The Way Through the Wilderness

“The Way Through the Wilderness”

“Streams in the Desert; Joy in the Journey”

Rev. Alison Longstaff, March 1, 2015

Bath Church of the New Jerusalem

Isaiah 43: 16-21, Matthew 4:1-11, Secrets of Heaven, Paragraph 2334

The hardest thing about writing a sermon is not “what to say” but “what NOT to say.”  There is so much bounty in God’s Word.  So many gems of wisdom!  This thing was ten pages long when I started it, but fear not, I did some relentless trimming.  I pray that the outcome is a lovely bonsai, not a… well, mangled bush.  So here we go.

“I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

In 2007 I had the privilege of going to the Holy Land. I breathed in the clear, clear air and walked under the brilliant blue sky.  The air is clear and the sky so blue because there is almost no humidity—no airborne water vapor at all.  You see, most of southern Israel is a desert.  Water is a rare and precious commodity.  Unless regularly irrigated, or immediately after a rain, nothing grows.  Nothing, except the occasional most drought-resistant shrubs. Maine is a lush rain forest in comparison to southern Israel.  There is simply NO WATER.  For miles and miles there is nothing but rough, extremely rugged rock.  This isn't a soft, sandy desert, but a deeply ridged and rocky landscape. 

The craggy mountains are sliced and intersected by “wadis,” or deep gullies carved by rare flash floods.  Crossing this landscape before the advent of modern highways involved a lot of climbing and descending into steep ravines, stumbling over large boulders, or taking repeated wide detours to find a less challenging path.

  Think about it: John’s prophesy that “every valley will be lifted up and every mountain and hill made level” takes on a whole new meaning when one  considers what must have been involved in trying to navigate such a hostile geography.  This is the wilderness the Children of Israel wandered in for 40 years; this is the wilderness in which our Lord Jesus suffered his forty days of temptation.

But that’s not all.  Being a desert, not only do the temperatures rise to scorching highs in the day, they plummet to near freezing at night, because, with no suspended water vapor trapping the heat near the surface, all the accumulated heat disperses back into the atmosphere at nightfall.  The lack of water in a desert impacts every aspects of the environment, rendering it shockingly inhospitable to human life. 

You and I may never have to contend with the actual Negev wilderness, but each one of us is called to cross our own spiritual Negev.  To make our own journey from the spiritual Egypt to our personal Holy Land, you and I must traverse this spiritual wilderness.

Saying “yes” to this journey invites intense spiritual work. No amount of physical wealth or powerful technology or top-notch insurance can make any difference when we face this personal gauntlet.  Only one thing can help us on that journey, and that is the presence of God—the original local nomadic guide, with his wisdom and compassion.  God’s love and wisdom are the only things that will get us through.  These show up in the Bible as the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night that guided the children of Israel in the wilderness. 

So where do I get me some of them?

As I've said before, Swedenborg talks a lot about love and wisdom.  He tells us that they are two distinctly different things that are in relationship inside us.  He tells us that the bread of communion represents God’s love, and the wine represents God’s wisdom.  In another place he says again the bread represents God’s wisdom, and the wine represents God’s love.  Wait….

Is the bread the love, or the wisdom?  Is the wine the wisdom or the love?  Huh?

The answer is: “Yes.”

Deeper study of Swedenborg’s material shows us the very yin/yang relationship between these two essential capacities of our nature. Wisdom holds deep within it tremendous love (or it isn't real wisdom), and genuine love is always guided by a deep inner wisdom. The two capacities mirror each other and work together in a profound and miraculous way.  This means we can always find BOTH qualities in every correspondence.  Wine or bread can represent love or wisdom, depending on the context and the emphasis.  The same is true with many other representatives in the biblical narrative.

So, I submit that though Swedenborg tells us repeatedly that water corresponds to truth, when we are looking at a rocky, sun-baked landscape, where rocks represent truth, and sunlight represents truth, the thing that is needed for survival in this case is possibly not more truth.  In considering the wilderness and surviving spiritual temptation, it is entirely possible that our need for water could represent our need for supportive, utterly essential life-giving love.

Can water represent love?  Well, think about it.  Love, feelings, and emotions—are they static and solid, or fluid and difficult to restrain? What is more likely to swamp us, ideas or feelings?  We can “drown” in emotions, be “flooded” with feelings and “filled” with love—all language that suggests a fluid nature more like water than rocks. Our bodies are 98% water, and Swedenborg tells us love is our very life.  We are gestated in water, baptized in water, and will die without water long before starvation can carry us off.  So for me at least, water and our need for water images our need for love far more than truth, and this is NOT contradictory to Swedenborg’s message.  You don’t have to agree with me, but when it comes to crossing my spiritual wilderness, nine times out of ten it is love and comfort I need to get me through.  It is the warmth of a hug, the reassuring squeeze of the hand of friendship—not a book or a quote or a lecture.  Honestly, when you are truly hurting, which is more helpful, a hug or a platitude?  A Kleenex or being told, “Don’t cry?”  A silent, sympathetic, non judging presence or a sermon?

Secrets From Heaven, Paragraph 1690:3 says, “Every temptation [which is what the “wilderness” corresponds to] is an assault upon the love in which a person is, and the temptation is in the same degree as is the love. If the love is not assaulted, there is no temptation. To destroy anyone's love is to destroy their very life; for their love is their life.” Emanuel Swedenborg

We are in temptation when our love is under attack---not our ideas, our love.  Love manifests and cloaks itself in ideas, but never let us mistake the fact that any genuine temptation is an attack on what we love, not what we think.  Confusion and deep questions and a crisis of faith will only occur in the midst of such a temptation, but they are not the real issue.  Genuine spiritual temptation means what we love is under attack.  And love is always good.  

Even twisted love, otherwise known as evil, derives any power it has from the kernel of goodness at its core.  And it is the attack on that goodness that creates the suffering.  It is the attack on God-with-us that creates the pain.  Jesus suffered because this is what suffers in us.  We are not wrong when we are suffering temptation.  It means that we are spiritually alive.  It means we are responding to God’s call to live and love more deeply!  It hurts like…well, hell but please don’t waste one scrap of energy beating yourself up for being in temptation if you are.  As Winston Churchill said, “When you are going through hell, keep going.”  Don’t beat yourself up for being there, keep going!

So, knowing all that we know about spiritual temptation, what do we do to prepare ourselves?  Given our Swedenborgian-status-special-Biblical-knowledge, how do you and I prepare to be Swat-team buff and ready to face our personal wilderness crossing?  How do we become wilderness-crossing-ninjas—not only surviving but ready to rescue everyone else?

Step one, we get over ourselves.  The twelve steppers have it right: “We admitted we were powerless before our personal wilderness….”

The truth is we will probably survive about as well as anyone else does.  We may even end up whining and complaining as loudly and often as the most cantankerous of the children of Israel.  We may give up again and again on God, even having seen the miraculous provision of water and manna for our survival in every prior experience. 

Because the story of the Children of Israel in the wilderness and their repeatedly failing faith and almost ADD inability to trust in their God isn't in the Bible to shame us into doing better than they did.  It is there to say, “This is what the journey looks like.  This is what mortals do in this process.”

We are the ones who get stuck on thinking we’re supposed to be better than we are.  We are the ones who think that somehow, because we supposedly “know better,” we should be able to do better.  That’s called pride.  Honestly, looking at the whole of human history, how often has “knowing better” ever meant we chose to do better?  Our idealism is adorable, but rarely realistic.

The Lord’s miraculous love and tremendous wisdom knows that we have lousy spiritual attention spans.  God is way ahead of us.  It is kind of darling how earnest we are and how hard we try to be perfect.  But the truth is, we are two-year-olds trying to do quantum physics here.  It is important to us that we try, and it is good for us to try, but the victory ever and always belongs to God. It is probably good for our pride that we don’t realize just how powerless we are.  But the truth is, despite all their shortcomings, God brought the Children of Israel through the wilderness intact, and God will do it for you and me as well no matter how inept we might feel.  We just have to show up.  We just have to say, “Yes,” to the journey. Then the only thing that might make the journey more comfortable is letting go of doing it more perfectly than anyone else.  You won’t.  I won’t.  We are not that powerful.  And that is perfect.

God’s power.  God’s love.  The spiritual journey to which our God calls us is the journey to venture more deeply into love.  Love equals compassion, and the one who needs compassion the most from you and me is not our lousy neighbor, not the idiot from our work-place, not even Hitler.   The one who needs compassion the most from you and me is our own, broken selves.  Yourself.  Myself.

I’m going to share something with you:  My particular heredity gifted me with an inner critic so harsh as to rival the most abusive nasty parent.  It never was and probably never will be more criticism that I have needed, but more compassion, more gentleness, and far more patient loving-kindness than I would ever naturally give myself.  I have had to get over an enormous pride—pride, I tell you, that was not because I ever truly felt I deserved it, but pride that is a massive defense against the relentless, merciless, profoundly abusive inner critic (that I now know is a legacy of my particular genetic line).  A cruel personal demon.  A nasty hereditary trait that is not unusually special by the way—I don’t even get to take pride in how harshly that inner critic can abuse me.  Dang!  Because a vicious inner critic is not even as rare or special as my pride would like to think.

But the point isn't whether I'm prideful or special.  The point is that what has helped heal me—what has helped get me through that leg of my wilderness—was not stones.  Which is to say, not criticism or advice.  Not the stone of “I shouldn't be so proud.”  Not the stone of “I should love God more.” Not the stone of “I should try harder;” but the life giving, miraculous experience of being radically loved in the midst of feeling so miserably unlovable.  Immense, overwhelming, utterly delighted tenderness.  Being bathed in that cleansing benevolence when we are so utterly dry is what saves you and me, and continues to save us in the midst of the glaring sun and harsh and scraping landscape of personal temptation. 

That God loves you and me even in our profound brokenness is the saving truth of God’s love.  It is true for me, and it is true for you.  Show up. Care.  And forgive yourself for being so imperfect. Who did you think you were, God?  We are so cute.

“I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert,” says our God.

It is the Lord’s bounteous, miraculous love that lifts the valleys before us and turns the mountains into plains, not our preparedness, not our amassed store of wisdom, not how many bible quotes we have memorized or how much Swedenborg we know.  It is God’s love that does that work—the spiritual water that fills every cell of our spiritual bodies and that sustains us and operates at levels far beneath our conscious control.  That is what wins the victory and transforms the desert.  If we can just let go of thinking we have to do it perfectly—when we can stop judging ourselves so harshly and stop trying so hard, we just might open ourselves into relaxing into God’s providence.  And when we can do that, then, then we will see how the river of God’s love lifts up and softens that barren rock and causes the desert to bloom with joy and life.  Amen.

The Readings:

Isaiah 43:16-21

Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, and a path through the mighty waters,
Who brings forth the chariot and horse, the army and the power (They shall lie down together, they shall not rise; They are extinguished, they are quenched like a wick):
“Do not remember the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing, now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it? I will even make a road in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.  The beast of the field will honor Me, the jackals and the ostriches, because I give waters in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, to give drink to My people, My chosen. This people I have formed for Myself; they shall declare My praise.

Matthew 4:1-11 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward He was hungry. Now when the tempter came to Him, he said, “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.”

But He answered and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’”

Then the devil took Him up into the holy city, set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down. For it is written: ‘He shall give His angels charge over you,’ and, ‘In their hands they shall bear you up,
Lest you dash your foot against a stone.’”

Jesus said to him, “It is written again, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’”

Again, the devil took Him up on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, “All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me.”

Then Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve.’”

Then the devil left Him, and behold, angels came and ministered to Him.

Secrets From Heaven, Paragraph 2334 “All temptation includes feelings of doubt about the Lord's presence and mercy, about salvation, and so on; for people who experience temptation suffer great emotional distress, even to the point of desperation. They are kept in this state primarily so that they may eventually be confirmed in the certainty that all things are governed by the Lord's mercy, and that they are saved through Him alone….” Emanuel Swedenborg