Into the Wilderness

Sermon for Christ the King Lutheran Church, Iowa City

Mark 1:9-15

“And the Spirit immediately drove Jesus into the wilderness.” –Mark 1:12.

Leave it to the camp guy to ignore the other stuff and head straight into the verse about the wilderness. Then again, if you’ve been paying attention these last several weeks to the Gospel readings in Mark, the wilderness shows up a whole lot. Six times in the first chapter of Mark alone we get this Greek word “eremos,” a word that is the basis for J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Eriador”—the land of the free peoples of Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings.

Two things you will get with me: Love of wilderness and nerdy stuff.

“Eremos” means a place that is desolate, lonely, solitary, and uninhabited; in other words, not really the place we expect Jesus to be. Yet, Mark 1:12 says that the Spirit drove him into the wilderness immediately, and there he stayed for forty days, being tempted by Satan and hanging out with the wild beasts.
            Why? Why would the Spirit send him there in the first place—why immediately go from baptism to temptation. Why does the wilderness matter to our faith?

I want to share with you a bit of my experience with wild spaces and why I believe they matter so profoundly to faith. I’m going to get to camp—I know you were worried—but I’m going to start with my experience out in the wild—in this case, on a hike.

In 2019, I took a sabbatical from my pastoral call in northwestern Minnesota and spent a month hiking the Superior Hiking Trail along the north shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota’s arrowhead, starting at the Wisconsin border just south of Duluth and finishing at the Canadian border. I meandered through 310 miles of forest and rivers over rocks and roots, spending days on end in wild spaces. It sounds silly to admit, but if I’m being completely honest, for the first week or so, I did not know why I was out there. Like so many places we find ourselves in life, I was just doing a thing that seemed like a good idea at the time only to find out it was hard and uncomfortable, and any day I might end up getting eaten by wolves.

Near the end of my second week on the trail, I paused at a sign along the trail—a pleasant wooden sign that shared how many miles you still had to walk to find the next campsite—in this case, too many miles. While I was standing there reading the bad news, I saw what appeared to be a blemish in the face of the wood—like somebody had taken a knife to the soft wood and pealed it back. I don’t know how long I sat there staring at that blemish, but it was probably a couple minutes at least since I was taking the opportunity to eat M&Ms—and, let me tell you, those were prolonged breaks—before I chanced to look closer. Only then did I realized that the blemish was not a blemish at all, but a moth of the same color and texture as the wood beneath it. All I was seeing was the shadow of the moth’s head lifted up from the flat wooden sign. It was remarkable.

That is the picture behind me today. That moth—partially covering the letter “A” in “CAMPSITE.”

I am 100% confident that had I come across the same sign on day one on the trail—or day five on the trail—I would not have noticed that moth. It was day 10 and I had only just slowed down and opened my eyes long enough to see, but when my eyes were opened, I started to see more and more.

What happened to me was perhaps a less dramatic version of what happened to Jesus—and indeed what I believe happens to everybody who spends time in contemplation in the wilderness. The things that we pray in our hustled and bustled lives back home find their answers when we slow down enough to see what God is doing before our eyes. In the wilderness, we discover that answers to prayer are not given, they are discerned through discipline. Even Jesus Christ, the Son of God, needed that distance from distraction to discover it.

Once I get started on that whole alliteration thing with all of those “d” words, I can’t stop—I apologize.

We need the wilderness

Scripture: Mark 1:29-39

“In the morning, while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.”

            I don’t know about you, but that sounds awfully nice to me. Away from the kids. Away from the bustle—the demands on his time and attention. Away from dinging phones, emails, social media. Just away. We probably don’t talk enough about Jesus’s penchant for leaving it all behind and heading off into the wilderness. And Jesus wasn’t alone. It seems like most heroes in the Bible would go off from time to time, whether Abraham, or Moses, or Elijah, or John the Baptist. They all went off to pray and reflect.

            When is the last time you prioritized going off on your own?

            I hope you don’t hear that question as judgment. Lord knows, we have so many forces in life begging us to never take a break. There is always more work to do—more, more, more. There is so much to do, in fact, that it can never get done, so we keep at it—more, more, more. Because our work is important—so very, very important. Raising a family is important—so very, very important. If we don’t give it 100% all the time, we will regret it—we will wonder why we didn’t do just a little more. We want to give our kids, our families, and our selves our best shot. What could be wrong with that?