Fifth Sunday in Lent

Isaiah 43:16-21

At the beginning of Lent, we heard how Jesus was “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness.” (Matthew 4:1) When I think of wilderness areas, I picture towering virgin forests filled with rich flora and fauna, but, in Scripture, “wilderness” is always “an uncultivated or uninhabited place.” And because the biblical story is situated in Egypt, Israel and modern Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, a more accurate image of wilderness is the desert — arid, barren land where shade trees are scarce and where rivers are less common than wadis, ravines or channels that are dry except during the rainy season.

This is the landscape of the biblical story. Especially in the Hebrew text, in what we call the Old Testament, “wilderness” is used to describe all the desolate places that are filled with danger and where our enemies wait for us.

But the biblical story also describes wilderness as places where God shows up:

In Genesis, when Abram had a son with the slave Hagar and the boy goes and lives in the wilderness, “God is with the boy.” (Genesis 21:20)

In Exodus when Moses, Aaron and Miriam led the Israelites out of Egypt and into the wilderness, the Lord provided the people with manna, feeding them so that would not go hungry. (Exodus 16)

In Deuteronomy when Moses is addressing the Israelites before they enter Canaan, he tells them, “in the wilderness, the LORD your God carried you, just as one carries a child, all the way that you traveled until you reached this place.” (Deuteronomy 1:31)

And the prophet Nehemiah recalls the Lord’s generosity to the Israelites, saying, “your great mercies did not forsake them in the wilderness….You gave your good spirit to instruct them, and did not withhold your manna from their mouths, and gave them water for their thirst. (Nehemiah 9:19-20)

So the wilderness is both a challenging place filled with the unknown and things we may fear,
and a place where God goes before us, accompanies us and provides for us.

In our reading from Isaiah this morning, our Creator God says,

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.

These verses are found in the fifteen chapters that are called Second Isaiah, a portion of the book which dates to 540 BCE, just at the moment the Persians overtook the Babylonians.

The historical divisions maintained by scholars identify the first thirty-nine chapters as First Isaiah and attribute that section to the prophet Isaiah who was in the Assyrian Empire in the 8th century BCE. Like the other prophets of that era, the first section is filled with warnings and judgment. The tone of the text shifts when we read Second Isiah, and then it shifts again in the last ten chapters which are called Third Isaiah and are dated to 520 BCE when Jews had returned from exile.[i]

All this to day that today’s text is addressed to Israelites whose ancestors wandered in wilderness before entering Canaan and who have now themselves been exiled in foreign territory for a generation.

They are being asked to imagine another way forward and God is leading the way.

Some of them would have been searching for God in their disorientation and wondering what living faithfully as God’s people meant in the place where they were now.

I imagine others were grumblers, people like those who followed Moses and fled the oppression of Pharaoh and then complained when the journey got hard. People who believed God would lead them into a new life but wanted it to happen more quickly, be less uncomfortable and more predictable.

There may have been people too who had grown accustomed to living in exile and were making the best of a bad situation, learning to live in their local communities without challenging the status quo. Perhaps they were content to leave any risk-taking to the next generation.

And still others may have been like the “nones” we have today. People whose grandparents or even parents were leaders in faith communities, but whose identity is no longer shaped by their religious affiliation or belonging.

And here, God calls all of these people together into something new, promising to make a way where there is no way and supply life-giving water in a parched place.

I wonder how the different people responded to God’s invitation and how quickly they released their hold on what they knew and opened themselves to the new thing that God was doing.

Did they rejoice? Or did they grumble some more? Or even grow angry? Did they roll their eyes or shake their heads in ridicule? Did they shrug their shoulders with indifference?

We can’t know, right? But we can hear the invitation God offers, knowing that God’s Word speaks to us in this place, and we can choose how we will respond.

The Good News from Isaiah is that even, or perhaps especially, in our congregations and faith communities, which are made up of all these same kinds of people, God will do what God does, and life will spring forth in unexpected ways. There is no place beyond God’s reach and involvement.

Inside your bulletin, each of you has a picture of the California desert. At first it may not look like it, especially if you are imagining a desert landscape as one filled with sand, cactus and Joshua trees. But this picture is from Antelope Valley Poppy Preserve, a California state park north of Los Angeles where this year, the rainfall in the desert has yielded the most glorious display of poppies in recent memory. Waves of orange blooms cover the hillsides transforming the desert wilderness that lies barren in winter. It is an image that reminds me of the promise we hear from God in today’s text. Take it with you, tape it to a mirror or your refrigerator, or someplace else where you will see it and remember:

The wilderness is both a place that is unfamiliar and a place that God shows up. And the wilderness is a place where we are invited to let God lead and show us what beautiful and surprising things God has in store for us, transforming us and giving us new life.

Thanks be to God.

[i] Walter Brueggemann. Isaiah 40 – 66. Westminster John Knox Press. 3.