What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, September 18, 2011

Season of Creation:
Wilderness Sunday

Joel 1:8-10, 17-20
Psalm 139:13-19
Romans 8:18-27
Matthew 4:1-11

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

We do not have to be out in the middle of nowhere to find ourselves in the “wilderness.” Louis Zamperini experienced the wilderness in a place not full of sand or rock. Shot down on a rescue mission in the Pacific during World War II, Zamperini floated to the surface from beneath his downed plane, and found himself in a life raft in the middle of the blazing hot sun. He could have blamed anyone for winding up in this predicament. But as Lauren Hillebrand chronicles in her recent book Unbroken, despite being faced with “wilderness” challenges more life-threatening than what many of us ever have confronted, he never stopped continuing to see the bleakness around him as a way to grow in life and in faith.

Zamperini thankfully had two friends with him in his life raft that also survived the crash, Phil and Mack. In this wilderness experience, the men knew they would have to conserve only the food they needed to survive. But on their first night, while the other two men were sleeping, Mack gave into his fears and ate most of what was the only ration they had left--chocolate. Mack’s hoarding not only didn’t ease his fears, it left him with fewer resources to cope after becoming sick, and he died after 30 days.

Zamperini always took as active a role as he could in this situation. He refused to see himself as a victim. He waded through many dangers during his 47 days on this raft with his friend. The worst threat was sharks who at first would simply swim around the boat, and who then, when the men would go to sleep at night, would swim underneath the men and punch their noses up onto the bottom of the boat, as if to let them know the men they were there waiting. Finally as their boat began to deflate, the sharks would gain momentum and try to launch themselves into the raft. But the men kept doing whatever they could to keep the sharks away: from beating them with oars, to hitting their noses with their fists to keep them out of the boat.

As it turned out, that wasn’t the worst of their time of testing in the “wilderness.” Next they were picked up by a Japanese naval ship that took them to a POW camp. Over a series of months they were given hardly any medical care, little food, suffered physical and emotional abuse and lived in beyond primitive conditions. The man in charge of the last camp they were at was so madly set on torturing prisoners there that Japanese royalty tried unsuccessfully have him removed.

But even after surviving all this, even after coming within an inch of his life, even after coming back home to California and suffering terrible nightmare flashbacks, Louis Zamperini found a way to forgive his torturers. Now 94 years old, and without an ounce of bitterness in his body, he continues to live one of the happiest lives that his chronicler Ms. Hillebrand has ever heard of.

What is it that allowed this man to survive such suffering? How could he have made it through an experience that would have broken the spirit of most of us? Call it human will power, call it faith, call it God, but through a mysterious power that touched his life, Zamperini refused to see the desolation of the wilderness around him as a place that intended to break him down. In the midst of a broken situation, Zamperini saw this as his growth opportunity, and he found enough resources in himself and around him to survive--even though he was going through what we would call, “the wilderness.”

It is this testing in the wilderness that I would invite us to reflect on today. What “wilderness experiences” have we been through in our lives--or perahs are we currently in right now--and what resources does God give us to overcome them? The wilderness, for all its wildness and undomesticated qualities, for all the ways that human beings want to find ways to domesticate and overtake it, does serve an this important purpose in Creation. The wilderness is a physical space and a spiritual experience that clarifies, refines and tests our values and our dependence upon God to sustain us. Though it may not enter our consciousness in this urban part of Creation we live and dwell in, the wilderness, as part of God’s Creation, cannot be forgotten nor “thrown away.” Absent of the kind of resources we are more comfortable having around us, occasionally being in the wilderness can connect us to God by placing us in a position of reliance that can make God more real than ever, whether it is Zamperini’s Pacific Ocean, or an untamed area in the Minnesota Boundary Waters, or even one of the prarie grass lands beyond the outskirts of Chicago.

In the Bible the wilderness is a place that serves as means towards teaching and readying people for being a part of God’s mission. The Israelites entered a forty-year “wilderness school” after fleeing Egypt that humbled them a great deal, forcing them to rely for food only on the meat provided by God in the evening and manna that came in the morning. Looking back from the promised land, the Israelites discovered that they had found what was in their hearts during that “wilderness school.” What was there was God’s sustaining presence, physically and spiritually, in the midst of what seemed like an environment that was anything but present with means to sustain them.

Jesus’ testing in the wilderness, which we heard in today’s Gospel reading, proclaims an even bigger message from God to us about the wilderness: the wilderness is the arena where Jesus’ identity as God’s Son gets tested and affirmed so much that he cannot be anything but our Messiah after completing that forty-day journey. Jesus defeats the temptations of self-sufficiency, of grasping for political power and of trying to defy death on his own--temptations that he faced again, but that he overcame for us by doing what he did in the wilderness, relying upon God’s help. The wilderness experience is Jesus’ “Outward Bound” journey that prepares him to pass the many tests that will come in his public ministry--tests that will pale in comparison to what he faced in the wilderness. Jesus discovered that in the wild, God is present--as he was fed and ministered to there by God.

We need not fear the wilderness, whether it be a physical or emotional wilderness. For as God has shown through the Israelites and Jesus, God has a track record of showing us that while the wilderness may seem to be a place that is desolate, there is no such thing as a spiritual crisis where we are in the wilderness. As we affirm throughout our liturgy today, God’s abundant presence fills even the most desolate areas of the planet. The wilderness is a place that is alive, waiting for us to discover all that God provides there, and it is a place that calls upon us to proclaim to others that the wilderness is not a place of crisis. It is a place to be navigated through, an adventurous place--both geographic and spiritual--where God’s provisions are laid out for us, morning after morning after morning.

We do not have to be in the physical wilderness to appreciate and connect with the parts of creation that are--at least on the outside--desolate or wild. But we give thanks for what God purposes these parts of Creation for: to express the sustaining goodness of God through even the scarcest times and places. Now as we continue moving through this Season of Creation liturgy, we move to the table that will fill us with our manna in the wilderness, Christ’s table, so we may go and share Christ’s love with all who are desolate, and who yearn to hear that no wilderness is cause for a crisis of faith in God's abundant provisions.

Amen.