Dec 8, 2024

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O God, my strength and my redeemer.  Amen.

I enjoy being out in nature.  When I was a kid growing up on a farm, I had a real sense of being connected with creation whether I was riding my bicycle down dusty gravel roads or going out and playing in the trees that made the windbreak or seeing all the stars on a dark night.

But being in the wilderness is something different altogether.  There’s an awesome sense of quietness and stillness in that seemingly endless undeveloped landscape.  God’s presence can seem so much more real in wilderness places.  And through the stories of the Bible, the wilderness is where people find God.  From Moses to Jesus, some of the most profound spiritual experiences took place in the wilderness – where waiting and stillness prepared people for something greater.

And so this morning, I want us to be thinking about what it means, as people of faith, to make our way through the wilderness.

The challenge of being in the wilderness is that, without marked trails or easy landmarks or people to provide advice and guidance, it’s easy to get lost.  There’s no GPS to help you figure out where to go.  No Google maps.  If you get into the wilderness and don’t know what you’re doing, you can really lost.  We don’t know how to orient ourselves.  We don’t know what path to go down.  Or even where we want to end up.  Ask anyone who’s been lost in the Boundary Waters or the North Woods, and you realize how frightening that can be.

What we need in the wilderness is a way to navigate through it.  Now, every navigational system has two capacities.  First, it needs to have an ending point, a clear direction and a plan of how to get there.  In other words, you have to know where you want to go and how you want to get there.  Second, a navigational system needs to orient you.  You have to be able to read the current location and put it in dialogue with the direction you want to go.  In other words, it’s hard to execute the plan and get to where you want to be if you don’t know which way is north.

So moving successfully through the wilderness means you need to be proficient with a specific set of skills and tools – like a compass.  And to become proficient, you need a guide.

So we come to this morning’s Gospel reading.  People are streaming into the Judean wilderness.  Maybe the reality is that they’re in a spiritual wilderness.  They’ve come hungry to know the God of Israel – to be challenged and renewed in a stagnant faith might seem to them to be stagnant.  Hoping that John can be a guide for them as they try to make their way through this wilderness.

Luke tells us that John proclaims a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  This was something new.  Jewish people practiced “repentance” when they did something wrong.  They asked God’s forgiveness and determined to change.  They would often have offered sacrifices to atone for their sins.  But the ultimate way of repenting, or turning from a wrong way of living to a right way of living, was when a Gentile to obey the teachings of Israel’s God.  And to convert to Judaism, Gentiles went through a ceremonial immersion – a baptism.

As a guide, John is giving the people who come to him the tools they need to navigate through their spiritual wilderness.  He’s giving them their destination – the salvation of God.  Salvation in all its many and wonderful forms.  Healing.  Deliverance.  Blessing.  Empowerment.  Liberation.  Feeding.  Clothing. And he orients them toward this destination by preaching repentance.  That people change their hearts and their lives and come to God as a new person – the same way that a Gentile would.  It’s only through this kind of radical repentance, John insists, that those in the wilderness move toward salvation.

Many of us might be in the spiritual wilderness ourselves.  We feel hungry to grow in our faith – in our closeness to God – but we realize we don’t have a road map or a GPS or any way of orienting ourselves.  We don’t know how to make the paths straight or to bring the mountains and the hills low.

So like those who came to John for baptism, we need a guide who can help us navigate an unfamiliar landscape.  We need a guide who can help us find our own way through the wilderness to something greater.

Advent calls us into the wilderness.  To wait and watch and hope.  And while we do those things, to repent.  But as we repent – as we change our hearts and minds – we take the Jesus that John points to as our guide.  And Jesus, my friends, tells us that love is the way we orient ourselves in the wilderness.  As we wait and watch and hope and practice loving God and loving our neighbor, we orient ourselves toward that future God promises where peace reigns, and creation lives in harmony, and humanity loves freely.

We see glimpses of God’s promised future every day whenever people of faith join God in radically loving the world.  And as that radical love makes us into new people – as new life is cultivated, estranged relationships are reconciled, the lonely are befriended, and good is celebrated – our way through the wilderness becomes clear.  In radical love, we learn to see that signs that point us to our destination – to the healing and liberation and deliverance that salvation brings.

Amen.