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| 'The Hen,' Stanley Spencer, 1891-1959 |
“God may be in the details,” said the irrepressible Gloria Steinem, decades ago, “but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them,” she said, “there’s no turning back.” I think it’s like that, for Jesus, in the wilderness. He discovers mystery and suffering and joy and agony, sometimes all of this in a single strange afternoon. He learns to live in the questions the wilderness asks. And there’s no turning back. Not for Jesus. He looks cocksure demons in the eye. Then he throws himself into the bewilderment of not knowing, into the ancient wisdom of ancestors and their stories. And there’s no turning back. Not for Jesus.
Strange things happen
in the wilderness, in the desert, where streams run dry and jackals bear their
teeth and demons offer deals.
Distinctions Jesus once took for granted blur in the heat and sweat of
survival. Truths settled long ago fade
in the bright light. This is where the
believer becomes a blessing. This is
where the renegade becomes a rabbi. “Polish
comes from the city,” wrote the novelist Frank Herbert, “but wisdom from the
desert.” Forty days and forty nights
later, and there’s no turning back. Not
for Jesus. The Goddess works him
over. The questions change him for
good. “Polish comes from the city, but
wisdom from the desert.”
Now biblically, spiritually,
this wilderness is a metaphor, of course. Familiar and disturbing; far-reaching and
profoundly personal. It’s a metaphor,
the wilderness, for seasons of testing and temptation: days of loss and
confusion, suddenly turning our worlds upside down and testing our values in
every way. We know, you and I, because
we’ve been there, because we are there a good bit of the time. Think about it for a moment. What kinds of questions keep you up at
night? What’s your wilderness look like
these days?
For some of us, it’s
indeed a remote desert, an alien landscape, an unfamiliar city in a new time
zone, something like a poorly blazed trail through abandoned territory. Maybe you’ve moved across the country or up
the coast for a new job. Or maybe it’s a
degree program that’s pushed you to the limits of your endurance. It’s hard to find the trail out here; a sense
of dread around every dark bend.
For others of us, the
wilderness is a single day of sobriety, living minute to minute to minute with hard
choices and temptation and strange grace.
The bottle cries out from the cupboard.
The corkscrew whispers “just one, just one.” Every minute of resistance is a good minute,
a holy minute, serenity itself. The
wilderness is radical vulnerability and gratitude in the here and now.
And for others of us, for
others, the wilderness is a dark night, a moral crisis, a puzzling personal or
professional conundrum. You’re moved to
speak something like your fragile truth to power and to risk psychic equilibrium
and security in the process. Perhaps a
friendship hangs in the balance. You hit a wall along the way and doubt you
have it in you to continue. Or you
settle for a time into old habits and keep that truth hidden and safe. And every time, every time, the Spirit meets
you there, and offers you her tender, holy encouragement. Every time, every time, you will face the
crisis together.
2.
So maybe, maybe the
Spirit leads Jesus into that puzzling wilderness, that dangerous wilderness—not
to test his loyalty, not to imprison him in monastic loneliness. Maybe she leads him there because he belongs
there, because his ancestors found God there, because the wilderness asks
questions that count. Questions that
break hearts open in all the right ways.
Questions that bewilder prophets and inspire gentle courage. And so it is with you and me. Sooner or later, we find ourselves in a
wilderness. Famished and bewildered. Fasting and ducking for cover. Maybe we need that wilderness more than we
imagine. Maybe wisdom waits out there.
So a couple of things
about this morning’s reading.
Notice how Jesus’
forty days in the wilderness conjure up memories of the Hebrews’ forty years in
the wilderness, fleeing Pharaoh’s armies and wandering the strange terrain of
their own liberation. This is no
mistake. Jesus consciously embraces his
people’s story: their passion for liberation, their encounter with temptation
and despair, their radical trust in God.
Remember that the
Hebrews had to struggle with seemingly scarce resources in the wilderness. Remember that they despaired even to the
point of pining for Egypt and wondering if things were safer and more
predictable there. Isn’t this Jesus’
first test out there in the desert?
Doesn’t he too wrestle out there with scarcity and hunger, even his own
suffering? And doesn’t he turn in the
end (radically, I’d say) to God’s abundance and grace? Jesus is first and foremost a faithful,
radically committed Jew. And his
people’s story becomes his own story—a story of abundance in the dry desert, a
story of grace in the harsh wilderness, a story of wisdom in a season of
bewilderment. Always, always, always,
liberation runs through the strange and puzzling wilderness. Faith and doubt dance together there. The rabbi can only know because his people
know.
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| 'Beloved Dietrich Bonhoeffer,' Paul Huet, 2010 |
At Union Seminary in
New York, in the 1980s, many of us were drawn in quiet moments to a paneled
study known to insiders as the “Bonhoeffer Room.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer was then and still is something
of an icon at Union, a German theologian who studied and taught at the seminary
in the 1930s and wrote powerfully on Christian ethics, discipleship and
community.
In that small study at
Union, Bonhoeffer was often found by classmates, smoking anxiously, a pile of
butts in the ashtray before him. It
became for him something like a wilderness in the city. An alien landscape where demons and spirits
did battle. It was there, in that study,
that the chain-smoking pastor made his painful decision to return to Germany in
1939: to resist there the rise of Hitler’s Nazis alongside friends and family,
rather than settle into a life of academic comfort and success in the west. For the more imaginative among us, in the
1980s, it was easy to feel Bonhoeffer’s presence still, and even smell those
stinky, costly, meaningful cigarettes.
In the rugs, in the curtains, in the books on the shelves: Bonhoeffer’s
wilderness.
In his writing,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer introduced the notion of ‘cheap grace’ for the kind of
Christianity that asks nothing much of its congregations. He was particularly critical of liberal
protestants in the U.S. for saying lots but doing little in response to the
edgy gospel of peace. In contrast, he
urged classmates at Union and Germans in Europe to hear in Jesus’ message
‘costly grace’—a love that bears all things, hopes all things, endures all
things and risks all things in the name of Jesus Christ and his universal love
for all beings. ‘Costly grace’ resisted
oppression and found freedom in suffering for the common good. ‘Costly grace’ set aside theological
certainties for a cross that led always to sacrifice, compassion and solidarity
with the weak.
In the end, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
gave his own life to the cause of freedom and love in Europe. He was arrested and imprisoned for his role
in plots to assassinate Hitler. Though
devoted in every way to nonviolence, he could not, in the end, stand safely and
idly by as the Third Reich devoured his country and his tradition. Bonhoeffer spent some years in prison and was
executed in Germany, by the Nazis, just days before the liberation of Europe in
1945.
I guess what moves me
most in his story is that he lived out, by choice and in deed, what he taught
and wrote in his books. And that kind of
integrity makes him an icon of sorts for Christians of all kinds and all
nationalities. Even now. Especially now. In the wilderness of Nazi Germany, in his own
personal wilderness of doubt and despair, Bonhoeffer turned again and again to
the light.
If you’re at all
interested in Bonhoeffer and his story, I’d highly recommend his “Letters and
Papers from Prison”—a stunning collection of his writings during imprisonment
and leading up to his death in 1945. It
could be that the book would even make a powerful and provocative Lenten
devotional, if you’re looking for such a thing.
“Letters and Papers from Prison.”
Among all the letters Bonhoeffer wrote to friends, family and even his
fiancé, there is a poem here that I want to read for you this morning. It strikes me as a poem about the wilderness,
the strange and disorienting wilderness where faith so often leads us. Even the saints. Especially the saints. The poem’s called “Who am I?”—and Bonhoeffer
wrote it from his cell in the last months of his life.
Who am I? They often tell me
I stepped from my cell’s confinement
Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
Like a Squire from his country house.
Who am I? They often tell me
I used to speak to my warders
Freely and friendly and clearly,
As thought it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I bore the days of misfortune
Equably, smilingly, proudly,
like one accustomed to win.
Am I then really that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
Struggling for breath,
as though hands were compressing my throat,
Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,
Tossing in expectations of great events,
Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
Faint, and ready to say farewell to it all.
Who am I? This or the Other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!
Remember that great
Gloria Steinem quote. “God may be in the
details, but the goddess is in the questions.”
Our own Lenten journey has something to do, maybe everything to do with
embracing and living the questions Jesus asks in the desert.
“What does it mean to embrace a practice of abundance, a daily practice of abundance, in a world troubled in a thousand ways by scarcity?” “How might my suffering open my heart to the suffering of friends and neighbors?” “And am I willing to divest myself of all power but the power of love?”
These are huge
questions, unanswerable questions, the only questions that matter really, for
Jesus and for us. Sometimes they seem to
mock us. Sometimes they keep us up for
nights on end. Always, they drive us
into the waiting arms of the One who loves us with unquenchable love.
Amen.
