Our Wilderness Guide

The Reading for this Sermon was Romans 8:18-27

For a few years I was a leader at a summer youth program called FutureQuest.  The part of FutureQuest that the participants seemed to love the most was the three or four day camping trip we’d take.  A lot of the kids had never been camping, many had never been out of their home cities, so it was always an adventure.  But as a leader, I would always lie in my tent at night, terrified about each and every one of the kids I was watching over.  Every rustle of leaves made me think about the size of the bear licking its lips as it approached one of the tents full of youth, all of whom smelled like hot dogs.  Every crack of thunder made me worry about what tent had just been struck.  It was only after we all would be safely at home and I could hear the excitement in the participants voices that I could breathe again and realize what an awesome time we did indeed have.  This is the nature of wilderness.  It is that awareness that we are not in control.

Paul and the people he wrote to were in a wilderness of their own.  In many ways, life in the first century of the Common Era was tough.  The streets were far less safe than they are today, life had less value. With poorer sanitation and less knowledge of medicine, illness and disease were constant threats. Even the image of birthing, which Paul uses in this letter, was not just a time of great excitement, but also of fear, as the infant and maternal mortality rates were much higher than they are today. 

Paul himself, often faced persecution for his beliefs, and even within the Christian community, he faced opposition.  The Christians of Rome in the first century also faced their share of persecution and division.  There was division between the Gentile and Jewish Christians.  The Roman authorities, at least twice came down hard on the Christian community there.  Once Emperor Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome because, to quote a Roman historian, they made “disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus” (probably a misuse of the word Christus or Christ).  And later they were intensely persecuted by Emperor Nero as a scapegoat for a fire that burned Rome.  These were people for whom life, in many ways, was beyond their control.

Times have not changed as much as we like to think they have.  We are a species that cannot admit it lives in the wilderness.  We cannot admit it, because it terrifies us.  Not having control, is frightening.  So we commit vast amounts of energy and resources into maintaining it, or at the very least, maintaining the illusion.

This desire, this longing for control, this denial of wilderness manifests in ways beyond count.  We see this manifest in the clear cutting of our natural wonders, trying to wield them to do our bidding.  We see this manifest itself in the cookie-cutter confines of suburbia.  We see this manifest itself in our refusal to even talk about death, or in our struggles to sit with those who are sick.  We see this manifest in thousands of years of sexual repression, trying to deny those feelings that make us feel out of control.  We see this manifest itself in thousands of years of religious oppression, the idea that we control whether or not we are in God’s good books.  We see this manifest in our violent attempts to maintain some sense of security. We see this manifest in the Gospel of America, that to be honest, we hold very close to our hearts in Canada, the delusion that somehow I am entirely in control of my own destiny.  That a poor person on the street, for some reason deserves it.  That who we are is somehow all a result of worth.  That is why, when bad stuff happens, we ask deep within our hearts, “What did I do to deserve this?”  We ask this, because we want an answer.  But when the answer comes back, “Nothing.”  We are terrified.

We hold onto these messages, we long for these rules and codes, for these opportunities to judge others and judge ourselves based on circumstances; because if they are not true, we see how out of control and how powerless we really are.

We live in the wilderness.

Let me say that again.  We live in the wilderness.  We live in the wilderness, and our guide is fear.  And so we run through the wilderness in a panic, trying to transform it into something that we can control.  Trying to shape it, to landscape it.  To turn it from a desert into Las Vegas, to turn it from a forest into a park.  We long to control the wilderness that we all live in. Until, one day, we forget that we are even in the wilderness.  And when a sandstorm strikes Las Vegas, or wild animals begin appearing in the park, we give our hearts once again to our trusted guide.  Our guide then tells us to tame the lions into kittens, to turn the wolves into puppies.  And when the kittens maul us, and the puppies bite, we give even more of our hearts over to our trusted guide.  Soon, all we have to trust, is fear.

This is why the Way of Christ is such a ridiculous faith.  Because it defies all semblance of logic, it stands in the face of one of our most base emotions, and offers a very different guide through the wilderness.  Hope.  Hope we encounter in the person of Jesus, hope that is embodied within our experience of the wilderness itself.

Truthfully, I find the Way of Christ, the Christian Scriptures to be among the most honest lenses to look at the world through.  Our faith is upfront (or at least it should be) with its admission that we live in the wilderness.  It admits that you can be the most noble being, the literal embodiment of goodness and holiness, you can live and breath God, devoting your life to charity, to justice, and to compassion, and still end up on a cross, rejected by family and friends, and declared a criminal.

What happens to us is not based on worth.  That idea is foundational to our faith.  Jesus said, “It rains on the just and the unjust, alike.”  His life’s ministry constantly showed that because someone was poor, or sick, or an outcast, did not mean they had done something wrong, and just because someone was rich and powerful did not mean that they had done something right.

This resonates still today, along with numerous other messages.  We can live the healthiest life in the world and still die of cancer, or still have a heart attack.  And I remember hearing an interview with the oldest woman in the world at the time, who admitted to being a lifelong smoker.  Economies collapse and affect those who have done tremendous good in their lives; and those who have lived lives of corruption may walk off unscathed.  In times of war it is not just the “bad guys” who die.  In fact , it is far more likely that it is the innocents who do, women and children often bear the brunt of violence.  The people in Somalia are not responsible for the famine that is causing such devastation.

Life is a wilderness.  And we can either deny that, and let fear dictate how we live our lives.  Or we can listen to the words of Paul, Paul who invites us to live lives of Hope.  Hope in something that Paul freely admits he cannot describe. 

Hope that even though the wilderness is beyond our control, we might encounter something unimaginable for ourselves, that we might see sights that take our breath away and resonate within our hearts.  Hope that one day we will learn to not run away from wilderness on our own, but walk through it with one another.  Hope that we see embodied in Christ, who though he saw himself walking towards the cross, would not change his direction out of fear.  Hope that as we walk through the wilderness, as we encounter our struggles, that we come to know we do not walk alone. Hope that it is in the wilderness that we encounter God. Hope that when we surrender our control, when we stop trying to wield this world, one another, and ourselves, that the Holy will be with us.  Hope that it is through the wilderness that God walks with us.  Hope that we come to know God intimately as we join Christ in his walk through the wilderness towards the cross.

We live in the midst of wilderness.  Who will be our guide?