Sermon — December 11, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Have you ever felt like you’re wandering in the spiritual wilderness?
I don’t mean the kind of wilderness people mean when they talk about finding God in nature, a wilderness of mountains to climb and pine trees to smell and babbling brooks in which to cool your feet. I mean the wilderness as Jesus knew it: the dry, rocky hills to the east of Jerusalem, a desert with barely enough in it to sustain life. By “spiritual wilderness” I don’t mean the kind of wilderness in which you feel God’s Spirit—no. I mean the place in which you thirst for a drop of life-giving water, and find none.
The wilderness goes by many other names—spiritual aridity or exile, burnout or the dark night of the soul—but whatever you call it, it is a kind of absence: the absence of the feelings of joy or peace or comfort you once found in prayer or work or life, the absence of a long-lost sense of meaning or of God’s love or presence. It’s very similar, in a way, to what (in a marriage) might be called the “after-the-honeymoon” period. It’s very similar to what happens in a friendship or a new job when the shine has worn off the apple. The wilderness is a time in your life where you feel, as Bilbo Baggins once said, “like butter scraped over too much bread.”
And this is what I mean when I ask: Have you ever felt like you’re wandering in the wilderness? You understand what I mean.
The startling message of our reading from Isaiah today is that God has promised to transform this wilderness—this most unenjoyable place—into a place of unimaginable joy.
Now, Isaiah doesn’t come up with the image of the wilderness. The people of God have known the wilderness for as long as there’s been a people of God. Their ancestors were nomads who spent their lives wandering through the wilderness. Generations later, after Moses led them out of slavery in Egypt, they spent forty years wandering in the wilderness before they entered the Promised Land. And a millennium later, when Isaiah wrote these words, they were in exile again. Their city and its Temple had been destroyed. Many of them had been separated from their homeland by a literal wilderness, living as hostages and refugees with five hundred miles of desert between them and the world they once knew. They are in desperate need of consolation, and Isaiah consoles them with the promise of a future in which the wilderness, literal and metaphorical, will be transformed.
“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,” he writes, “the desert shall rejoice and blossom.” (Isaiah 35:1) God will transform the dry place into a flowering field, and “everlasting joy shall be upon [your] heads; [you] shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” (35:10) In the very midst of the desert you will see “the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God.” (35:2) “Here is your God; he will come,” Isaiah tells the people. “He will come and save you.” (35:4)
Just… not quite yet.
This is, without a doubt, one of the hardest things about Christian life. God promises us incredible things—peace and joy and life everlasting—but in this life, we only get a glimpse. Isaiah promises that “sorrow and sighing shall flee away,” (Isaiah 35:10) but still we sorrow and sigh. It’s comforting that God makes these promises to us… it’s better than having no hope for the future. But it’s undeniably frustrating having to wait around for them. “Be patient,” the apostle James wrote two thousand years ago, and we are, and we have been, waiting quite patiently for quite some time now for “the coming of the Lord.” (James 5:7-8)
Think how John the Baptist must have felt. I think of him sitting in prison, hearing the stories of what his cousin Jesus was doing, wondering whether he was just another prophet or whether he was The One about whom John himself had prophesied. And Jesus tells John’s messengers to go back and quote these exact words from Isaiah to John the Baptist, to tell him that the moment had arrived: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear.” (Matthew 11:5; Isaiah 35:5) The day has come when the desert will blossom, and the wilderness will be transformed from a place of desolation into a place of joy.
And yet John remains in jail. And he will not make it out alive. But neither, of course, will Jesus.
So we’re left with this conundrum: God has promised us, on the one hand, abundant joy, a world in which sorrow and sighing are transformed into joy and singing. And God has left us, on the other hand, in the wilderness, where we continue to roam. And there’s a sense in which we will always be in the wilderness in this life, a sense in which—however much joy and peace we may have—there will also always be suffering and pain, until our wandering is over and we reach that promised land of eternal life with God.
But at the same time, the wilderness is not the desert it once was. It is already being transformed. Water is already breaking forth in the desert, streams of water are already flowing in our world. God has not left us comfortless, but is working now in and among us, even if that work is still incomplete.
There’s an image that James uses that I find to be a helpful one, at least for me. “Be patient,” he says, but that’s not all he says. Be patient, he says, like a farmer who “waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.” (James 5:7)
James talks about our lives like plants, growing over time. And eagerness and abundance can spoil a plant’s growth as easily as caution and patience. You can flood it with too much water, scorch it with too much sunlight, pick it before it’s fully grown. God waits instead, James said, until we have grown in the ways we need, until we’ve received “the early and the late rains,” but God is present all the time with us, like that careful gardener. And one day, we will finally be ready to bloom.
God is with us, even and maybe especially in the wilderness. God is with us in rainstorms and in droughts, in the driest desert and the greenest valleys. God is with us, whether we wait impatiently or patiently, whether we are singing or sighing. Whether we realize it or not, God is with us—in this short season of waiting in Advent before the joy of Christmas, and in our longest seasons of waiting and wandering in the wilderness, before the desert finally rejoices and blossoms. God is with us, and God is watering us, and God is waiting for us finally to bloom.