Scripture: Matthew 4:1-11
This sermon is, at least in my own mind, a continuation both of what I was saying last Sunday and the direction of my thinking and brief speaking on Ash Wednesday. I said at the end of the sermon last week that the idea of wilderness, spiritual wilderness if you will, is a Lenten theme and I suggested on that last Sunday before Lent that the legacy of slavery and the history of racial oppression leaves us in a kind of wilderness place where our souls and our worship continue to be burdened by the history of racism and where we do well not to try to escape from that sense of being burdened but rather learn to dwell there. One of the definitions of a spiritual wilderness might be that it is a place we are tempted to want to escape from, and I was suggesting that with regard to our ongoing history of racism that is a temptation we need to resist. I said what I had to say for the time being about apologies for slavery and the way our history haunts us on an ongoing basis last week. I have not finished even for the time being with the notion of wilderness.
Wilderness is a Lenten theme, and of course a Biblical theme, with images of wilderness occurring throughout the Bible from the forty years the Hebrews spent in the wilderness to John the Baptist appearing in the wilderness to Jesus beginning his ministry by spending forty days in the wilderness, the story we read on Ash Wednesday and again this morning, a traditional one for the Lenten season. Wilderness, of course, can refer to many things, and it is less a place than a quality, a quality as I was trying to say Wednesday, of our lives as human beings and which “having faith” or being “people of faith” does not release us from. In fact, it’s interesting that the scripture says Jesus was “led by the Spirit” into the wilderness. Not only does faith not shield us from the kinds of human qualities I’m thinking of in connection with the notion of wilderness, it may lead us into those wilderness places of the soul and ask us to stay there, to dwell there, for forty days or forty years, or who knows how long. Jesus was led by the spirit into the wilderness, and so may we be led by the spirit into wilderness places of our own or into a deepened awareness of the wilderness qualities of our lives.
I thought I would begin this Lenten season, so far as my preaching goes, by trying to be specific about some of those wilderness areas of my life that I feel like I am being led into or asked to acknowledge more fully during this Lenten season. For one thing, Sheron Montrey is very much on my mind.
Only a handful of people here at Sojourners have met Sheron in person. Most of us know her only as the mother of Desi, Desiree, who has become very much a part of this community, and who is having a birthday this week, which we are celebrating today and which will also raise some extra money for Desi’s child care costs. It seemed like a good occasion for Jeanine and Karen Beiber to bring us all up to date quickly on where we have been in this journey so far—there are no doubt a number of people who are relatively new and don’t know any of the background—or not very much anyway—of how Desi came to be part of Sojourners and how Desi’s village—which includes more than Sojourners—came to be. Jeanine and Karen and Lynn Litchfield will also talk us through some of what lies ahead in the coming weeks and months for Desi and Sheron and for us, who have become her extended family.
I’m going to leave most of what needs to be said to Lynn and Karen and Jeanine, but just briefly Sheron, Desi’s mom, has been in prison for 12 years and is going to be released from prison on March 15, less than three weeks from today. I’ve been trying in some small way to imagine her feelings. Of course she would be looking forward, to say the least, to being with Desi, and there would be excitement just to be free and to be starting up a new life. But I’m also imagining that the world she is about to enter will not necessarily feel like a very familiar place to her, or a very certain place, or a very secure place, or even a very friendly place, at least some of its faces will not be friendly. So I’m imagining that Sheron’s release from prison, along with the joy and the relief of it, may also very well feel a bit like—my word, not hers obviously—but a bit like entering a kind of wilderness—the strangeness and uncertainty of it all. I’ve been imagining Sheron having those kinds of feelings and including that in my prayers for her.
And—I’ve been thinking that I’m not so sure how I can best be of help to her and so I feel just a little bit like I am in a wilderness situation of my own in relation to Sheron’s release. And—I’ve been thinking as I try to identify with Sheron making her way in an outside world that has no doubt, at least to some degree, become unfamiliar to her, that it wouldn’t hurt me every so often to experience this world I live in every day as at least to some degree unfamiliar, not taken for granted, not given, and where my place in it is not given, and where to some degree I have to learn to make my way in the world all over again. It wouldn’t hurt me, it might be good for my soul, to feel the world as strange, as a kind of wilderness, where my life is not predetermined and laid out and all neatly organized. You may not sense what I’m getting at here, and I’m not sure I really know what I mean either, and I don’t want to go very far in this direction today, but thinking about Sheron and praying about Sheron has led me to think that kind of thought too—the worthwhileness of imagining that this world we live in every day is a kind of wilderness, even though we may not usually approach it that way.
Then, to switch gears, there is the war in Iraq, also a reality that burdens our worship every week, even if we don’t speak of it, and also a reality that makes the world we live in feel to me strange and threatening, wilderness like. That continues to be a wilderness place for me as we go into this Lenten season. So far as the war goes, there is a part of me that has an opinion and takes a position, a part of me that just wants to say no. That sort of straightforward part of me is not so much the part that makes me feel like I‘m living in a wilderness kind of place. But, of course, the opinion, the opposition is not all there is to feel. There is also an overwhelming sense of sadness at the violence that has taken place already, the lives that have been lost—3,000 U.S. soldiers dead, perhaps 30,000 wounded or perhaps many more, as well as other casualties of war, 60,000 Iraqi civilians dead, no telling how many wounded and every day the killing continues and there is no end in sight—an overwhelming sense of sadness at the violence that has already taken place, and a fear of the possibility of escalating violence from all sorts of sources including, not limited to but including, an escalation of our own government’s violence—fear, dismay, all sorts of feelings that go way beyond the positions, programs, and politics of it all. There is a wilderness here, and I know I need not to be in denial about it.
Then—switching gears again—I’m sure some of us have been reading about the recent meetings of the world-wide Anglican communion held in Kenya (?). And in any case we are certainly aware of the debate—to put it politely and somewhat inaccurately—the debate going on in many church bodies about the church’s attitude toward and the role, the rights, and responsibilities of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people in the life of the church. This situation has been raised as a prayer concern, specifically the situation in the Episcopal/Anglican group of churches has been raised as a prayer concern several times in recent weeks, and I am grateful for that partly of course because its appropriate to have such a concern for sister and brother Christians, but also because it reminds us that we are in a kind of a wilderness situation in this regard too. That is, it reminds us that we are in a wilderness situation, not that they are—those Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and others who appear to be in all-out, self-destructive conflict with no likelihood of a positive outcome and no clear way of even knowing how to move forward—not that they are in a wilderness situation but that we are.
It may be tempting for us to pretend otherwise, to think that we at Sojourners don’t have to deal with that particular wilderness, that we are pretty clear what our values are on these issues and that Sojourners is a kind of a sanctuary where we can be largely free from the church wars that are going on in so many other places. But that is a pretense. We would have to pretend that is so, because it is not really so. For one thing, the United Church of Christ of course is not exempt from the church wars, and although the denomination at national regional and local levels has taken inclusive positions and advocated for justice for lgbt people, as far as the whole expanse of the United Church of Christ the issues are far from settled and may tend to be settled in the same way that other denominations seem to be heading, acrimony, division, and separation. So the issues are not other people’s, they are ours insofar as we are part of a larger United Church of Christ.
And not only that. Whether we are talking about sister and brother UCCers or more generally sister and brother Christians, there are all sorts of concerns that trouble me. All sides in these debates (for lack of a better term) all sides recognize, accurately I think, that there are some pretty basic issues at stake here as to what Christianity is all about, or ought to be all about. Few people have been very good at describing what those issues are without demonizing their opponents and adding to the acrimony. I’m not even sure it’s possible. But that leaves us all with the question of how we’re going to relate to each other, as fellow UCC folks, as fellow Christians without giving up or putting aside some basic commitments as to the directions we hope the Christian church will move. What happens to the values of peace and unity in the church when many people, myself included, believe that it’s more important for the church to begin doing the right thing rather than the peaceable thing. But where does that leave the peace of the church as a value? Does it have a place at all? Do we resign ourselves for the foreseeable future to fighting as a way of life in the church? This is a wilderness area for me as I enter this Lenten season. As I say, I’ve been grateful for the prayer concerns that have been offered around this issue and I would only want to make clear what may be unspoken but is implied in those prayer concerns—that the prayers are not just for others; they are for us as well.
In this regard, but in other ways as well, I am finding being a Christian to be a bit of a wilderness experience these days. There are lots of reasons for that, and I don’t have time today to go down that path. Besides that seems like a good road to go down some other Sundays during this season of Lent. But it does occur to me that being a Christian probably ought always to feel a bit like, feel a lot like, being in the wilderness. In our efforts to be Christian, to become Christian, the spirit leads us into the wilderness. If that is not so, then I wonder for myself how far into being Christian I have traveled. There is something about being Christian that makes us feel, makes me feel anyway, that we are in uncharted territory. The part that is pre-fabricated, the part that is all laid out for us, if it is Christian at all, is the easy part. The rest is the hard part, and the good part. And with that thought, unspecific as it may be, with that thought too I begin this Lenten season, very much aware that the spirit has led me and my faith is lived in wilderness places. May God sustain us as we dwell, as we journey, in those places. Amen.
Jim Bundy
February 25, 2007