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.

If we take it as truth that distance from distraction is what we need to become spiritually whole people—that all of us need to enter the wilderness from time to time to center ourselves, whether a literal wilderness or not—then the real question is “How on earth do we do that?” Not everybody gets a sabbatical—not everybody gets to get away easily at all. Most of us feel the hustle and bustle most of the time.

Well, let me tell you about the power of camp, because Ewalu is fertile ground for wilderness experiences in the midst of a hurried and harried world. Obviously, Ewalu is an outdoor ministry so we have that going for us, and even amongst outdoor ministries, Ewalu is set apart by our focus on the outdoors. We are what’s called a “decentralized” camping experience, which means that our camps take place apart from one another over a large territory and beyond on out-trips. However, we are also decentralized into the communities of eastern Iowa through day camps in local congregations, and we are further decentralized into communities that form amongst camp alumni, and retreat groups, and supporters, and more! In a given year, 10,000 people encounter Christ through Ewalu—from the kids who come to traditional overnight summer camp to you in the pews this morning.

Lives are changed by this ministry. In fact, I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that outdoor ministry is the single most successful evangelism ministry within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which is the first word in our churches name, after all, so I think that’s a pretty big deal. Better still, we do evangelism the right way. We don’t bring kids to Christ. After all, Christ is already there with them, meeting them in their baptism (if they have been), Christ is revealed to them in their parents, and family, and all those who love them. No, we don’t bring kids to Christ—we provide the ground for them to discover what it means to be known and loved by Christ already—to be saved by grace through faith already—to be children of God. We do evangelism by letting Christ lead us.

We provide the ground along the Maquoketa River—and often within the Maquoketa River—for Christ to be made known to these kids—for Jesus to be more than an historical figure but the person of God who knows them inside-out, who is pursuing them and will never let them go, no matter what they face in their own personal wildernesses. But you know what’s even better? The ground that Ewalu provides does not end at the boundaries of camp. We are partners in all the work that you do here at Christ the King, and I believe one of the best ways that we can be your partners is to kick you out of your comfort zones from time to time. Your pastor might want to do more of that, but she has to deal with the ramifications—she has to take measurements of the temperature in the room and decide to do this new thing but never change too much, because you are Lutherans and change makes you nervous. She has to worry about that… but I don’t.

You see, the wilderness is absolutely a critical, vital, important place, but it is also much more than a place. Anywhere can be wilderness, because it is far more about where you are being tested and where you are able to encounter God than it is whether that place has bugs or natural sunlight. In fact, I suspect many of us here today are in our own wildernesses at the moment, or perhaps you have been recently, or will be soon. More than anything, I want you to know and remember that Jesus Christ went into the wilderness often—in fact, he seemed to prefer to be there when he wasn’t hanging out with sinners, and lost sheep, and all the wrong sort. So, Jesus is there with you whatever you are facing.

Jesus meets us most often in simple places that are set apart. Often like Ewalu. Often like Christ the King. Other times it is in no place in particular but simply when we slow down and take the time to see God somewhere we hadn’t before.

Thank you for being a partner with us at Ewalu in this great adventure. When I say we are your camp, I mean it in exactly the same way that any wilderness can be yours. It is there if you use it. So, come and see. Pray. Encounter Christ, because that’s where he is—in the wild, but more than that, with you. In your wilderness.

May you encounter Christ there, and come back alive.