wilderness God

There’s no escaping the long thread of wilderness (along with its close counterpart, exile) that runs through the Bible from beginning to end. Even before the Creation took shape, there wasn’t nothing—there was wilderness. Chaos, darkness, an untamed place waiting to be forever changed by the breath of God.

Adam and Eve, upon their infamous fall in Genesis 3, were exiled into a wilderness outside the curated Temple Garden that was Eden. Cain, upon murdering his brother, was banished even further out into “the land of wandering.” Humanity was scattered from Babel in confusion; the world was returned to a precreation wilderness state in the flood; Noah and his family became exiles, floating on the chaos waters while it rained for 40 days and 40 nights.

Immediately after being chosen and promised a land, Abraham self-exiled to Egypt, foreshadowing all the times his sons and grandsons and great-grandsons would do similarly: Isaac became a refugee of famine in Gerar; Jacob had to flee his home country for fear of Esau; Joseph, Jacob’s favorite son, was sold into slavery in Egypt and then followed by his father and all eleven brothers when they, too, became exiles because of famine. Moses was banished from his people into the household of Pharaoh for the first 40 years of his life, and then became a sheepherder in the wilderness of Midian for 40 years after that—fleeing the consequences of bloodshed, like Cain. He became the leader of the entire people of Israel out of bondage in Egypt and into . . . yet another wilderness, for yet another 40 years.

This is all just in the first two books of the Bible. We haven’t touched on David fleeing from Saul, or the Babylonian kingdom literally marching the children of Israel into exile in chains, or Jesus going straight from His baptism into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights to be tempted by the Adversary.

For some reason, the wilderness matters—and not just because it’s evidence of a sin-tainted humanity. Remember, the wilderness was there first.

The Bible calls the first pre-human wilderness not evil, not bad, but “formless” and “void.” It is less than ideal because it’s disordered and not yet what it was meant to be. It’s waiting for something to happen that will fundamentally alter it.

For the breath to hover over the waters (Genesis 1, 8).

For the angel to come and wrestle (Genesis 32).

For the bush to be set ablaze, yet never burned up (Exodus 3).

The wilderness is as key to the plotline of any given human life as it is to the plotline of the Bible, and what the Greater Story tells us again and again is that it is not a place we go alone. When Adam and Eve were sent out from the Garden, we think they were punished by the withdrawal of God’s presence—and yet, in the very next chapter, Cain and Abel are communing with God (Genesis 4). When Cain is banished to the land of Nod, God Himself sets on him a mark of guardianship and protection so that he won’t receive the just desserts of murdering Abel (Genesis 4:15). It’s on the run from Esau that God blesses Jacob (Genesis 28) and on the run from Pharaoh that He gives His personal name to Moses (Exodus 3). He actively leads the children of Israel by fire and cloud out of Egypt and through the Sinai desert (Exodus 13).

All this, from the God who supposedly threw Adam and Eve out of His presence back in Genesis 3.

Clearly, that’s not how it works. He is not only the God of Eden or the God of the Temple.

He is God of the wilderness, too.

When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” . . . Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.

Luke 3:21-22, 4:1-2a

Can you see the beginnings of Creation-over-again? The Spirit over the waters. The Voice from heaven. Jesus, the True Human that Adam and Eve could not be.

And yet the first place He goes is not into the Holy of Holies with God, to the place and status that our first ancestors lost. It’s to the wilderness. And the wilderness, thus occupied by the Trinity, becomes Eden—and Genesis 3 is rewritten with the ending it ought to have had, this time in the desert-made-sanctuary.

We, too, occupy this story, and so even after Christ’s victory we don’t get to live wilderness-free lives. We will all find ourselves in small and great exiles, mini and vast deserts. Chaos and emptiness continue to pock the created world and its history and perhaps, instead of asking why God lets us so suffer, the real question is Why—and how incomprehensible it is!—does God go with us?

We fail, and God follows us out of Paradise.

We sin, and God meets us where we’re hiding.

We are wronged, and God settles in beside us to refute the accusations of the devil.

Our wildernesses become temples because God is there.

“The poor and needy search for water,
but there is none;
their tongues are parched with thirst.
But I the Lord will answer them;
I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.
I will make rivers flow on barren heights,
and springs within the valleys.
I will turn the desert into pools of water,
and the parched ground into springs.
I will put in the desert
the cedar and the acacia, the myrtle and the olive.
I will set junipers in the wasteland,
the fir and the cypress together,
so that people may see and know,
may consider and understand,
that the hand of the Lord has done this,
that the Holy One of Israel has created it.”

Isaiah 41:17-20

We are not always in the wilderness because of God’s judgment. It’s not always a bad place or the result of evildoing. No, even the Israelites who were exiled to Babylon—which was a judgment—were encouraged to live good lives in their unideal circumstances, to continue to participate in the Edenic vision of creation and kingdom (Jeremiah 29:5-7).

But we are always meant to be looking, praying, waiting for the Wilderness God to make a move.

Divine breath. A dream. A fight. A burning bush. The Holy Spirit, the very presence of God.

You’re still standing in the same place, but suddenly this wasteland is holy ground. Maybe there’s even water, or a green thing growing, a sign of life.

Maybe you are being made new.

“Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland.”

Isaiah 43:18-19

from Sabbath to New Eden

It is Holy Saturday, the seventh day of this long and fraught week. On this day in Genesis 2, after the creation of the world, the Creator rested.

On this day 2,000 years ago he rested again in the sleep of death—yes, once again, after a work of creation. Just not the one anyone was expecting.

After the pattern of Sabbath is marked out in Genesis 2, a second account of the creation of the world begins:

Then Adonai, God, formed a person from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, so that he became a living being. Adonai, God, planted a garden toward the east, in Eden, and there he put the person whom he had formed. Out of the ground Adonai, God, caused to grow every tree pleasing in appearance and good for food, including the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

A river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divided into four streams. The name of the first is Pishon; it winds throughout the land of Havilah, where there is gold. The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx stone are also found there. The name of the second river is Gichon; it winds throughout the land of Kush. The name of the third river is Tigris; it is the one that flows toward the east of Ashur. The fourth river is the Euphrates.

Adonai, God, took the person and put him in the garden of Eden to cultivate and care for it. Adonai, God, gave the person this order: “You may freely eat from every tree in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You are not to eat from it, because on the day that you eat from it, it will become certain that you will die.”

— Genesis 2:7-17, CJB

I’ve spent a great deal of time in the Garden of Eden over the last six weeks: the garden where God began his kingdom project, where he made sacred space to dwell, where he placed his first self-likeness to represent him and co-rule with him. It was a place of abundance, blessing, and gift; a place of rest, riches, and promise. Even the perfection within the garden’s borders was meant to spread beyond, and we are tantalized with the descriptions of Havilah, Kush, and Ashur, the mysterious lands where life-giving rivers meander and wind. The Kingdom was always intended to expand.

Daily we are reminded how far the image-bearers fell short of their holy vocation. There are sicknesses, deaths, homeless encampments, abused children, wars, autocrats, billionaires, slave laborers, and people who are starving. Instead of growing outward in glorious partnership between God and human as they explored and tamed and cultivated the wild lands of gold and gemstone, the borders of the garden named “Delight” (‘Eden) and the gate leading to the Tree of Life were closed by cherub and flaming sword. The human, having willfully broken communion with the Creator, was not to be allowed back in—banished, instead, to a wilderness now poisoned with death because of his sin.

In Holy Week we are drawn back into garden spaces: First, to the garden named “Olive Press” (Gethesemane) where the Messiah was wrung out in prayer, crushed under the anticipation of his fate, and betrayed. And then, after Jesus drank the cup of death, to an unnamed garden mentioned only by St. John:

Now there was a garden in the place where Jesus was crucified, and in the garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been laid. And because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and the tomb was nearby, they placed Jesus there.

— John 19:41-42

Jesus was crucified—hung on a tree of death, to put it plainly—in a garden.

And in a garden like the place Adam was made the first (doomed) image of God, Jesus—the true and perfect Image, the Son of Man—was laid to Sabbath rest, barricaded by stone and guard, and for an instant the cosmic enemy rejoiced that his Genesis 3 plan to overthrow Creation had succeeded.

Adam, and any hope left for Adam’s heirs to return to the Garden of Eden, was destroyed.

Until.

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. . . . Mary stood outside the tomb weeping. And as she wept, she bent down to look into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and the other at the feet. “Woman, why are you weeping?” they asked. “Because they have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I do not know where they have put Him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there. But she did not recognize that it was Jesus. “Woman, why are you weeping?” Jesus asked. “Whom are you seeking?” Thinking He was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried Him off, tell me where you have put Him, and I will get Him.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to Him in Hebrew, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”). “Do not cling to Me,” Jesus said, “for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go and tell My brothers, ‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, to My God and your God.’”

— John 20:1, 11-17

If Genesis 1-3 is the beginning of Creation, John 20 is the beginning of New Creation. We are not in Eden anymore; it is no longer Sabbath, but rather the “first day of the week” in another kind of garden. Adam is long dead, but the New Adam is alive. The stone is rolled away! The flaming sword that rendered impassable the path back to God’s presence has been utterly removed by the Son of Man, the only Image worthy of walking straight through it. He who hung accursed on the tree of death has become the fruit of the Tree of Life.

And the first person to meet him in New Creation history is Mary of Magdala—who, initially, supposes him to be the gardener.

I love that detail. She’s not wrong. Mary of Magdala may not realize it until she hears him say her name, but she is the new Eve in the new Eden meeting the original Gardener of the original Eden and the New Adam of the New Creation at the same time. She is our very first glimpse of the Church, the Bride.

And she is the first to expand the borders of this new Eden out into the wilds beyond.

Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them what He had said to her.

— John 20:18

If we remember anything this Resurrection Day, let it be that our Bridegroom is alive, and we live in New Creation now. Our life’s work is to push the borders of his Kingdom outward, not by winning battles in the old way—fighting, arguing, going to war, trying to out-gun or out-snark those we see as “God’s enemies”—but by participating in the Grand Reversal of Christ’s example.

He came on a donkey, not a war horse. There is no place for violence in this kingdom.

He was lifted up on a cross, not a throne. There is no place for pride in this kingdom.

He was crowned with thorns, not gold and jewels. There is no place for greed in this kingdom.

He entrusted the Gospel first to a woman. There is no place for sexism in this kingdom.

He expands his borders by cultivating gardens and hosting banquets. There is no place for war in this kingdom.

Tomorrow, we awaken as members of a new family and citizens of a new nation. We awaken as children who share a Father with Jesus, as royal priests in a new kind of temple, bearing God’s image and God’s sacred presence within ourselves. We awaken on the first day of the week to a world entirely remade.

Thanks be to God!

the 40 days of uncreation

We begin the Lenten fast with ashes on our foreheads in the shape of the cross, and the priest saying to each of us in turn, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

The reminder comes directly from Genesis 3 and the consequences of the first humans’ sin:

By the sweat of your face
You shall eat bread,
Until you return to the ground,
Because from it you were taken;
For you are dust,
And to dust you shall return.

Genesis 3:19

God composed the human body out of dust, and because of his sin, the human’s end is a decomposition—an uncreation—back into dust.

Uncreation is also where we find the first instance of forty days in Scripture:

Then the LORD said to Noah, “Enter the ark, you and all your household, for you alone I have seen to be righteous before Me in this generation. . . . For after seven more days, I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights; and I will wipe out from the face of the land every living thing that I have made.”

Genesis 7:1, 4

Before there was the world, the world was water—and to water it once returned. Over the waters of chaos in Genesis 1, the Spirit of God breathed and said “Let there be light.” But when the lighted world began to drown under the darkness of human evil, God called the chaos-waters down from the heavens and up from the deep to undo Creation and to reclaim His Spirit-breath from every living creature on whom it had been bestowed.

Save a few.

These few—Noah and his family, and the pairs of animals by kinds—are the anticipation of New Creation amid the despair of uncreation. They are the hope of life that flickers still throughout our 40 days to memento mori. The ark that comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat, passing safely through the waters of death as a vessel of life, becomes our symbol of God’s mercy and faithfulness—that even as we examine ourselves over these 40 days of Lent, finding sin and failure and unworthiness too deep to measure, we remember the cleansing waters and hold fast to His guarantee that we have passed through death into life.

We are dust, and we are New Creation people. Decomposition is not our final destiny.

As written by St. Peter,

In the ark a few people, only eight souls, were saved through water. And this water symbolizes the baptism that now saves you also—not the removal of dirt from the body, but the pledge of a clear conscience toward God—through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers subject to Him.

1 Peter 3:20b-22