Text: Luke 4:1-13

Speaker: Joel Miller

It’s hard to enter into the story of Jesus in the wilderness from the comfort of a church sanctuary.  A roof over our heads means we don’t feel the effects of the sun.  Being surrounded by four solid walls greatly reduces the odds of a wild animal roaming by.  There’s no wind.   We’re climate controlled at a pleasant 70 degrees.  There’s a drinking fountain just a few steps away.  There are restrooms with flush toilets and hand soap.  In short, anytime we gather here, and really almost any time in our modern lives, we are far from the wilderness.

It’s difficult to put ourselves inside this story of Jesus in the wilderness, but not impossible.  We have imaginations, and probably most of us have been, at some time in our lives, in a place we would consider wild.   

The wildest place I’ve been the last couple years is the Grand Canyon.  It was with two college friends I hadn’t seen in forever.  Four days and three nights, camping down in the canyon, hiking from the south rim to the north rim, and back again.  It was a lot of hiking with loaded backpacks, and since we hadn’t been together for a long time, a lot of talking.  It was a lot of old rocks, layered down to the exposed metamorphic Vishnu basement rocks, approximately 1.75 billion years old.  When rock is named after the supreme lord who creates, protects, and transforms the universe, it’s old.   

There was a well-worn path, but there were times in the less-traveled parts that felt pretty wild.  Like us soft-bodied relatively new-on-the-scene homo sapiens were flimsy guests in a landscape better suited for California condors and bighorn sheep.  And despite all our walking and talking, one couldn’t help but slow down and feel the silence.  Silence in the wild.  Silence as the solid basement rock of existence over which everything else is layered. 

In a place like that, one feels the ridiculously small scale of one’s life, which somehow affirms all the more life’s significance.  Not life in the abstract, but the first person consciousness of one’s particular life.  One encounters many wonders in the wild, one of them being – inescapably – oneself, and all the layers – new, and very old –  one holds in one’s being.

Jesus, “full of the Holy Spirit” Luke says, returns from the Jordan River of his baptism, and heads out to the wilderness.

It’s significant that this takes place at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.  More accurately, it’s before his ministry begins.  It’s also significant that Jesus didn’t necessarily have this on his calendar.  There’s no sign he’d been planning for this.  Instead, Luke, Matthew, and Mark, all indicate that Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit.  Mark even says the Spirit threw Jesus out into the wilderness.  As if it holds something essential and entirely necessary.  Something that would be missing if Jesus had gone from his baptism straight to the villages of Galilee where he called his first disciples, gave his first teachings, and performed his first healings. 

Not yet. 

First, the wilderness and the many layers one encounters there.  First facing down one’s hunger and the temptations that come with it – hunger for bread, hunger for power, hunger, even for invincibility.  First, the inescapable confrontation with what the wild evokes within oneself. 

I guess if you’re going to meet up with college buddies, you plan the details in advance.  But if you’re going to meet up with devil, it takes a spontaneous act of the Holy Spirit.  And if you’re fasting, no need to pack in 30 pounds of supplies on your back.  The Spirit leads – or throws – Jesus out into the wilderness.  And so begins the Sundays of Lent every year, when we re-trace these steps, if not literally, then spiritually, from wherever we are – sanctuary, house, or otherwise. 

Seen through the lens of compost, a pile of layers, we can consider that Jesus does not enter the wilderness an empty vessel.  He has nothing yet on his resume as savior and messiah, but he is not a blank slate.             

One layer he brings is the story of his people.  This is not the first time a descendant of Abraham has wandered in the wilderness for 40 units of time.  Back in Exodus the Hebrew people were enslaved in Egypt.  But they were delivered out of oppression by a divine hand, and before they begin their collective life as settled people, they are in the wilderness for 40 years.  They face hunger, many trials, and ultimate questions about who they are and who they will become. They receive the Torah as an extended commentary on the core commandment, “love your neighbor as yourself.” 

This is a layer Jesus carries into the wilderness.  We all have that layer – stories about where we come from.

On top of that foundational story are the many other Hebrew scriptures Jesus had internalized.  He will reference three of these scriptures when faced with the devil’s temptations.  “One does not live by bread alone.”  “Worship the Lord your God, and serve God only.”  “Do not put the Lord to the test.”  And, shockingly, or perhaps not, the devil himself will quote scripture right back to Jesus.  It’s a Psalm promising unconditional protection:  “God will command his angels concerning you, to protect you….you will not dash your foot against a stone.”  Scripture is not, and never has been, a stable, rock-solid layer.  It’s more like a garden with fruits and roots and seeds and weeds, any of which can be dangerous in hands of a devil.

On top of that layer is Jesus’s life experience up to that point that’s almost entirely hidden from us.  Luke does present his mother, Mary, as a fierce poet, and maybe a singer.  Her words during her pregnancy with Jesus could very well have been a lullaby in Jesus’ infancy and instructions in his youth. It’s what we call the Magnificat in Luke 1. Jesus’ mother Mary proclaims: God “has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and set the rich away empty.”  A mother’s instruction, a father’s voice, form a layer in everyone’s compost pile.  It can be rich, or it can be rotten, or some mix of both.  But it’s there. 

Below all that, even lower than a people’s origin story are the tendencies and traits of being human.  We are not California condors or bighorn sheep, but we are primates.  We find our identity in collective behavior and we tend to make meaning by defining ourselves over and against others.  Our quest to survive can cause us to exercise power over others rather than power with others.  Our appetites can drive us to do things for short term individual satisfaction in ways that harm long term well being.  We are fully human, and so too, says every theologian who has survived accusation of heresy, was Jesus.     

And even deeper, if we want to go there, is that Vishnu bedrock layer.  The silence that underlies all created things.  What Buddhists call the “original face” when they pose the question: “What was your original face before your parents gave birth to you?”  There’s not supposed to be a clear answer, unless you count silence in response to an unanswerable question as an answer.  Jesus, in the wilderness, Luke says, is full of the Holy Spirit, which could be another way of saying that he is touch with the layer that makes the compost pile possible in the first place.  The open, formless reality which makes all actuality possible. 

Jesus enters the wilderness – is led by the Spirit into the wilderness, holding all these layers, and more.

The thing about a compost pile is that the layers don’t stay separate layers for long.  Unless you’re the Grand Canyon, in which case those layers take a very, very long time to break down.  But they will, eventually, erode and mingle, uplift and twist, metamorphasize and melt down.  Even the Vishnu Schist is very slowly cycling toward becoming something else.

But we’re working on the human scale.  Our layers, like the layers of a compost pile in the backyard, are always and forever in dynamic relationship with each other.

And that’s the test of the wilderness.  How in the world are all these layers going to relater. How is Jesus, how are we, as human beings within a particular life story, going to resist our worst tendencies, and be led by the Spirit whose fruit, the Apostle Paul will later write, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Well, you’d think for such a test, Jesus would come prepared with fortifications.  Some dense protein bars, maybe his favorite spiritual writings uploaded onto a Kindle for lightweight transport.  

Instead, he does what spiritual traditions have long recognized as a way to make oneself physically depleted, mentally vulnerable, and spiritually alert.  He fasts.  He doesn’t eat anything for weeks.

I won’t add any further commentary on fasting here, except to encourage you to read Sarah Zwickle’s meditations this week.  She weaves together her experience of physically starving herself in young adulthood through an eating disorder, with revelations of how compost takes in all of everything, even the messiest, hardest edges of ourselves, and remakes it into something that can grow. 

Suffice it to say, during his time in the wilderness, Jesus is in a highly vulnerable and depleted state.  He confronts the human tendencies most present for him: Immediate fulfillment of appetite – turn these stones into bread.  The will to power and domination – all these kingdoms can be yours if you take up the devil’s tools to rule them.  And the lie that living a faithful life will enable one to avoid suffering and death.  Throw yourself down from the top of the temple.  “God will protect you.”  That’s the devil quoting scripture.  All of these must have been some of the real layers of thought and tendency Jesus brought with him into the wilderness.  Otherwise they wouldn’t have been temptations.

All of this leads us, in the spirit of Lent, to take a look at our own compost and its many, many layers.  There are the ones similar to Jesus – the stories of where we come from, our relationship with scripture, the childhood voices of our parents, the fact that we are very, very human.  And the depth beneath all these depths of silent presence. 

And we each have the decomposing mess that is uniquely ours to smell, and the beautiful way we see the world that is uniquely ours to cherish.

What’s key about the compost pile is that it all belongs, and it all ultimately contributes toward fertile soil for something to grow.  What’s key about the wilderness is that there’s no hiding from oneself.  It’s a place of great vulnerability.  It’s a place we may never go were we not thrown there by Holy Spirit.

The story ends unresolved, which is a good place to end the first Sunday of Lent.  Jesus finds nourishment in the face of each temptation.  The devil departs, as it says, until an opportune time.  The layers are mixing, the unseen agents of transformation are at work.  And it’s enough to be the beginning.  Jesus sets out from the wilderness “with the power of the Spirit” Luke says in the verse after what’s printed up front.  With the power of the Spirit, Jesus begins to embody the good news for which so many people are so hungry.