FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT
FEBRUARY 17, 2002

WILDERNESS
John M. Buchanan

Lent is a time to begin again. Lent gives us time to pause and take stock: am I becoming
the kind of person I want to become? Or am I letting things slide, giving way to the
comfortable, the easiest way, the popular way? Do I stand for something I can be proud
of? Lent is a good time to stand up and be counted ... Lent is a time for hope. Life
doesn’t have to be a time of discouragement. The Christian life is, in part, a decision to
keep looking at the One who went through all we have to go through, who was buffeted
even more that we are, who died and rose again.

John B. Coburn
Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, retired

FOURTH
PRESBY
TERIAN
CHURCH

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

WILDERNESS
February 17, 2002

JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Matthew 4:1-11

“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness . . .”
Matthew 4:1 (NRSV)

Silence in us any voice but your own, O God. As we begin again the Lenten journey we have
traveled so many times, walk with us. And be with us as we think and pray and struggle with the
big issues of life and death and love and rebirth. Lead us, O God, to the light of resurrection, but
first lead us into the wilderness—and there, startle us with your truth and your love and your
promise to be with us always: in Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

In one of the journals I was reading to prepare for Lent, the editor began with this provocative
suggestion: “In an age of quick-fixes, fast food, instant gratification, and Internet
communication, the Lenten tradition seems like an ancient practice that is out of step with the
age. Lent promises no immediate result, no instant answer, no dazzling communication from on
high. Rather Lent is a call to disciplined inquiry and patient searching after the presence of God”
(The Living Pulpit, January-March 2000).

At no time do I feel more out of step with the culture around me than during Lent.

This church and many other Protestant churches these days have rediscovered and reestablished
the ancient church custom of the imposition of ashes on the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday.
The ashes come from the burned palm branches from the previous year’s Palm Sunday
celebration. They symbolize Jesus’ suffering and death and our own mortality. As they are
placed on your forehead, in the image of the cross, the person doing the imposing looks you in
the eye and says, “From dust you have come and to dust you will return.” It is, to say the least,
sobering. “From dust you have come and to dust you will return.” You don’t hear that kind of
talk much along the Magnificent Mile.

Richard Mouw, President of Fuller Seminary, grew up in an evangelical family and not only
didn’t observe the ashes-on-the-forehead tradition but regarded it as a kind of Catholic mystery
rite. He recalls, as I do, the day when his Catholic friends showed up in school with dirty
foreheads, having been to early Mass. And he recalls, as I do, the sense that there was something
peculiar but important going on, something for which we Protestants didn’t have a word or a
symbol, an “underlying seriousness” about this business, even if we didn’t understand at the time
what it was (The Living Pulpit, January—March 2000).

So last Wednesday, walking out of the building at 1:00 p.m., I was struck by the incongruity: two
well-dressed young men, walking briskly down Michigan Avenue, on their way back to work—

with ashes on their foreheads—and then a middle-age woman, in a stylish coat, pausing at the
perfume counter in Lord and Taylor, with the ashes of her mortality on her forehead.

It felt particularly abrupt this year, after all we have been through and following so close on the
heels of Christmas. Lent is early this year. Christmas, it seems, was just a few days ago. My
colleague, Dana Ferguson, in her Ash Wednesday sermon, struck just the right note by observing
that after the darkness of September 11, the threats to our safety and security, the loss of so
much, so many innocent lives, the lights and music and joy of Christmas were more precious
than ever, And so it feels even more out of step and out of sync this year.

Lent is a time of intentional introspection and self-examination, a time to take a look at the lives
we are living and gain some self awareness about where we are, where we are going, about
where we may be compromising, or not living up to our best selves, or taking the easy way. Lent
is a time to change—repent is the church word for it—and to allow the gift of God’s forgiveness
and grace to recreate us. It’s a time that looks forward to the Sunday morning forty days from
now when we will crowd into our pews again to sing and hear and affirm our trust in the boldest
notion in the history of the world: that Jesus of Nazareth was God’s only Son, that he lived and
died for us and for our salvation, and that God raised him from the dead, and, therefore, death no
longer has any power over us.

That’s not an affirmation one can make lightly, casually. Easter requires some preparation, some

‘homework. That’s what Lent is, and Lent begins every year with the same story, the peculiar
story of Jesus and the forty days in the wilderness and the appearance of Satan and the three
tests, or temptations, as they are traditionally called.

Jesus is about thirty years old, just about the age when many people begin to have second
thoughts about career, life direction, meaning, and vocation. He has a powerful experience of
self-awareness when his cousin, John, baptizes him in the Jordan River, and in that baptism
experience he suddenly knows the road ahead is different now—that he needs to be different. In
his baptism, standing waist deep in the waters of the river, he experiences God’s claim on his
life. He hears a voice and he knows that he is God’s Son, God’s beloved. Now he must decide
what to do, how to live out his new sense of God’s claim. And it is precisely at that point that the
story says he is led by the Spirit—the Spirit of God, that is—into the wilderness to be tempted by
the devil. That’s important. It’s not his idea to go on a wilderness trek to find himself. The Spirit
leads him. This is part of whatever God has in mind, an important part of the whole process.

Wilderness. I think of the mountains of western Pennsylvania where I grew up, thickly wooded,
underbrush so dense you have to hack your way through, so easy to become disoriented, lost,
that you need a compass. I think of the wilderness of Virginia where the Union Army
disappeared from sight for a long time. I think of Lewis and Clark looking out across vast
stretches of terrain no white man had ever seen before. And so it was edifying and not a little
disturbing to board a bus in Jerusalem to travel to Jericho—through the wilderness, endless
stretches of absolutely arid, dry, rocky terrain, as far as the eye could see, not the tiniest sign of
life, under a merciless baking sun.

Forty days Jesus was there—fasting. That’s a very long time for those of us whose temperament
is affected negatively by just a touch of hunger, those of us who in the middle of lunch find
ourselves wondering what’s for dinner. After forty days, he is famished and the tempter comes.
Medieval art has created an image of Satan that is monstrous, foul, terrifying. Ancient literature
portrays him as the Father of Lies, the essence of evil. Our brand of modern Christianity
understands mostly that Satan is not so much a being, a person with horns, tail and pitchfork, as a
symbol of the reality of evil.

In this story, he is not frightening so much as smooth, clever. In his fine novel The Gospel
According to the Son, Norman Mailer has an intriguing retelling of the incident.

Jesus’ hunger has become a “solemn emptiness of spirit.” On the fortieth day, the visitor arrives.

And he was as handsome as a prince. He had a gold ornament on a gold chain about his
neck... and the hair of this prince was as long as my own and lustrous. He was dressed
in robes of velvet that were as purple as late evening and he wore a crown as golden as
the sun. . . . He introduced himself. I said to myself, “The Devil is the most beautiful
creature God ever made.”

He looked at me fondly. His eyes were black marbles but there were lights within. He
said, “Are you hungry? Are you in need of a drink?” And he brought forth a jug of wine
and a leg of lamb, well cooked. . . . I refused his food... . and [he] said, “But, of course,
you have no need of food. Being the Son of God, you can easily command these stones to
be bread.”

Norman Mailer captures the ambiguity that surrounds the decisions you and I have to make
every day, decisions Jesus made. Turning stones into bread isn’t a bad idea. Accumulating
political influence in order to implement your program is not bad. Nor is engaging in good public
relations and marketing—which is what the Devil suggests Jesus try, by leaping from the
pinnacle of the temple.

The temptations themselves are not to do terrible things—rob, cheat, steal, do public violence to
innocent people. If there are crimes here, they are victimless crimes. What Jesus is tempted to do,
as I understand it, is to take the easy way out, take the shortcuts, persuade by novelty rather than
content, by sensation rather than the substance of his teaching and his life. Jesus’ great
temptation was a familiar one: to be less than God created him to be and wanted him to be, to
compromise his own integrity and authenticity as God’s man.

That struggle is what Lent out to be for us.
And it ought, in some way, take us to the wilderness, the place where we encounter uncertainty
and doubt. There are, someone noted, no paths in the wildemess. To be there is to know what it

means to be without direction.

That’s a powerful image. That’s what life feels like sometimes, a dry wilderness of ambiguity
and uncertainty. As we look at the world, we want things to be simple, black and white, good and

evil, right and wrong. And sometimes in our own need for certainty, we make bad choices. Jesus,
in the wilderness, had to live with ambiguity and, at the end, make choices, based not on proof or
guarantees but based on his best instincts, his integrity, and his trust in God.

Who doesn’t know what it is to experience uncertainty and doubt? Who doesn’t know the
longing for clarity and certainty? Who hasn’t experienced the appeal of a religion, for instance,

that has ready answers to every question, the comfort of a faith without the wilderness of
ambiguity?

Living with religious ambiguity and uncertainty is our assignment for the future, I believe. It’s
not for everyone. I can hear the objections already. If we lose our sense of certainty, the

absolution of our doctrines and creeds, if we let go of our certainty that ours is the only way—all
will be lost.

I think the road ahead through a wilderness of confusing and now dangerous, competing faith
claims will require us to open up, to listen to neighbors, to live with looser boundaries, to know
what is absolutely essential, to live more loosely with all the rest, to ponder a God bigger than
either our questions or answers, to do what Jesus did, in that forty days—namely reduce our faith
to its essential core—to take our stand there and to live it out with everything we have and
everything we are.

Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor has written a wonderful essay “Tuning the E String” for
the Christian Century magazine. She talks about finding her old psaltery, an ancient string
instrument she had played as a young woman. Trying to tune the strings, she found a pitch pipe,
played an E, and tried to tune the E string. Now if you’ve ever tried to tune an instrument, or
been listening in as a musician tunes, you know that there’s something almost physical about
being out of tune; you can feel disharmony. When the string she was tuning “found E,” she
writes, “My whole body agreed. The note inside me and the note outside of me were the same
note.” And she reflects:

Since I live with a lot of doubt, the tuning of the E string had a large effect on me. After
years of seeking certainty about the things that cannot be seen, I have pretty much
surrendered to the necessity of faith: that love will last, that goodness has power, that
God is real. I cannot lay hand on any of these things any more that ] can hold an E note
up by the stem. Even when I am not searching for it, the note is there. It was real before I
ever was and it will remain real long after I am gone. .

My favorite part of the story about Jesus in the wilderness, the ambiguity and doubt, the hunger
and the hard decisions, is in the very last verse. This is what is says: “The devil left him and
suddenly angels came and waited on him.”

It was a difficult time, a lonely time, a time of doubt and uncertainty, a time not unlike periods of
life through which we must walk, a wilderness in which we suddenly and unexpectedly find
ourselves.

Without warning, you find yourself unemployed, for instance, and you wake up in a wilderness,
not knowing what to do, cut loose from your moorings.

Suddenly the relationship that has given your life meaning and purpose ends and you’re lost.

Suddenly a dear one dies, a friend leaves. Suddenly your lifelong religion starts to shake and
seem not nearly so certain.

Suddenly you find yourself wondering if your life has made any sense at all—wondering what
you should do next.

I am cheered by the suggestion that the Spirit of God leads us into those wildernesses and after
the struggle—the promise that angels come and minister to him, that God does come to us at the
end of the day, the end of the wilderness.

Today it begins, a new Lenten journey. God bless us on our way. Amen.

Prayers of the People
By Dana Ferguson, Associate Pastor for Mission

We scan the heavens, O God, in search of your likeness, but we do not find it there. Instead, we
find it on earth in Jesus Christ, not as the result of our search for you, but as the result of your
search for us. We are prone to stray, but you always remain close enough to hear our cry. You
endow us with gifts worthy of creatures made in your image. Yet you do not abandon us when
we use them for our own purposes. Not only do you forgive us when we misuse what has been
given to us, you pursue us with a love that will not let us stay away.

For the assurance that while we may be late in our repentance, it is not too late for your
forgiveness, and the assurance that even though our love may let go of you, your love will never
let go of us, we give you thanks.

We are tempted by the world in which we live. We live in a land rich in harvest, a culture
steeped in learning, an economy famous for its technology, a political system envied for its
democratic traditions. We may not be tempted to betray our God to own all the world’s food, but
we have been known to put more money towards the dinner bill than to feeding the hungry. We
may not be willing to betray our God to control the world’s people but we have been known to
use our access to resources to protect and hoard our riches. The world you have set us in runs
deeper than our wisdom and ranges wider than our understanding and yet you have put it in our
hands, the hands of us who are flawed and fickle.

We see it lying there in the palm of our hands, almost wanting to give it back, to let you reshape
it without giving us a say. But it is not ours to return. And so it is to you, who alone can raise up
life where none has lived, that we turn.

In these days ahead, you have called us to reflection, and so we pray that you would help us be
up to the task. Give us hearts stout with courage that we may not hide from the suffering of
friend and foe. Give us shoulders broad with strength that we may walk with the wounded. Give
us spirits quiet with humility that we may call forth new life in your name.

When this journey is done, call us forth from the wilderness, that we might reveal the source of
our lives by the way we live them. Let us dedicate our harvest to the war on starvation; our
learning to the war on ignorance; our technology to the war on misery; our democracy to the war
on oppression. Let us intercede for these victims of injustice, if we dare. Call us forth to be with
those whose souls and bodies need your soothing touch. Return them to us with your power that,
through your presence, we might resurrect and restore, revive, and renew.

In all of this we pray that we may we be creators with you in life and conquerors with you in
death. And we ask it in the name of the one through whom we know life, praying together as he
taught the disciples saying, Our Father . . .