Introduction
Look outside and what do you see? The early signs of
building expansion by the Catholic community here? Housing in one of the
fastest-growing parts of Chelmsford?
Cars? Bored local youths loitering with vague intent?
Let me tell you what I see. I see a wilderness. And when I
look out at Broomfield
I see a wilderness there. I see another one at Hatfield Peverel. Moving to Chelmsford has been a
wilderness experience for me. I often feel out of step with the churches I
serve: here I am rather more conservative and low church; at Broomfield and Hatfield Peverel I am rather
more contemporary in the expression of my faith than many church members! Yet
God clearly led us here and so I serve as faithfully as I know how.
I wonder whether any of you are in a ‘wilderness’. Work,
family, church and many other aspects of our lives can feel like a desert
sometimes. At its most extreme some of the spiritual giants have
referred to the ‘dark
night of the soul’. In the dark night of the soul, prayer as you know it
becomes impossible, but in the long run it is a blessing in disguise as God
leads you through to new forms of prayer.
And the wilderness is a blessing in disguise, too. As the
hot sun beats down and as you struggle for water to quench your parched soul,
God is using the wilderness for good. And so we turn to John the Baptist’s
wilderness ministry in preparation for the coming Messiah. What is special
about the wilderness for our spiritual life? Two things strike me, and I hope
they help you, too.
1. The Word In The
Wilderness
The word of God comes
upon John (exactly how we don’t know) in the wilderness (verse 2) and he then
proclaims that word in the wilderness (verse 4, adapting Isaiah’s context).
What? In this place? This barren desert? Yes: here is where God speaks his word
and his followers learn to recognise it and to share it with others.
How can this be so? The wilderness is the place where God
strips us of all the accoutrements that weigh us down. It is a place where we
cannot take anything other than that which is necessary for life. It is not
somewhere that we can become obsessed with our luxuries. We are brought into
stark encounter with God. And with nothing else to pamper us, he gets our
attention.
It might be the sort of thing that can happen to us when we
deliberately choose to go on a silent retreat. The silence can be a wilderness
– it is utterly frightening to many people today. But in that silence God does
not allow us the luxury of other words even getting in the way. We can feel
naked and exposed before him, and wonder whether we can survive the ordeal. Yet
the stripping can be for new clothing, the clothing of Christ.
For many of us, though, the wilderness experience is not one
we seek for noble spiritual reasons. It is one that seeks us out and catches us
unawares. Redundancy, divorce or other crises make us career off the road we
were on. We are unsettled and in shock.
A spiritual writer whom I greatly admire, Ken Gire, tells of one such
wilderness experience in his book ‘Windows
Of The Soul’. He graduated with a master’s degree in Theology, written on
the theme of the wilderness in the Old and New Testaments. He began as a
pastor, but packed that in after two years, because the writing bug got hold of
him. So he decided to become a full-time writer. And that was when the problems
began. For two years he wrote, but no-one would buy his work. He and his family
had to sell their house and some furniture to make ends meet. Sometimes he
worked hanging wallpaper just to earn a crust for his wife and children. All he
experienced of God was his absence:
Where was God in all this? Why wasn’t
He helping me? I needed His help, wanted His help, asked for His help. Didn’t
He hear the words I prayed, see the tears I cried, understand the confusion I
felt? Didn’t He care?
[p 101]
A turning point came when a stray mother cat and her three
kittens sought refuge under the pier-and-beam foundation of the house where
they were living. The Gires left food and milk out for them every night, which
the cats approached with fear and trepidation. Then one day they caught one of
the kittens in a cardboard box and brought it indoors, so that it could
experience warmth and comfort. But the kitten went motionless. Then it arched
its back and hissed. It scratched when Gire tried to hold it and feed it.
And then it struck him. He was that kitten. Scared stiff one
moment, spitting mad the next – towards God. All God wanted to do was hold him
safe. Yet he ‘wanted the security of a job, not the security of His arms’ [p
103]. Later he concluded:
When I first listened to the call of
God to write, little did I realize it was a call to the wilderness. But it was
there, not seminary, that God prepared me to be a writer. The wilderness was a
place of pain, of humiliation, of uncertainty, of loneliness and desperation.
All of which were necessary for me to experience if I was to be the writer I
needed to be, wanted to be, prayed to be. How could I know the feelings of the
desperate if I had not been desperate myself? How could I know the feelings of
the poor if I had not been poor myself? How could I know the feelings of the
confused if I had not been confused myself? Or depressed myself? Or abandoned?
[p 104]
God speaks through the stark and painful experiences of the
wilderness and shapes us into the people he wants us to be. My most similar
experience occurred in 1987. Three times in the summer of 1983 my left lung had
collapsed. I should have had surgery on the third occasion but the consultant
was on holiday. I then went three and a half years, to January 1987, before it
recurred. I was at theological college
and had just returned from an evening of humping around heavy equipment from
the college radio studio and was playing table tennis when I felt a familiar
pain. I knew what it was, but went to bed in the hope that I would wake up
without it. I didn’t. I ended up at Casualty
the next morning. They said I would almost certainly need surgery now. I
returned to college, knowing that a friend of mine’s father was visiting that
day. This father had a renowned healing ministry. But by the time I returned
this man had gone. On the Monday the surgery was confirmed, and by Wednesday I
was in Frenchay
Hospital, being readied for an operation the next day.
Why had I missed the visit of my friend’s father with the
healing ministry? I was as upset about that as anything else. Only later as my
life took further shape was I to realise that my experience of major surgery
with eleven days in hospital and more than a month’s convalescence (three
months before I was truly fit) was my wilderness experience for the sake of
others. So often that time in my life is before me when I visit people in
hospital as a minister. I have at least some idea of what I think is helpful
and what isn’t when you are in a hospital bed. It was God’s silent word of
preparation, speaking through the pain of a wilderness experience. The
wilderness is a place to hear the word of God, but that word may come in ways
quite unexpected that we may even start to know God in a new way. As Ken Gire
puts it:
The God who now held me in the clutches
of His hand was so foreign to the God I had once held in mine. Was it His face
I was scratching at, His hand I was biting?
[p 103]
2. A Way Through The Wilderness
The Gospel writers see John the Baptist as fulfilling the
prophecy of Isaiah 40 in a new way. The text probably originally spoke to
exiled Judeans in Babylon, and encouraged them
to believe that the highway of God for them would lead through the wilderness
back from Babylon to Jerusalem. This is the royal highway. God has
not exempted himself from the wilderness, and his people do not have a get-out
clause, either. And even though the Gospel writers change the emphasis to the
voice in the wilderness from the original ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of
the Lord’, nevertheless that pathway can only be one that comes through the
desert to the final destination.
But the highway of the Lord needs some work:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.
5Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth;
6and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
[verses 4b-6]
Paths need to be straightened, the lows of valleys need to
be brought up to road level, the mountains need to be brought down, we don’t
want crooked paths but straight ones and the rough roads need to be smoothed.
Quite a feat of civil engineering is in view here!
During the three years I trained for the ministry in Manchester the
authorities were putting back a tram
system. One friend of mine commented waggishly, ‘Manchester will be a nice place when they
finish it.’ Similarly, before coming here, when we were in Kent, it was
nothing unusual to travel the A2 up to the M25. Always there were roadworks
somewhere, usually due to the work associated with the Channel Tunnel Rail Link.
Things are not as they should be. Preparing any highway
requires huge effort and the willingness to put up with much disruption.
Preparing God’s highway in the wilderness requires some long-term corrective
work. For there is no doubt how John the Baptist saw the call to prepare a
straight, level, smooth highway for the Lord in the wilderness, and that was
repentance. To be in the wilderness can be to discover where our paths are not
straight or level, and where we are crooked and rough. It may take a severe
experience such as a spiritual wilderness to expose these things and see our
need for a certain kind of civil engineering in our lives.
Here in the wilderness, on the spiritual wild frontier, far
from the comfortable suburbia where we anaesthetise anything uncomfortable, we
discover the ways in which our lives need to be straightened out to make them a
fit highway for our God. The stripping away that happens in the wilderness
means we have nothing left with which to hide or mask our sins. The desert sun
shines brightly on them and we cannot ignore them or explain them away. We feel
trapped and much as we want to justify ourselves in a defensive manner, we know
we can’t get away with it.
In all this we may think that God is being severe, even
cruel to us. Who is this monster consistently pointing out our failings?
Couldn’t we do with a bit of encouragement in the desert? Wouldn’t it be nice
to be built up rather than ripped apart for once? You may feel like God has
your number and he’s out to get you.
But that is never the whole story with the God revealed in
Jesus Christ. Our crookedness is straightened out for positive, holy purposes.
Soon we shall be singing Christmas carols with words such as, ‘And fit us for
heaven to live with thee there.’
The straightening out and
smoothing is to ‘fit us for heaven’. And it is also to fit us for kingdom life
now. It is how we ‘Make way for the king of kings’, not only when he returns
but also because he has already come in the humility of a Bethlehem manger. We are unlikely to enjoy
this straightening out and smoothing but it is for a Gospel purpose. It makes
us people who can proclaim that the king is coming on his highway and be
believable in that proclamation, because there is evidence in our lives of
being conformed – straightened and smoothed – to his character.
Conclusion
The wilderness is an uninviting
place to be, but often it is the only place to be. A man called Howard R Macy
in a book entitled ‘Rhythms
Of The Inner Life’ said this:
The spiritual world … cannot be made
suburban. It is always frontier, and if we would live in it, we must accept and
even rejoice that it remains untamed.
[Gire, p 95]
Technorati Tags: wilderness, John+The+Baptist, dark+night+of+the+soul, Ken+Gire, Windows+Of+The+Soul, Manchester, trams, Channel+Tunnel+Rail+Link, repentance, Howard+R+Macy, Rhythms+Of+The+Inner+Life
Big Circumstance 
What Do You Think?