Be not afraid of the Wilderness

I had never planned a communion service whilst wearing night vision goggles before. I was looking across a thick line of trees, visible only because of the lenses attached to my helmet. It was a training exercise, and that night I had found myself working alongside the medics. A few of them had asked for a field service in the morning, and I shared a few hours on watch with them as I thought about what I would say. The forest before us was large, with dense undergrowth, and walking through it without the right kit would most certainly get you lost. For the next few hours, until daybreak, it was to us a wilderness, dark and unyielding,

The benefit of being in the wilderness is that your mind swiftly thinks about the need to be found. Sadly, not everyone believes that they will be found. A sense of hopelessness is very real, and yet as Christians we are called to offer light and love in just such moments. Ultimately, everyone’s idea of a wilderness is different. For some theirs is a parched desert, still and featureless, for others it is a stormy sea, a tumult with high waves and raging currents.

In some sense, the wilderness is a type of unshackling from the unseen chains which constrict our daily lives. These chains represent the obligations of a world fixated on power, prestige, and performative morality. In Luke 7 Jesus speaks of John the Baptist who famously emerges from the wilderness proclaiming the hope of the coming Messiah. Jesus, when speaking to a crowd about John, asks “But what did you go out to see? A man clothed in soft garments? Indeed, those who are gorgeously apparelled and live in luxury are in kings’ courts. But what did you go out to see?”

John was a man of God, but he was also a man of the wilderness. He sought no fame; he dressed with no sense of grandeur, despite his mighty ministry. John was a man of camel’s hair clothes and locust rations, unhindered by the vanity and chains of the world. He found himself only in the love of God.

With access to modern media we become ever more convinced that the problem is “over there”. We may feel informed, we may feel safe in our walled cities of screens and data, but in reality, we are drowning.

We are exposed to 24-hour cycles of outrage which obscure the greatest question which any person faces, which is ultimately the question: who am I? The challenge with exploring this question is that ultimately it requires throwing off the chains of what we have always assumed goodness and righteousness look like. What is certain is that we will at some point ask ourselves these questions; what is uncertain, is will we ask these questions before the storm breaks, or in the midst of it?

Stepping out of this shanty town of meaning and into wilderness is an awakening, and it is uncompromising. It’s a shocking process of realisation that so much of the foundation under our feet is sand. Reading any passage of scripture soon makes this apparent. Like the sin of Adam and Eve in the garden, our world is ravenous to define good and evil by its own standards. This leaves those who find their sure footing in the world defining themselves by worldly acclaim, worldly assurance, and a worldly definition of human flourishing. Christianity is extraordinary not because it seeks to temper or guide this life philosophy, but because it challenges the foundations of everything the world offers.

The wilderness is ultimately understanding that so much of our hopes and identity are like the flowers of the field, prone to be shaped, bent, or even blown away completely by the next gust of wind, the next shift of opinion. It’s a forced acceptance that trying to grasp a gospel hope while retaining a worldly identity, or seeking worldly acclaim, is to try and grip smoke with our fingers only to watch it evaporate in the sunlight. Christian resilience is having endured the wilderness and knowing that Christ is the rock on which we stand.

However, in both paradise and desert, temptation speaks. The tempter has only one weapon, the same wielded in the garden, the same that was offered to Christ in his wilderness. This is, namely: “Take the power of God for yourself”. This is a perverse courage: to shape the morality of the world according to our own narrative, to be outraged at its brokenness, to rage as other humans fail our personal standards of righteousness. This is the fate of so many who experience a walk in the wilderness and seek to escape it by adding Jesus to their vision of what the world should look like. The reality of sin necessitates a wilderness moment, but the question beyond it is: how does Jesus draw us out of the wilderness? Is he our saviour or merely our advisor?

The gospel makes for a poor accessory to a life already established on other hopes. In 2 Corinthians Paul says this about the Christian hope: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away, everything has become new.”

This is the proper joy to be born of a walk in the wilderness, that through God’s grace I am now lost in Christ, because I have been found by Him. My hopes, passions, and identity are now being conformed to the hopes of heaven, and this is the greatest of adventures.

During their time in the wilderness, both John and Jesus clung fast to the love of God. We too can be sure of His presence whilst also experiencing moments of wilderness. This is why I always take encouragement from listening to sermons where the preacher asks a question but does not necessarily answer it.

Preachers give us many gifts when they preach. The preparation they invest in their sermon, their insight, their passion for God’s word, but one of the most underappreciated gifts of good preaching is the unanswered question. Such moments allow me to think deeply, for myself, about the hard truths whilst being assured that Jesus is always beside me.

Challenge the shanty towns of meaning in which much of our world resides, be willing to have moments of walking in the wilderness, ask the hard questions and know that in all that time, Jesus has not left you for a moment.

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Revd Stuart Hull is a Church of England minister who trained at Wycliffe Hall. He serves as an Army Chaplain.

Views expressed in blogs published by the Latimer Trust are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Latimer Trust

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