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About the time of the storming of the U.S. Capitol Building Dana and I found ourselves in a conversation about wilderness survival. Whether the one topic led to the other I don’t remember, but we found ourselves discussing whether we would be able to live off the land. Dana is a pretty experienced canoe tripper and guide and I’ve got some outdoor experience. We’ve got some experience in the bush but how to survive in the wild without your gear and the food you packed in is another matter. In my opinion, knowing how to survive in the wilderness is an essential skill but pretty much everybody today is lacking in it. “If” something truly societally overturning happened, we’d all be in a bad way. In that case, to me, it seems that it would be a lot safer to head for the wilderness and live off the land than it would be to hang around the general population once the grocery stores have all been looted.
Now, let me just say that I’m not trying to start some “prepper cult”. I’m just throwing some sermon fodder out there because it’s the first Sunday in Lent and surviving in the spiritual wilderness is the topic at hand. We’ve all been in that wilderness where the feathers have hit the fan, to put it politely, and we’re wondering where God has suddenly got off to and why this manure has piled up on me or on the people I love. Knowing how to survive in the spiritual wilderness is also an essential skill which pretty much everybody is lacking. I think this why it seems everybody is looting the proverbial grocery stores of life just trying to hoard everything “I think I need to survive” rather than heading to more solitary places and finding true life in what God provides. There’s a sermon in all that toilet paper hoarding that went on at the beginning of the first COVID lockdown.
Wilderness survival, we need to know how to survive in the wilderness; so…since we read Mark’s Gospel about Jesus in the wilderness, let’s see if there is anything to gain there. Well, Mark is very brief on what Jesus faced in his wilderness experience. In Matthew and Luke, we find this lengthy drama of Satan coming at Jesus with three temptations that invited Jesus to use his gifts, his powers, as the Son of God to serve himself rather than the will of God the Father. Jesus bravely fended him off by quoting Scriptures. We don’t get that in Mark. If we want any more than one verse we have to include what came before and after Jesus’s Wilderness experience.
Preceding, we have Jesus baptized by John the Baptist and during that the heavens were torn open. Here’s some Bible Trivia. In Mark’s Gospel only two things ever get torn open: here at the baptism, the veil between heaven and earth and when Jesus died on the cross, the veil that hid the Ark of the Covenant in the Temple tore in two. Apparently, Jesus provides access to the hidden things of God. Jesus then heard the Father’s voice, “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased,” and the Holy Spirit came into him and drove him out into the wilderness. In Mark’s Gospel only two things get “driven out”: the Holy Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness, and Jesus drove the unclean or evil spirits out of people. I’m not sure what to make of these bits of trivia but they do make us go “Hmmm.”
There are some Old Testament correlations here we should also note. The theme of forty days; Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days like Noah and the Flood and the forty years that Israel wandered in the wilderness during the Exodus from Egypt. This would indicate that the Wilderness experience doesn’t last forever. It is for a limited period of time. That’s good to know.
Also, in the wilderness Jesus faced testing by Satan and lived with the wild animals. Here, I see a resemblance to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They, the first of humanity, were in the Garden with the wild animals and were tested by the Serpent/Satan but failed. Jesus, the first of the New Humanity, was in the Wilderness with the wild animals and was also tested by Satan; but Jesus succeeded. Adam and Eve failed and God drove them out of the Garden whereas the Holy Spirit drove Jesus into the Wilderness. Angels barred Adam and Eve from re-entering the Garden, but for Jesus, the angels serve him in the Wilderness providing him with what he needs. In the end, Adam and Eve came out of the Garden to live under the curses God pronounced. Whereas, Jesus came out of the Wilderness proclaiming that the Reign of God was at hand. To put all this together, it seems that Jesus’s Wilderness experience is the undoing of Adam and Eve’s failing in the Garden of Eden.
Well, I’m not so sure how all this Bible trivia is very helpful in teaching us how to survive in the spiritual wilderness. There are some fun facts. Bible geeks go “Hmmm”. But there is not very helpful for wilderness survival unless pondering Bible Trivia is how you keep your mind from panicking while lost in the wilderness.
So, having not found much guidance on how to survive in the Wilderness in Mark’s Gospel and realizing that “There are some questions that can’t be answered by Google” (That popular church sign phrase was coined by my former Clerk of Session and good friend, Mr. Bill Horton.), I used Yahoo and searched the web. There I found four words of advice on wilderness survival that would help us both in the wild as well as in the spiritual wilderness.
First, exposure to the elements can kill you in as little as three hours. Therefore, shelter from the elements is the first thing to seek out in the wild whether it be shade in the heat or warmth in the cold. In the spiritual wilderness, the topic of shelter is one of personal identity, who am I and how I derive my personal sense of security. I’ll start this conversation with a song, an old favourite:
Shelter, where does one find shelter, a safe place for our self in the spiritual wilderness? Do we find it in ourselves, pridefully hiding ourselves behind the lies of accomplishment, of being self-made? Or, do we shelter our self in knowing we are God’s beloved children for whom Jesus died to set us free from death and give us new life as his ever-failing, ever-bumbling disciples. In life and in death we are not our own. We belong to Jesus who gave himself for us that we might live. So says the Heidelberg Catechism.
Our second bit of advice; in the wilderness thirst can kill a person in three days. Therefore, our second most important concern in the wild is water. Thirst is different from hunger. In the human body, water is what conducts the electricity that flows through our neural networks keeping everything alive. One could say that water keeps life flowing in the body. In the spiritual wilderness, water is the Holy Spirit, the presence of God with us. Here’s another song.
Come, thou Fount of every blessing,
tune my heart to sing thy grace;
streams of mercy, never ceasing,
call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I'm fixed upon it,
mount of thy redeeming love.
Here I raise mine Ebenezer;
hither by thy help I'm come;
and I hope, by thy good pleasure,
safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
interposed his precious blood.
O to grace how great a debtor
daily I'm constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here's my heart, O take and seal it,
seal it for thy courts above.
In the spiritual wilderness our thirst is for the living water. It is the thirst of wanting a reason to praise God. If we can’t praise God, we are dead so say the Psalmists on several occasions. We find the water by going one-on-one with God, having it all out until God gets through with the truth of the matter and we, like Job, can gratefully say, “God you are right about me and in awe I shut my mouth.” That final bit of the truth of the matter is simply finding oneself the presence of God. We won’t get the answer as to why we are in the wilderness. Instead, we get God.
Thirdly, in the wild we can live for about three weeks without food. Therefore, after shelter and water we must find food. Food is what we get our strength from. How about another song, if that’s not imposing too much on your ears and time this today?
In the spiritual wilderness, our food is Jesus. “Jesus my manna be.” We get our strength from Jesus and we find him in Christian companionship, Christian community, the community of unconditional love, the community that listens to us and prays with us, the community that takes the teachings of Jesus seriously and strives to be faithful to him, the community that lives in his Reign of God mandate. Wherever two or three are gathered together for reason of him, Jesus is in the midst of them and feeds them. Once again, we have returned to God’s presence with us. This seems to be the common thread of wilderness surviving.
Lastly and of key importance, indeed the wilderness is a scary place, so don’t panic and, better yet, keep hopeful. Attitude is everything. If you get lost in the wild and panic, you are done. Fear will consume and kill you. So also, fear in the spiritual wilderness will consume every bit of spiritual and emotional wherewithal we have. If there is a purpose to the spiritual wilderness, it is not only to learn the faithfulness and steadfast love of God, it is also to become aware of God’s presence with us. This is true no matter the wilderness; whether it be the hospital bed, the hospice bed, the divorce bed, the unemployment bed, or even the malaise of life bed. The wilderness is where we meet God and he gives us what we need to survive. We go into it feeling cursed. We find ourselves tried and tempted. Yet, we come out saying “Our God reigns. Hallelujah”, because somewhere in there we came face to face with God. Amen.
