• Email Link
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Digg

This article appears in the Wilderness issue of Trinity News , the magazine of Trinity Church-St. Paul's Chapel.

By Earl Kooperkamp

Wilderness is not anything I normally encounter. I live in a vast city, and the concrete keeps the wilderness at bay. Or so it seems. Even in the midst of the constant motions of people going to and fro, the wilderness can be closer than I might care to admit. The solitude and isolation of even a metropolis as great as New York City can mean that wilderness might lurk around any corner, or may be found in the lives of people I meet every day.

The very word conjures up images of that childhood classic, Where the Wild Things Are. And like Max, the child in the book who visits the wilderness and the beasts every night in his room, I am both terrified and exhilarated in my terror of that wild side. Those childhood fears of the dark, scary places have a lasting power.

As a Christian, as one who seeks the Good News in God’s Word, I encounter wilderness most often in the Bible. Whenever I lead a Bible study, I stress the importance of looking at the context for some clues about what we will encounter in the strange world of the Bible. Even the topography is important; actually it is often supremely important. Within the biblical topography, the wilderness plays an important role, especially in the Hebrew Scriptures. It is that place of exile and refuge, the region where that which is to be purified is made pure, the location of testing and faith, and finally, but foremost, the setting for an encounter with God.

In the wilderness, where human achievement is meaningless, God reigns supreme. And in the wilderness, nothing but honesty will suffice. Those former slaves, liberated by God’s mighty hand, might build golden calves and long for the conditions of their former bondage. The dishonored prophet might complain that only he has remained faithful in all of Israel. But such self-serving deceptions cannot stand for long in the blaze of honesty that prevails in the wilderness. Over and over again, the people of Israel learn that in the wilderness, there in the encounter with the God who has chosen them as God’s own people, the only hope is to rely solely on God’s mercy and providence. The bread and water to sustain life are freely given, and if that’s not enough, God will throw in a few quail besides. In that formative act of faith in the wilderness, Abraham could tell his dear child, “God will provide.”

Our Christian Scriptures give the wilderness short shrift. We Christians tend to be city folk, and so it has generally been since our origin. But John and Jesus knew the power of the wilderness for the renewal of faith in the divine encounter. John called the people out of the city to the wilderness to purify Israel from their collaboration with Empire and to revive their faith in the God of the liberated slaves. Jesus also withdraws to the wilderness: not as a means of renewal, but as a manifestation of the incarnate power of God, to challenge the powers of Hell, literally facing down Satan, and claiming the wilderness fully and finally for God.

This Christian witness speaks to us over and again through the centuries. With the rise of Imperial Christianity, tens of thousands of sisters and brothers melted away from the cities to the barren regions of Egypt and Syria, seeking God not in the great basilicas but in the solitude of the desert. Yet even in the cities Christ’s struggle in the wilderness could not be forgotten: rather than withdraw to a place, a time for withdrawal was established in the Christian year. The 40 days prior to the Day of Resurrection were set aside as a special time of preparation for the catechumenate before their baptisms. Others began to mark these days in solidarity with them, and thus the season of Lent was established. Forty days of withdrawal, reminiscent of the wilderness periods in the life of God’s people. A temporal wilderness set up to encourage that encounter with God.

The temporal wilderness is an interesting place. In contrast to the expanse of the desert, the temporal wilderness has definite boundaries: it is 40 days (or in the case of the newly liberated slaves from Egypt, 40 years). Those 40-day periods of the biblical witness provided time for purification during the flood, time for renewal and learning how to live in God’s freedom after the Exodus, and a time for Jesus to prepare during his refuge. Forty days is a long time, longer than a month, but it does have a definite end. As we move into and mark the days in the temporal wilderness, we do so in the knowledge that the limits are established, the wilderness time does not last for all eternity. The point of being in the wilderness is to give up our artifices and dishonesty — whether we are situated in the geographic or temporal wilderness — to become honest with ourselves and, most of all, to be honest with God. In the wilderness, the force of Abraham’s faith comes through, that yes, God will provide and that is all we really need.

A sojourn in the wilderness means confronting ourselves, and perhaps at the core, confronting our fears. We go, like Max, to where the wild things that “roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws” are. But we go into the wilderness in Lent as Christians knowing the most frequent command in the entire Bible is, “Fear not.” Those words are spoken by God to Abraham as he starts off on the journey that leads him so far from his home. Confronting our fears, living into that commandment, “Do not be afraid” transforms us with a radical openness, a place in which God’s love can make a dwelling.

Even Max, made king of the wild things, became lonely after all the wild rumpus. As the story concludes, he “wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.” Our Lenten wilderness finally concludes on that small mount outside the city wall, at the foot of the cross, where we find a love that loves us best of all.

The Rev. Dr. Earl Kooperkamp is rector of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in New York City. He has a doctorate in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary and was named a Trinity Fellow in 2004.

To receive a free subscription to the print edition of Trinity News , send your mailing address to news@trinitywallstreet.org.

Return to:
Wilderness
A Trinity News Companion