The Biblical wilderness is hardly a place most people would choose to go. It is harsh, barren, dry, unforgiving. Unlike a North American wilderness, there are few trees, no water, only a few large boulders and some caves for shade. The sun is unrelenting during the day and the cold bone-chilling at night. If you are there, chances are you are seeking either to traverse its land as fast as possible, or you are seeking a spiritual experience.
The two are not always mutually exclusive. I have found myself in a wilderness these past two months or so, the wilderness of a cancer diagnosis and chemotherapy. As I’ve traversed its landscape, I’ve sought the spiritual in the midst of the deprivation, and found abundant signs of God’s blessings. You are among those blessings, with your prayers and your journeying with me. My amazing spouse, David, has simply and lovingly accompanied me, setting aside his ordinary life to care for me. What a blessing he is! The desert wasteland that this might be has been transformed into an oasis in the midst of life, filled with a powerful sense of God’s presence, of being surrounded by a community of thousands, of being lifted up in prayer that sustains and heals.
Yes, I want to pass through this desert as fast as possible, but while I’m here, I’m seeking and finding God in new and rich ways, and hoping that some of you are as well as you accompany me, even in my isolation.
So a wilderness of the near eastern sort, unforgiving and barren at first blush, may indeed hold signs of God’s abundance. And perhaps all the more so because we have absolutely no reason to expect it. There are no lush oases that can be seen from where we’ve landed, no date or fig trees from which to pluck the fruit, no streams of water, or even stagnant pools. Yet this is the wilderness to which Jesus chose to go for forty days to seek God.
We would do well to remember that in these days in our nation’s life, for we are in the midst of a desert wilderness experience. The ground is so dry and hard that others’ footsteps cannot be seen. We have no trails to follow, no guide for our way. We are disoriented. We are angry. We are scared.
When people are lost in any kind of wilderness, in their panic, they tend to keep moving, believing they will find a way out if they just keep going. In the frenetic pattern of their wandering, they trample what few signs of others’ passage there may be. They miss important clues. Far better they should simply sit down a bit and observe. Find which way is north and where the wind comes from, what creatures share the space and what it is that God is whispering to them.
The near collapse of our financial markets has set us in a wilderness in which we are completely disoriented. Few of us have the capacity to offer a cogent analysis of all the factors that led us here. We do not know yet what it means to be here but we sure know we are here. Our worries are deep. For which of us does not worry about our future and how we will live, about our children and the debts they will be saddled with – the debt of war, the debt of bailout, the debt of the animosity of nations, the debt of an earth in deep trouble. Those who have been poor all along have always known these worries, and now the rest of us share them.
I hardly need to recite the financial woes we are all facing; we’ve all been listening as the media have recounted them and given advice that none of us knows whether to follow or not. And so I won’t.
Instead I want to speak of wilderness and God and joy. Framed by my own experience in these weeks, I want to lead you to discoveries that only come in wilderness that is unsought. I am not sure I can do that, but I will try.
You will remember that in the early days of this crisis, many were saying this is a market correction; it’s going to be a bad one but all will be fine. Our economy is basically sound. One pastor told me of a man who insisted that the pastor was being too bearish in expressing concern on Sunday morning just a month ago. That same man came to him two weeks later and acknowledged he’d been wrong, that this is no market correction; this is the loss of an entire way of life.
One thing about life transplanted to the desert -- it cannot go on the way it used to. Life here is fundamentally altered, and the sooner we adapt, the better off we will be. We don’t need a complete map to know that there are changes we need to make.
When I went for my mammogram on July 25th, I was pretty sure I knew the outcome, but I had no idea what it would mean. I was scared. I was angry at myself for having slacked off on my self-checks through the late spring. I was distressed because to me it meant that I would be failing you and unable to give you the vigorous leadership you deserve.
I had to decide how I would go through this. Would I spend hours and hours on the internet researching every aspect of the disease and the initial indicators? Would I slump into depression, dig a hole and bury myself in it? What was the most important way for me to spend my energy? As it turns out, my spirit made that decision for me. I decided that I would invest myself in being spiritually and emotionally centered. I did not spend any time on the internet. I haven’t experienced a moment of depression, nor even any worry about survival. In the midst of my wilderness, I’ve chosen to focus on adapting to this new reality and seeking God in the midst of it.
Life for me is completely changed, for now. I have to take great precautions around people and food to avoid becoming ill because my immune system is compromised. I don’t have the energy to do much. Sometimes I can’t read or work at the computer because the chemo dries my eyes out. Life is changed. Yet when one can’t do the normal things, there is still much that one can do and be. Contemplation and reflection become second nature. Thankfulness becomes one’s mode of being. Observation of the little things of life yields unending joy.
So in this unsought wilderness we all now inhabit, our first and most important step is acknowledgement that life is changed, that we can’t go on the way we have in the past. We will do well to conserve, to teach ourselves some better habits, to practice generosity. We will do well to take a good long pause and assess where we are spiritually, emotionally, and physically instead of pacing frenetically. We will do well to pay more attention to the needs of others than our own. Ultimately we will do well to ask ourselves how we got here and to analyze that deeply. And, among all the other things important in a time like this, it is absolutely essential that we keep our churches strong and vital through this time, for it is our ministries that will make a difference in people’s lives.
If indeed a way of life has now disappeared, not only for those who made portions of that life for us, but for us as well, we need to acknowledge just how dependent we had become on the assumptions and the benefits of that way of life. Even those of us who don’t understand the complexities have built our futures in those houses of sand that have now been to some degree washed away. My heart goes out in every direction these days,
We are disoriented. We are angry. We are scared. In this unsought wilderness, we cannot help but look for someone to blame. We need to keep a watch on our character so that we do not become a twisted people, full of rage and retribution. It is fine to be in touch with our fear and our anger; we must not let it be our dwelling place.
It is the case that some, like Jesus and the desert saints, seek the wilderness as a place to encounter God. Most of us seek God in lush landscapes, on mountain tops, near flowing water or in the secret places in our souls and sanctuaries. Yet the desert with its stripped-down harshness bears a certain experience we should to attend to in this time. There is no room for artifice, or pretense; no way the usual loafers or spike heels will make it, nor business suits or bathing suits. Only sandals and a simple robe will do. In the desert wilderness, like it we are stripped down. Here we come face to face with God in the dry wind, the sandstorm, the beating heat.
No wonder Jesus went to the wilderness to clear out his mind and to prepare for the temptations that were to come! Forty days – and nights! -- of fasting is a very long time in those extremes. And those temptations were mighty ones, coming as they did as he was famished at the end of his sojourn. His faithfulness in response was breathtaking, and can inspire us in these times.
We too will be tempted as we emerge some day from this desert wilderness. If we will build a stronger future for ourselves, our families and our world, it will be best for us to use this time to gain spiritual strength. We need to meet the God of the wilderness, not the one we’ve been thanking for our prosperity; not the one we’ve concocted in our minds as the source of our health; not the one we’ve believed protected us while others suffered. No, we need to meet the God of the wilderness, where all the mountains have been made low and all the valleys lifted up and all of us are the same in God’s sight. We need to meet the God who expects the best of us in our generosity and our faithfulness.
For here in the wilderness, many of us will find that our being deprived of what we depended on is a profoundly spiritual experience. We will discover that ultimately we can only rely on God and on God’s people, not on the accoutrements of life. We who encounter the God of the wilderness will, yes, be brought up short, but in the process we’ll discover a richer and deeper life than we had ever imagined.
To encounter God in the wilderness, however, is not just a matter of being there. It is a matter of desire and of discipline. We must decide, as I had to, will we fret over the conditions and all we’ve lost, or will we slip into a funk, or will we focus on being spiritually and emotionally centered in God? We must, as the scriptures urge, follow our deepest yearning and make space for God in our pain and fear. We must desire God, and seek the ancient paths of righteousness and peace.
Here in the desert, the sight of a single locust can be a sign of hope, the discovery of a flock of birds, an evening’s meal. What we must learn is that God’s abundance is unending, even in the desert. We arrive here and experience deprivation. But if we pause and wait, if we adapt to our new environment, we will find that all around us are signs of God’s blessings. It will take us a while to see them, addicted as we are to wealth and comfort. But they are here, and so in their own way are riches and comfort even if we cannot recognize them yet.
In the midst of this wilderness experience, God, I think, is giving us new life. And here I speak of us as a nation, not just as a collection of individuals. With this seismic shift in the tectonic plates of our existence, we have a renewed opportunity to focus our values and our ethos. Have we been the nation we want to be? As a people, do we really want to live in such extremes of poverty and wealth? We have slipped into a pattern of ignoring the poor and admiring the wealthy. We have spent billions, trillions on wars yet our own people suffer greatly. We have tolerated torture as a national policy; we have abused our power and forced our will on other nations, not always with good reason. Do we want to be that kind of nation?
In this moment, we have a chance to reflect on the most important issues of any generation’s life: what is most important to us and how will we achieve it? Maybe in this crisis, we can commit ourselves to ending poverty as we rebuild our economy. Maybe we can recover a sense of the holiness of God’s creation. Maybe we can commit ourselves to the best and highest values in our relationships with other nations. Maybe we can dismantle the figurative mansions of greed and build a new nation – and a new world – of hope for all. Or maybe not. It’s going to depend on whether we meet God in this wilderness, and how deeply we listen to God’s whispered hope for humanity.
While it is certainly the case that the Biblical authors use the image of the wilderness as a place of privation and punishment, it is also true that many of the most memorable life-giving events in Biblical history take place there.
Remember with me these images from the wilderness:
In the midst of privation, there is joy. It is the joy of people rediscovering God. It is the joy of the assurance that God will not allow us to wander alone and untended in the wilderness if we are faithful. It is the joy that, stripped down, unencumbered, set free, in God’s great generosity, we will find grace anew and gratitude will suffuse our lives.
These are joys we rarely know when we think all is well with us. Even in the most difficult wilderness experience, joy is there for the discovery.
Now I have one last thing to say and it concerns the election. Like most of you, I am disappointed at the inability of the American people to sustain a civil conversation about significant issues that confront us at such a crucial moment in history. I am beside myself with the incivility, the racist rumor-mongering, the fomenting of fear at a time when we need steadiness from our leaders. I am appalled at the hate that advocates for each side seem to have for the other. My deepest worry is that no matter who is elected President of this great but faltering nation, the people will not have the patience for the long and difficult work that lies ahead. I worry that we are creating our own wilderness in politics, a wilderness from which we will not emerge a stronger people.
And so I urge us all to turn our best minds to work on the solutions to the many challenges that confront us. I pray that each and every one of us, Republican, Democrat, third party, or no party will commit ourselves to support this new President. We have monumental work to do together, and every one of us is essential. We must commit ourselves for the long haul, with patience and conviction in staying the course toward renewal.
I also want to urge us to reach out across the lines of bitterness and hatred and the fear-formed barriers of class and race and do all we can to unify this nation and inspire this world. Every member of the United Church of Christ has gifts to give in rebuilding our common life. Let us give them. Let us not live in fear, nor be consumed by gloom and doom. In our gifts to our nation’s life, let our witness be one through which we exemplify our core values of extravagant welcome of the other, and evangelical courage in standing up to bigotry and hate. Above all, let us live with faithfulness and generosity as Jesus did, our exemplar, our savior, our hope.
Rev. Dr. Davida Foy Crabtree
