Wilderness and enemies. Wilderness as a powerful symbol in our American culture and in today’s Scripture readings. Enemies in our lives and our Lenten disciplines. Enemies and wilderness.
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The story of life in America could be told using the wilderness as a central theme. The first European settlers considered the wilderness an enemy – a dark and evil place, full of chaotic forces to be conquered; a wasteland to be made productive through clearing and cultivation. They saw the native peoples already inhabiting the wilderness as savage heathen requiring civilization and enlightenment, at best, if not enemies to be destroyed.
Later, in the 19th century, European American romanticists like Henry David Thoreau temporarily fled the cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia into the wilderness searching for a retreat removed from the evils of civilization and industrialization. In novels and paintings, the wilderness became a symbol of innocence and simplicity; Nature unspoiled by human greed and the machine.
For some Americans today, the wilderness remains raw material awaiting human development. For others, it represents a playground where affluent city dwellers and suburbanites can find brief respite from their hectic lives. But the white settlers’ war against enemy wilderness has been so successful that wilderness now joins the endangered species list and cries out for protection. Study a map of the western United States and you will find a few precious parcels of land set aside by Congress as wilderness areas – safe from traffic and commercial exploitation, at least on paper.
This tells only part of the American story, however, and tells it from the victors’ perspective. American history looks quite different from the underside.
Native Americans treated the wilderness neither as enemy nor as retreat. They called the land home and revered it as sacred ground. In their eyes, the agent of chaos was European American civilization, destroying ancient and balanced arrangements among the living.
Prior to the Civil War, African slaves found the wilderness a friend that sheltered and fed the runaway. The woods beyond the plantation, the swamp that could not be cultivated, even the backside of a haystack provided spaces where slaves could meet God and worship free from the control of their white masters. One Negro spiritual begins: “If you want to find Jesus, go in de wilderness / Go in de wilderness, go in de wilderness.” The verses continue: “You want to get religion, go in de wilderness; If you ‘spec to be converted; O weepin’ Mary; ‘Flicted sister; Half-done Christian, go in de wilderness; Jesus a waitin’ to meet you in the wilderness / Go in de wilderness” (quoted in Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, p. 111).
After emancipation, the meaning of wilderness in African American culture shifted. Wilderness came to refer to the cold, cruel world of economic instability and social vulnerability into which the freed slaves were cast. This wilderness was located not in the rural countryside, but in the large cities to which African Americans migrated. Black women in particular began to call their struggle to survive and to support their children amidst the hostility and oppression of white America’s factories and homes, hospitals and schools, churches and jails, a “wilderness experience.”
A final image of wilderness has emerged to dominate the American psyche since September 11, 2001. Can you still see it, that enormous pile of rubble left by the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York City? One of the greatest achievements of European American physical, social, economic, and cultural conquest. Those Towers seemed so solid, so resistant to time and failure. Yet in just a few hours they were reduced to a jagged wasteland, a wilderness brought about by human violence and terror, by enemies who use airplanes and cell phones and the Internet.
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Wilderness also figures in our readings from Scripture this morning.
Moses had escaped from Egypt into the wilderness to elude capture as a murderer. There he unexpectedly encounters God in a burning bush and receives direct, personal revelation from God. Which God? The God of Moses’ ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God who discloses for the first time to Moses and to his descendants God’s proper name, “I AM WHO I AM.” As a result of his wilderness experience, Moses leaves fear behind, returns to Egypt with prophetic power, and leads the liberation of his enslaved Israelite people (Exodus 3:1-15).
Moses is not the first person in Hebrew Scripture to meet God in the wilderness. He follows in the footsteps of Hagar, Egyptian slave girl of Sarah and Abraham. Hagar twice meets God in the wilderness – after running away from Sarah’s mistreatment of her and after being expelled from Abraham’s household with her young son (Genesis 16:1-16, 21:8-21). Both times, Hagar’s survival is in jeopardy. Both times, God sees the suffering of the slave, speaks to Hagar, and helps her find a way where there was no way. God spares the life of Hagar’s son Ishmael, Abraham’s first born, just as God later redeems Abraham’s second born, Isaac, when Abraham was about to offer him as a sacrifice.
Hagar has been a sister in the wilderness for African American women in their struggle to survive. (See Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness.) Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all children of Abraham: Muslims through Ishmael; Jews through Isaac; Christians through Jesus.
In the reading from 1 Corinthians (10:1-13), Paul acknowledges God’s care for the freed Israelite slaves in the wilderness. But he also remembers the wilderness as a place of their disobedience and rebellion against God. Paul uses the story of God’s punishment of the ancient Israelites in the wilderness to encourage his Christian reader to greater faithfulness.
Today’s gospel lesson anticipates the trauma of 9/11. Jesus refers to two instances of human death and disaster in his own day: Galileans slaughtered by Pilate and people accidentally killed by a collapsing tower in Jerusalem (Luke 13:1-9). The city as wilderness, wasteland caused by human violence. Jesus’ point? A warning to his hearers, “Unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did” (13:5). Your cities and towns will become places of devastation. You will lose all that seemed so solid and so secure.
Taken together, the readings for this Third Sunday in Lent draw us into the wilderness of repentance from the wasteland of violence so that we might meet God on holy ground. Unfortunately, we hear the word repentance so frequently in Christian settings we may be inoculated against taking it to heart. In Christian Scripture, repentance is not just saying I’m sorry (maybe with fingers crossed behind my back). Repentance demands of us a fundamental reordering of our attitudes and behaviors, a conversion from the old way to a new way. So, with the talk of wilderness still in our ears, let us explore radical repentance by thinking about enemies.
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The only way to destroy an enemy completely is by turning the enemy into a friend.
What does radical repentance look like?
Remember the Amish back in October 2006 after a gunman killed or wounded ten of their young schoolgirls. Writing about that event in the National Catholic Reporter, Joan Chittister said (vol. 4, no. 23, 10/09/06):
“But it was not the violence suffered by the Amish community last week that surprised people. Our newspapers are full of brutal and barbarian violence day after day after day – both national and personal.
“No, what really stunned the country about the attack on the small Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania was that the Amish community itself simply refused to hate what had hurt them.
“‘Do not think evil of this man,’ the Amish grandfather told his children at the mouth of one little girl’s grave.
“‘Do not leave this area. Stay in your home here,’ the Amish delegation told the family of the murderer. ‘We forgive this man.’
“No, it was not the murders, not the violence that shocked us; it was the forgiveness that followed it for which we were not prepared. It was the lack of recrimination, the dearth of vindictiveness that left us amazed.
“Here they were, those whom our Christian ancestors called ‘heretics,’ who were modeling Christianity for all the world to see.”
“The real problem with the whole situation is that deep down we know we had the chance to do the same. After the fall of the Twin Towers we had the sympathy, the concern, the support of the entire world.
“You can’t help but wonder, when you see something like this, what the world would be like today if, instead of using the fall of the Twin Towers as an excuse to invade a nation, we had simply gone to every Muslim country on earth and said, ‘Don’t be afraid. We won’t hurt you. We know that this is coming from only a fringe of society, and we ask your help in saving others from this same kind of violence.’
“‘Too idealistic,’ you say. Maybe. But since we didn’t try, we’ll never know, will we?” That was Joan Chittister.
The only way to destroy an enemy completely is by turning the enemy into a friend.
I saw radical repentance on display a month ago at an event co-sponsored by the School of Theology and Ministry where I work. There sitting side by side were Sulaiman al Hamri, a former Palestinian fighter from the West Bank who had been jailed for years because of his violence against Israelis, and Shimon Katz, a member of an elite Israeli army unit responsible for surpressing the Palestinian intifada in the occupied territories. Sulaiman and Shimon now call themselves “combatants for peace.” They were touring the United States on behalf of hundreds of other Israelis and Palestinians who have put down their guns. Sulaiman and Shimon sat next to one another without tension or nervousness; they smiled at each other and laughed with each other. They spoke to us as two individuals with very different life stories. And they also spoke as a pair of human beings deeply united with one another in friendship. How different the two looked. Sulaiman was tall, big-boned, with dark eyes, lots of dark hair and a bushy mustache. Shimon was shorter, rounder, with light eyes and a prematurely balding head. But I noticed that they both had exactly the same deep lines at the corners of their eyes. Lines caused, maybe, by time spent out under the same sun in the same land where they were fighting and killing each other’s people. The only way to destroy an enemy completely is by turning the enemy into a friend. All other strategies sooner or later lead to revenge and reprisal, vindication for one side at the expense of the other. All other strategies preserve enemies as enemies, ready to fight again and again.
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Radical repentance demands that we take seriously the peacemaking message of Jesus. It is not weakness or sentimentality. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall turn the world upside down. Only as peacemakers do we have the power to destroy our enemies completely by turning them into friends. All our enemies – national enemies around the globe as well as personal enemies within the office, the neighborhood, or the family; the enemies we have made of our own bodies, our past experiences, the futures we dread, death, even the natural world itself.
We create enemies out of our own insecurities and by lashing out at what we see in others that we covet for ourselves. We destroy enemies by spending time with them, listening to them, opening ourselves to them, playing and praying with them, praying earnestly for them.
For in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus we are shocked and blessed to meet a God who destroys our enmity and sin by befriending us, even in the wilderness of violence and disaster we have made. Jesus is our burning bush. This altar is our holy ground.
See and taste. Taste and see.
Amen.
