The Inner Wilderness

Hey brother,

Have LOVED the past few blogs from you.  I have not had time to respond but will do so.  This is the sermon I preached last night at church.  I went 'rogue' part way through but this is heart of it. Used the text of Jonah in the bell and Marks account of Jesus being "thrown out" into the wilderness.

I grew up in a church that for lent offered a program called “Ten Brave Christians”  – it was a based on John Wesley’s sermon where he says “give me ten brave Christians who fear god and nothing else, and had sin and nothing else and I will change the world”.  What I remember most is early mornings, a lot of scripture memorization and raw vegetables for 40 days.  And most of Christianity got reduced down those two things for me and so I got after it.  Hate Sin, and work for God. And there is a place for that, but it is a pity that much of what Lent has become is an attempt to try to make ourselves feel uncomfortable.  Many times Lent becomes a performative way that we indulge in the secret and destructive pleasure of doing a upright orthodox grovel to a pseudo-Lord, as Harry Williams says, “ the Pharisee in each of us we call God and who despises the rest of what we are”.  Many times Lent can be just that – despising ourselves, the shadows, our personal weaknesses – attempting to hold down, to drown these elements in our lives through the muscle of our spiritual vigor. 

            Tonight I don’t want to talk about all the ways that you and I are apt to pull ourselves up by our spiritual bootstraps by our own self-effort.  Somehow we all know the hollowness of that – the dead end that these impulses lead to.  Lent is a time when we think about Jesus in the wilderness.  When we allow the images of Jesus being driven into the wilderness and all the haunting fear that comes with it to occupy our story, become the echoes of our internal reality. 

The wilderness belongs to us.  It is always lurking somewhere as part of our experience, and there are times when it darn well feels that that is all that there is – wilderness everywhere.  And although some people are pushed into the wilderness by being pushed out of community  -   For the most part our wilderness is internal.  Most people’s wilderness is inside them – and if we were able tonight to turn towards each other and by some act of spirit,  speak in very raw and vulnerable ways, each of us would utter the vastness of this wilderness, the inner isolation that creates no line on the horizon that lives within us. 

Our inner wilderness constructs an absence of contact.  It communicates in a multiplicity of ways and in almost a constant feed that we are alone, individuals, forsaken  - terrifyingly alone.  And God knows we shake our fist at this haunting wilderness by filling up our schedules to the brim with little space between the gaps, we eat to much, drink too much, busy ourselves and bury ourselves in a mountain of research, we use religion, sex, recreational drugs, retail therapy – or a combination and cocktail of them all.  And for a while it assuages the loneliness – momentarily it beats back the isolation – but these distractions and the anesthetic quality of them work only for a limited time and we find ourselves deposited back to the very space that we are attempting to be rid of, to run from.     

            Our isolation is really us.  But it doesn’t seem like that. We take inventory of where this isolation comes from and the answer looks agonizingly easy enough.  I feel isolated from intimate life giving relationships, it is not just my singleness but the loneliness that is unendurable  – we think marriage or partnership will fill the space inside of us only to find that the fear of rejection, the terror of vulnerability, the distance in the other laying next to us only makes the pain more acute.  Or I feel isolated in social contexts, in groups - sizing up the inside crowd, and constantly I find myself on the outs looking in, wanting in, but the very desire only highlights the deep and personal estrangement.  Or I feel isolated from the competent, achieving people – wondering if I had that degree, that fellowship, that book deal, that chair that amount of income, that job, those well behaved kids. I feel isolated from my work.  What promised to be such sustaining, imaginative, life-giving work has become dull and uninviting.  What used to wake me up now just puts me to sleep. And this causes a deep dread in us.  We are apt many times to put our life on “auto-pilot” and just to run the clock out. 

And through it all it feels as if we have been robbed of our certainties, our convictions – there are still vestiges of my thinking that says this is black and this is white, good people get good things and bad people won’t succeed, and if I read more of the bible it will cure my depression and anxiety and God is in heaven and all is right in the world.  And if I believe enough am good enough I can cheat this part of me, assuage this experience, find a detour around it.  But when the ground shifts when all I see for miles, endless miles is wilderness the question that comes out of my chest that haunts as much as it screams is –“how long oh Lord, how long, How am I to live this?  Where am I to put this?  Does my life get reduced to an endless string of grey days, forced laughter, crappy TV and streaks of downright pain? How long oh Lord, how long?”

            What I have been describing is the true Lent, the true wilderness and it has little to do with giving up sugar or Guinness for a few weeks or trying to feel as bad about yourself as you can to purify your ego. And this Lent, this isolation, this low-grade despair – this sense of being unhinged, unequipped and exposed, because it is us, therefore has a place in the life of the Son as Man as well.  This man of sorrows, this one who was acquainted with grief, he too did time in the wilderness.  And what happened to him shows us what is happening to ourselves.  In his life, in his wilderness we see the meaning of our own.  Outside this paradigm I struggle where to put it.

So what then happened to Jesus in the wilderness?

            We read from Mark’s account tonight because it is the earliest account of the life of Jesus.  The language is simple, almost crude at times.  There is not the detail or symmetry, it doesn’t come with the soundtrack that it does in Matthew and in Luke.  Mark’s account is stripped down, it is raw and essential.  At his baptism in the Jordan, the Spirit of God descended upon Jesus, and deep within His life rang an immediate certainty of who he was and it echoed in the depth of his identity:  “You are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased” said the Spirit of God. And Mark says, immediately the Spirit drove him into the wilderness.  And he was there for 40 days with Satan and the wild beasts and the angels were ministering to him. 

What does this story tell us not just about the wilderness of Jesus, but our wilderness?

Let me suggest a few things.

The first is that the wilderness is inevitable.  You cannot avoid it, you cannot buy your way out of it, achieve yourself around it, out smart it, out pray it – it is a part of you and you will experience it.   Those who attempt to create hyper-religious reasons for the wilderness, or programs for by-passing it, are usually called “actors”,  “mask wearer” or Hypocrites by Jesus.  And the sad state of affairs is for the most part, instead of entering into the wilderness where the world is, the church for the most part has tried to offer programs that promise a type of spiritual circumvention around it, or details of why people go through this.  Maybe that is why so many people leave the church – who wants to dwell in a white washed tomb pretending there in no wilderness when you are in fact sitting in the wilderness.  The wilderness is inevitable and it lives inside of us all.  Another way of saying this, is that you will be swallowed by a beast and brought to the bottom of the ocean.  The ocean, the sea in scriptures represents the primordial chaos, the deep fear and terror, the unspeakable despair that lives in us all – and there is no way around this.   You will be thrown out into the wilderness, you will spend time in the belly of the beast. It is so.

The second thing the story tells us.  Is that somehow even God is here.  The presence of God and love and purpose of God is not separate from it, that in spite of the darkness, in spite of being swallowed by a beast, still the purposes of God are present. This is the light that shines in the darkness and cannot overcome it.  Part of the importance of the church reclaiming the wilderness as our own and not some side track due to sin or not being Spiritual enough -  is that in our own vulnerability we become living icons to the world - the wilderness, the belly of a beast, even hell, if Jesus descended into it - is not god forsaken. The angels ministered to Jesus amid the accuser and the beasts, Jonah even in the bottom of the sea in the very absence of God expereinces his presence.  This is the great paradox of the wilderness, the bottom.   And although I am unable to hold the light for myself – my brothers and sisters who have gone through their own wilderness, who have been swallowed by their own beasts are able to hold the light for me, are able to come beside me.  And in words, in stories, in silence and in tears – hold for me what I cannot on my own.

But to be isolated, to be incapable of establishing communion and connection is part of the deep spiritual work of our humanity.   Wilderness is not antithetical to the spiritual work – it is the work.  So much of what has been touted as communion is really a song and dance that keeps us away from the deeper work.  But it is here, that real possibilities of communion are possible.  It is here that we learn to drop the pretenses of ego and come to one another, vulnerable and open.  It is here that we experience the depth of our own self, and our need for each other.  It is here – in our own powerlessness and loss of faith that we learn surrender and communion.  The purposes of God are present here.

The third thing that I would like to say is that it does not last forever.  The Spirit that drives us into it is the spirit that will carry us out of it. 

But it belongs to the Belly of the beast, to the wilderness to feel it will last forever.  That the darkness is all there is, that the primordial chaos is the only reality.  And so we are tempted of Satan.  Tempted to give up, tempted to despair, tempted to cynicism, tempted to cruelty, tempted to pull in and not to help others – because what is the use?  Tempted to push the button that says, “I just don’t care”.   Tempted to become a part of the mass of dead eyes that pass us on the street.  Tempted to not take risks anymore, to let our hearts become enlivened, to shirk back form the most ordinary and undangerous things.  Tempted to disbelieve what we really are and to distrust the Spirit tells us “ You are my beloved son and daughter and in you I am will pleased”.  And when we come here it is easy to disbelieve this by pulling in, not being vulnerable to each other around us, closing our lips entering into our pleasantries and living with our silent terror and panic.

            This is our Lent.  This is what we are faced with and must deal with. This is the pattern, being driven into the wilderness, being in the wilderness, coming out of the wilderness.  Jesus, being pressed by the Pharisees for a sign said I would give you a sign, being thrown into the sea, swallowed by a beast, and spit up. This is the paschal pattern –this life, death and resurrection.  And it will happen over and over in our lives. This is what we must learn to speak out in the midsts of this community, in this context.  The only spirituality that you will have – will be worth having - will emerge from the wilderness.  The only God who is there is the God who is able to be profound absences as well.  This is the great paradox of the wilderness, presence and absence, fear and angels, beasts and Spirit – and they live together in the wilderness – and the live together in you and in me.   And whatever communion is – whatever the communion of the spirit that happens in this community will be because we have been given the grace to do this work, to speak of these things.  To hold each other and to move towards each other in these places.   And as we do so, the very echoes of the cannons whisper among the beasts in this place of death and dying – ‘who shall separate us from the love of God, shall persecution or distress shall tribulation or famine or nakedness or peril or sword?  For I am confident that neither height or death or angels or principalities or powers or things past or things to come or any other created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of God.  Even in this place we can find Easter in disguise.