Get thee to a wilderness!

Earlier this month, Mother LouAnn and I went to an Advent quiet day, and I had wilderness on my mind. Atop a credenza with a stack of books for our inspiration, I spied one called “Dakota: a Spiritual Geography.” It spoke to me of wilderness. So, in my time in the undistracted, mostly empty, tall-ceilinged sanctuary of St John the Baptist—my own few hours in the wilderness--I read that book. The author, Kathleen Norris, talks about moving to Plains country with her husband, a poet, way out to the western part of South Dakota, on the border of North Dakota, to take care of her grandmother’s home after she died. No one was going to buy it. It’s in one of the most desolate and most impoverished regions of the whole country. It always has been. During the great Western expansion, the native people were pushed off the land to make room for homesteaders in the 1890’s. But 80 percent of the homesteaders left within first 20 years of settlement. Another one-fifth of population of her county has left since 1980.  It is a wilderness.

            The Norrises came from New York City—a city bursting with culture, and the greatest achievements of artists, musicians, writers—to a barren landscape and villages with a few hundred people. The contrast couldn’t have been more stark. Nevertheless, Norris says, “the Plains have been essential not only for my growth as a writer, they have formed me spiritually. I would even say they have made me a human being.” It was in her time in this country that she encountered a Benedictine monastery and became an oblate (someone associated with a religious community but not bound by vows). “A monk isn’t supposed to need all kinds of flashy surroundings,” a monk tells her. “We’re supposed to have a beautiful inner landscape. Watching a storm pass from horizon to horizon fills your soul with reverence. It makes your soul expand to fill the sky.” Norris talks about the irony of seeking a desert within the desert.

Wilderness is all over our readings today. In Isaiah, we are called to the desert to prepare a highway. We are told to prepare for disruptive change:  Valleys will be lowered, mountains raised up. This is no small shit--like a new way to stream movies to your TV. This is like a new law of physics. A new reality where the first is last. The last is first. And death has no sting. So get ready. Everything is going to be different.

This is the message John the Baptist brings from the wilderness. As is often the case--disruptive messages come from the outside, from the fringe. The messengers who come have been away from the status quo, free from distraction and pressures of so-called civilization. Angel, by the way, is the same word in Greek as messenger. Like Gabriel, John the messenger comes out of nowhere.

We sometimes think of the wilderness as somewhere God-forsaken.  But God calls people to the wilderness. I think it gives God a blank canvas to work in us.

And here are some of the things Norris learned from the Plains people and monks out in the Dakota wilderness. The first is waiting. Waiting for rain in this wheat farming and ranching country is a constant pattern. They talk about living in “next-year country,” a metaphor for hope. Life in the slow lane, as she calls it, cultivates patience.  It causes you to partake of a more contemplative reality, to need instant information less, to trust that processes take time and emerge out  of the ground of experience.

Nothing much happens on the Plains, or in a monastery. So the gradual changes are blessings. The deprivation of the Plains life and the monastic life also sharpen the awareness of the small gifts as treasures.

St Gregory of Nyssa once said, “Sin is failure to grow.” When you can grow even in the wilderness, indeed when the wilderness helps you grow, you are preparing the way. You are changing the pattern. Norris writes about the loneliness of the prairie. She says, “I am learning to see loneliness as a seed that, when planted deep enough, can grow into writing that goes back out into the world.” As a raving extrovert and, as you may have noticed, a very verbal person, I know I would be tested by the quiet.  Perhaps like Norris, that would help me develop a keen appreciation for the gifts of both fast and feast.

The desert is testing. If you are low on gas and make the wrong bet about the wind or snow, you can die out there.  John the Baptist lived on locusts and wild honey. In these circumstances our dependence on God might be more clear to us. Fear is as good a place as any from which to start a spiritual journey, Norris says. If you know what makes you afraid, you can see more clearly that the way out is through the fear.   

The desert makes us aware of our limitations, our lack of control, the relative dearth of variety and stimulation. The silence allows us to hear the still small voice.  If we are continually open to conversion, then the need to change can come with a clarity. In the quiet, as our psalm says, we can listen to what Lord God is saying.

                                                                                   Grand River National Grassland, photo by Jennifer Suter, trover.com

 

God uses the wilderness. God sends Adam there for a timeout after he steps away from his calling in Paradise. God calls Moses there to behold the burning bush. God tests the Israelites in the wilderness on their many years of wandering. Jesus goes to the wilderness after his baptism, where he is tempted by the devil, and before he enters Jerusalem. There’s the expression that God comes to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. God seems to use the wilderness primarily to afflict the comfortable—to get their attention, to have some alone time with them. And so, God is calling us there as well. Far from being God-forsaken, going outside our comfortable boundaries is often where we meet God.

I think that’s because God wants us to be disoriented. What orients us is largely our human-created world, the institutions, buildings, and cultural experiments we have undertaken to put a wall between us and the wilderness. The maps of our lives: our neighborhood, where our friends live, where our children go to school, where we shop or play. At least in this part of the Western Hemisphere, we can harbor under the illusion that we have “tamed” the wilderness. We have made creation our servant:  scenery, natural resources, recreation space. Certainly for the Jews in the Roman Empire, the encroaching civilization was orienting them far, far away from their original instructions. Whether the Pharisees or Sadducees, they were trying to tweak the rules to be more pleasing to God, but John was saying—you have to get away from all that. Tweaking won’t cut it.  Start out here in the wilderness, with a clean slate, away from where you are invested in institutions that you think you depend on for your salvation, for your identity. All these have made you forget your dependence on God. So start out at the edge, and begin to reorder your world.

The wilderness does not have to be geographically disconnected. It just has to be somewhere where we are not in charge, where we don’t make the rules, that we don’t own, or order up; and where we are called to silence, where we set aside our dependencies on phones, or cars, or the Internet, and adopt discipline and obedience.  That’s why I found six hours of wilderness at the parish of St John the Baptist earlier this month. What is home to its parishioners was more unfamiliar terrain to me. From those locations where our routine is shifted, and we leave our everyday lives behind, we can ask ourselves, from what in my so-called civilized life do I need to repent?  Where is my comfort coming at a cost to those whom God calls me to serve? If some truth-teller from the fringes calls me to listen, how open is my heart?

John the Baptist had something of a cult following for a while.  People flocked to the desert for his message, and to be baptized. So much so that he realized that he had to make clear what had been revealed to him in the desert—that Jesus was the Savior and he was merely the one calling the people to prepare the way. And so a movement started and the Jesus followers became a force. At first, it was counter-cultural, disdaining rank and societal boundaries of slave and free, rich and poor, Jew or Gentile.  It was a radical message. Later, when Christianity was legalized by the Roman emperor in the 4^th century, some of the church fathers watched with disgust as Christians began to build big institutions, to acquire property, to set up a hierarchy of power.  So they became the desert fathers, establishing monasteries in the wilderness to seek God and calling out again a message of repentance and new life. 

And so, we too are called to continually to set aside what makes us too comfortable, too self-sufficient, too sure of ourselves. To de-center ourselves and prepare the way:  To lift the lowly and bring down the mighty, to put our trust in God and to actively wait, and work, for God’s kingdom on earth.

Get thee to a wilderness!! And prepare the way.   Amen.

Advent 2B Sermon -- December 12, 2017 -- St Gabriel Parish, Portland, OR