To Till, and Keep, and Be Tempted

“To Till, and Keep, and Be Tempted”

First Sunday in Lent Year A, February 26, 2023

First Presbyterian Church of Sandpoint, Idaho

Andy Kennaly, Pastor

          I attended Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin and majored in Outdoor Education with a Recreation and Leisure emphasis. Using the outdoors as a mode of teaching, the curriculum was geared towards developing skills. If I would like to take a group on a canoeing trip, for example, then I should know how to canoe. This skill set would help me lead and help keep others safe.

One of those classes was called Wilderness Skills. This involved a May term, where for the month of May you focused on one class. For wilderness skills, about 16 of us students went off campus to learn and practice wilderness skills at the Audubon Center in Sandstone, Minnesota. The culmination of that time was a 14-day canoe expedition to the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota, and the connected Quetico wilderness of Ontario. This involved canoeing, portaging from lake to lake, camping, and for three days of this trip we went solo, and had the option of fasting from food, which I did. Three days on my own without eating.

Spring break took place the end of April, just prior to this May term class. As I sat on a rock next to a wilderness lake in one of the most beautiful places on Earth, my college-age mind was racing with thoughts of fried chicken. I’d gone on spring break with some friends to southern Indiana, then to Kentucky. My friends took me to dinner at a nice place along the Ohio River, and I had real Kentucky fried chicken. That memory was a blessing and a curse. I savored the flavors that I remembered, and I longed for a second helping.

I did have a backup. In my gear I stowed away some gorp, that trail mix of raisons and peanuts, and I had a package of crackers. I was very tempted to eat, which would break the fast but tie me over until we regrouped. I didn’t even have to tell anybody, could’ve kept it secret. Yet I chose to ignore the crackers and welcomed that hungry feeling to reveal lessons that only fasting could show. On that rocky shoreline, in the cool of a beautiful spring evening, I felt so lucky to have had that spring break time away, time with friends sharing delicious meals. On that wilderness shoreline I gained perspective and appreciation on how special it really is to have eaten authentic meals of local flavors, and to have relationship with people who share their lives with me. The divinity of food became tangible, the gift of a meal became sacred to my experience. To break bread in community expanded beyond church sacrament into ordinary life.

The wilderness is a place set apart. In this day and age, wilderness involves a protective status to help limit human encroachment and extraction of raw materials that disturbs the land. In the Bible, most of the significant, main characters share some sort of wilderness experience that changes their life and shapes their prophetic ministry. A wilderness can be dangerous, one’s exposure and vulnerability is heightened without the usual protective measures we enjoy with luxuries at home.

A wilderness is not only threatening from external aspects, such as wild animals, or loose rocks, or storms, but the raw wilderness reveals our inner character, assumptions, and attitudes. Our worldview may or may not hold up under the pressures of these tests.

But what is the nature of wilderness tests? What’s at the core of internal and external dynamics taking place in wild? Jesus in his conversation and confrontations with the tempter, the devil, Satan, shows us wilderness is a place that invites listening, deep listening, and echoes of silence. Jesus says, “One does not live on bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” This involves deep listening. Sometimes God’s word is not verbal language. Wilderness has a way of attuning us through all our senses to pay attention, to notice. This could involve longing, inner stirring, pain or joy that surprises us. God’s word finds a way to reveal itself, and wilderness experience helps us savor and appreciate listening in various ways.

When we hear God’s word it does not necessarily mean we understand it, or fully recognize it, or are able to articulate what it means. A second thing Jesus shows us as he’s given the invitation to jump from the pinnacle of the Temple so God’s angels would catch him, yet he says it is written, “Do not put your God to the test.” That second thing is trust. One doesn’t need to test if they have trust, or maybe the word is faith. Faith doesn’t need to see proof. Faith doesn’t test just to make itself feel better. It’s amazing how Christians are timid when it comes to trust, to not knowing, and they insist on certitude. The opposite of faith and trust is not doubt, but certitude, the insistence that one has the full truth and picture and cannot be wrong or limited. The devil presents Jesus with a very arrogant invitation, and Jesus chooses trust instead of arrogance.

A final thing Jesus is invited to do is to fall down and worship the devil who has now shown him all the kingdoms of the world and promised them to him if he does this. That third thing Jesus shows us in response to this invitation toward ambition has a couple aspects to it. One involves focus, that as we listen, as trust deepens, we can learn more and more to focus on God’s loving presence. Trust in our own inner experience that embraces the divine within links together contemplation with action, experiential faith with response. This focus helps us turn toward God by renouncing the devil and evil. Jesus shows us an important action when tempted by evil as he says, “Away with you, Satan!” Sometimes that is the best response in the face of temptation, to run the other way, to be delivered from evil so we can again focus on God.

The wilderness is a special place where we are removed from everything we assume is normal or routine. In that place set apart, we can be open to notice things we otherwise overlook. Like Jesus, we are called to listen, to trust, and to focus on who God is and what God is doing in our lives and world. This helps give shape to who we are as we are nourished in our soul and affirmed in our essence as created in the image and likeness of God to care for God’s garden, to till it and keep it.

There are many temptations that would derail the best laid intents. The headlines are filled with stories of grief and despair when this sacred trust of relationship gets violated. The wake of consequences is generational, and traumas and suffering cannot be ignored or minimized. But love has a way of inviting us deeper into our truer self, and Jesus invites us to follow as we learn to listen, to trust, and to focus as wilderness experience with God leads to transformation as only wilderness experience with God can do. May we have courage for the journey of faith, and may we learn spiritual disciplines to help us listen, trust, and focus, to give God room to work in our heart and soul. Thanks be to God for prayerful journeys of faith. And may God be glorified, now and forever, Amen.