GeeDubya's Sermon Site: Luke 4: 1-13 - March 9, 2025

A work detail that you never asked about and really don’t need to know, is that I typically write the first draft of a Sunday sermon on Tuesday. This week, that meant that I was attempting to go deep with this scripture about Jesus and his testing time in the wilderness at the same time that heavy, constantly changing, falsely justified tariffs were being applied-then-not-yet-applied on Canadian goods by a the leader of a long-time formerly trusted neighbour. To say that this impacted my reading of Satan offering that “all this can be yours if you bow down and worship me” would be an understatement.

Also on my mind while attempting to birth a sermon is an anniversary: two days from now is the fifth anniversary of the day when COVID-19 was declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Though our current days of scattergun chaos are very different from that global health emergency, I find my emotional life is in a similar state of disruption: I feel like I am in a constant state of alarm now, as I was in the early days of COVID, not knowing what the future would bring or what strategies would be best applied amidst the chaotic unknown.

It is strangely reassuring to overlay these daily realities with the age-old story of Jesus going into the wilderness to be tested. It’s not just a sense of “misery loves company;” it’s the sense that our connection with God-in-Christ is even more intense in times of desolation, fear and confusion. And even in the season of Lent, when Christ’s crucifixion on Good Friday is on the horizon, we know that the ultimate word in God’s story in Christ is the beauty and power of resurrection. The sufferings of Jesus connect our souls to the divine, with the assurance that there will be emergence from the dread, as the power of life refuses to be subdued.

So: what about that wilderness experience that Jesus experienced? What can this metaphor from the gospel of Luke teach us in our time and place? How can it equip us not just to survive, but to emerge and even thrive? We start with our understanding of the word “wilderness”.

In the days of Jesus, wilderness – specifically, the badlands east of Jerusalem - was a place of unknown terrors. There were rumours of all manner of monsters and fearsome creatures that lived in the wilds, and some of that was true: lions, bears, wolves, leopards and serpents were among the wildlife there. But more than that, heading into the wilderness signified that you had crossed the line from the predictable safety of community within the city walls, entering the unknown lands of storms and wild beasts and scoundrels. You had gone from the land of “us”, the community of the comfortably familiar, to the land of “them”, the place of the fearsome unknown. Conspiracy theories, lies about societal trends, and blaming all of life’s shortfalls those who are different from the norm, are 21^st century versions of creating a sense of danger and alarm about the unknown. We live in a time when we are quite rightly alarmed by the mean-spirited and outrageous actions of the 47^th President and others with outsized power, and that gets intensified by the insinuations of even worse things on the horizon. The raw openness of wilderness is hard enough on its own, but keeping one’s head constantly on a swivel to watch out for unexpected threats is physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausting.

Alongside these dangerous aspects of wilderness, we know that wilderness was and is an important place of testing and growth. In the wilderness, either a physically “wild” place that tests us or a place of uncertainty where we don’t know what to do, you must face your fears and either overcome them, or find coping strategies to allow you to co-exist with them. I think back 25 years in my own life’s story, the time when I crashed with clinical depression, and in the midst of that dark night of the soul it was clear that this place of emotional wilderness gave me no choice but to confront the cognitive distortions that were pushing me to the brink. Twelve steppers have often spoken to me about a similar experience in their lives, of not having the wherewithal to change until they hit bottom. Wilderness forces us to confront ways of being that aren’t working, and find new ways forward.

In Luke’s account, we recall that Jesus didn’t just find himself in the wilderness; he was led there by the Spirit, immediately after his baptism by John, to undergo what Indigenous cultures would call a spirit quest. In many world religions, this is the case: the leader of a new way needed to undergo a time of wilderness testing. The symbolic forty days Jesus spent there mirrored a time centuries earlier, the legendary forty years of wilderness wandering by the Israelites, as God helped them learn the lessons of freedom. I do not think that God intentionally leads us into heartbreak, but I do know that in those times when regret, embarrassment, despair, or unrelenting grief threaten to overwhelm, God points us toward that which we need in order to get through. The sun will rise on a new day, even after the stormiest of nights.

Although it may not have been part of the context for Jesus, there is one more thing about wilderness that I need to mention. For many people here in western Canada, wilderness is not in any way a bad or frightening word; quite the opposite. Living in Canmore for twelve years, there were sizable rock-climbing and ice-climbing communities, back-country hiking and biking and skiing and snowshoeing were part of what drew people to live there, and wilderness was a good word. It was a place of recreation/re-creation, a place where your knowledge, experience, physical strength and problem solving were put to the test, and it was also the place where you escaped the falsehood and artifice of daily urban living. In the wilderness, the space between you and God was not moderated by the internet, your ability to stay warm and get a meal did not rely on a furnace or an oven. Wilderness, at its best, rekindles your kinship with the earth and your fellow creatures, and it can be a place where it is a lot easier to meet God.

And that is one of the reasons why the Lenten study this year, is about the spaciousness of spiritual practices. Lent, this wilderness time, is a great time to find ways that get beyond the distractions and barriers between us and God, and go deep into the realities of the Holy. Rather than the usual choices of fight, flight or freeze in response to the bizarre days in which we live, we seek ways to be present to the challenges by going deep with God and with one another, to find the hidden resources that will help us not just survive these tests, but find renewal, light and life. If you can see your way clear to joining Shannon on this journey, it starts this Thursday at 3:30 at Oliver United Church, and from there will be alternating between Oliver and Osoyoos each Thursday. All are welcome, bring a friend.

In conclusion: to me, it feels like we are living in days where we need to have our wits about us, much like the forty days of testing endured by Jesus. It strikes me as a good time to be “woke”, as the attacks on marginalized people and nations are real, and people of good will in this land and all lands are needed to stand against such tyranny. One could even say it is a good time for us, as Canadians, to “stand on guard.” It is not a time to be alarmist, but neither is it time for avoidance or complacency. It is very much a time to realize all that wilderness can offer in a time of real threat, as it pushes us to go deep with God, to be confident in the life-affirming light that God has placed in us, to recommit ourselves to be people who trust that the final chapter in the Jesus story is not death, but resurrection. These are hard days but unlike the wilderness testing of Jesus, they do not need to be solitary days – indeed, they must not. These are days when we lean into one another, and together lean into the abundant and everlasting love of Christ Jesus to help us through. In all of this, we live with hope, gratitude, and the trust of better things to come. May this be so: Amen.

For further reading:

Hultgren, Arland. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent-3/commentary-on-luke-41-13-4

Otto, Andy. “Lenten Practices”. https://godinallthings.com/2012/02/21/lenten-practices/

Quora.com: www.quoara.com/What-wild-animals-lived-in-ancient-Israel

West, Audrey. Commentary on Matthew 4 (gospel parallel to Luke 4). https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-matthew-41-11-3