00:00:06.000 - 00:00:34.160

God of life, God of light, of all that is seen and unseen, be with us today. Bless those who come to lead and to teach. Open our hearts, open our minds, and may we be faithful servants and agile travelers in this life. In your name we pray, amen.

00:00:37.760 - 00:01:31.920

Yesterday, Dr. Dorothy Bass, excellent director of the internationally known and respected Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith, author of books such as Receiving the Day, Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time, and more articles than you can shake a stick at, confirmed a hunch that says that the most productive, intelligent, thoughtful people are morning people. In just a little under an hour at the unholy time of 8.30 A.m., you served us enough wisdom to leave us compelled and questioning for a lifetime.

00:01:33.680 - 00:02:01.600

I was first welcomed into your place, Dr. Bass, while in Divinity School. In three different classes, feminist theology, black church history, and American church history, we were given articles of yours to read. Many years later, while researching and attempting to learn to practice the Sabbath, I met you again, a familiar face at a new intersection.

00:02:04.080 - 00:02:26.000

To read Dorothy Bass is to read a servant scholar who clearly wants to be read. Her work is thought-provoking and genuine. To hear her speak is to hear a sister in Christ who believes in justice and trusts in grace. It is as if Dr.

00:02:26.000 - 00:02:49.720

Bass thinks and writes in academic poetry. Yesterday, you gave us a map for a geography of grace that outlined the landscape of the Christian's life that had seven distinct points. You told us to be mindful of place. Where are you?

00:02:50.560 - 00:03:35.520

How do you live and engage wherever here is, be it for a long time or a short time? You told us to lean into the tensions of our baptisms, to allow ourselves to float on the waters of the font knowing they will keep us within our baptizing community and pull us into a global sea. You told us to honor the human body as a gift from God, all human bodies, to care for ourselves and others. To remember we are temporal, we own none of this.

00:03:37.840 - 00:04:16.400

You reminded us to live in and tell the truth, all of it. To live near the boundaries, note who is included and who is excluded, and to remember Christ will always be outside any exclusionary border. And finally, you told us to find our neighbors, to engage in the dangers and the crises of our places with community. I left your lecture wondering where to begin with this new roadmap.

00:04:17.360 - 00:04:44.640

Even with Christ as the compass, it all seemed so big. So I bought some worms. They'll help us to begin our kitchen compost. So the shameful amount of food my family wastes can at least feed the worms who will nourish the soil that will plump up the tomatoes that we can share later in the spring.

00:04:46.640 - 00:05:23.340

I don't know where Dorothy Bass will take us today, but I know, again, it will prove inspirational. She may even convince us to wake up a little earlier so we can learn what all those productive people are doing out there. Good morning. Thank you so much for that very thoughtful and gracious introduction.

00:05:24.020 - 00:05:44.560

And Ted, I've been having a great time at Austin Seminary, just so you know. Yeah, it's been wonderful to be with you all. As I said yesterday, this is the first time I've lectured on these topics. And when I had to give the titles a couple of months ago, or three or four months ago, I said I was going to lecture once on wilderness and once on suburbs.

00:05:44.560 - 00:06:01.040

And instead I decided to do the whole geography of grace. And today we're just going to go to the wilderness, not to the suburbs. But I hope to show that what we find in the wilderness will be relevant to our lives in the suburbs as well.

00:06:04.080 - 00:06:32.000

So my title here is Christian Formation in and for the Wilderness. Next Sunday, those of us who worship in churches that use the Revised Common Lectionary will be led up into the wilderness. We will follow as Jesus, freshly baptized by John and soon to begin his public ministry, goes alone to a place where water is scarce and where threats to human life are many.

00:06:33.120 - 00:07:03.360

There he will fast for 40 days until he is famished. He'll be tempted to give in to his gnawing hunger, to choose actual bread over reliance on God's care. He'll be tempted to make a flashy display of God's care for him by putting God to the test. He'll be tempted to seize power in the same way the empire does, but he'll say no, speaking his replies in the words of Scripture, and the angels will come and minister to him.

00:07:05.200 - 00:08:00.880

Throughout the history of Bible-reading people, wilderness has been known as a place of testing and identity formation, a place where human well-being is imperiled, but where God is nonetheless mysteriously near. As you know, the Synoptic Gospel's accounts of Jesus' 40 days in the wilderness point us also to another desert, affirming the continuity of his ministry with the experience of the people of Israel, whose own 40-year wilderness sojourn was a decisive and defining event. A few centuries later, men and women monastics would imitate both Jesus and the children of Israel by forsaking the cities and villages of the empire. first a pagan empire, later a Christian one, to dwell in territory that was quite literally dry and dangerous, there to practice prayer and to seek conversion of life.

00:08:01.920 - 00:08:36.320

And even today, many of us make pilgrimages to Ghost Ranch, anyone? Holden Village, my own personal favorite, in the North Cascade Mountains, the Hill Country, the Rockies, the Himalayas. expecting something strange and wonderful to happen in terrain that's remote from home and starkly beautiful, even though this terrain is intrinsically inhospitable to our usual way of life in a technological and consumerist society. When we go to the wilderness, what do we expect to find?

00:08:37.040 - 00:09:00.640

And what do we actually find? The contemporary Christian writer Belden Lane has written movingly of what he calls the solace of fierce landscapes. The bleak and broken emptiness of desert and mountain, Lane believes, echoes the spiritual condition of those who experience wilderness within their own souls in the midst of grief and doubt.

00:09:01.680 - 00:09:32.240

The solace does not come easily, but rather comes when one relinquishes the expectation of fullness and control. It comes when emptiness clears way for God. Not a God who can be grasped and explained in words, but one whose mystery and utter transcendence are made manifest by the inaccessibility of a mountain or the barren beauty of a desert. This wisdom is carried in the apophatic strain of Christian spirituality.

00:09:33.520 - 00:10:05.280

And Lane writes, The spiritual function of fierce terrain in the apophatic tradition is to bring us to the end of ourselves, to the abandonment of language and relinquishment of ego. A vast expanse of jagged stone, desert sand, and towering thunderheads has a way of challenging all the mental constructs in which we're tempted to take comfort and pride, thinking we have captured the divine. The things that ignore us save us in the end. Such is the truth of every apophatic image.

00:10:05.440 - 00:10:47.520

Sinai as desert and mountain stands as a great and terrible wilderness, an unmistakable reminder of our grand inconsequence and the limits of all theological discourse. In his book, Lane moves swiftly back and forth between the actual landscape and the inner life, between the jagged stones of New Mexico and the painfully dry experiences of finitude, loss, and death. His book stands in the tradition of focus on the inner life that Philip Turner associates with Cassian, if you heard his lecture yesterday. And I think there's value here, but this is not the focus I am choosing in this lecture or in my work.

00:10:48.640 - 00:11:12.160

My interest in fierce landscapes has different sources and motives. By exploring one kind of place, and I hope later to explore other kinds of places, I want to take seriously the triune God's deep engagement in and for creation in all its earthy materiality. So I don't plan to be primarily spiritual about wilderness.

00:11:13.200 - 00:11:38.320

Though I do think that going into the wilderness reframes our desires, our sense of what we need. It's just different to live out of a backpack and to carry your own water. And that's crucial for us to have our desires reframed and for our neighbors and for the well-being of this planet. And when I say we there, we is one of those global words, I mean we who are affluent and who live in this very wasteful and injurious economy.

00:11:39.920 - 00:12:10.880

Nor is my main point here to vindicate a socially progressive agenda as part of some new version of an environmental social gospel. Though I am utterly convinced that the newness of life we are given in baptism includes the gift of knowing the natural world as God's creation and ourselves as part of that creation. And I also believe that this knowledge arises from and nurtures a life-giving way of life in and for creation.

00:12:12.040 - 00:12:54.640

But instead, I'm inviting you into the wilderness in order to lift up the incarnate, embodied character of Christian discipleship, taking seriously the claim that the where and when and what and how of our daily living forms us in certain ways. I want to sketch some features of a way of life that begins to embody newness of life. way of life that is abundant not in things, but in the fruits of the Holy Spirit. I want to ponder the convergence of people, earth, and story that occurs when we step beyond the safety of modern shelter into a terrain that has largely escaped human domination.

00:12:55.440 - 00:13:15.560

And to suggest that in doing so, we may be formed for abundant life when we return. And so, the wilderness. There are 4 caveats as I begin, things that make this hard to talk about. One, there are just metaphors running all over the place.

00:13:15.560 - 00:13:50.080

I mean, I want to talk, I want us to notice canyons and rocks and bears and bushes, but wilderness is layered with so many non-geological and non-biological meanings across the millennia, beginning with the redactors of the Exodus story. who are also reflecting on other experiences of exile and alienation and on divine guidance in the midst of these. Wilderness as metaphor is unavoidable for people whose vision is shaped by the Bible. And so we will return to those metaphors later.

00:13:50.720 - 00:14:09.840

But when an image like this one becomes only metaphor, detached from embodiment, materiality, and location, I think it loses some of its edge. So I want to stay with some real wilderness too. becomes merely a spiritual thing then, and I want it to be more than that. Secondly, this one's hard.

00:14:09.840 - 00:14:34.640

Some very important environmentalists are saying that the whole idea of wilderness has been part of the problem in our care for creation. And this is a complex argument, but basically they're saying human beings have always engaged with their ecological locations. There is no place on Earth that has not been touched by human engagement. This is how we make a living, and it has always been so.

00:14:35.040 - 00:15:08.160

And the idea of some virgin land, some untrammeled territory, that's just nuts, and we need to be thinking instead about the places we really do live and how to take care of those, rather than fighting about protecting a certain lake up there. And there's truth in that, but I hope that what I'm going to say will get back to a way of living that also works outside the wilderness. Third, an irony. Part of this is based on my own, and as I'll talk later, my children's experiences of actual wilderness.

00:15:08.240 - 00:15:27.760

I took a hike once with Ted's daughter to a remote mountain lake, and have really cared for a certain specific part of the wilderness. But in fact, it would all be better off if we weren't there. So, you know, it's kind of ironic. But this is simulistas at Picatour of my faith.

00:15:28.960 - 00:16:10.320

And 4th, the other caveat, one of the overarching concerns in all of this work is to embrace the life of Christian faith as a way of life that is embodied and cruciform. And this leads to resistance and subversion of ways of life that are primarily consumerist, instrumental, utilitarian, where we treat one another and the earth as things to be consumed, to be used. And yet it's impossible to even think about going into the wilderness without getting all wrapped up in those things. I mean, do we want to preserve the Amazon because it might have a cure of cancer for us, right?

00:16:10.560 - 00:16:25.600

And because those species might be for some good for us. Or, you know, can I go to on a hiking trip without lots of expensive gear? You know, it's so it's impossible to avoid these things. But again, there it is.

00:16:27.040 - 00:16:57.760

Simultaneously justified in a sinner. Now, Lane takes his starting point in the solace of fierce landscapes. I have to admit that I have been moved by the eloquence of spoiled landscapes. A real turning point for me and my own belief that wilderness time can form me, us, for a faithful living was years and years ago, one of the first times my husband took me on a long hike.

00:16:58.560 - 00:17:16.720

And we used to carry these little things called Sierra cups. Does anybody know what a Sierra cup is? It was a shallow metal cup with a little hook that fit over your belt. And back then, this was, say, early 80s, we were still in those mountains drinking out of the streams, which was just the best water I've ever tasted.

00:17:16.720 - 00:17:40.000

It was just amazing. And we would go hike, and nobody yet had started to get those spiral diseases that we've carried into the wilderness. And it was glorious. But we're hiking over very hard boulder fields and with water down below, and I dropped my cup down in between some rocks where it would be very difficult to retrieve.

00:17:41.120 - 00:17:54.480

And truly my first thought was, oh, you know, if this just costs a dollar, let it be. But then I thought about leaving that, you know, littering that place in that way. And just couldn't.

00:17:54.480 - 00:18:33.520

And it kind of became a metaphor for me, a metaphor of, trying to be on the earth in a way that doesn't destroy it, doesn't litter it. And, I think, and now, so now I notice that that's a very small injury to a very remote place. But now, if you start noticing the toxic waste dumps that are often in impoverished neighborhoods, or the destruction of the South Bronx River, or, there's just many, many places that have been spoiled, and that's a very eloquent thing.

00:18:34.640 - 00:19:13.760

So now I want to undertake an experiment in the practical theology of wilderness that started from, and later will return to, Jesus's own wilderness travail. I've lately been intrigued and troubled by the life of another young man who undertook a wilderness sojourn. Perhaps you know his story from the recent film Into the Wild, or from the nonfiction book by Jon Krakauer on which the film is based. Christopher McCandless grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., the son of a well-to-do aeronautics engineer and his wife.

00:19:14.240 - 00:19:42.400

He thrived in most ways in his childhood and youth, though resistance to authority seemed to be an intrinsic part of his makeup. After high school, he took long road trips each summer, practicing A transient, frugal way of life he experienced as utter freedom. In fall, winter, and spring, with financial support from his parents, he was a student at Emory University, where he brought a passionate search for truth to his reading of philosophy and literature.

00:19:42.880 - 00:20:02.160

So he would read Tolstoy's Criticism of Wealth and Ease, and actually begin to live more simply and strenuously. He would read Walden and find his own yearnings confirmed in Thoreau's decision to live deliberately. He studied global economic inequity and resolved to renounce his own class privilege.

00:20:02.880 - 00:20:43.440

I wonder if the teachers realized what a serious student they had in their classrooms. Shortly after graduation, he donated his sizable savings account to Oxfam and drove west in an old Datsun. When the car stalled, he abandoned it, burned all his cash, and stuck out his thumb for a ride, and for nearly two years wandered the continent, occasionally stopping to work for money or to stay with one of the remarkable series of caring older adults he ran into. In April 1992, he walked into the Alaska wilderness with 10 pounds of rice, a rifle, a fishing rod, and a sleeping bag to begin the great adventure toward which he had been aiming all along.

00:20:44.160 - 00:21:17.360

Exhilarated by springtime and solitude and immersion in the compelling work of simply staying alive, which is part of the fun of camping, he wrote a brief, joyful manifesto. This is his words. And now, after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure, the climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution. Ten days and nights of freight train and hitchhiking bring him to the great white north.

00:21:18.160 - 00:21:56.240

No longer to be poisoned by civilization, he flees and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild. Four months later, Chris McCandless died of starvation, leaving behind a journal and some notes, including that note. that tell of his motives, his resourcefulness in surviving as long as he did, his failed attempt to return to society. He concluded finally that he'd learned enough, tried to get back, but our swollen river, which had been frozen when he walked in, blocked his way, and his dawning awareness of his own finitude and need.

00:21:58.400 - 00:22:09.840

The skills of the gifted journalist who was called in to cover this story led to its gaining more attention than it may have deserved. And here I'm giving it more. So perhaps the readers who wrote to Outdoors Magazine had it right.

00:22:09.840 - 00:22:40.000

They called McCandless, quote, a reckless idiot, a wacko, a narcissist who perished out of arrogance and stupidity. Though, you know, we could also perish out of arrogance and stupidity as a society. But anyway, but Krakauer's But Krakauer's account persuades me that McCandless' fatal adventure arose from more than individual temperament and family dysfunction, although those surely were factors, and a complete practical theology of this would need to include somebody in pastoral care.

00:22:40.560 - 00:23:20.080

But this unfortunate pilgrim, as Krakauer calls him, reflected certain strong themes, this is where I'm going, in the complex medley of relationships that have existed between European Americans and the wilderness itself. Among these are, and these are strikingly similar to some of the things, the characteristics of our contemporaries who seem not to get the gospel. These are very similar characteristics as ones that both Willeman and Turner mentioned yesterday and we discussed in the afternoon. A notion that human freedom is realized through self-reliance.

00:23:22.160 - 00:24:14.800

especially in the context of nature and given the assumed innocence of both the individual human being and the natural world. Second, a vivid appreciation of the beauty of rugged landscapes unspoiled by human use, a quest for robust adventure and intense experience as proofs of personal authenticity, another theme we see, and a corresponding mistrust of civilization. And together, these presumptions and passions cohere in a spirituality of what it means to be fully alive as a human being. This romantic, and I think predominantly masculine, vision of wilderness and its challenge and call is just one among several visions of wilderness that have deeply shaped religion and culture and people over the course of U.S.

00:24:14.800 - 00:24:59.600

history. Another vision belonged to some of our forebears, the English Calvinist settlers whose cultural impact has been most influential in our national life, and who conceived of their journey to North America as an errand into the wilderness. An exodus away from civilization undertaken by a covenant people whose godliness would be tested just as Israel's had been, and whose election was presumably just as secure. It's interesting to note that the Protestants who first rendered the Bible into the English vernacular, the grandparents of that Exodus generation, translated the Hebrew word midbar, which in biblical lands is a dry, rocky, and barren landscape, what we think of as a desert.

00:25:00.160 - 00:25:23.600

They translated it as wilderness, wild beast place, a word from the north that wove resonances of threatening dark forest. haunted by untameable spirits into the landscape. In either translation, mid-bar signified beyond. Beyond safety, beyond that which is familiar, beyond civilization, with its protections and restraints.

00:25:24.640 - 00:26:03.040

As these settlers reached the forbidding shores of North America, disease came to, and it literally decimated the human communities that had previously inhabited the coastal forests and meadows, and sustained those places as a balanced and fruitful ecosystem that included substantial agriculture and commerce. The settlers' violence finished the job, and what had been wilderness was tamed, clear-cut, plowed and planted, bridged and dammed, leveled and paved. By the time Thoreau moved to Walden Pond in the 1840s, that part of New England contained no beavers,

00:26:03.360 - 00:26:40.320

no turkeys, no bears, and almost no deer. The same was true in many other settled areas of the eastern United States. Alexis de Tocqueville, the observant French count who traveled the United States in the 1830s, was astounded at how little Americans valued the exotic beauty of the wild lands near which they lived, and how eager they were to subdue them for any lucrative purpose. When he arrived at the fringes of settlement, asked to see the primeval forest, his hosts could not be convinced that he was not making secret plans to speculate on land or lumber.

00:26:41.840 - 00:27:21.280

Tocqueville wrote, They are insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature, and they may be said not to perceive the mighty forests that surround them till they fall beneath the hatchet. They march across these wild, draining swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature. An Ohio newspaper at the same time declared that the resulting transformed landscape was a sublime spectacle. Get this, wilderness, once the chosen residents of solitude and savageness, converted into populous cities, smiling villages, beautiful farms, and plantations.

00:27:22.080 - 00:27:48.160

The disdain for the original American terrain and its indigenous inhabitants reflected here is, of course, joined to other. lies and harms. We can be sure that not all of those newly built villages smiled and certain that none of the newly cleared plantations was sublime. In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared that America's frontier was gone.

00:27:48.800 - 00:28:30.480

By this time, most attention and most population belonged to the nation's large, troubled cities, which replaced the frontier as both source of wealth and focus of moral concern. As civilization started to look worse, wilderness started to look better. Turner and others worried that the democratic spirit of the nation would be diminished by the loss of wide, open spaces, in which Americans could test, again, their individuality and independence. In addition, some Euro-Americans had finally been smitten with love for the disappearing wilderness and begun a campaign to protect the beauty and non-monetary value of the undeveloped land that remained.

00:28:30.800 - 00:28:53.280

John Muir was the most eloquent and important of these. He was the son of Scottish Calvinists. And his reflections on the mountains of California are full of scripture, psalms, a love of natural beauty, and the joys of immersion in it that gave rise to what we now know as the environmental movement. He founded the Sierra Club and come to think of it, probably invented the Sierra Cup.

00:28:56.320 - 00:29:34.320

Reading Muir, you get a sense of the world, and especially the unsettled parts, as the theater of divine glory, a theater however, that Muir apparently thought could be enjoyed by the adventurers at first hand without benefit of Christ or the church. Embedded in the deeply experienced personal engagement with rough and beautiful terrain articulated by Muir and other early environmentalists, there's another vision of what it means to be truly alive as a human being. Now, yesterday I spoke of place as the convergence of earth, people, and story.

00:29:34.640 - 00:29:52.640

And I lifted up the necessity of telling true stories about the places we inhabit. Though I don't think we can ever get them exactly right. We can try. In the brief history I've outlined, some of the stories that damaged the Earth and the human community are very obvious.

00:29:53.120 - 00:30:32.560

The story of the unstoppable march of progress, the story of unlimited economic expansion, the story wherein everything becomes a commodity. the story that recognizes human authenticity only in self-reliance and individual choice. Across the last century, all of these have informed our national conversation about wilderness, which has usually been driven by urgent concern about threats to the quality, size, and use of public lands that remain. But underneath and among all these debates, larger questions

00:30:33.280 - 00:31:11.120

about how late modern society as a whole does and should inhabit the earth are simmering. This debate is not just about conserving statutory wilderness areas and spotted owls. When the glaciers and the amazing national park that spans the border between Montana and Canada have disappeared, as scientists say will happen within 50 years, it will be because of climate change induced by human actions far from that area. These same forces will also have devastating effects on the people of Bangladesh and other low-lying countries on the other side of the world.

00:31:11.840 - 00:31:40.240

If we treasure the glaciers of the Rockies, the waters of the Colorado, and the people who inhabit certain islands in the Pacific, we have to live differently in Austin. And if we respect the caribou and the Gwich'in people who have shaped and depended on the fragile ecosystem now known as the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, we need to consume less oil in Valparaiso. So against this background, I turn to Christian formation at last. This is fun.

00:31:40.240 - 00:32:07.920

I got to remember some of my, and reuse some of my old American studies interests. I think we need to understand this culture well. Okay, so what might wilderness teach us today about living in ways that respond to the grace of God as we know it in Jesus Christ? Scripture and tradition abound in wisdom about the transformative power of life in the midbar, the beyond human safety and civilization regions of the world.

00:32:08.560 - 00:32:30.160

This wisdom comes to us as stories and as practices. But these storied practices, these life-shaping stories, are not simply about wilderness, we soon learn. They turn out to be about a way of life, to be lived in Austin and Valparaiso and other places, about human beings in relation to God, to one another, and to creation.

00:32:30.800 - 00:32:51.760

They turn out to be about what it means to be a human being truly alive. As the Exodus text portrays it, the wilderness into which the Israelites escaped slavery in Egypt is a forbidding desert, for the realities of human finitude and mortality are impossible to ignore. Where's the water?

00:32:52.120 - 00:32:57.920

What should we eat? What if enemies fall upon us? Who will settle our dispute? It's all right there.

00:32:58.520 - 00:33:20.560

Of course, it's also a place of surprising provision. Everybody who knows the story and has across the ages knows that the Israelites will survive as a people, for Yahweh will provide water, food, and protection, and most of all, a covenant. This is a comfort, but still, each individual Israelite is going to perish before reaching the land of milk and honey.

00:33:22.560 - 00:33:44.400

But above all, even in the face of this death, this desert is the terrain of freedom. It's not just where God's revelation and covenant-making happen to occur. This beyond is Yahweh's chosen meeting place. Yahweh's self-disclosure does not flow through the established and settled cults of the powerful cities.

00:33:45.440 - 00:34:08.080

Instead, this deity is like his worshippers, mobile and rootless and unpredictable. This is a God who is free, unconfined by the boundaries that human beings erect. A God who is as different from Pharaoh as manna is different from the flesh pots of Egypt. Here, quoting the Jewish scholar of Hebrew Bible, John Levinson.

00:34:08.560 - 00:34:49.440

As the narrative develops, it becomes clear that one master represents human pride, the security of an ancient and settled regime which has lasted for millennia, and will, so its ruler believes, outlast the demand of these Asiatic barbarians for the liberty to serve God in God's desolate home. That was Pharaoh. The other master is that unpredictable deity himself, unknown in the urban world of Egypt, a deity whose home and whose power lie outside Egyptian sovereignty, increasingly threatening it and continually reminding Pharaoh of the limits of its power. Of his power, the limit of Pharaoh's power, yes.

00:34:49.680 - 00:35:20.240

So Elijah will also meet this free and freeing god in the wilderness, a place of prophets that will continue to stand in opposition to cult and king. This is also how the people recognize John the Baptizer, whom the Gospels identify with the voice of one who cries in the wilderness. In Isaiah, to repent, to begin anew, the people must leave the built environment and enter the space of freedom. What did you go out into the wilderness to look at?

00:35:20.400 - 00:35:30.960

Jesus asks the crowd. Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. What then did you go out to see?

00:35:31.080 - 00:35:40.080

A prophet? Yes. Wilderness, as it is portrayed in the story of Israel's sojourn, is richly layered with meanings. You know what they are.

00:35:40.080 - 00:35:59.440

I'm going to go quickly through some of them. These meanings resonate in and through a wide range of biblical texts and historical appropriations. Wilderness operates on manna economy. Walter Brueggemann points out the contrast between wilderness bread, you know, the word manna means, what is it?

00:36:00.640 - 00:36:22.000

And land bread, which is destructively managed and unjustly distributed. Mark's gospel will remember manna when Jesus feeds the hungry crowd. His disciples ask, how can one feed these people with bread here in the desert? Secondly, paradoxically but understandably, wilderness is also a place where you go on honeymoon.

00:36:22.800 - 00:36:47.040

Hosea and Jeremiah speak of it as a place of special closeness between God and the people. Even though it's a land without seed, that's Jeremiah's phrase, it's barren as a womb is barren, it's like the barren womb of Sarah, the scene of surprising gifts. Third, the wilderness is not a place to stay. In the larger narrative, it's a place of transition, a place on the way.

00:36:47.600 - 00:37:09.200

Even the desert fathers and mothers' residents there and their self-chosen deprivation make no sense except as a transition into eternity. Another one, wilderness is a place of testing for the children of Israel, also for Jesus, and later for the desert ascetics. In this, it forges identity.

00:37:09.920 - 00:37:33.600

If you are the Son of God, wheedles the tempter, going right after Jesus' identity, just right after he's been baptized, right after the voice has said, this is my beloved, this is what Satan tries to take away. If you are the Son of God. He even quotes scripture in the effort. Jesus' identity is secured as he too holds fast to scripture.

00:37:33.600 - 00:38:16.400

It is also written, and gains support from and allies himself with the wilderness wanderings of his ancestors. Perhaps they are the angels who are coming to minister to him. The wilderness separates, another point, the wilderness separating Egypt and Canaan and the experience of God's care in that place and between and beyond provides images of dislocation, separation from home, and trust in God that persist throughout the traditions of those who love this story, beginning with those who redacted the text in light of Israel's later experience of exile in Babylon. Later generations have continued to make these images their own.

00:38:16.800 - 00:38:49.840

I mentioned the settlers of New England, but a more powerful account, I think, is Albert Raboteau's reading of the African-American experience. He said, for Euro-Americans, North America was the promised land. For African-Americans, it was the wilderness. And interesting, and today, of course, one thinks of, and I should be doing more with this, the wilderness desert along the border of Mexico and the United States, where people are actually perishing for want of water and protection.

00:38:53.040 - 00:39:13.680

Another point. In wilderness, hostile terrain is not the only source of hardship. Many faces of human sin are also exposed. In Exodus, we see ingratitude, fearful mistrust of God in one another, hoarding, violence, idolatry, greed.

00:39:13.680 - 00:39:52.880

I suppose in the southwestern desert, we'd see also profiteering, persecution. Obliquely in this narrative, but centrally across the millennia, among those who have told that wilderness is not only land, It is also a spiritual condition, a harsh, dry, jaggedness that exists within as well as without. Another point, the lush green places on either side of the wilderness, Egypt, Canaan, though each one is ambiguous, set a pattern of contrast between wasteland and watered land that recurs again and again in the Psalms and the prophets.

00:39:53.360 - 00:40:11.200

Using these images, they paint desolations and fulfillments of many kinds. The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom. That's Isaiah thinking of Israel's restoration. And here we're starting to get to the paradoxical heart of the matter.

00:40:12.080 - 00:40:39.920

It's not in the land along the Nile that the flowers will appear. It's in the wilderness, the death and dryness that blossoms are most beautiful. And here I'll give in to metaphor completely and say that this can happen in all the desolate places of our lives. It is in true vulnerability where death is so close and its threat is so real that life with God begins to flourish.

00:40:40.600 - 00:40:56.960

Near the end of Matthew's gospel, Jesus will again be tempted. If you are the Son of God, the crowds will say. If you are the Son of God, come down. This time not from the pinnacle of the city, but from the cross.

00:40:59.600 - 00:41:29.200

And this time he's back in the wilderness for sure. Now for the past two summers, changing gears a little, but I hope you'll see the connections, my son, who is now a college senior, has worked as a counselor at an ELCA camp in Montana. Actually, Eugene Peterson's house is right next door, and Eugene Peterson came over every morning to do Bible study with these counselors in training. His work is on Flathead Lake.

00:41:29.600 - 00:42:10.320

John's work, my son's work, is to lead groups of teenagers on week-long backpacking and camping trips in a remote mountainous area near Glacier National Park. When he was home for Christmas and I had been reading all these books on the history of the environment and scripture and wilderness, I just said to him over dinner, what can you accomplish in Christian formation in the wilderness that you couldn't do here at Christ Lutheran Church? And he talked for half an hour without stopping. Even after reading lots of biblical history and criticism and so on, this was the best research I did on this topic.

00:42:10.640 - 00:42:18.160

So he said, Everyone has to depend on one another. You have to pitch in. You have to ask for help.

00:42:21.120 - 00:42:32.000

You can't take much stuff with you. You're down to the basics for survival. People get dirty. All the kids want to take makeup and deodorant, and they can't.

00:42:32.000 - 00:42:42.800

Those smells would attract the bears. They have to be real. The Bible comes alive, he says. So some of the counselors like to point this out all the time.

00:42:42.800 - 00:42:54.080

I think it emerges by itself, and then we have great Bible studies. He said, we live so intimately. You can't take too many people, and we all sleep in a tent together. It's intimate.

00:42:54.080 - 00:43:07.440

He says, just the regular practices of daily life are different, he says. It takes a long time to prepare the food, most of the day, in fact, and that's how most people have lived. You prepare it together. You eat it together.

00:43:07.440 - 00:43:24.760

You sit together for a long time around it. And some of these kids have never had such a long dinner, so full of conversation. The way you live in time is different too, he said. We leave clocks and watches behind and start to sleep.

00:43:24.880 - 00:43:34.640

We go to sleep when we get tired. We wake up when we're rested. We eat when we're hungry. And you do get tired because you're exerting yourself the whole time.

00:43:35.560 - 00:43:50.160

We find a shared rhythm of life. And there's some integrity to it. You're with the same people for devotions, for meals, for work, for travel. Different from suburban life, which separates us.

00:43:51.120 - 00:43:59.960

We find a shared rhythm. We care about our impact on creation. We do leave no trace camping. We carry everything

00:44:00.160 - 00:44:08.760

out. So I said, okay, now what about the murmuring, the grumbling in the wilderness? You know, the children of Israel are always grumbling. What about that?

00:44:08.760 - 00:44:18.480

Isn't there a lot of whining? He said, well, yeah, there is. Well, how do you handle it? He said, well, you never say it's not real.

00:44:19.840 - 00:44:28.880

You never say, oh, come on, you can. It is real. It is hard. And sometimes you have to slow down.

00:44:30.400 - 00:44:45.360

And sometimes you have to stop and pump water. And sometimes you have to shift some heavy stuff into your own backpack. You adapt. I said, well, is this, do you go, do they go, do you go for the beauty of creation?

00:44:45.360 - 00:45:05.680

Is the point to get to the summit and look out at the beautiful scenery? He said, no, that's not the main point. In fact, you don't want to talk about that too much and give the impression that all the hard work is just for the sake of a reward like that. He says, campers' evaluations rarely mention this.

00:45:06.160 - 00:45:22.960

And if they do, it's not the main point. You can get the views by driving an SUV up there. And maybe there are, and besides, there are only one or two really great views in a week's hike. It's the getting there.

00:45:24.320 - 00:45:37.360

that they remember. I said, well, what about the fact that somebody could die? There could be a, he carries grizzly bear spray in his pocket. I mean, what about that?

00:45:37.600 - 00:45:57.040

He said, well, that exists, and every once in a while you're really aware of it, but you try not to bring it up very often. Well, what about safe? He says, I said, do you see them coming into Christian faith? He says, if you talk about the trip afterwards, they won't say they have a greater faith in God.

00:45:58.160 - 00:46:19.120

They will want to tell you their stories. They don't want to stay in the wilderness, but they have a great sense of accomplishment that they were there. They're not sad it's over, but they're proud that they could do it. In the 21st century, Christian formation in the wilderness needs also to be Christian formation for the wilderness.

00:46:20.160 - 00:47:18.880

It can rehabituate us to live differently within creation, to tread gently, and to walk at a pace the whole party can manage, to breathe deeply, to pray often, to stretch our gaze toward the horizon, to talk long and eat slowly with our companions. to leave no trace, or as little trace as possible, because we're inescapably part of creation and cannot avoid influencing the rest of creation in one way or another. And then we need to carry some of these same practices back to our homes in the cities, towns, and suburbs, and see what shape they might take there, hoping that these wildernesses, too, may blossom. I've wondered what a Christian congregation in the suburbs might have to offer to some new Christopher McCandless, to a young person in love with the wild places and full of intense longing for vibrant, authentic experience.

00:47:19.760 - 00:47:47.280

For him, it was the suburbs that were the wilderness, that were dry and barren. I'm not sure that I would know what to say to him, but I would know what not to say. And throughout this, as I was thinking about this topic, a phrase I remembered from years and years ago when I was studying the Puritans kept lingering with me, and it came back to me. I found it in Perry Miller, where I remembered it.

00:47:48.640 - 00:48:29.920

The same Calvinist settlers who migrated, who settled this country, our ancestors, out of a deep sense of God's sovereignty. and with a vivid sense of their own faith and life with God, were also always fearful that religious passions would get out of hand. And so it started as a great revolution, ended up with a bunch of really buttoned-down, moralistic little churches in New England, really. And here's what Thomas Hooker, one of the early

00:48:30.400 - 00:48:48.400

Divines said, this is the quote I remembered. We know that there is wild love and joy enough in the world. there are wild thyme and other herbs. But we would have garden love and garden joy of God's own planting.

00:48:50.640 - 00:49:26.480

There's some wisdom there, but it's not what I would say to Chris McCandless. And I'm not sure it's a full enough presentation. So last week, as I was pondering these questions, I mentioned my title, Christian Formation in and for the Wilderness, to a very thoughtful young professor at my university, a serious Christian whose field is environmental policy. As we talked, I realized, to my horror, that he thought I was referring to those kind of boot camp programs.

00:49:27.440 - 00:49:53.760

where you send kids who are really, like who are spiraling totally off in a death-defying direction with addictions and violence and all kinds of things, and the same patterns that my son mentioned as life-giving would lead them to life as well. And I don't know enough about those programs. I haven't investigated them. I'm sure some are probably positive and others I know are not.

00:49:54.720 - 00:50:04.320

So I don't mean to judge that. But what's interesting to me was my own reaction. Excuse me. When he's, I realized that's what he was thinking.

00:50:05.040 - 00:50:19.160

My liberal mainline self just practically erupted. And I was going to say, oh, no, I don't mean those kind of, I don't mean this is a matter of life and death. I don't mean that, you know, those kind of kids. Oops.

00:50:19.160 - 00:50:35.600

And I thought, no. There's the mainline mistake. It is those kinds of kids too. And it is a matter of life and death for them and really for all of us at this time in history.

00:50:36.320 - 00:50:58.640

So thank you. As we, it is a matter of life and death how we live on this planet. And we have our own deserts, our own wildernesses, but No, it's into the wilderness of all those different kinds that Jesus is going to lead us in this season of Lent.

00:51:00.880 - 00:51:46.960

And I hope that these reflections are somehow helpful as we go there. Thanks. Wow, thank you. Are there anybody, is there anybody who would like to offer a, please?

00:51:47.200 - 00:52:04.960

Yeah. I'm aware that we have, as I see John Walton over here, that, you know, I was kind of not talking about cities. Though, in fact, cities are more environmentally positive places to live. than suburbs.

00:52:05.160 - 00:52:24.320

Okay, so all this is meant more as a critique of the suburbs, which I think also can and need to become life-giving places. But that's where I think I personally and many of the mainline churches need to be doing some of our work. And that's where I'll go next. And if I do continue in this project, I will, I'll talk about cities too.

00:52:24.400 - 00:52:47.760

I love cities. I think there's a lot of, obviously, a lot of wonderful biblical stuff about cities and their how they can be places of real, true life for others and for the whole world. So this is just going place by place on the geography of grace, not a rejection of a critique of cities.

00:52:48.320 - 00:53:03.280

Just wanted to make that clear. John, do you feel better about all that? Comments or questions, opportunity to reflect a little bit with Dorothy. We have a few minutes before we

00:53:03.840 - 00:53:11.040

go to our reception in Vickery Atrium. Comments or questions. Yes.