The Desert

Waking up in Vegas

It’s good to be back with you all, I hope you didn’t miss me too much. We went on a little pre-baby get away, just Lexi and I. We figured it might be our last adult vacation ever. So we made a bold move and went to Vegas. Yeah. I can confirm that it is still living up to the name “Sin City.” So if you were thinking to yourself, “man I’d like to go to Vegas and see if it’s still wild and crazy,” there’s no need. Your pastor went and scoped it out for you. You’re welcome.

But seriously it was nice to get away. We had a nice time. Ate a lot, watched some shows, didn’t gamble at all, and had fun. But there’s always something that catches me off guard when I travel out west. It’s the amount of open space that just blows my mind. I’ve been an east coast city adjacent person for my whole life. So I live in this mindset of land scarcity. Land is super valuable in my eyes. So when I go out west and there’s tons of land I just get this real itch to buy some.

I told my dad that, and he was like “absolutely not. Do not buy land in the desert Son. You’ll never get any water to it.” This is why Parents are still important, even when you’re pushing 40. I forget how nature works. I’ve lived where people have made water available everywhere for my entire life.

So I think about that advice that my dad gave me, “don’t buy land in the desert” and of course I’m a pastor so I really have got to get all theological with it. Like that’s a good word. And as we drove around the Nevada desert and saw how much literal nothing there is, I couldn’t help but think to myself, wow. What a deeply important metaphor this is for my life and for the lives of Christians.

If you are reading the Bible with us this year then you likely remember the book of Numbers and how the Israelites just wandered around in the desert, in the nothingness for years and years. If it wasn’t for God’s grace that fed them, gave them water, and protected them from the dangerous realities of the wild then they most certainly would not have made it. But regardless, even though God sustained them in the desert, they weren’t meant to live there. They were meant to live in the promised land. A land that flowed with milk and honey. I hear the voice of God speaking down to Moses — “don’t buy land in the desert, son.”

Painting with Ashes

On Wednesday, we began the season of Lent, which is the journey that we take to the Cross and Empty tomb with Jesus. We marked our heads with Ash, the dust of the earth and remembered that from dust we came and to dust we shall return. This is not a curse, this is a natural reality of life on this side of eternity. But it is also a reality that informs us that after our mortal bodies serve their purpose, they continue to do the work of creating and sustaining life by becoming the very dust of the earth that creates and sustains life.

Through ashes, and the time of lent, we are invited to take an honest look at our lives as they truly are, and then reflect on how they are in deep need of transformation. We accept the frailty of our condition, seeking an encounter with God who can take the ashes of our life and move us into something new. We find that God is an artist, and that the dust of our lives, our ashes, are the medium that God uses to paint beautiful masterpieces, and we will find over the course of the next 6 weeks that God wants to teach us how to paint with ashes as well.

The dust, the ash, and the desert that we find them in aren’t our problem. It’s what we do with them, or in them that matters. We’ll always have to visit the desert, that’s a simple fact of life. We just shouldn’t be buying land there.

In fact, Jesus models this for us. Jesus wandered around a lot. And his first real bout of wandering was one of the most infamous stories of Jesus’s life. It’s the story that the entire 40 day season of lent is based on.

Right after Jesus was baptized, the act that symbolized the beginning of his ministry, he was led into the wilderness, into the desert of Israel. And what Jesus found in the desert was what you most definitely find if you wander into the desert and wake up in Vegas. Temptation en mass.

Let’s take a look at today’s text and just see what Jesus dealt with during his visit to the desert. This is Luke 4:1-2 which states

Luke 4:1–2 NRSV

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished.

So Jesus is confronted by the source of sin, and he’s in a pretty weakened state. and this is how it all goes down.

Luke 4:3–13 NRSV

The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’ ” Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’ ” Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’ ” Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ” When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

So Jesus here is being portrayed as a human, open to temptation, just like you and me. And that’s really important. He’s being offered the same promises that you and I are offered, the same promises made to Eve in the garden on that fateful day in the garden.

Eve was offered fruit, something that looked good for eating. And within that fruit was 2 promises — the authority to define good and evil for herself and the opportunity to be like God.

Jesus was offered bread, something good to eat. He was offered authority, and the opportunity to show off his status as God.

Every day we live our lives tempted by these same things right? Things that will fulfill our primal desires — food, sex, pleasure. The authority to rule over others and define what is right and wrong based on whats best for ourselves. The opportunity to be our own God.

Eve failed. We fail. But Jesus does not. Jesus keeps his eye on the ultimate prize. Even when the tempter uses scripture to try to entice Jesus, Jesus knows the whole story. Jesus uses scripture to ward off temptation, and he’s able to do so because the words of scripture are written on his heart.

And Here’s a side note:

And so when you ask yourself, “why am I reading this Bible?” The answer is because sometimes the things that aren’t good for you, that aren’t good for this world, come to us veiled in the quotation of scriptures. And it’s our responsibility to know the whole story so that we can look at them and say… no that’s not quite right.

Ok. Side note over.

Don’t Buy the Land

But let’s be honest with ourselves about ourselves. We are people who are broken, and in many ways that brokenness was handed to us. It was handed to us because we are sinful by nature thanks to the failure of Adam and Eve in the garden. We are broken because of the failure of the people who were supposed to care for us and our hearts when we were children. We are broken because systems that were put in place to help us failed to see us.

And of course we are broken because of the decisions that we’ve made over the course of our lives. We are broken because we’ve sought after money and power with a bit more fervency than is healthy. We’re broken because we’ve placed work above family, drinks or drugs or gambling above our own health, ourselves before others and God. We’re broken because it’s just so darn easy to be lured in by the hopeful and empty promises that call to us from the desert.

And so we wander out there, and for a time it all seems well. We see the for sale sign and say “this seems like a good place to settle down.” But the reality is that it’s a trap. And when we put down roots in the broken places of our world then we begin to identify ourselves with them. When we put down roots in the broken places of our world then it becomes increasingly harder to pull them up and move back into the glorious future that God is calling us to. It just seems so far off. We just seem too far gone.

What does God want with persons like us. Desert people?

Well it seems that God actually wants quite a lot from us. God’s wants to move us through the desert. God wants to take us, broken mess and all and move us into a place of human flourishing. God wants us to want the good gift of life that he offers if we will just keep moving through.

The people of Israel were stubborn in their time in the wilderness. For 40 years they travelled, constantly rebelling against God who was moving them towards a promise he had made to their ancestor Abraham. But still, God is calling these people to come out of the Desert and into his promises. In Deuteronomy 7:6-9 Moses says this to the people:

Deuteronomy 7:6–9 NRSV

For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you—for you were the fewest of all peoples. It was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath that he swore to your ancestors, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who maintains covenant loyalty with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations,

Moses is telling the people “hey yes you’ve been making a mess of things. I know. I was there. But this is still how God sees you.” Now its true that this generation that Moses is talking to in Deuteronomy is the children of those who caused such a problem in the wilderness. But as you all know, generational curses are a real thing that need to be broken. I guarantee you that these children watched the disobedience and the grumbling of their parents and were quite prone themselves to the same type of behavior. In fact it happens later on in the story. But the point is, that’s not how God sees them.

God sees the Israelites as a chosen people. Folks who are living in the desert, who are a broken mess, whom he is going to turn into something beautiful if they will let him. They aren’t going to be desert dwellers any longer, if they will just listen to the voice of the God who calls them “treasured.”

This is where we find ourselves too. We stand in the desert with the choice to buy land or move on. God’s got hopes for us. God’s got a masterpiece in mind to paint with the brokenness that we have endured. God’s got deep restoration avaliable to us here and now throughout these 40 days of lent and beyond. But we have got to move. We have got to take those steps.

And it’s difficult because maybe we’ve done this before. Maybe we’ve been doing this year after year and we’re tired because this life of following Jesus seems much more like a treadmill than it does a walk in any particular direction. And friends, I wish that I could say that it won’t always be this way, but the fact is that no matter how far away we move, we’ve still got a little bit of desert living inside of us. And so we just naturally gravitate back to those things that steal joy from us, that steal our heart away from our neighbors and our God.

But the good news is that as long as we keep moving, as long as we don’t give up and put down roots in the broken desert places of our lives, then we will be living into our identity as God’s treasured possession.

The 90s hip hop artist Coolio once said of his experience living the gang life, “as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I take a look at my life and realize there’s nothing left.” And if that doesn’t aptly summarize what it’s like for us to live out here on the edge of the kingdom that God has promised us, I don’t know what does. When we live according to the promises of this world — money, power, and the violence required to get them, then we are staring the desert in the face and saying ‘“I think I’ll buy land here.” And that land yields nothing but danger and death.

But the invitation of Jesus and the Lenten season is to walk past that for sale sign. We are invited to cross through the water of life and start living the transformed life that God offers through the empty tomb. For it is written: blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Filled with grace, filled with love, and filled with the peace of God.

You see, no matter where you find yourself, whether you’re deep in the desert or just right there on the edge, we have been given a gift. The desert, though dangerous and not a place to buy land, is a place where we are still deeply held by a God who loves us. The desert is a place where Jesus still meets with us. The desert is a place where we can honestly look at our lives and make a decision to walk with God towards a new future. The desert is the place that God begins to paint with our ashes and make us into something new.

So will you take those next steps. Will you be honest with yourself about where you find yourself today. Where is your soul still putting down roots in the desert. Where is you heart still drawn to that for sale sign out there somewhere off of Route 66 in the middle of nowhere? Why is it drawn there? What do you need to let go of in order to heed the warning of my father: “Don’t buy land in the desert, son?”