“LED BY THE SPIRIT INTO THE WILDERNESS” Luke 4:1-2; Exodus 2:11-15a; Deuteronomy 8:1-6 A sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church by Carter Lester on February 21, 2010

Introduction: In Jesus’ 40 days of testing in the wilderness, we are reminded of the

Israelites’ 40 years of testing in the wilderness after they fled Egypt and before they reached the promised land. During this Lent, Kerry and I will be focusing on Jesus and the Israelites’ time in the wilderness, with the hope that it might provide illumination for our own times in the wilderness and our own times of testing. Let us listen now to passages from Exodus 2 and Deuteronomy 8.

Read Exodus 2:11-15 and Deuteronomy 8:1-6

I think it was former Chief Justice Earl Warren who explained why he always turned first in the morning to the sports pages of his newspaper rather than the front page: “I would rather read first of man’s accomplishments before I read of his failures.”

Justice Warren spoke long before the existence of ESPN, but I imagine he would have made a similar comment about news and sports on television.

But sometimes, the sports channels tell us more about failures than accomplishments. If you were in front of a television on Friday at 11 a.m., you really saw something extraordinary. No matter whether you had news channels or sports channels on, you saw one thing: Tiger Woods’ confessing his infidelities and apologizing for the damage he has caused to his family, friends, business partners, and fans. Before and after the news conference, the amount of airtime spent discussing what Tiger said and how he looked, reduced Haiti, Afghanistan, and the economy almost to afterthoughts. And yet, in all of that chatter and blather, I did not hear one 2 person say that he or she saw what I saw when I tuned in. What I saw was a man in the wilderness.

It is what we see in the Biblical passages we read today: people in the wilderness. In Deuteronomy, it is the Israelites. In Luke 4, it is Jesus.

Now it may seem ludicrous, even blasphemous, to draw a link between a famous adulterous golfer and the Israelites – and even more so, to link Tiger Woods and Jesus.

But they do share the wilderness, because all of us share the wilderness. Part of what it means to say that Jesus was fully human is to say the he did not bypass the wilderness that we all face at one time or another. How we differ from Jesus is not that we have wilderness experiences. How we differ is how we get there and what we do once we get there. Jesus, like the Israelites before him, is led by God into the wilderness.

Sometimes we may be as well.

What is the wilderness? According to Deuteronomy 8, the wilderness on the

Sinai peninsula through which God led the Israelites was a wild and desolate wasteland with limited water, a dangerous place of scorpions and poisonous snakes. The wilderness to which the Spirit leads Jesus was a little different – more rocks. This is the way one Biblical scholar describes the wilderness that Jesus entered: “The hills were like dust heaps; the limestone looked blistered and peeling; the rocks were bare and jagged; the ground sounded hollow to the horses’ hooves; it glowed with heat like a vast furnace and ran out to the precipices, 1200 feet high, which swooped down to the Dead

Sea.”1

The wilderness described in the Bible, however, cannot be limited to one or two places on a map. That is why it can speak so powerfully to our own experiences. In the 3

Bible, the wilderness describes those places without villages and without people and therefore outside of human control and protection. The wilderness is a deserted place where those who enter can feel very much alone. It is a trackless place where people can easily get lost.

When and where have you found yourself in such a place in your life? There are many types of such wildernesses. There are physical and emotional wildernesses – when our bodies let us down, when we face long illnesses or recoveries, when we battle depression, or when we face conditions that will not go away, such as chronic pain or infertility.

There are vocational wildernesses, when we lose our job, or when we are unhappy in our job but do not know what to do instead, or when we are in college and do not know why we are there or what we should do.

There are also social wildernesses, when friends move away, or friends change, or when we feel utterly alone – no matter how many people are around us.

And, there are spiritual wildernesses when “the center does not hold” in our lives, when doubts or fears erode our faiths, and we do not know what to believe. Sometime our prayers can even seem empty and we wonder, “where is God?”

Sometimes we end up in the wilderness by the choices we make, whether it is the result of what we thought was a good choice, such as to change a job or move, or whether it is the result of a series of bad choices. Prison or recovery programs are certainly wilderness experiences. To his credit, Tiger Woods acknowledged in his press conference that he alone is responsible for the place where he finds himself. In the passage we read today in Exodus, Moses finds himself in a wilderness of his own 4 making after he has killed an Egyptian and fled from Egypt. Not all wildernesses are a reflection of God’s intention or action. That much is clear from the scriptures.

But this too is clear. Sometimes God does lead us into the wilderness. Hear

Luke 4:1 again: “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness.” Why is that? Why does God lead Jesus – and the

Israelites – into the wilderness? Why, at times, does God want to lead us into the wilderness?

Let us look at the Israelites first. Deuteronomy tells us: “Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments.” When the Israelites fled Egypt they were a disparate mob of escaping slaves. When they enter the promised land of Canaan, forty years later, they have been made into a people, linked to each other and linked to God, through the humbling experience of those forty years in the wilderness and through the covenant and laws given to the people by God through Moses. The wilderness defined and clarified who they are and whose they are.

Why would the Spirit lead Jesus to the wilderness right after Jesus is baptized?

For the same purpose: to define and clarify who Jesus is. And in the process, he shares the human experience of testing and temptation. Here in the wilderness, Jesus struggles, without giving in to the devil, about what kind of Messiah he is to be.

Why might God lead us into the wilderness? We are certainly not the saviors of the world, but we too are God’s people. And from time to time, God sees fit to led us into desolate places – so that we can define and clarify who we are and whose we are. 5

Because, in the wilderness, we are stripped down. All that can distract and numb us in our everyday lives is taken away. As one Christian writer has observed, we frequently fail to appreciate the healing gifts of the wilderness because we are so blissfully unaware that we need them. “The false gods of today do an excellent job keeping us distracted from our woundedness. ‘Eat! Drink! Work! Party! Shop!’ they tell us, and the painful, unhealthy, diseased areas of our lives are kept comfortably anesthetized. But when we venture into the wilderness, to a place and time free of distractions, we can come to know that the diversion these gods offer us is, in fact, bondage.”2 Sometimes God leads us into the wilderness because God needs to wake us up and lead us away from all that which diverts us from God and God’s purpose for our lives.

Sometimes God leads us into the wilderness, because we need to grow and change – and God knows that we will never change or grow so long as we remain where we are. The Israelites could never know what it was like to live as a freed people as long as they were slaves in Egypt. But it was a scary thing for them to leave that which was comfortable and familiar to go into a place where they had never been before.

The same is true for us. We resist change, even when it is change for the better, because no change comes without struggle or comes in an instant. With all change, even change for the good, there is a time when we are in unfamiliar territory, when we are unsure of where we are headed, and when changing looks far more dangerous than staying where we are – even if we are unhappy where we are. But as the French 6 novelist, Andre Gide, once wrote, “One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”

And sometimes God leads us into the wilderness because to be fully human, to be the child of God that we were created to be, we need to spend time without other humans so that we can be more aware of God. As David Rensberger puts it, “the great gift of deserted country to us is solitude, the chance to be alone before God.”3

The wilderness is a place for growing in focus and clarity. Perhaps you remember the lyrics of the old song, “Horse With No Name,” by the pop group, America:

“In the desert you can remember your name,” they sang. In the wilderness, in the desert, you can remember who God says you are – and not who the world tells you that you are.

But that aloneness with God apart from others can also be “the desert’s greatest terror.”4 I heard this week about a man who went hiking with about a dozen companions through a meandering canyon in the west. By chance, he got ahead of the group. For some reason, he thought he had fallen behind them, so he took off to catch up. His friends, who were behind him, thought for some reason that he had fallen behind, so they slowed down and waited for him to catch up. The result was the he spent the night alone before the towering walls of the canyon, “adrift in a desert of silence and stars,” more alone than he ever had been. Later he said about the night, “It was terrifying. The best night of the trip.”5

Terrifying – the best night of the trip. That is the way it is with the wilderness. It can be a tough struggle that lasts much more than a night. It can even be terrifying, and 7 we may not want to re-enter it when we get through it. But we too may see the wilderness as the best part of the trip.

Sometimes, we end up in the wilderness because of our own foolish choices, and sometimes we end up in the wilderness because the Spirit has led us there for a purpose which is not always clear to us.

But however we get into the wilderness, and however long our time in the wilderness might last – 40 hours, forty days, forty years, we will never be alone. God was with the Israelites when they traveled through the desert. And, the Spirit of God filled Jesus as he went into the wilderness.

So it is, that God is – and will be – with us. And so it is that we will find that the wilderness is never a god-forsaken place. Thanks be to God. 1 William Barclay, The Gospel of Luke, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), 43. 2 Penelope Mark-Stuart, “Lent: The Undiscovered Country,” in The Living Pulpit, “Lent,” January-March, 2000, 20. 3 David Rensberger, “Deserted Spaces,” Weavings, XVI: 3, May/June 2001, 9. 4 Rensberger, 5 David Douglas, “Inviting Solitude,” Weavings, XVI: 3, May/June 2001, 16.