So, if you ever decide you want to take a road trip, to just pack the car and go, in any direction to anywhere, I want to suggest you consider South Dakota. It is an amazing place; you won’t go wrong.
From here, you will most likely begin traveling west along the upper midwest until you arrive in the eastern part of the state, in Sioux Falls.
From there you will continue to travel west, and, if you are fortunate, you will stop in Mitchell to admire the murals created by stapling colored corn cobs to the side of the walls of the Mitchell Corn Palace.
They currently use 12 different colors or shades of corn to decorate the Corn Palace: red, brown, black, blue, white, orange, calico, yellow, and now they have green corn!
Each year there is a theme of prairie animals, or holidays, or presidents, beautifully depicted on these walls. When I was last there they were honoring Elvis, and there he was up there, swiveling his corn cob hips.
And this coming year, Wild Bill Hickock will be memorialized doing whatever he did best. Shooting thing, I reckon.
As you gaze at this wonder of the modern world, you also can’t help but feel a certain sense of pride. For you know, deep down, that this is the stuff of civilization.
But as you head further west, you will notice that things begin to slowly change. A deep gloom may descend upon you because you start to see that the number of Stuckey’s and Dairy Queens are fewer, because the numbers of exits are fewer, because the number of places to exit to are fewer.
Civilization, as we know it, is disappearing, and it is beginning to look very barren and very bleak.
Then you reach Wall Drug Store, the last chance, the last stand, the last outpost, advertizing…for free!...the last iced water for the next 50 miles. You stop and look at the stuffed jackalopes and sample the salt water taffy, not wanting to take that first step into the unknown.
But eventually you have to leave behind the snow globes, bobble heads, and dream catchers. You have to leave behind civilization.
And you enter into the Badlands -- a wide desert of exposed buttes and spires and pinnacles. And nothing much more, but the occasional scorpion or prairie dog, avoiding the occasional bobcat – tracking them with its eyes.
This is harsh, dangerous country. This is not a place to stay the night if you are civilized. Best head back to the luxury of a Best Western before the sun sets.
Our ancestors may have been wandering Israelites, able to make a desert journey, but we are better off hunkered down in a motel room with the distractions of free WiFi and iced water.
The Badlands have that name for a reason. It’s the wilderness; it’s threatening; and we don’t want to come face to face with it. But then again, that is where we go with Jesus in Luke’s story today.
Before today’s reading, Matthew barely had time to get Jesus born, and get all those wise men off the set before he tells us that Jesus came down from Galilee to Judea, a grown-up, civilized man living in a grown-up, civilized world.
And then the next thing we learn is that Jesus has appeared before John, lined up with the crowds, waiting to be baptized. And when he is, the heavens open up, a dove descends, and God announces, “This is my Son, and I love him.”
Had God thundered out his love for me in front of all everyone, I might linger a bit to be admired. But not Jesus. He leaves. He heads for the badlands.
The Son of God is there in the desert. After forty days he’s hungry, thirsty, and weak. And this is where things get weird. Satan appears, and, seeing this weakened, famished Jesus, he. . . simply wants to talk.
And Jesus agrees. He engages the tempter, faces the temptation, has a conversation, parrying each attempt to enthrall him with, “No, that’s not what God wants. No, you’re not who God is. No, that’s not how God saves the world.”
Jesus is fully engaged in this wilderness conversation, confronting those things set there to tempt him, set there to corrupt God’s plans.
It’s so easy to think of this story as a model of our ongoing struggle with temptation, with sin. But we aren’t Jesus; Satan is not trying to corrupt us – we are already corrupted.
When Jesus enters the badlands, he enters something completely other. We go there because it’s our home.
And this is what Lent is all about. . . recognizing the wilderness for what it is. And once we do, we can begin to have our own conversations with our own shadows of corruption and sin.
“What is it about those people that make me so angry?”
“God seems to keep leading me to take my life in a different direction, but it’s just so hard to give up all that I have now.”
“How do I admit what I did was wrong? What if I get found out, if people find out who I really am?”
Those sorts of conversations that we can only hold with ourselves. . . and with God. When we finally admit that those sins we don’t think of as sins are sins. When we finally understand that running away from something is not the same as running toward something.
When we sit in our wilderness and realize that we are alone because, by feeding our scorpions of hate or greed or indifference, we have isolated ourselves from others…and from Christ.
Lent is the tough introspective work of changing our lives, held during a time in our Church year when we leave the happiness of the birth of God and head toward the happiness of the resurrection of God.
It’s a time to pause and not worry so much about keeping our Lenten promises for forgoing chocolate or coffee, but to take that journey into the wilderness of our souls.
It sounds dangerous, and there are wild animals out there with their eyes on us, tracking us, waiting for us to stumble. But there’s something else out there, too. Matthew tells us that Jesus didn’t go out to the wilderness alone.
The Holy Spirit went with him in the form of angels.
And the Holy Spirit remains there. And is there to sustain us when we have our own conversations, so don’t be afraid to take this journey.
Jesus came out of the wilderness after forty days a changed man, ready to do the work of God, to go where God leads, to love and serve others, to do miraculous things through God and with God.
So we too have our forty days. And how we use this time in our wilderness will determine how our conversations with will turn out.
Perhaps we will see, with new eyes, those around us who hurt and are in need. Perhaps we will listen with new ears as God calls us to follow, to leave the old things behind. Perhaps we will speak with new tongues when we say, “I confess,” to those we’ve wronged and find out that this difficult admission opens up entirely new ways for loved ones to love us.
God’s Spirit accompanies us during these changes. And leads us out the other side of the wilderness, sustained and loved so that we can sustain and love others in and through Christ.
And that’s how it is with Lent. So, when you leave here today, get a nice long drink of iced water, leave civilization behind, and take those first steps into the Badlands. Like the ancestors of the wandering Tribes of Israel, we will see each other on the other side. And that land will be beautiful.