Why the Desert?

Matthew 3

This coming weekend 20 of us will be taking a bus to Erfoud, in the south of Morocco on the border with Algeria and on the edge of the Sahara Desert. I have wanted for several years to make a trek to the desert but this will be the first time for me and I am eager to go on this trip. Why do I want to go to the desert?

The desert features prominently in the Bible which makes sense when you look at the geography of the Bible. Israel was bordered by two huge deserts, the Arabian desert to the east and the Sinai wilderness to the south. And then much of Israel itself had desert-like qualities.

So it is not surprising that Hagar ran away from Sarai into the desert, that Joseph was cast by his brothers into a cistern in the desert, that Moses met God in the burning bush in the desert, that Israel wandered for forty years in the desert, that on the Day of Atonement, the sins of Israel were put on a goat that was sent off into the desert, that Elijah fled from Jezebel into the wilderness, that John the Baptist ministered out in the desert and that Jesus prepared for his public ministry by going out into the desert.

I wonder what the Bible would read like if Jesus had been born in the forests of Germany or the Alps of France, Italy or Switzerland.

David wrote Psalm 63 when he was hiding in the desert from the army of Saul. Verse one from this psalm is the verse I put under the date in today’s bulletin.
O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you,
in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

I suspect that if David had been hiding out in the caves of the Alps he might have written this:
O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you:
my soul shivers for you, my body longs for you,
in a cold and windy land where there is no warmth.

If God had called Abraham to go to Switzerland instead of Canaan, hell might have been described as a freezing, bitterly ice-cold, desolate environment.

We use language to hint at truth and whether hell is ice-cold or burning hot, it will not be a pleasant destination. And whether we thirst for God or long for his warmth, this is a longing that is blessed and pulls us in a good direction.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the desert because I’m preaching from a chapter of Matthew each week during Lent and Matthew 3 and 4 take place in the desert. Our trip this next weekend is a marvelous coincidence and ties in very well with the preaching this week from Matthew 3 and in two weeks when I am back in church on Palm Sunday, with the preaching from Matthew 4.

Why did John the Baptist take his ministry out into the desert? If he had wanted to reach as many people as possible, wouldn’t it have been better to set up shop somewhere in Jerusalem? When you start a ministry, you go to where the people are. If you want to start a church, you see where it is that people are and then build the church near to them. Who was it that John the Baptist intended to reach when he began his ministry in the desert? Camels? Scorpions?

Why did the Holy Spirit, after Jesus’ baptism, lead Jesus into the wilderness? Why is it always the desert?

As I suggested, if the Jews had lived in Europe, the imagery of the Bible would be quite different. The desert is not what is significant. It is what the desert offers that matters. It doesn’t matter if it is a desert, the wilderness, a forest, the Alps or out at sea, what all of these offer is solitude, a chance to get away from all the busyness of our lives and be alone with God.

Thomas Merton, the contemplative monk, wrote in his book, Thoughts in Solitude
As soon as you are really alone, you are with God.

That’s the trick. That’s the difficult part, to be really alone.

In this sermon I will be referring to the desert, but when I say that, you can translate that to any place where you can get away and be alone.

So we go to the desert to hear God speak to us.

In Genesis 16, the angel of the Lord found Hagar, the servant of Sarai, the wife of Abraham. Hagar had run away after being mistreated and the angel of the Lord told her:
“Go back to your mistress and submit to her.” “I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count.”

In Genesis 21, fourteen years later, Hagar and her son, Ishmael, were again out in the desert having been kicked out by Sarah because of jealousy for her son Isaac. And again God spoke to her:
“What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid; God has heard the boy crying as he lies there.  18 Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation.”

In Exodus 3 Moses was tending sheep in the wilderness when God appeared to him in a burning bush and spoke to him.
God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!”
And Moses said, “Here I am.”
5 “Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”  6 Then he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.”
And then Moses received his instructions to set Israel free.

In Exodus 19 Moses went to meet with God in the isolation of Mount Sinai and God gave to him the law that was to govern Israel.

And in Matthew 3, Jesus came to the desert to be baptized by John and heard these life-changing words:
“This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

I know that a major reason so many of the incidents in the Bible take place in the desert or wilderness is because of the geography of the area, but I think also that there is something about the solitude of the desert that allows us to hear God speaking.

We go to the desert to hear God speak to us. When we go to the desert, we escape the noise of the world which allows us to more clearly hear God speak to us.

When Elijah fled from Jezebel, he went into the wilderness and there God spoke to him.
I Kings 19
The LORD said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.”
Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake.  12 After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.  13 When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

Most often, God does not speak to us in dramatic ways; he speaks to us in a gentle whisper and when there is a lot of noise we have difficulty hearing him. It is not just the noise of cars and people and televisions and ever-present walkmans or ipods. The noise we escape when we go to the desert is also our relationships with others, our daily responsibilities, the expectations others have for us, what people think of us, the noise of our ego and pride.

“The desert loves to strip bare,” wrote Saint Jerome and when we go to the desert our external self gets stripped away and we are confronted with who we are in relation to God. In the desert when I step into solitude, I am not a husband, father, friend or pastor; I am a child of God.

One of my favorite Christian songwriters is John Fischer. In 1972 he produced a vinyl album – this was before CDs – with the title and soundtrack, Still Life. These words have resonated with me over the years of my Christian life.

Still life
We were always meant to live
a still life
But somehow we got trapped into the fast life
The cast life
Where everyone plays a part

You lose yourself in the fast life
In the fast pace of the rat race
Where no one knows who you are
And nobody cares
If there really is a God
And He has something to say
We would never hear it
‘Cause the noise is in the way

Still life
We were always meant to live
a still life
Where everyone can see our real life
Be still and know who is God

This is why we need to go to the desert, to be still and know who is God.

This line is taken from Psalm 46 with images of earthquakes and mountains collapsing into the sea and huge storms in the sea. Nations bring war against each other. It is against this backdrop that the power of God is revealed. He lifts his voice and the earth melts.

So be still and know who is God.

Don’t underestimate the power of the world to pull you away and distract you from knowing and hearing God. When you wake up in the morning with thoughts of who you have to meet that day and the long list of things to be done, where is God? I often have dreams at night that express in some way the pressures I face. I become worried and anxious about people and projects. My life is often consumed with the affairs of this world.

I need, we need, to be still and know who is God.

We go to the desert to hear God speak to us and it is because we escape the noise of the world when we go to the desert, that truth gets spoken in the desert.

If you read the accounts of John the Baptist in Luke and Matthew, you see that John spoke positively to the crowds, the soldiers, the tax collectors but had words of condemnation for the Pharisees and Sadducees.

People went out to him from Jerusalem and all Judea and the whole region of the Jordan.  6 Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.
7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?

The difference is that the Pharisees and Sadducees came out to evaluate John, to see if he was indeed a prophet. They came with their heads to examine and probe and judge. But the others came with their hearts to confess their sins.

Abraham’s wife, Sarah, was not a very nice woman (and to be fair, Hagar was not very nice either). When Sarah could not conceive, she followed local custom and offered her maidservant, Hagar, to Abraham so she could have a child through Hagar. But when Hagar became pregnant, Sarah became jealous and was mean to Hagar so that she felt she had no option but to run away.

So Hagar sat alone in the desert, pregnant, discouraged, depressed. Her heart was breaking and it was in this state that the angel of the Lord came to her and encouraged her.

For fourteen years her son was treated as the heir of Abraham but then Isaac was born and Ishmael began to mock him, Sarah got upset and forced Hagar once again into the desert. So once again Hagar, this time with a teenage son, was sitting in the desert, discouraged and depressed and in that state, the angel of the Lord again spoke words of encouragement to her. The most significant part of what the angel of the Lord said to her might have been that if she and Ishmael had a future, they would not die there in the desert.

Moses spent forty years in the desert, tending the sheep of his father-in-law, Jethro. He had never escaped the sense of failure that was his for not rescuing his people from the hands of the Egyptians. He suffered from a poor self-image, poor self-worth. It is in this condition that God met with him and encouraged him to take the responsibility he had tried earlier to take by himself.

Elijah had fought a magnificent battle for the Lord on Mount Carmel when he defeated the prophets of Baal. But then he was terrified by Jezebel who pledged that she would see him die. He fled into the wilderness, exhausted, depleted, at the end of his rope. It was in that condition that God met with him, fed him and spoke to him.

When you step out into the desert, you can face the truth about yourself in a way that you cannot if you remain busy in the world. It is your responsibility when you come to the desert to actively participate in this process of being stripped bare, to be honest, to come with your heart open.

The truth is revealed in the desert. Illusions get stripped away. You are who you are in the desert, without pretense and without masks.

In my early years of marriage, once a year I used to go to a Catholic retreat center for three days and step out of the world to read my Bible, journal, reflect and pray. Later, when I was a pastor in Ohio, I had a Marist brother who was my spiritual director and who helped me to take time away from my pastoral responsibilities to be alone with God.

I find myself being more and more drawn to this kind of retreat from the world.

I haven’t thought about this enough, but my first impulse is to reject the idea of living in the desert. Carlos Carretto in Letters from the Desert wrote:
The desert is not our final stopping place. It is a stage on the journey….Our vocation is contemplation in the streets….Certainly it would be easier and more pleasant to stay here in the desert. But God doesn’t seem to want that.

There are great saints in the history of the church who pulled away from the world and spent their time in solitude. Their insights and prayers have benefitted the church but for most of us, God wants us to be in the midst of the noise of the world, being his hands and feet and voice to the people of the world.

So there is a balance. We need to be in the world, but from time to time, we need to pull away from the world to be alone in solitude.

I know that not everyone can afford to pay the cost to go to the desert in Erfoud, but you need to find your own desert where you can step away from the world and be alone with God. I’m talking about more than a daily devotional time. I’m talking about getting away at least once a year for a few days to retreat.

A couple years ago I read Walter Wangerin’s book, Paul, A Novel. This book transformed my reading of Acts and the letters of Paul. It put flesh and blood on the spirituality and intellect of Paul that is revealed in his letters. Ever since then I have thought about what it was like for Paul as he made his way from city to city. And I have thought more about what it was like for Jesus as he made his way from place to place.

Paul and Jesus did not cross time zones and have to adapt to jet lag. They did not even rush at 120 km/h from one city to another. When they traveled, they walked or later in Paul’s life, he rode in a cart. There was a lot of time for reflection and meditation. As Paul walked along, he had time to think through his developing theology. In the Gospels it is recorded that Jesus walked alone and the disciples followed him at a distance, afraid to interrupt his thinking. They stopped to eat lunch someplace and at night they sat by a fire and looked at the stars.

Can you imagine how they would react to today’s high-pressure, fast-paced world?

I have been feeling drawn to this slower pace of life.

I drive up to Ain Leuh many times each year to go to the Village of Hope and in this last year, as I have thought about how Paul and Jesus traveled, the idea has been growing in me to walk from Rabat to Ain Leuh. When I have shared this with people, there is a shocked reaction It is such a radical idea. The world is a different world when we walk than when we speed by in trains, busses or cars. At this point, I plan to do this two week walk in October, after Ramadan. I hope others will be able to join me, even if it is just for a day.

God can and does speak to us wherever we are, but I think when we take conscious steps to remove ourselves from the world, we are able to hear God speak more clearly.

I have been on three day retreats when those participating agree to spend the time in silence. We were given passages from the Bible to read and exercises to help us in our meditation. When we came to meals someone would read from the Psalms, but we would not talk to each other. We spent the time walking outside in the forest or meditating in the chapel and those were always rich times for me in which God spoke to me.

So here is my challenge: find sometime this year when you can get away. Maybe later this year we will try to organize a retreat such as I just described. You can make arrangements to go to the Catholic retreat center here in Rabat for three days. There are many places to go where you can escape the noise of the world and be alone with God.

When you go, go with your heart open. Go with honesty, not hiding behind masks. Let God speak to you.

We will be in the desert for just two days. I feel that we are just dipping out toes into the water – or sand – with such a short time, but it is a start.

There is an Arabic proverb that says: The further you go into the desert, the closer you come to God. That is the goal. The goal is not to go to the desert but to draw near to God. May God bless us next weekend as we go to the desert. May God bless you as you find your own desert in which God can speak to you.