringing that Good News to us who are that new planting. We were outside, far off, not even on the radar to begin with, and yet Jesus, wild at heart, the enfleshed God of unpredictability, brought us near, gathered us in, and Paul fought upstream against the expectations of everyone to declare that ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Everyone. That’s wild. That’s outside the boundaries of the God we expect, far too radical for the God we want. But that’s God’s nature, we are learning: to embrace all that lives, to go especially to the outsider, to meet us in the wild places, to tie us to the mast of the ship and save us in the storm, and to be the mast of that ship to which we are tied.
Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, is led by that same Spirit into the wilderness, where the world’s sense of order and rightness meets him and he disavows it all. He refuses to allow the world to claim him in that controlling way, that ‘if you really love me’ way. We aspire to follow this example in our rites of Baptism and Affirmation of Baptism, when we renounce the devil and all the forces that defy God. We renounce the powers of this world that rebel against God. We renounce the ways of sin that draw us from God. …But so much of that is wrapped up in the boxes we try to create for God, the expectations we have for who deserves how much of what kind of God. And God is not tame, not box-shaped, not what we expect or deserve or understand. That’s what makes God worthy of our worship.
In the wilderness, there is no place where God is not. This is true, of course, everywhere. In the wilderness, however, we may find ourselves crying out more for God, seeking a bit more, wrestling, doubting, even outright telling God to back off because we are done with believing in Him. That is what this wilderness is for, and that is precisely where God meets us, disturbs us, moves us and claims us. We already are not the same as when we began this journey, and we will not be the same on the last day as we are today. Because to be loved by the wild, uncaged Love that created the cosmos, that is the work before us, ongoing and unpredictable. It shatters the expectations we build, unsettles our systems of organization, grants us both a larger community and a greater future than we could have ever thought possible.
God is wild, brothers and sisters. God is in the wilderness, God is in the darkness, God is in the storm and the quiet and the trials, and God is in the welcome home. But we’re not there just yet. No need to worry, though, because God is always greater than our fears and anxieties, always greater than even our greatest expectations of what God can be. After all, who would expect such a wild God to take on the limits of human flesh and life willingly, and joyfully, for our sake? That kind of love is worth the wilderness, and more.
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