Sometimes, to go forward, we have to go back.  The first steps on the long journey to the cross, the tomb, and Easter take Jesus and us into the wilderness.  The Spirit drove him into the wilderness.  To do effective ministry we first must confront the wilderness.  You may have noticed the image on the front of the regular-sized bulletin.  There is Jesus, in the wilderness.  How does he look, to you?  To me, he looks lonely.

God is not always happy with the things we do, the things we say, the things we fail to do, fail to say.  He knows us through and through, and His love is always with us.  He wants to save us.  He isn’t going to force anybody to be saved.  When we find ourselves in our own wilderness—that time of confusion, disappointment, sorrow, maybe pain, that time of trial, and temptation—when we are there, let’s remember Jesus was there, too, and the Spirit.  When we feel most lonely, let’s remember we are not abandoned or forgotten.  God is with us: we just need the faith to know it, to accept it, the faith to want God above all else.

Maybe you’ve seen episodes of Man v. Wild, or similar shows where a guy—why is it always a guy?—throws himself into a grueling challenge where he must rely upon his skills, training, and intuition to survive the wilderness.  He always survives.  Bracing stuff.  The basic message is that when you have the confidence to rely upon yourself, you, too, can do amazing things.  Self-reliance!  In the wilderness, we are thrown upon our own resources.

But wait, in the wilderness, we learn our full reliance upon God, or we can, if we’re willing.  A hiker in Washington State slipped and fell, snapping one of his shinbones in half.  He dragged himself for eleven hours, until he was able to get phone service and help was then able to get to him.  His knees were meaty, bloody messes by the time he was found.  Thank God for cell phones!  And reception!  But the mind of faith knows to say thank God for God.  Beloved, God sent that trial, and that rescue.  God’s ways are mysterious, yet there is love in all that He does.  That can often be hard to accept.

The wilderness is not the place of abundance; it’s not the Garden.  In the wilderness, we come to terms with our full reliance upon God.  Moses reminds the people about God’s purpose in causing them to spend forty years in the wilderness:

You shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you in the wilderness these                        forty years, that He might humble you, testing you, to know what was in your heart, whether                        you would keep His commandments or not.  He humbled you and let you be hungry, and fed                      you with manna [. . .], that He might make you understand that man does not live by bread                          alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord” (Dt 8:2-3,                              NASB).

Familiar words; we just heard Jesus speak them.  Our full reliance is upon the Lord.  We say yes, but it becomes easy to neglect (tempting, even) as we get on with other, more pressing matters and pursuits.  We prefer to rely upon ourselves—I mean, how else will anything get done?  God leads, guides, directs, nurtures, and God humbles.  God tests us to make us know.  God knows what is in our hearts: all that wilderness, all that unknown country.  Will we wander there, lost?  Will we seek a way, any way?  Or will we seek the way, and the truth, and the life?

We know we aren’t under the Law, but God does have expectations of us.  The testing and the temptation, the trials we have undergone already in this our wilderness have demonstrated, abundantly, that we need help.  God provides the help we need in order to live more and more as He expects of us: Jesus Christ is our help.  The Spirit is our help.  The Word of God, read and proclaimed, is our help—all this preaching of mine, one week, one step, after another, is meant for help on this journey . . . even if it feels too often like a lecture.  And the bread and the juice offered to you from this table this day, is help for us in the wilderness of this world—torn by strife and jealousy, envy, murder, perversion of God’s plans and way.  This bread and juice are help also, holy help in the wilderness journey within.  What a wilderness our wild hearts have made of this world!

Jesus looks lonely.  It’s hard being in the wilderness, and even harder to be in the wilderness of the heart.  That’s where Jesus is; that’s where the Spirit puts him.  The English Victorian novelist George Eliot wrote, “What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”  When the tempter invites Jesus “to prove” he is the Son of God, he is attempting to get Jesus to distrust God, just as the tempter does in our own hearts.  And how does the tempter tempt? By dangling before the heart authority, invincibility, and abundance.

Authority.  Oh, to be the person who speaks, and others act, perform, obey.  This is the third temptation.  The tempter says all the nations belong to him, and he will give them to Jesus, if Jesus would only bow down and worship him.  He doesn’t even say worship me rather than God.  He may even have been okay with being worshiped in addition to God.  Temptation can be very accommodating, that way.  You can have God and me!  God commands that our worship be exclusive.  God expects this of us as we struggle and strive with career, wealth, family, beauty, self: the wilderness outside and within.

In Christ, we no longer belong to this world, to serve its many, clamoring gods.  The kingdoms of this world?  Jesus says his kingdom “is not of this world” (Jn 18:36).  This wilderness journey has a destination, brothers and sisters: that kingdom.  It’s a long journey, though, and the wilderness is a hard place, and there are many things we must go without that we would rather have, sacrifices we would rather keep.

Invincibility, the second temptation.  How we are wounded by life!  And by others.  All the hurts we bear, the scars—if we saw them all upon one another, how stunned we would be—it would drive us to tears for one another, beloved, as it should; it would drive us to Christ.  The tempter takes Jesus to the highest point in Jerusalem, the highest point of the Temple, about fifteen stories high.  Prove.  Throw yourself down, for surely God will not permit His well-beloved, only-begotten Son to be harmed or hurt?  Surely no harm can come to him!  When, beloved, has belonging to God ever meant that the world could not wound us?  Why, we wound ourselves, and others, still, in our ignorance and weakness, in our fear, sorrow, and wandering need.

What Scripture tells us, many times, is that the Messiah will come and came to be wounded, rejected, hurt, harmed, reviled, accused, convicted, condemned, and to be executed.  But why?  Why?  And who can say?  The world wonders and won’t stop for an answer.

Christ did not come to dash his foot against a stone but to be the stumbling stone—the crucified Messiah; God forces no one to be saved, forces no one to want God above all.  When the people cry out for water in the wilderness and begin to believe that God is not with them, or doesn’t have the power or the willingness to help, God instructs Moses this way: “Strike the rock, and water will come out of it for the people to drink” (Ex 17:6).  Jesus came to be the rock, struck, broken: and from that fracture, abundant water, water for life, for joy, for assurance, for hope.  You are not forgotten.  You are not abandoned.  God wants to help you.  He has the power.

Abundance, the first temptation.  In the twenty-third psalm, we sing of God because of whom we shall not want.  Paul reminds us, simply and beautifully, that God shall supply all our need (Phil 4:19).  But sufficiency and abundance aren’t quite the same in our hearts, and between the two there comes fear, lack of faith, and temptation.  Make stones into bread, the tempter says.  If you came to be in solidarity with people, Jesus, then be in solidarity with their lack, their hunger, their thirst, their emptiness, and fill it; fill it by filling yourself first.

And the tempter’s words are true; the tempter’s words always are, that’s their power—it wouldn’t be temptation, otherwise!  But the tempter’s true words are incomplete because they always miss one dimension, the most important dimension: faith.  Jesus has the power to turn stones into bread, and he uses it, not for himself, but to the glory of his Father in heaven.  Our hearts are the stones he turns into bread.  This is how Jesus is in solidarity with us, with our hunger and our thirst, because Jesus knows the source of our emptiness is lack of God.  And Jesus fills it.  He fills it by himself being full, full of grace, full of truth, full of the Spirit of God, full of love: grace upon grace, fullness upon fullness—abundance, eternal, infinite, glorious, given.

Jesus knew hunger.  He tells his disciples he has “food to eat that you do not know about” (Jn 4:32).  Seeing his disciples confused, again, Jesus clarifies what he means: “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work” (Jn 4:34).  There’s a verse to learn by heart!  In the wilderness, outside us and within, let us remember, together, these strong words, these nourishing words.  Let us welcome our savior with us in this bread and this juice.

Christ offers his fullness, his grace, to us from this table, in the bread that by faith is much more than bread, in the juice that by faith is much more than juice.  “As bread and wine sustain this [earthly] life so his crucified body and shed blood are the true food and drink of our souls for eternal life [. . . .] we come to share in his true body and blood through the working of the Holy Spirit” (Heidelberg Catechism, Question 79), through faith.  The blessing of faith is the blessing of life.  As he by faith lives in us, let us, in faith, live for him.

Now, to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.