Today we are in the wilderness, listening to John the Baptist crying out. What does that make you think of? I’m guessing that for most of us, the wilderness might be kind of nice. We Canadians have a fondness for the wild - the vast spaces away from the city, where nature is at its finest, where we can go for hikes, or picnics, or get some time alone. The wilderness is untamed and beautiful - awe-inspiring, but also calming. New research says that if you get outside into nature every day, your immune system improves. When I think of the wilderness, I think of Kananaskis, and Canmore, the Kootenays. I’d love to be with John the Baptist out there in the wilderness, away from the noise and chaos and complications of the city.
But of course, that’s a bit of a fantasy, isn’t it? That the wilderness is a place to get away from it all - that cities are bad and wilderness is good. In biblical times, it was exactly the opposite. The wilderness was a place of chaos, and the city was a place of safety. Nobody lived outside of the city if they could help it. The wilderness had wild animals that would eat you (it still does), and lawless thugs who would attack you. There’s no buildings or any shelter in the wilderness, you’re completely at the mercy of the elements - if a thunderstorm comes up suddenly, or a violent windstorm, or in our case a freak blizzard or tornado, there’s nowhere to hide for protection in the wilderness. There’s no easy access to food - no stores or even gardens, and no access to clean drinking water. There are no street lights to light your way when it gets dark. There are also no people in the wilderness. While this might be nice for a time, if you’re trying to get away, people also offer companionship and can watch your back, as it were. But there’s none of that in the wilderness. The city is a place of security, the wilderness is a place of vulnerability. In the wilderness we are exposed, unprotected, defenseless, vulnerable.
Most of us today choose to live in the city, and not the wilderness. But we still encounter the wilderness in our lives. What I mean is that we still encounter those times when we feel defenseless and vulnerable. There are many times in our lives when we feel as though things are completely beyond us, and that we are completely exposed - stripped bare to the world, without any defenses and completely unprotected and alone, sitting in the wild dark without any lights.
- For instance, you might find the doctor’s office to be a wilderness. Nothing leaves us feeling quite so vulnerable and exposed and alone as sitting in a doctor’s office waiting to hear the results of a critical test we’ve had done.
- Christmas gatherings, or the lack thereof, might be your wilderness. For some people, family get-togethers are wildernesses. Chaos. When siblings fight, or adult children argue with their parents, when people drink too much and say or do ugly things, when all of the past hurts and failures are exposed - then we can feel stripped bare and vulnerable to those with the power to hurt us most.
- For other people, Christmas can be the wilderness of complete loneliness, with no loved ones, or maybe loved ones who’ve died and are no longer there. Either way, the result can be darkness and loneliness and vulnerability.
- Physical pain, too, can create a wilderness - unrelenting, ongoing, day-by-day, month-by-month pain. This, too, can leave us feeling defenseless, at the mercy of something that threatens to eat us up, alone, vulnerable, exposed.
- The wilderness is everywhere. Zechariah and Elizabeth, in the Gospel of Luke, lived in the wilderness of being unable to have children, before John the Baptist was born. The people in the reading from Malachi, our Old Testament prophet, lived in the wilderness of having corrupt religious leadership and therefore no access to God in the Temple. John the Baptist lived in a literal wilderness, at the mercy of the wild animals, no access to proper goods like clothes, and no proper source of food.
Our lives tend to be one wilderness after another, even if our physical address is in a city. Most of us tend to live from one vulnerability to another, from one darkness to another, feeling completely exposed and alone.
But as Zechariah, a Temple priest, tells us, in the words for our Psalmody today, “by the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.” Our Scriptures remind us, over and over again, that God comes to us in the wilderness, to shine light on our darkness, and to be with us in our vulnerability. The Gospel of Luke actually says it outright. After listing all the great regions and their rulers, places where the cities were supposed to be marvelous places of security, the writer of Luke says, “the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.” Not in the city, not in Jerusalem, not in the Temple, not in the places where we expect to find protection and security and God’s presence. In the wilderness. In the place of wild animals and exposure and chaos and vulnerability. God comes to John in the wilderness, just like God came to the people of Israel in the wilderness of Sinai, like God came to the prophet Elijah in the wilderness, like God came to Jesus in the desert - Israel’s wilderness. God comes into the wilderness to be with us, to walk by our side, to stand with us against the wild animals, to shine the light of the sun. I will not say that God transforms our wildernesses into cities, because cities of course have their own problems. But Scripture is unequivocal that God comes to us when we are in the wilderness, when we are feeling alone and exposed and vulnerable. God embraces our pain and our fear and our darkness - God does not abandon us in our moments of greatest need - God stays with us and we are no longer alone.
It can be hard to see this, I realize. We don’t always notice the dawn until it’s pretty bright outside. We don’t always feel that God is with us when we’re overcome by pain and vulnerability. It’s not that we don’t have faith, it’s just that it’s easy to get swamped or overrun or even worn down by how alone we are in these times.
This week, while I was working on this sermon and the message that God is in our wilderness, I had to sit with my youngest child while he had a test for kidney function. I may have told some of you that he was born with kidney problems - they didn’t get the chance to fully form when he was born. And so we’ve never known for sure whether or not his kidneys work properly. Of course, you’ve seen him, he doesn’t show any sign of kidney impairment or anything like that - he’s happy and “active.” But after we moved to Canada, his doctor suggested that we have his kidneys tested to see how well they’re actually working. So, this week, they injected him with a radioactive dye - which he thought was the coolest thing ever - and used a special camera to watch his kidneys filter the dye, to see if they worked. And so he and I sat in a room while he watched Tarzan on the TV set up for him, and a camera recorded the dye moving into his kidneys and then filtering out again to his bladder. And as I was sitting there, watching his kidneys lighting up on the camera display like glow-in-the-dark balloons as the dye entered them, thinking about today’s message and God in the wilderness, I noticed that one of his kidneys was getting darker, because it was filtering out the radioactive dye into the bladder, while the other wasn’t. And as the minutes ticked by, or maybe it was seconds, because who can tell when you’re in the wilderness, one of his kidneys cleared the dye out completely, and the other kidney didn’t. It stayed all lit up. And I know the room didn’t get darker, but it sure felt like it. As I realized what this meant - that of his kidneys is not working the way it’s supposed to - I felt more and more in the wilderness. If you’ve ever received bad news - that you have cancer, or that someone you love has died - you know how the world around you kind of dissolves and you can’t quite grasp what’s going on but you’re still weirdly focused. You’re alone in that moment - completely alone in the universe - completely vulnerable and exposed in the wilderness. And so I’m sitting there, in the nuclear imaging room, with proof that my child’s kidneys aren’t properly doing what they’re supposed to, with a sermon that God is in the wilderness running through my head at the same time, wondering where God’s light was at that moment.
And I looked over at my child, and he was watching the Disney jungle animals singing and dancing and making music with pots and pans and doing all kinds of goofy things, and he was just smiling and completely captivated by the fun and the joy on the screen. And seeing his joy, that was a tiny, barely noticeable glimpse of dawn. And the now-dark, clearly functioning one kidney, that was another glimmer of dawn. And the Children’s Hospital, with their pediatric specialists, that’s another glimmer of dawn. And the nurses who were with us in the exam room, they were another glimmer of dawn, they were God’s hands with me in that wilderness. And my friends and family who listened to me process all of this were also hints of dawn and signs of God’s presence with us in the wilderness. All of these very small things, not nearly as noticeable as a glow-in-the-dark kidney on a computer screen, all of these things are tiny rays of light that reassure me that God’s light shines in the darkness. They are hard to see, but they are there.
“The dawn from on high shall break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.” We all still live in the wilderness, but the dawn from on high shines upon us. We’re not yet living in the full daylight - that will happen when Jesus Christ comes again. But the dawn is here. The little bits and pieces of God’s kingdom are here now. They’re hard to notice when we’re overcome by exposure and vulnerability, but they are here. Blue sky, a friendly smile, a gentle touch, a warm blanket, a hot meal, a beautiful painting, an exquisite piece of music, a listening ear, the body and blood of Christ on Sunday morning, God opens our eyes to these moments to proclaim to us that dawn is here. In Advent, we proclaim that Christ is coming, but we also proclaim that Christ has come, and that Christ is with us now. God is with you in your wilderness. The Word of God comes to you in your wilderness. You are not alone. The sun is rising. Come, Lord Jesus, Come. Amen.
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