Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 13, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Last week, on Transfiguration Sunday, I talked to you about mountaintop or peak experiences. They are those powerful, thrilling, ecstatic times when the Holy breaks into our lives and becomes obvious to us in ways that it usually is not. A peak experience fills us with light, energy, and joy. Peak experiences are wonderful. We wish they could go on forever; but, as we also talked about last week, they don’t. We talked about how Jesus always leads us down the mountain, back into the world, back into our daily lives. Peak experiences are a real rush, but the life of faith doesn’t take place only on the mountaintop. Mostly, it takes place down here in the valley, in our ordinary lives.

Last week the lectionary gave us Jesus’ mountaintop experience, the Transfiguration. Today the lectionary gives us the exact opposite. It gives us Jesus’ wilderness experience--or at least the first of them--his wilderness experience of temptation by the devil at the beginning of his ministry. Psychologists and students of spirituality know about mountaintop experiences, and they know about wilderness experiences too. A wilderness experience is the opposite of a mountaintop experience. One Christian spiritual tradition calls the wilderness experience "the dark night of the soul." It is a time of spiritual and emotional darkness. Our creative juices are dried up. Our emotional, psychic defenses break down and our souls are laid bare. Wilderness experiences may be times of depression, isolation, loneliness, anxiety, grief, or despair. They may take place in an actual wilderness, but more importantly wilderness is a metaphor for all of those troubles of the spirit, of the soul. If in a peak experience the Holy breaks into our lives, in a wilderness experience it is not the Holy but the demonic that breaks in.

Just as we love the mountaintop experiences, so we hate the wilderness experiences. We hope to avoid them. To say the least, they are no fun. At their worst, they are the worst times of our lives. So it may come as a surprise to you that I want this morning to say a word in favor of wilderness experiences, and I don’t mean pleasant nature hikes through the North Cascades. We need wilderness experiences in our lives, and I don’t think that it is a by chance that three of the four Gospels begin their story of Jesus’ ministry with an account of just such a wilderness experience.

Matthew begins the story of Jesus in the wilderness by saying that the Spirit "led" Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. Mark, on the other hand, has it that the Spirit "drove" Jesus out into the wilderness. mark 1:12 I think Mark has the better of it here. "Led" is such a gentle verb, but a wilderness experience isn’t gentle. It feels a lot more like being driven than being led. We can’t be led unless we consent to follow, and wilderness experiences happen very much without our consent.

Be that as it may, Jesus ended up in the wilderness; and Matthew gives us a story of his experience there. I have preached here before on the meaning of the specific temptations that he faces. I won’t go into that today. Rather, I want to look more generally at what happened to Jesus in the wilderness and the importance of his wilderness experience for his life and his ministry.

What happened in the wilderness, I think, was that Jesus was forced to grapple with the question of who he really was, his foundational identity, the meaning of his life. Maybe you think those things were never an issue for him. After all, if you’re the Son of God, indeed God Incarnate, how much question can there be about your identity or the meaning of your life? Well, I beg to differ. We confess that Jesus was the Son of God, but he was also, and I think foremost, a man, a human being not all that different from you and me. We tend to forget that sometimes, but it’s real important. If Jesus is only God, his experiences don’t mean that much to us in our lives. We’re not God, after all. We’re humans, and it is important to us that Jesus was human too.

As a human, he must have struggled with his identity and his mission. We all do. For Jesus, it must have been a particularly difficult struggle. That, I think, is what the story of his temptation in the wilderness is all about. Whatever else he may have been, Jesus was clearly a man of remarkable spiritual power, and power brings with it the temptation to abuse it. Power in and of itself is morally neutral. The moral question is how one uses one’s power; and that question raises fundamental issues of one’s identity and purpose in life. Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness all had to do with how he would use his power. They therefore all had to do with who he was and what he would do with his life.

Out there in the wilderness, he came face to face with himself. He came face to face with the temptation of power. There was no place to hide. All his defenses were stripped away. That, I think, is what it means to face the devil. It means coming face to face with our own weakness, our own temptations, what the psychologists call our shadow. That’s where Jesus was. In the wilderness he faced the devil of his own temptations. In doing that he discovered who he really was. He found his identity and his mission. He faced the temptation of selfishness, of using his unique spiritual power for the narrow purposes of his own ego; and he defined himself as someone who would not give in to that temptation. It was a painful, scary experience. Matthew tells us that when it was over angels came and ministered to him. He needed it; but Jesus’ wilderness experience was a necessary, formative, defining experience. In it, Jesus learned who he really was.

We all have our wilderness experiences too. Like Jesus’ wilderness experience, our wilderness experiences can be hell. In them, we can experience the depths of despair. We can experience an emotional, spiritual pain far worse than any physical pain. That pain isn’t physical, but it is real. I’ve felt it. I know how it hurts, but I also know that wilderness experiences are necessary for us just like they were for Jesus if we are to discover who we really are, if our lives are to have depth, power, and meaning. I know that because I’ve been in the wilderness, and the wilderness changed me. In the wilderness, I found who I am. Let me tell you a story:

There was a man who was considered a success in the eyes of the world, for he was a lawyer. He had many possessions. Some considered him wise, for he had many letters after his name. He was a leader in his church, and he tried as best he could to live a decent life according to the teachings of his faith. Yet as time went by he became deeply troubled in his soul.

And the Spirit of the Lord drove him into the wilderness and tormented him saying: "You are not meant for all this. Give up the things of the law and come, follow me." But the man held firm to his old ways. He said to the Spirit: "I cannot leave all this and follow you, for I am advanced in years, and I have many responsibilities." The Spirit would not leave him. It drove him deeper into the wilderness. The man continued to resist. He became exhausted and sorely depressed. He wanted to give in and follow the Spirit, but he did not have the courage.

And the Spirit drove him even deeper into the wilderness. His depression became severe. His efforts to avoid the Spirit were sapping the life from his soul. Yet the Spirit would not relent, and finally the man knew that he must either give in and follow the Spirit or die. So he said at last to the Spirit: "Amen. Let it be with me as you will." And he followed where the Spirit led. When he did, he found his true self; and when he did, the Spirit led him into a life far richer, more meaningful, more peaceful, and more joyous that his life of worldly success had ever been.

That is the story of my wilderness experience, or one of them. Like most Bible stories it isn’t literally true. Those conversations never took place like that. The story is short, but it covers a period of about four years of my life. All through that time I never left home. The story isn’t literally true, but like most Bible stories it is profoundly true. I was in the wilderness, and the wilderness changed my life. It saved my life. It was hell. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

That’s how it is with wilderness experiences, or at least it’s how it can be. They don’t always turn out as well as that one did for me, and surviving one doesn’t mean there won’t be others. I’ve had at least one other that was even worse. Still, if we can survive them they can change us in powerful, constructive ways. We can learn who we are. We can discover an inner strength we didn’t know we had. We can strengthen our relationship with God. We can learn to rely on God and to trust in God. As hellish as they can be, our wilderness experiences can do that for us in a way the normal times, the good times of our lives cannot.

Wilderness experiences can be rich and constructive, but mercifully God doesn’t want us to stay in the wilderness. Just as Jesus led the three Disciples back down the mountain after the peak experience of the Transfiguration, so the Spirit will lead us out of the wilderness. For many of us grief has been our wilderness, but grief does not last. It changes us. The loss never goes away; but if we will rely on God, we can come out even of the hell of grief. In loss we can find ourselves and learn to live anew. In despair we can learn our need to trust in God, and we can discover hope. Our journey to the light usually leads through darkness. There is no Easter without Good Friday.

Today is the first Sunday of Lent. Lent is the wilderness time of the church year. It is a time to enter the darkness of life, to consider our brokenness, our sin, our need for meaning, direction, and wholeness. It is a time not to shun the darkness of life but to embrace it. And we can embrace it because we know that the Spirit will not leave us there but will use the darkness to lead us to the light. Just as we should not stay on the mountaintop, so we shall not stay in the wilderness. Thanks be to God. Amen.