“Streams in the Wilderness”

A sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Christine Jerrett at Central United Church, Sarnia on September 12, 2010.

Scriptures:    

1 Timothy 1: 12-17
Psalm 14
Luke 15: 1-10


Three core stories form us as followers of Jesus Christ. They are the lenses through which we learn to see the world. They help us understand what it means to live in faith in the God who is revealed as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The three core stories are Exodus, Exile and Easter. Those stories become metaphors, or figures, that run throughout the scriptures. They seed our imaginations and open our spirits to the living God in each new season of faith.

Within the story of the Exodus, the figure of the wilderness plays a prominent role.  Hebrew slaves escape in the middle of the night; Pharaoh’s soldiers chase them down to the edge of the Red Sea; by a miraculous act of God, a way opens where there was no way. The people go through the waters and find themselves in the wilderness. They are in the desert with forty years of wandering ahead of them until they get to the Promised Land.

A few thousand years later, Jesus is baptized by his cousin John in the Jordan River. He goes through the waters and then spends forty days and forty nights in the wilderness being tested by the devil before he begins his ministry.

Surprisingly, the people of God spend a lot of time in the wilderness even though the wilderness seems an odd place for God’s people to be. It is a harsh, difficult place. Food and water are scarce, if they can be found at all. There is unbearable heat during the day and numbing cold at night. Either one can kill you if the animals don’t get you first. It is easy to get lost in the wilderness -- to get turned around, become confused, unable to find your way out.

When you are lost, it is easy to lose touch with God. Psalm 14 paints a picture of God surveying God’s beloved creation.
The Lord looks down from heaven on humankind
   to see if there are any who are wise,
   who seek after God.

3 They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse;
   there is no one who does good,
   no, not one.

4 Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers
   who eat up my people as they eat bread,
   and do not call upon the Lord?

The psalm gives a glimpse into God’s heart: God’s heart is aching because we have all gotten so confused and lost. We have all wandered away from the goodness and delight that God intends for us to enjoy. We cannot find our way home.

Sometimes we end up lost in the wilderness simply because life takes us there: we suffer a devastating illness; we lose a job; a loved one dies; someone wounds us deeply. Some of us do not feel lost ourselves, but we pray every day for a child or grandchild who has lost his or her way. There’s nothing we can do except bring their names and our love for them to the feet of the living God. Some of us feel lost because the culture is changing so rapidly that we cannot keep up.
Talk with young people in their twenties about feeling lost in the wilderness: some of them will tell you about having gone through high school being told that, by the time they graduated, the Baby Boomers would be retiring in droves. There would jobs for the picking. Now, many of them are running out of Employment Insurance and there are no jobs in sight.

Sometimes, we get lost simply because life happens and we get confused and disoriented and cannot find our way.  Sometimes, though, the scriptures say that we find ourselves in the wilderness because God has led us there.

The Official Board has been studying a passage from the book of Exodus that says that the Hebrews could have taken a shorter route to the Promised Land, yet Yahweh led them in a roundabout way. There were lessons that they had to learn in the wilderness -- lessons about God’s faithfulness and about trusting in a God who acts in surprising ways.

One of the challenges to our faith can come when it feels like God has pushed us into a wilderness time and then has left us wandering around long past the time when we figure God should have rescued us from our troubles. We pray for direction; we beg for help. We try to find a short-cut past our troubles. We look for a way to escape or someone to rescue us. Nothing opens up.

The wilderness stories in the scriptures always include the surprising discovery that God is present there. Even more than that: God is not only present but God is also working our our salvation in those wilderness conditions. It often does not seem that way. Part of what makes the experience feel like the wilderness is that we feel bereft, abandoned. It seems that we have been left on our own, with nobody caring. It feels as if God, especially, does not care.

The promise of our faith is that God does care. God cares deeply and passionately for each of us. God, says Jesus, is like a shepherd who will leave ninety-nine sheep in order to go find one that is lost. God is like a woman who will tear her whole house apart looking for one small lost coin. then, God will throw a grand party to celebrate when the lost is found.

The problem, then, is not that God does not care. The problem is that the salvation God offers to us often does not look like the salvation we were wanting or expecting. Because it looks so different, we do not perceive it.

Luke says that Jesus told the parables of the shepherd searching for the lost sheep and of the woman searching for a lost coin and of a father searching the horizon for a lost son to Pharisees and teachers of the scriptures. These were people trying to live as God’s people. They were good religious folk. However, they could not imagine that God’s Saviour would save them by spending so much time with people who lived on the margins of respectability. This was not the way they were expecting God to rescue them from their oppression.

They were ‘murmuring’ against Jesus, says Luke. Murmuring -- like the Hebrews did when they realized they wouldn’t be going straight to the Promised Land. They found out that they would be spending a lot longer in a dry and desolate place than they had planned. They realized that the journey would take a lot longer than they had expected, and that it would be a lot more difficult than they wanted. They murmured against Moses and Aaron: “Why did you bring us out here? Where are we to get water? Where are we to find food? Is the Lord with us or not?”

The Pharisees and teachers of the Law also murmured against Jesus: “He welcomes the wrong kind of people.” Salvation was supposed to be a gathering of the righteous. it was to be a great banquet where the righteous would receive their reward for doing God’s will. But Jesus just kept gathering in the broken, the lost, and the wounded. He kept inviting people to the feast that did not seem to qualify. Such an inclusive community was God’s salvation, happening before their eyes, said Jesus. But the Pharisees and teachers of the Law could not see it. They were lost in a wilderness of disappointment and confusion. If they were going to get in on God’s new creation, they were going to have to change their expectations.

That is true for us as well. Sometimes, we find ourselves going through a wilderness time that lasts far longer than we hope it will. In those times, the task that faces us is to open ourselves to the ways God is changing us rather than changing our circumstances.

Someone has suggested that we wrestle daily in prayer with the kinds of questions that open us to God’s holy, transforming work:
What are you doing, God, in these circumstances?
What are you asking me to leave behind?
What are you asking me to become?
What are you telling me?

There are no short-cuts through the wilderness. The answers do not come easily. This Saviour who finds us in our lostness does not seem nearly as concerned about our comfort and safety as we are. He has something much greater in mind for us. The change God wants in us can be painful, hard work. We resist. We cling to what we know rather than embrace the mysterious new creation that God has in store for us. We become impatient, wanting to get past the pain. Instead, God invites us to move deeper into the pain and to find even there God’s grace and God’s strength and God’s faithfulness. That is what will see us through to the end of our days.

The lessons we learn in the wilderness are always lessons about God’s faithfulness, about learning to trust this God above all else. God longs for us with a love that is deeper than anything that tries to separate us from God. God has purposes for us that are better than any that we imagine for ourselves.  In times of wilderness wandering, God grows us deep so that we shall find the streams of grace that run through all our lives. The promise is this: God’s grace will be sufficient for us. Knowing that, we shall join the celebration. Thanks be to God.

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