Manchaca UMC

Lesson 1: God is at home in the wilderness. 

What surprised me most when I first went to Israel was how rocky and desert like it was. In fact, seventy per cent of Israel is desert. Another word for desert in the Bible can be “wilderness.” The patriarchs Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca as well as Jacob lived most of their lives there. Moses and the people who escaped Egypt spent forty years there. Even Jesus spent time there as the Spirit led him into the wilderness for forty days before he began his public ministry. On one of my trips to the wilderness of Negev the temperature reached 120 degrees one day. So as the weather heats up in the Austin area, I thought it might be a good idea to reflect on some biblical lessons from the wilderness. Another good reason to think about wilderness lessons is that many of us are experiencing our own wilderness time during these days of the pandemic of Covid 19 and the awakening to the ongoing struggle for equality and justice for Blacks in America. I know from being dropped off for a few hours in the wilderness how disorienting the wilderness can be. I remember feeling lost and isolated- not unlike how I feel on occasion these days.

The first thing to know about the wilderness is that, while it seems foreign and foreboding, God is quite at home there. One of my mentors, Ray Vander Laan, notes that while God calls Egypt, “the land of Pharaoh,” and calls Israel, “the land that I am giving you,” God calls the wilderness, “my land!” The ancient rabbis called the wilderness, “God’s womb” because God so often birthed things there. In the Bible God speaks much more often in the wilderness than God speaks anywhere else. And the deeper one goes into the wilderness the more common miracles become. Remember manna and quail falling from heaven and water flowing from the rock? One other thing to know about the wilderness is that we, like Jesus and the people under Moses, will spend time there. We may have expected that our life as a disciple would be like a vacation in Hawaii, but we come to find out that it is more like a wilderness wandering. We struggle with disorientation, isolation and the loss of normalcy. When that happens, look around you. It won’t surprise me if you see God because you are now walking in God’s neighborhood!

I recently saw a story about a tourist couple out for a walk near Queen Elizabeth’s castle at Balmoral in Scotland. On the walk they crossed paths with the Queen and her gardener. They did not recognize the Queen as she was dressed in her gardening clothes. So they asked the Queen and her gardener, “Have either of you ever met the Queen?” The Queen looked toward the gardener and said, “He has.” Then she walked on. The tourists never realized they had seen the Queen! The biblical writers are telling us that if we walk in the wilderness, we will likely meet the King of the Universe. They offer their lessons so that we might not miss that moment.

~David