YAGM Wilderness

This is the manuscript that I preached from for the opening worship at this year's YAGM Re-Entry Retreat.

A reading from Mark (1:9-13).

⁹In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee

      and was baptized by John in the Jordan.

      ¹⁰And just as Jesus was coming up out of the water,

            he saw the heavens torn apart

            and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.

      ¹¹And a voice came from heaven,

            “You are my Child,

                  the Beloved;

                        with you I am well pleased.”

      ¹²And the Spirit immediately drove Jesus out into the wilderness.

            ¹³He was in the wilderness forty days,

                  tempted by Satan;

            and he was with the wild beasts;

            and the angels waited on him.

Word of God, Word of Life.  Thanks be to God.

-----

I grew up in the mountains of Colorado, so I have always loved the Bible passages about the wilderness.  It’s easy to imagine the wilderness, because it was my back yard growing up.  And it’s beautiful and fun—the snow, the aspen leaves in fall, the bluest of blue skies.  I have always had a fondness for the wilderness.

Then, as I was getting ready to graduate from Luther College, I came here for DIP.  From there, I ended up in a different kind of wilderness in a small village in eastern Slovakia.  Sure, there are hills and even a few mountains in Slovakia, and I got to go hiking and enjoy nature, but this was a different kind of wilderness.

Like the wilderness we find throughout the Bible, this wilderness wasn’t familiar to me and it wasn’t always friendly.  You all have spent a year in the wilderness.  And in that year, a lot has changed.  You have changed.  The people who sent you have changed.  The people you encountered have changed.  This country has changed.  That’s what wilderness does.  It changes you.

Whether you’ve heard the distant rumbles of the heavens being torn apart or encountered wild beasts, doves, or angels—or maybe all of them at once.  You spent a year away from your family, your friends, your loved ones, and that is hard.  I can’t help but think of the words from the song, The Summons, “Will you go where you don’t know and never be the same?”        

You did.  And you probably will again.  And it will still be hard.               It is hard to be different and an outsider.  I still remember those first months in Slovakia, hearing sermons and Bible studies in which I could only pick out a few of the words.  And the sinking feeling I would get in my stomach every time the word I understood was Sodom or Gomorrah, knowing that there was a part of me as a queer person that would never belong.

Maybe for you it was a racist remark, or the violence you witnessed in words or actions, the access your u.s. passport granted you at checkpoints, the parts of the language that always eluded you, or the customs that never quite got explained so that you could understand and participate.

The wilderness doesn’t always make sense, and sometimes it hurts; but the other thing about the wilderness is that that’s where Jesus goes.  Jesus is baptized by John in the Jordan, the heavens are torn apart, God claims Jesus as beloved, and then “the Spirit immediately [drives] Jesus out into the wilderness,” to you.

Because that is what YAGM is about: Jesus finding you—in the hug of your host mom on that extra homesick kind of day, in the kids who are excited about how well they did on the test—or who continue to push your buttons until the day you leave; in the struggles to understand yourself and others, in the quiet moments of just being with another person, drinking mate, talking, singing, laughing, and crying.

We as the church have sent you out into the wilderness and called you back to a new kind of wilderness in this country.  This wilderness is both familiar and foreign, full of love and full of fear and hatred.  The struggles against injustice, the pain of oppression, sorrow, and hardship are not reserved for other countries. They are here, too, as are countless options for which spaghetti sauce or laundry detergent to buy, new and different ways to ride the bus—no longer the crammed rush hour buses of Buenos Aires or the long winding country roads. 

But what may be the hardest about this new wilderness we’ve called you back to is that it seems so much like the land and places and people you called home before; like a place you should know.  Shouldn’t you understand what to do, who and how to be here?  And shouldn’t they understand you?   

But the people, the places, the politics here        have all changed in subtle and obvious ways,                  as have you, so that the ways you seek familiarity and comfort aren’t the same.  The people you are encountering again might not understand why you like different foods, why you need more time to talk or more time to be silent, but together, than you did before. It's wild, this new wilderness.

Your YAGM year may have ended, but this journey in the wilderness has not, and maybe it never will.  Maybe, as you continue to leave your heart in different places, you will always find a wilderness around you—of joyful mountains and snow, of desert and scorching heat, of safety and of danger.  We don’t know.  You can’t know until you get there.

But the promise I have, the promise of God for you, is that Jesus will show up.  In the suffering and struggle as well as the comfort and joy.  Jesus will show up because that’s how the Holy Spirit works—in the most unexpected places and ways—driving Jesus out into the wilderness to meet you.

The Holy Spirit has claimed you.  The voice from heaven claims Jesus and she claims you as well.

You are God’s child, the Beloved, with whom God is well pleased.  And there is no amount of wilderness or struggle or pain or screw up that can make that untrue.  There is no loneliness, isolation, alienation, or oppression that diminishes God’s immense love for you.  And, especially in these days that we have together, there is no questioning, frustration, random burst of laughter or tears, or befuddlement that is more powerful than God’s love for you.  No matter what.

Thanks be to God.