Into the Wilderness
"What did you go out to the wilderness to look at?"
As many of you know, my spouse, Dr. Felicity Harley, and I have been here for about seven weeks, experiencing this community as a tranquil scholarly oasis for writing—thanks to the librarians, catering staff, and all of you.
The house in which we have been staying as Dean’s Scholars is just an acorn’s throw from the Coffield Refectory, so it is not exactly a place of scarcity or isolation. Yet, when you approach the front door, there is a handsome, more-than-century-old brass knocker with the words “The Wilderness” inscribed on it.
With the help of the dean and Professor Bob Pritchard, whose home it formerly was, we discovered the origin story of this whimsical designation—you may know it already. The esteemed professor—Dean Sparrow, as he would become—who was its first faculty inhabitant found the placement of the house isolating. Long before the current cluster of buildings centred on the Refectory went up, that reverend and scholarly gentleman had to make his way across scrubland, flooded creeks, and even past nests of snakes in season to get over here to the library, chapel, and administration. He complained, in melodramatic and biblical terms, that he felt “like St. John in the Wilderness!” The label stuck.
Jesus asks in today's Gospel, what did the crowd had gone out to the wilderness to look at, he asks whether they, who had earlier gravitated to John the Baptist, had wanted merely to see the reeds that grew there—representing both the riverside scenery and some kind of wavering uncertainty, the opposite of John’s feisty preaching.
More ironic still is Jesus’ other question: “Did you go to see someone in soft clothes?” You remember that John’s camel's hair and leather belt were anything but. They went, then, for something else: for what John was doing and for what the wilderness really is.
“Desert” and “wilderness” do not mean barrenness but emptiness. Some of you know deserts, and some will have been to that wilderness where John was active, what we call the Judean Desert, although it is hardly barren.
The desert of the Western imagination, by contrast, is a bleak fantasy: both a product and a tool of colonialism, wherein we imagine the city as the place of fulfilment and the wilderness as the place of scarcity and fear, which must be fenced and planted. Thus late capitalism beguiles us into thinking that the desert is no-place, and that those who live there are fit simultaneously to be dismissed and dominated.
Those who live in and around that Judean desert—or another—will tell you that it is not necessarily what it appears to be, let alone what it is said to be. Ask Bedouin people there, or Australian Aboriginal people in my homeland, or Diné in Navajoland: the wilderness is a place of beauty and even of plenty, for those who know how to find it. Its gifts are provided almost mysteriously, especially though not only when the rains come and the desert blooms, and animals and human beings alike can forage on its bounty—not because of their efforts, but because of God’s efforts. This was actually the original meaning of the idea of “wasteland” for Europeans too: land that was not privately owned or enclosed, land on which the poor could depend for gathering fuel and foraging for the wherewithal of life.
The desert is not paradise, but neither is it inhospitable to those with eyes to see.
John goes out to the wilderness and invites the crowd to go with him, to renew Israel’s collective memory of a time when, in the wilderness, they were closer to God. As people passed through the water again, just as Israel had once passed through the Red Sea and then crossed the Jordan to enter the land of promise, the wilderness became the place where the love of God and of the people for one another was remembered again; where what John and Jesus called “the regime of heaven” was present.
That was why the crowds went. So, what did you go out to the wilderness to see?
Seminary may initially seem more like the land of promise than the wilderness. This lush and beautiful campus, its generous resources, and its institutional strength seem like everyone under their own vine and fig tree—especially relative to a church that overall looks mixed and at worst faltering and unstable.
Yet this is also the wilderness. Even for you first-years, some of the excitement and idealism will be wearing off as the realities of Greek verbs, new community, distance from family and friends, and the rest all add up. The temptation may be to think that because there is not always a vine and fig tree under which to sit unafraid, the experience will not be everything you hoped for.
Let this be the wilderness. The seminary does not exist to fulfil your expectations; it exists to help you fulfil God’s expectations. Let it be a place where the rumor of that coming reign of heaven calls you to this baptism of formation, where both gift and struggle are God’s gift. For the wilderness is not where we settle, but the place through which we pass, on the way to where Jesus is leading.
"Let those with ears to hear, listen."
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