Spiritual Survival

Wilderness:  Way to the Word”

Isaiah 35:1-10

A Sermon Prepared for the Hollywood Presbyterian Church

Rev. Stephen A. Herring

December 12, 2010

When I was a young man I wanted more than anything to be able to live in the wilderness.  My ideal was to be able to walk outside, off into the hills, up into the mountains, and simply to be at home there.  With my home in a back pack, I called it the “Freedom of the Hills.”  This was the ability to look into the mountains and to go wherever my heart called me.  In my efforts to learn how to do this, I found myself in a few difficult and interesting places.  Once, in 1975, a friend of mine and I decided to climb Mount Rodgers in Virginia over the New Year’s weekend.  We got a late start, and night fell just as we reached the summit.  We could not go down because it was too dark, so we had to spend the night camped out in the wind up on a ridge near the top.  That, I can tell you, was the coldest night of my life.  It was not the most miserable though.  My most miserable night had come some years before when I was camping near Chapel Hill, not far from home, when I was much younger.  We had an icy rain come pouring down.  It flooded our tent completely, and all I could do to stay out of the water was to curl up on my pack frame as a stream of ice water ran beneath me.  There have been other nights when I froze, or got wet, or fed myself to the bugs or slept on rocks, but those two nights stand out as the most difficult. 

So where did you spend your most difficult nights?  From time to time all of us have to go places which are outside of the normal comfort zones of life.  Many of us have spent nights on buses, curled up in cars, or on trains headed to uncertain places.  We have slept in airports, or in hotels that properly should never have been called hotels.  We have slept in the recliner beside a hospital bed.  We have spent nights in various awkward, dangerous, and difficult places.  We have found ourselves in places where we never would have planned on going.  In our own way, in our own time, we have been to the wilderness. 

Today we need to think of the wilderness in spiritual terms.  Wilderness is where you find yourself in the moment you realize that the comforts of the world which you thought you could rely on are no longer present.  Bad health is a wilderness.  Aging is a wilderness.  Grief is a wilderness.  Loneliness is a wilderness.  So are depression and anxiety.  All the hardships life can bring us are a wilderness.  You know you are in the wilderness when someone looks at you and says; “I understand what you are going through,” but you know they have no idea what you are going through. 

In the days of Jesus, the desert, the Judean wilderness to the east of Jerusalem, and the wilderness of Sinai to the south were both places which most normal people avoided if they could.  People preferred to stay in the towns and cities.  There were always a few people on the periphery, on the edges of society who wanted to enter the wilderness.  They wanted to be in the wilderness because, through history, the wilderness was where you went to have a direct encounter with God.  Throughout Biblical history, people have found the word of God deep within the wilderness of the Judean and Sinai deserts. 

In modern terms, there is a reality which we all need to face.  Somehow, we can’t hear the voice of God calling to us very well when we are surrounded by the ambitions and commitments of life at the center of things.  In Biblical terms, Jerusalem, and the Jerusalem Temple were at the center of things.  At the center, things had become corrupt.  The temple had become a den of thieves.  Jerusalem was completely wrapped up in corruption, idolatry, and political intrigue.  The early followers of John the Baptist wanted to get away from all that.  They wanted to find the living fountains of God’s word flowing in the wilderness.  They left the city, and adopted a lifestyle of being completely at home in the wilderness.  They chose to abandon the city center of Jerusalem. 

Today, in our own way, and in our own time, this is exactly what we also need to do.  We need to enter the wilderness in order to find our Lord.  To get into the wilderness we need to leave the politics, the ambition, the social connections, and the prosperity of Jerusalem behind.  When it comes to a life changing encounter with God, the wilderness is the way to meet the Lord.  The wilderness is the place where we can clearly hear the voice of God speaking to us in the quiet of our solitude. 

The problem we have with the wilderness is that it is the place where we try not to go.  We do not want to leave the comforts and the companionship of our version of Jerusalem behind.  The wilderness is a place of loneliness and separation.  It is a place of isolation and a place of danger.  The wilderness is also a place of testing and temptation.  Instead of meeting God in the wilderness, we can find ourselves, like Jesus, tempted by the Devil in the wilderness.  For these reasons we try our best to avoid going there.  As soon as circumstances push us out into the wilderness, we want to get back home as soon as possible.  We miss the comforts, the conveniences, and the company of being at home back in the city. 

We have to go to the wilderness though.  Our lives are such that we can’t stay with all our comforts for long.  Things always change.  As they do, they draw us along a different kind of a path.  There is a way, a path we must all walk as we travel through life.  It is a holy way.  It is a sacred path.  It also leads us right through the wilderness.  Some call it the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Grief, the Way of the Cross.  It leads us into the heart of loneliness and isolation.  It leads us into places and situations we would never have planned on having as parts of our lives.  It leads us through all of the separation and scarcity and conflict.  It leads us through all of those difficulties which would separate us from those who are close to us. 

The bad news is that we must walk that way.  The good news is that we will never walk it alone.  Jesus is with us.  He is there for us to guide us through every moment of temptation.  He is our guide and he will make sure that we will find the word of God in our personal wilderness.  When all of the trappings and the fancy obligations of life in the city are used up, we will have no other recourse but to rely completely on our God.  This is the moment when our wilderness journey becomes transformative.  This is where our wandering in the wilderness becomes a genuine encounter with God.  God will speak to us in the wilderness and God’s word will change us in that place. 

So how do we feel when our circumstances bring us into that wilderness place?  In our scripture lesson from Isaiah you can underline a set of words which describe exactly how we feel in that place.  We feel weak, fearful, blind, deaf, lame, and unable to speak. 

We feel weak because we think our physical, emotional, and spiritual strength might not be up to the task. 

We are fearful because nothing is predictable, and there are no margins of safety.  Fear cannot be denied, but it must always be faced.  The way to get over a fear of heights is to climb into high places and look down.  I can remember looking down off a cliff on the Sierra Crest near the top of Mount Whitney and seeing a 1,500 foot vertical drop.  After that there is no fear of heights.  The way to deal with any fear is to surround yourself with what you fear.  Then, and only then, can you see that which you fear is only an illusion.  There is seldom any truth in fear. 

We are blind because we can not see what is truly happening to us in that wilderness place.  We may see the dangers and the traps and the pitfalls and the things we are so afraid of.  What we can’t see is the simple fact that our Salvation is drawing near.  What we can’t see is the fact that in terms of the journey of our soul this may be the best place we have ever been.   

We are deaf because we may hear the rushing wind, or the rushing water, or the storm, or the wolves howling, or our own cries of fear, but we cannot hear the voice of God speaking so clearly to us.  God is telling us that we are His children, eternally loved, forgiven of all our sins.  God is telling us we will live for ever and we will triumph over any evil.  All we can hear though is the chorus of our own worries. 

Being lame is painful.  I can remember once my father and I walked from south Lake Taho to Tualamne meadows in Yosemite National Park.  It was a distance of 150 miles and every foot of it was above 10,000 feet.  We were at or above the timber line most of the time and the trail was solid stone.  On about the third day of the trip I got a bad set of blisters.  My blisters had blisters.  There would be no stopping because we had a limited amount of food and so we needed to keep to a schedule.  There was nothing to do but to walk through the pain.  The first few miles hurt like crazy in the morning, but later in the day the pain was bearable.  The lesson is that in hardship we need to stand on our own two feet.  If we can’t stand though, there is One who will set us on a firm footing and help us to stand.  That One is the LORD our God. 

Finally, we are dumb, unable to speak.  We are often speechless because we can’t stop complaining long enough to praise the Lord.  Our grumbles and gripes, mutters, mumbles, and complaints are so loud and so continuous that we can’t speak the words of praise God wants to place in our mouths. 

Our scriptures tell us that our weakness will be strengthened.  Remember Philippians 4:13.  “I can do all things through (Christ) who strengthens me.”  On any given day, at any given moment, I can tell you we are way stronger than we think we are.  In Jesus Christ we are even stronger.  In Jesus Christ there is no power in heaven or on earth that can defeat us.  Therefore we can be strong in the Lord. 

I can tell you that on the average day, there is no substance whatsoever to our fears.  Most of the time fear is something we make up in order to fill in the blanks of that which we do not understand.  When we have a good relationship with God, all fear is gone.  We can hear Isaiah’s words; “Say to those of a fearful heart, BE STRONG.  FEAR NOT.  Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God he will come and save you.” 

Then, our eyes are opened and we can see the true, limitless beauty of the wilderness where we are sojourning.  Then we can see that this is the place and these are the circumstances in which we will meet our Lord.  This is the landscape in which we will encounter the limitless light of the God who created us.    

Then our mouth can open, not with complaining, crying, and wailing, but with praise and celebration. 

The point is that the Wilderness is the Way to the Word.  Keep those three words in mind:  Wilderness, Way, and Word. 

By our ventures into the wilderness of this life we will find the way, as Isaiah says; “A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the

Holy Way

.”  There is a highway prepared in the wilderness which will lead us to direct fellowship with God. 

Finally, the way through the wilderness leads us to hear the word of God with clarity.  Do not be afraid if you are led into the wilderness.  It is there that you will clearly hear the promises of God in Jesus Christ.  Amen.