Wilderness, Memory & Cycles
Salvation isn’t an event, it’s a cycle: of wilderness, repentance, then forgiveness in order to find a way to salvation. But the way through this cycle isn’t always clear, and we often need others to help us get there.
About wilderness, memory, and cycles.
Wilderness
First, wilderness. But actually, I’d like to start with what the wild, wilderness is not.
An article circulated this week, from the New York Times, about baptisms. The reporter was writing about this new fad in baptism of baptizing in horse troughs and inflatable tubs, purchased on Amazon, blown up and filled for baptisms accompanied by t-shirts and hashtags, and swelling rock music and lights, and (heaven-forbid) cheering. She talks about the old leaky and expensive baptistries, those built-in tubs, as relics of the past and sort of conclusively at one point in the essay said, “baptism is getting a little bit wild.” I could not disagree with her more.
My beef isn’t with the churches with selfie stations after baptism, or the light show during the service, however. My beef is in the reporting because in calling these baptisms “wild” she cheapens this idea of wild and wilderness.
To mislabel in this way isn’t a simple slip of the tongue, it’s a deep and profound misunderstanding of the movement of God. True wilderness is a place that is desolate, abandoned, inhospitable. The places where no one wants to be or go. It is grief, seasons of profound sadness, a big ol giant mistakes that feel unredeemable.
Memory
What’s interesting about the lectionary passages from today is that they almost all reference each other. Luke 3 where we hear about John’s call from God, is deeply connected to Luke 1, where we learn of the circumstances of John’s birth, but Luke 3 references Isaiah 40, and the Malachi passage is connected to Isaiah 40 because it’s the only other time in the Hebrew scriptures that there is mention of a messenger who is sent to prepare or clear the way for salvation. All of this implies to me that we are meant to make some connections between the Hebrew prophecy of a messenger and the New Testament messenger, John the Baptist. And while my more literal self wants to just make that one for one connection, I think the connection between these passages is much more interesting than that.
Isaiah 40, the passage referenced in Luke 3, in the NRSV, reads differently than Luke of the NRSV. Isaiah 40, verse 3 says, “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord...” According to commentary in the Jewish Study Bible, this translation reflects how this passage was originally written and used. The marks used for chanting the text in the synagogue place “in the wilderness” with “prepare the way” (or clear the way). The Jewish Study Bible translates it: “A voice rings out, ‘Clear in the desert [or the wilderness] a road for the Lord’”. This as opposed to how it’s been translated in Luke, which says, “The voice of the one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord…”
This translation makes a lot more sense in Isaiah, as chapter 40 in Isaiah is considered a turning point in the book. Israel is still in exile, but the prophet moves from judgement to reminding the people of the promise of God––that they will move into a time beyond this wilderness, and into God’s promises for them. In this context, then, of exile, it seems likely that Isaiah was simply assuring Israel that they had suffered enough, that they no longer needed to wait for God’s forgiveness, that the way was being prepared for their return.
This difference in translation is a really small shift in meaning, but it was enough to jostle free my brain from the literal and into something much more capacious. This slight change in meaning from Luke’s translation back to the original Hebrew takes the focus from a specific figure crying out from the wilderness, and turns it to a way being prepared, a road being cleared, in the desolate places, in the wilderness. Perhaps what Luke was doing in bringing up this old Jewish story of prophecy, was recalling or invoking memory. Yes, he was talking about a specific figure, but in doing it this way, he was also recalling collective memories for his readers, of what was lost and of what could be. It’s as if Luke is saying “remember when we were in exile and the prophet told us that our suffering would be over? That we would be restored?. Yes, this is happening yet again.” Luke isn’t being nostalgic, he is giving life to memory.
In the opening essay from his newest collection of poems, called Home, Christian Wiman said of memory: “memory might not simply be occasioned by the physical world––but actually inhere within it. What [that] means...is that the past isn’t inert and sealed off but volatile, available, even salvific.” This memory is meant to save.
Cycle
But there’s something else in there that stands out to me, an important piece tucked into both Luke passages, and that is this idea that John was to prepare the way by proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. It’s a key part of what Luke wants his readers to remember. That lost, in the wilderness, the way out, the way to salvation, is through–––through repentance, the Greek metanoia, which is a change of heart; for the forgiveness, aphesis, a dismissal or letting go; of sin, hamartia, failure or missing the mark.
And now, we have a cycle––a story that we cycle through again and again. Lost, in exile, in the wilderness, awaiting salvation, we are shown the way to repentance, to change our lives, and to forgive, to let go of what was, and then move into salvation, to hope and restoration. We are always in the wilderness, and we are always being prepared by someone or some thing to repent and forgive, and we are always being saved. We live in constant cycles of wilderness, waiting, repentance, forgiveness, and restoration. Israel knew it in their time, the New Testament writers knew it in theirs, and we know it, now, in our own ways.
Restoration
Okay, but there’s more piece to all of this. It’s a thing that happens in all of these texts, which is that salvation is hard to find and hard to see. Why is salvation hard to find? In short, because the wilderness is a scary, overwhelming place. And so a road must be cleared so that we can find the way back in those desolate places back to salvation, back to hope. Who will prepare the way, then? What will that feel like, when you’re out in the wilderness? I can’t be certain, but I think, it will feel something like this. Returning to Christian Wiman’s introductory essay, he has a written conversation with the last few lines of the poem “If China” by Stanislaw Baranczak. Baranczak was Polish and was blacklisted for his activity in the Polish human right’s movement. He was refused an exit visa eight times before he was able to leave Poland in 1981. The whole poem is worth reading, but for this purpose, I’m just going to read the last few lines.
The poem ends like this:
“‘who told you you could settle in?
who told you this or that would last forever?
didn’t anyone tell you you’ll never
in the world
feel at home here?’
And Wiman says in response: “But someone did tell us, didn’t they? Existence whispered in our ear at some point, with or without words, for each of us knows, even if we have never known, that pull...to some time so replete with being it seems timeless, wordless, ‘everlasting omen of what is.’”
In this Advent season, we are meant to remember one part of the cycle: that part where the way is prepared in the wilderness. This is a time to remember that deep metanoia, what it takes to shift that heavy ship that is our hearts, towards letting go of sin, the times we have failed, so that we may be restored to that time so replete with being. Perhaps you currently feel lost, in a place nobody wants to be; but these words of the prophets are clear, watch for voices because there is someone, some thing that will prepare you with a change of a heart in order to let go, and you will, once again, enter into hope, the kind of hope that becomes your home.
–Emily Hansen Curran
