Uncharted Territory
September 14, 2008
Wilderness Sunday
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Exodus 13:17-22, Mark 1:9-15
When you hear the word “wilderness” what do you think of? Some people have told me a desert, the woods, mountains – it seems that the word conveys many different images. And actually, wilderness can be a variety of geographies – it can indeed be desert, mountain, forest, and jungle, grassland, or ice cap. Simply, wilderness is any area that is essentially outside of human domination. Whether it is the Boundary Waters, the Teton Mountains, or the Serengeti Plain – wilderness is where humans haven’t taken over. The Wilderness Act of 1964, which established protection for some wilderness areas in the United States, defined wilderness in this way: "A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."
So for us, as people of faith, wilderness is a way that we can see the world as God created it – and it is a place where we are reminded that humans and our work are not the arbiter of meaning in the world. Wilderness is land that is not defined by humans, it is not shaped by humans, it is not plotted and mapped by humans. Of course that is not literally true – by now, most wilderness areas are, in fact, mapped. But the maps of wilderness are a description of what humans have observed, not a guideline to what we have built.
Wilderness is where humans come face to face with the work of God – and for many of us, being in that kind of immediate contact with God’s creation inspires a sense of awe and faith that we rarely experience in the church building or anywhere else. Being in the wilderness is an opportunity to be away from the world that humans have defined, and away from what individually defines each of us: in the wilderness, we’re not teachers or lawyers, rich or poor, the degrees we have don’t matter and neither do our bank accounts. In the wilderness, we are, in a sense, stripped of what defines our lives normally – whether we are successful, or reeling from yet another failure, in the wilderness we are just men and women, creatures of God in God’s creation. There’s a sense in which being in the wilderness boils us down to the essentials – to who we really are.
Certainly that was the case in both the Biblical passages we read this morning – for the people of Israel newly freed from slavery in Egypt, and for Jesus newly named and claimed in baptism, time in the wilderness sharpened their sense of identity – it confirmed who and whose they were.
When Pharoah let the people go, they went through the wilderness…and they ended up living there for a generation: a people without a homeland, learning to depend upon God. In the passage we read, we learned that God was always with them, as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. God was a visible presence among them.
And in the chapters to come, God cares for them not only by being present, but by providing sweet water, and manna – food to eat each day. In the years to come, God would continue to care for them, guiding them with the Ten Commandments and the Law, and eventually guiding them to the Promised Land. While the initial point of identity was the liberation from slavery in which they were claimed and freed by God, it was the journey through the wilderness that confirmed this identity for them.
Jesus had a similar experience in the wilderness – in his baptism, he heard “You are My Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And then, we read that the Spirit immediately drove him into the wilderness. And while he was in the wilderness, he was tempted – and my reading of these temptations, as with all the temptations Jesus would face – is that they were temptations of identity. He was tempted to be other than who he was – in Matthew’s Gospel we read more particulars of these temptations and we learn that he was tempted to turn stones into bread – to rely on material goods rather than God to meet his most essential needs. We also read that he was tempted to throw himself off a cliff to demonstrate that God’s power would save him – he was tempted to prove himself through miracles. And finally, he was tempted by being offered the power to rule all kingdoms – he was being tempted to love power, rather than to reveal the power of love. So for Jesus, the time in the wilderness was a time of affirming his identity – sharpening his sense of who he was, and how he would be in ministry.
Neither the Hebrew people nor Jesus chose their time in the wilderness – these were not nature retreats for them. They were in uncharted territory, away from the lives they had known, and they came to a new sense of self. And each of us has times that we experience also – times of being in uncharted territory, that we may grow to understand as some kind of wilderness, when we no longer have the usual landmarks of our lives to tell us who we are – and in those times we can come to a new, or renewed, sense of self. Some of these wilderness times are hard times, some are times of deep joy, but what tends to characterize them is being times of transition – when who we were is no longer who we are, and we have to come to a new sense of self.
What kinds of transition am I describing? Many life transitions take us through uncharted territory – when we go away to school, or become a parent; when we are divorced or retire; when we lose our health or our wealth – when the circumstances of our lives change in such a way that we find ourselves in uncharted territory. The first such time I remember in my own life was a month after I started college when I got the news that my best friend had committed suicide – suddenly, my sense of self-confidence was utterly shaken. If Betty, who was so much more organized and reliable than me, couldn’t make it – how would I?? More recently, as I’ve started the empty nest experience, I’ve been in uncharted territory again – it’s not so much that I miss the kids, although I do from time to time – but it turns out that I spent a lot of my time, my energy and my identity in being a mom…and so the one I miss the most is me. And I find myself realizing that I am in uncharted territory – and sometimes it has been depressing, and sometimes it has been somewhat daunting, and sometimes it is exciting. And I’ve been a little chagrined to realize that I’m having such a clichéd reaction to something that delights me as much as my kids doing what I had long hoped they’d do – but then I realized that this is why clichés develop.
In talking with people who are widowed or retired, I often hear about the same loss of identity – of course for widows and widowers there is a deep relational loss, and a sense of missing the spouse who has died. But there is something more, that is often harder to express – there is a loss of one’s self as well. If you have been someone’s husband or wife for 50 or more years, then their death is not only the loss of the beloved person with whom one has woven a life, but it is the loss of the self who did that weaving with the one who is gone, and who sometimes seems to have taken us with them.
In retirement, the loss of self is somewhat obvious – if you’ve always answered, “I teach,” or “I’m a doctor” then who are you when you’re not that anymore?? It can be just as painful between jobs – I spoke to someone recently who said, “I loved working. I loved being able to say that I had that job. I loved doing it, and I want to be working again.”
And at the same time, while some of these experiences are clichés, they are not universal – I’ve known several parents who found it very difficult when their children first went to kindergarten, while I found it thrilling. And some people never skip a beat upon retirement. Some parents don’t have any issues when they become empty nesters. Some people have a wilderness experience in the midst of joy – when becoming a parent for example. After years of becoming competent on the job, a new parent can feel startlingly inept. We all respond differently to our lives, and while there are some experiences that many people share, there are always others who do it another way. Some kids find the first year at college very difficult, others seem to have been born to it. We may not end up in the wilderness for the same reasons, or in the same seasons as others – but all of us will find our way there sometime, and some people, like the Hebrew people after Egypt, may spend a longer time there than they expect. And all the while, our identity eludes us in some ways. Who are we if we aren’t who we’ve been?
It is a wilderness experience at the existential level – it’s about who we are – and like the experiences of Jesus and the people of Israel, it can be a time to sharpen our own sense of ourselves, when the familiar modes of identity are gone. And like the people of Israel and like Jesus, we can find ourselves cared for by God in a way we’ve never experienced before if we are open to that experience. Perhaps it’s the first time we’ve allowed ourselves to experience the love of God – in the wilderness, I’m not loved because of my competence or my reputation or my sense of humor…we’re just loved because of who God is, and who we are in God. Realizing that can be a real light in the darkness for us – we felt alone as we never had before, and we can find out that we really aren’t alone.
But perhaps we, like the people of Israel, are having trouble seeing that – I know in my own experience there have been periods in each transition when God’s presence wasn’t clear to me. There have been times along the way when I have felt not only that I am in uncharted territory, but that I am lost, and alone…and those times can be quite overpowering. I don’t have much experience with depression, but this summer and fall I have found myself depressed sometimes…even as I have felt embarrassed to be depressed.
And so, from time to time, I have reached out to someone – even just admitting to my own experience. And I have learned this from many of you, who have reached out to me from your own wildernesses…as one of you said to me yesterday, “I find that when I admit to what’s going on in my life, I often learn that others are experiencing something similar, or even worse.” Some of you have explored wildernesses that are harsher than I've ever encountered, and you have emerged safe on the other side...and you inspire me, and others of us who find ourselves lost from time to time.
So that sometimes in the wilderness, we find that we are not alone, but that there are guides here and there. And after we get a little used to the wilderness, we may find that it’s a place to try new experiences – and perhaps some of these will become part of who we are. When the Hebrew people were in the wilderness, God gave them the Ten Commandments, and the shared rhythm of Sabbath became part of their identity as a people, long before they found the Promised Land.
When we are in geographic wilderness, we might find ourselves exploring dimensions of ourselves that we don’t much back in town – perhaps we write, or paint, or sit in silence as we find ourselves in the uncharted territory of God’s lakes and woods, or desert highlands; and so too when we are in a wilderness time in our lives …perhaps journaling will become helpful, or experimenting with a different form of prayer; perhaps our family will be newly important to us, or new friends, or perhaps we find ourselves nourished by solitude in a way that we never had..
Just as pioneers in this country made their way through the challenges of the wilderness to build new homes, so can each of make our way through our personal wildernesses to a new sense of self – but we will do best if we don’t run away from the wilderness. We may need to take our time letting a new sense of self emerge.
After all, the wilderness is important to civilization – wilderness areas protect watersheds that provide drinking water, wilderness areas can provide critical habitat to wildlife, wilderness helps to filter our air, and maintain biodiversity, wilderness areas contribute economically by improving nearby property values and providing recreation areas, and opportunities for research and education. But wilderness does more than that – President Lyndon Johnson said, when signing the Wilderness Act of 1964: “If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.” And Nancy Newhall perhaps said it best: “The wilderness holds answers to questions [we have] not yet learned to ask.” This is true of our own wilderness periods as well – and as we find ourselves face to face with such times, and the questions that accompany them, let us not be afraid, or afraid to ask someone to be with us. As we regard the rough and rugged contours of unfamiliar, uncharted territory, let us trust that God, who accompanied the people of Israel as a fiery pillar, is with us even here, even now, and that in taking our time in the wilderness, we might come to a new sense of God, and of ourselves as well. And may we come to the experience that Isaiah describes: The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing….. They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God. Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, "Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God…. He will come and save you." Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped… For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert…. Amen.
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Exodus 13:17-22, Mark 1:9-15
When you hear the word “wilderness” what do you think of? Some people have told me a desert, the woods, mountains – it seems that the word conveys many different images. And actually, wilderness can be a variety of geographies – it can indeed be desert, mountain, forest, and jungle, grassland, or ice cap. Simply, wilderness is any area that is essentially outside of human domination. Whether it is the Boundary Waters, the Teton Mountains, or the Serengeti Plain – wilderness is where humans haven’t taken over. The Wilderness Act of 1964, which established protection for some wilderness areas in the United States, defined wilderness in this way: "A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."
So for us, as people of faith, wilderness is a way that we can see the world as God created it – and it is a place where we are reminded that humans and our work are not the arbiter of meaning in the world. Wilderness is land that is not defined by humans, it is not shaped by humans, it is not plotted and mapped by humans. Of course that is not literally true – by now, most wilderness areas are, in fact, mapped. But the maps of wilderness are a description of what humans have observed, not a guideline to what we have built.
Wilderness is where humans come face to face with the work of God – and for many of us, being in that kind of immediate contact with God’s creation inspires a sense of awe and faith that we rarely experience in the church building or anywhere else. Being in the wilderness is an opportunity to be away from the world that humans have defined, and away from what individually defines each of us: in the wilderness, we’re not teachers or lawyers, rich or poor, the degrees we have don’t matter and neither do our bank accounts. In the wilderness, we are, in a sense, stripped of what defines our lives normally – whether we are successful, or reeling from yet another failure, in the wilderness we are just men and women, creatures of God in God’s creation. There’s a sense in which being in the wilderness boils us down to the essentials – to who we really are.
Certainly that was the case in both the Biblical passages we read this morning – for the people of Israel newly freed from slavery in Egypt, and for Jesus newly named and claimed in baptism, time in the wilderness sharpened their sense of identity – it confirmed who and whose they were.
When Pharoah let the people go, they went through the wilderness…and they ended up living there for a generation: a people without a homeland, learning to depend upon God. In the passage we read, we learned that God was always with them, as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. God was a visible presence among them.
And in the chapters to come, God cares for them not only by being present, but by providing sweet water, and manna – food to eat each day. In the years to come, God would continue to care for them, guiding them with the Ten Commandments and the Law, and eventually guiding them to the Promised Land. While the initial point of identity was the liberation from slavery in which they were claimed and freed by God, it was the journey through the wilderness that confirmed this identity for them.
Jesus had a similar experience in the wilderness – in his baptism, he heard “You are My Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And then, we read that the Spirit immediately drove him into the wilderness. And while he was in the wilderness, he was tempted – and my reading of these temptations, as with all the temptations Jesus would face – is that they were temptations of identity. He was tempted to be other than who he was – in Matthew’s Gospel we read more particulars of these temptations and we learn that he was tempted to turn stones into bread – to rely on material goods rather than God to meet his most essential needs. We also read that he was tempted to throw himself off a cliff to demonstrate that God’s power would save him – he was tempted to prove himself through miracles. And finally, he was tempted by being offered the power to rule all kingdoms – he was being tempted to love power, rather than to reveal the power of love. So for Jesus, the time in the wilderness was a time of affirming his identity – sharpening his sense of who he was, and how he would be in ministry.
Neither the Hebrew people nor Jesus chose their time in the wilderness – these were not nature retreats for them. They were in uncharted territory, away from the lives they had known, and they came to a new sense of self. And each of us has times that we experience also – times of being in uncharted territory, that we may grow to understand as some kind of wilderness, when we no longer have the usual landmarks of our lives to tell us who we are – and in those times we can come to a new, or renewed, sense of self. Some of these wilderness times are hard times, some are times of deep joy, but what tends to characterize them is being times of transition – when who we were is no longer who we are, and we have to come to a new sense of self.
What kinds of transition am I describing? Many life transitions take us through uncharted territory – when we go away to school, or become a parent; when we are divorced or retire; when we lose our health or our wealth – when the circumstances of our lives change in such a way that we find ourselves in uncharted territory. The first such time I remember in my own life was a month after I started college when I got the news that my best friend had committed suicide – suddenly, my sense of self-confidence was utterly shaken. If Betty, who was so much more organized and reliable than me, couldn’t make it – how would I?? More recently, as I’ve started the empty nest experience, I’ve been in uncharted territory again – it’s not so much that I miss the kids, although I do from time to time – but it turns out that I spent a lot of my time, my energy and my identity in being a mom…and so the one I miss the most is me. And I find myself realizing that I am in uncharted territory – and sometimes it has been depressing, and sometimes it has been somewhat daunting, and sometimes it is exciting. And I’ve been a little chagrined to realize that I’m having such a clichéd reaction to something that delights me as much as my kids doing what I had long hoped they’d do – but then I realized that this is why clichés develop.
In talking with people who are widowed or retired, I often hear about the same loss of identity – of course for widows and widowers there is a deep relational loss, and a sense of missing the spouse who has died. But there is something more, that is often harder to express – there is a loss of one’s self as well. If you have been someone’s husband or wife for 50 or more years, then their death is not only the loss of the beloved person with whom one has woven a life, but it is the loss of the self who did that weaving with the one who is gone, and who sometimes seems to have taken us with them.
In retirement, the loss of self is somewhat obvious – if you’ve always answered, “I teach,” or “I’m a doctor” then who are you when you’re not that anymore?? It can be just as painful between jobs – I spoke to someone recently who said, “I loved working. I loved being able to say that I had that job. I loved doing it, and I want to be working again.”
And at the same time, while some of these experiences are clichés, they are not universal – I’ve known several parents who found it very difficult when their children first went to kindergarten, while I found it thrilling. And some people never skip a beat upon retirement. Some parents don’t have any issues when they become empty nesters. Some people have a wilderness experience in the midst of joy – when becoming a parent for example. After years of becoming competent on the job, a new parent can feel startlingly inept. We all respond differently to our lives, and while there are some experiences that many people share, there are always others who do it another way. Some kids find the first year at college very difficult, others seem to have been born to it. We may not end up in the wilderness for the same reasons, or in the same seasons as others – but all of us will find our way there sometime, and some people, like the Hebrew people after Egypt, may spend a longer time there than they expect. And all the while, our identity eludes us in some ways. Who are we if we aren’t who we’ve been?
It is a wilderness experience at the existential level – it’s about who we are – and like the experiences of Jesus and the people of Israel, it can be a time to sharpen our own sense of ourselves, when the familiar modes of identity are gone. And like the people of Israel and like Jesus, we can find ourselves cared for by God in a way we’ve never experienced before if we are open to that experience. Perhaps it’s the first time we’ve allowed ourselves to experience the love of God – in the wilderness, I’m not loved because of my competence or my reputation or my sense of humor…we’re just loved because of who God is, and who we are in God. Realizing that can be a real light in the darkness for us – we felt alone as we never had before, and we can find out that we really aren’t alone.
But perhaps we, like the people of Israel, are having trouble seeing that – I know in my own experience there have been periods in each transition when God’s presence wasn’t clear to me. There have been times along the way when I have felt not only that I am in uncharted territory, but that I am lost, and alone…and those times can be quite overpowering. I don’t have much experience with depression, but this summer and fall I have found myself depressed sometimes…even as I have felt embarrassed to be depressed.
And so, from time to time, I have reached out to someone – even just admitting to my own experience. And I have learned this from many of you, who have reached out to me from your own wildernesses…as one of you said to me yesterday, “I find that when I admit to what’s going on in my life, I often learn that others are experiencing something similar, or even worse.” Some of you have explored wildernesses that are harsher than I've ever encountered, and you have emerged safe on the other side...and you inspire me, and others of us who find ourselves lost from time to time.
So that sometimes in the wilderness, we find that we are not alone, but that there are guides here and there. And after we get a little used to the wilderness, we may find that it’s a place to try new experiences – and perhaps some of these will become part of who we are. When the Hebrew people were in the wilderness, God gave them the Ten Commandments, and the shared rhythm of Sabbath became part of their identity as a people, long before they found the Promised Land.
When we are in geographic wilderness, we might find ourselves exploring dimensions of ourselves that we don’t much back in town – perhaps we write, or paint, or sit in silence as we find ourselves in the uncharted territory of God’s lakes and woods, or desert highlands; and so too when we are in a wilderness time in our lives …perhaps journaling will become helpful, or experimenting with a different form of prayer; perhaps our family will be newly important to us, or new friends, or perhaps we find ourselves nourished by solitude in a way that we never had..
Just as pioneers in this country made their way through the challenges of the wilderness to build new homes, so can each of make our way through our personal wildernesses to a new sense of self – but we will do best if we don’t run away from the wilderness. We may need to take our time letting a new sense of self emerge.
After all, the wilderness is important to civilization – wilderness areas protect watersheds that provide drinking water, wilderness areas can provide critical habitat to wildlife, wilderness helps to filter our air, and maintain biodiversity, wilderness areas contribute economically by improving nearby property values and providing recreation areas, and opportunities for research and education. But wilderness does more than that – President Lyndon Johnson said, when signing the Wilderness Act of 1964: “If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.” And Nancy Newhall perhaps said it best: “The wilderness holds answers to questions [we have] not yet learned to ask.” This is true of our own wilderness periods as well – and as we find ourselves face to face with such times, and the questions that accompany them, let us not be afraid, or afraid to ask someone to be with us. As we regard the rough and rugged contours of unfamiliar, uncharted territory, let us trust that God, who accompanied the people of Israel as a fiery pillar, is with us even here, even now, and that in taking our time in the wilderness, we might come to a new sense of God, and of ourselves as well. And may we come to the experience that Isaiah describes: The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing….. They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God. Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, "Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God…. He will come and save you." Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped… For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert…. Amen.