Faith in the Desert - The Rev. Brian Petersen

It’s almost the time of year for one of my favorite things to do in the spring – camping out in the desert. I’ve camped in the desert all year long, but spring tends to be the best because the weather is just right – not too hot during the day, not too cold at night – and because most years you get to experience all of the desert flowers blooming.

But when desert camping in the spring, you also need to be prepared for one major factor – the wind. Winds can whip up to crazy levels, enough to blow down tents and bring temperatures down to near freezing. And as much as you try to prepare, sometimes the wind sneaks up on you – and all you can do is hunker down and hope for the best. It’s an exercise in both trust and respect for the awesome power of nature.

The themes of both the desert and the wind loom large in the Bible, and they show up in our readings today. Lent is also a “desert” season, with its 40 days mirroring Jesus’ own time in the desert and the Israelites 40-year wilderness journey. But today, our reading from Genesis gives us a different desert story – that of Abraham.

Abraham was a man of the desert, but he had managed to build a pretty prosperous and stable life in the midst of that lifestyle. But when God calls Abraham to “Go to the place that I will show you”, it’s a call to journey even deeper into the unknown – to leave behind the familiar, the comfort of certainty, and to step into faith and trust.

And then in John’s gospel, we have Jesus’ famous encounter with the Pharisee Nicodemus, the source of perhaps the best-known verse in the New Testament – John 3:16. But that whole conversation is wrapped around a discussion of the Spirit, with Jesus using the metaphor of wind to describe the unpredictable and unprecedented nature of the new creation that God is calling all of us to join in.

Both of these stories lead us to the realization that faith in God requires a radical sort of trust, something that goes beyond lip service or simple piety. The faith of Abraham, and the new birth described by Jesus, require us to let go of any preconceived notions of how things are supposed to work. They require us to let ourselves become displaced – disoriented from the ways of certainty, and to faithfully go wherever that call may lead us.

Such a message has always been radical, but in our present time, I think it speaks powerfully into the world we find ourselves in. We awoke yesterday to news of our country at war – of fresh violence and instability in a world already rife with conflict and uncertainty. And while I’ll recognize that as American citizens, we might reasonably differ on matters of defense and foreign policy, as Christians and citizens of God’s kingdom of peace, we must acknowledge that war and violence are an affront to the heart of God. The God who so loved the world that he sent his only son, not to condemn to but to save, grieves at the terror that we inflict upon our fellow human beings, in whatever name we might seek to justify it.

In such times, we might find ourselves tempted to anxiety, to fear, to anger, to despair. We find ourselves in the desert, in the windstorm of world events that we cannot possibly control, wondering what we should do. And in this, I hear Abraham’s call extended to us as well.

God calls Abraham into uncertainty, in order that he might be a blessing to the world. And so we might ask ourselves in a time such as this – how can we be a blessing?

I think that first and foremost, we can be a blessing by holding onto our faith and our message that violence, war, and despair do not have the final word. That although we acknowledge that the cross is the outcome of human sinfulness, there is a greater power at work – the power of resurrection, the power of God’s promise that swords will be turned into plowshares in the future that has already been won for us.

If we hold onto this audacious sort of faith, it also means that even the smallest actions we do really matter. Our prayers for peace really matter. Raising our voices, collectively speaking out really does matter. Everything we do to help co-create a world where love wins instead of hate matters. Even though we journey out into the desert with no idea where we are going, we know that it all matters because God has the ultimate destination in mind – “that the world might be saved through him.”

I believe that even now, the wind is blowing around us, the wind of the Spirit that we cannot predict or control but that we can trust. Can we answer this call – to be a blessing, even when blessing seems distant? To speak words of peace – when violence surrounds us on every side?

In Romans, Paul tells us that the presence of God, the presence that Abraham trusted when he set out into the wilderness, can “give life to the dead and call into existence things that do not exist.” Can we boldly bear witness to a peace that passes all understanding?

We may not have chosen the circumstances of our time. We might not be prepared for whatever lies ahead. But we can trust that the same God who calls us also empowers us, and that by that same Spirit equips us to answer that call to make a world where peace, justice and love of our neighbors is not just a naive dream, but a reality.