WILDERNESS GUIDE AND SAFARI SAVIOR

The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel

January 13, 2008

The Baptism of Christ

First Congregational Church, Glen Ellyn, Illinois, UCC

www.firstconge.org

630-469-3096

Scripture: Matthew 3:1-17

¹In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, ²‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ ³This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,
‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” ’
⁴Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. ⁵Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, ⁶and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

⁷But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? ⁸Bear fruit worthy of repentance. ⁹Do not presume to say to yourselves, “We have Abraham as our ancestor”; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. ¹⁰Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

¹¹‘I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹²His winnowing-fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing-floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.’

The Baptism of Jesus

¹³Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. ¹⁴John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ ¹⁵But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.’ Then he consented. ¹⁶And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. ¹⁷And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.

Sermon:

In all my years in the church, I have heard stories from the bible that take place in the wilderness. From the early stories of the Old Testament when most of the world was wilderness, I have imagined the people of Israel trekking across desserts, wandering for miles without any sign of civilization, and coming upon tribes, maybe nations, and then more wilderness.

Yet by the time Jesus lived, things had changed. Two thousand years ago, Jesus wandered from town to town, from Galilee to big city Jerusalem, but still, he often found himself in the wilderness. We know that when things got hard for him in his ministry, he retreated there, spending forty days being tempted by the devil, for there were no human beings to keep him company. So even though there were towns and cities, there was also much undeveloped landscape in Israel, places where one could go and be assured that no one else would be there who walked on two legs and bathed. The wilderness was right there, around the corner.

And that was where John the Baptist chose to live, to work and to baptize people. If you wanted to hear his teachings, you had to come to him. You had to find him out in the wilderness of the Jordan River, where he was living like a wild man, eating locusts and wild honey, surviving out there with the animals, far away from the comforts of home or the company of other people. Except that we know there were other people. They were coming out to see John, to be baptized by him in the river for the forgiveness of sins. This was a new message. People thought John might be the savior of the Israelite people. But he knew he wasn’t. John told his followers who had trekked out the desert to find him,  ‘I baptize you with^* water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with^* the Holy Spirit and fire.”

But people had trouble believing that there could be more to come. Like most of us, they got stuck on what they saw right in front of them. They focused on the present and thought, “This is it. We’ve got John. We’ve got it figured out. He will save us. Our work is done. Whether he thinks he’s the guy or not.”

At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, for you see that today’s passage comes early in the gospel of Matthew, not late, early on, Jesus showed up in the wilderness to be baptized by John. John, who knew he himself was not the savior, recognized the savior when he saw him, and said, “You should be baptizing me.”

But Jesus demurred, “Let it be so for now, for it is proper.” In other words, Jesus was saying, “If you really understand that I should be the one baptizing you, then take my word for it that you should baptize me.” So John did it, and “just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. ¹⁷And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

It is one of many stories in scripture in which the order of things is thrown off. John comes first and starts baptizing, but he recognizes that the one who will come later will not be his follower but his leader. The last gets to be first and the first gets to be last. It’s an early prediction that following Jesus will be full of contradictions, and that the hierarchies and chains of command will stop making sense.

It is one of the many stories in scripture that takes place in the wilderness. It appears that in order to learn that the world does not work the way we think it does, you sometimes have to leave the world you know, and go out into the wilderness.

Until a week ago, I had never been to the wilderness. I didn’t realize I had never seen the wilderness until I saw it and I said to myself, “I have never been here before.” I have been to beautiful beaches, I have hiked in gorgeous state parks, and I have looked out at sunsets that made my heart stop with their raw beauty. But even in these place, there was always the sign of humanity. If it wasn’t the parking lot at the end of the hiking trail, never more than a short walk away, it was the litter from the last person’s picnic, the soda can wedged into a rock, the Frisbee left behind on the beach, all signs that humanity had claimed this spot in nature and made it our own.

But after a mere 36 hours of travel, last week I found myself in the wilderness. And I realized, it’s a lot harder to find your way to wilderness from the suburbs of Chicago than it would have been for Jesus or John the Baptist. They could walk there. But for me to get to the wilderness, I had to fly to Atlanta, catch an eighteen hour flight to Johannesburg, South Africa, with a refueling stop in Dakar, Senegal. From Johannesburg, we left the comfort of Delta airlines to bus out to a tiny plane decorated with the insignia of Air Botswana.

This little prop plane was like some hand-me-down plane from a fire sale twenty years ago. My husband’s seatbelt had been stitched together where it had ripped, and the bathroom door banged open and shut the whole flight, given that the lock was broken. Was it my imagination, or was wind whipping into the aircraft from mysterious spots, welcomly, since there was no functioning air conditioning. Just for the record, you will never again here me complain about the inconveniences and discomfort of American air travel. We landed in a small village called Maun, now the heart of the eco-safari tourist industry upon which the brave nation of Botswana has pinned its economic hopes.

We piled out, a strange collection of adventurers from all around the world, people who had clearly not gotten the memo that vacations are supposed to be relaxing affairs where you rest with a fruity drink on the beach. No, our family gathering of eleven people, our nuclear family of four, my adventurous, very cool in-laws who had come up with this idea, and five cousins joined the small but growing group who venture to Africa not to hunt and kill big game but to admire it, at safari camps in the Bush, where the only shooting takes place with a camera.

We were not yet in the wilderness. The crowd from the Air Botswana flight went off to separate spots in the tiny village airport, to catch our little planes that would deposit us all in different camps out in the Bush. We walked to the end of the hot runway to see a young man in his twenties flip open the engine on the tiny prop plane as casually as you would flip the hood of your car. He adjusted a few items, told us to be careful when we landed in forty minutes, and to avoid the propeller which would still be running, so that he could drop us in the middle of the African bush and take back off out of there without having to restart the engine. And with that I found myself flying through the air low enough to the ground that I could see immediately when the modest mud houses disappeared and the true wilderness began. How do I describe the flight? It really did not feel like air travel. It was like riding in the back seat of a noisy Ford escort in the sky. And down below? Nothing but beautiful Bush landscape, water pools, low Acacia trees, dirt and patches of verdant green. And then I saw the elephants, walking around the landscape as freely as I would walk around Lake Ellyn. This was their place, not mine, and they popped up every minute or two in our vision from the tiny, noisy airplane, but we were not in their’s. I could never have imagined that later that day, I would see those elephants as closely as I am seeing you on the front pew. As well as zebras, baboons, wildebeests, warthogs, and even hippos. This was the wilderness and we, as human beings, would be the guests, not the hosts, in this strange world.

Now, I am not a hunter. I realize that may come as a shock to you. But in a safari, you indeed hunt. You hunt animals not to kill them but merely to see them. The goal is to intrude on this natural habitat as unobtrusively as possible, to explore and stay there, but to leave as little of a footprint behind as possible, so that future generations may get to see these most miraculous of God’s creatures at a time when so many of them are in danger of extinction. In some ways, by intruding on the animal’s world in this way, we may be their best hope, if others come to value this type of tourism, and I know it’s not for everyone, it may lift not only the economies of the small nations that engage in it, but save the animals as well.

But loving the wilderness is not without its complications. In the week we were in Botswana, tourists and visitors to Kenya, another popular safari destination, came face to face with the political unrest of a nation that resulted in the horrific deaths of 300 people taking sanctuary in a church.

And here in the States, on the day we were leaving for our adventure, the news was filled with the terrible story of a young man at the San Francisco zoo, who had been mauled and killed by a tiger. This was a tiger who had been used to people, to hearing and seeing them up close all day long, and yet, when the opportunity presented itself, the tiger acted as he was meant to act as a tiger, and saw that young man as his prey. For that, the tiger was shot, for a man eating tiger will not work in captivity, but the world was forced to consider the larger questions of whether animals should be in captivity at all. And mostly we all grieved with the parent of that young man, and his injured friends, who will never again view a trip to the zoo as harmless fun. For animals are indeed wild, and I was going to spend my vacation with these creatures. Reading the story about the tiger in the zoo on the airplane to Africa made me wonder whether we were all crazy.

But seeing the animals up close made me realize that I was receiving the gift of a life time, and seeing the miracle of God’s creation up close in a way that was so humbling. We can build our sky scrapers, and pave our highways, and launch our giant airplanes into the sky, but we could never invent anything as miraculous as the hippopotamus, who we saw lumber out of the water and then run, and I mean four tons of hippo, run, and fast, with such efficiency but in a way that visually made no sense. If God can create a hippo that can run, four tons of it, and can create all the birds that feed on it’s back, and the grass that feeds the hippo, and the sunset in Africa that paints the sky a different color than the sunset here. If God can do all that, what can we hope to achieve that would be more important? We list the Seven Wonders of the World as things like the pyramids, triumphs of human ingenuity, but the wonders of the world are made by God.

The wonderful author Maya Angelou once wrote about trips, “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” In my case, my recent travels reconnected me in friendship not only to a different culture of people, but also to the earth and its creatures.

I had to go all the way to Botswana to realize that the wonders of the world may be the blades of grass in my yard in Glen Ellyn, or the squirrel in the tree outside of church, or the power of an infant’s grasp and the softness of a mother’s touch. These are the things God made, and we are not the authors of the wonders of the world.

When Jesus approached John the Baptist to be baptized, Jesus was acknowledging early on that even he was in need of God’s grace. Even he needed to be baptized. And he didn’t need to be baptized by someone perfect. Crazy, wilderness living John the Baptist would do. In fact, he might be perfect for the job, this man who had given up titles and prestige back in the city. John brought Jesus out to the wilderness. He was like Jesus’ wilderness guide, ho showed him the power of such a place. Later, having met his wilderness guide, Jesus would return there many times in his ministry, and it was always a place of humility and regrounding for him.

It occurred to me that as much as I love my creature comforts, there may actually be a cost to living far away from the wilderness. We human beings out here in civilization run the distinct risk of starting to believe our own PR. From the massive malls in Oakbrook to the Hancock Center stretching to skies downtown, we might mistakenly start to think that we have it all figured out, that we are our own messiahs and that we have no need of God’s grace, no need of God’s baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We might fool ourselves into believing as the next luxury home goes up that this is the salvation of the world. We might drive down lakeshore drive and look at the wrong things. We might get mesmerized by the magnificent mile, instead of the more magnificent lake on the other side.

It is to people like us that the wilderness stories speak. They remind us that in a different time and place, the holy man John, and the more holy man Jesus, sought out the emptiness of the wilderness to remind themselves that God was everything, and that sometimes, in life, when you think you have figured out the order of things, you have it all mixed up.

In most of our safari hunts, we were most anxiously in search of the animals that would most likely see us as prey. I don’t know why that is, maybe it’s just human nature, but we, and I am ashamed to admit it, almost got bored of the animals that were easiest to see. That includes animals I have waited all my life to see, like giraffes, and elephants and impalas and zebras. But after seeing them everywhere, we longed to see the rarer animals, the lions, the leopards, the cheetahs and the wild dogs. The hunters, in other words, who both frighten us but fascinate us with their sheer power and strength.

Racing around in the land rover, a vehicle entirely open to the world, we banked upon the fact that if we stayed seated and quiet near such animals, they would see the vehicle itself as a large strange animal they had no interest in hunting. But if we were to squeal or stand up, the guides warned us that we would look like prey. I have never seen my children sit so still in a car before.

One night, we hit the jackpot, with a pack of wild dogs. Wild dogs are famous hunters, because even though they are small compared to the big cats, they can take down animals as large as a water buffalo because they hunt as a team. Five wild dogs can attack such an animal and take it down, but what is frightening about such team work is that they eat as soon as they pounce.

An animal caught by wild dogs will not be killed and dragged away, but will be eaten alive. And we found ourselves on such a hunt, off roading over trees and rocks to keep up with the pack on the trail of a baby impala, in other words, Bambi, I kid you not.

It was at moments like this, and I did have them, where I thought, you know I am all in favor of appreciating God’s creation, but this is a heck of a vacation for a vegetarian. The circle of life. I’ve had it with the circle of life. Let me tell you, it’s not at all like the Lion King.

To be honest, up to this point early on the trip, I had not really understood that we were going to be seeing predators. I think that as much as I knew we were in the wilderness, I still thought that if it were me who was to approach those wild dogs, they would let me pet them. For they looked like big friendly old mutts, with splotches of colorful fur, cute big ears, and a desire to hunt that was shocking me into the realization that I was not in Glen Ellyn any more.

There is a Somalian Folk Saying that goes, “When the elephants fight, the grass suffers.” That even in the activities of the herbivores, a life is lost, for all of are indeed connected, in our life and in our death. We are fascinated by our own strength and fragility, seen through the lives of the creatures we observe as somehow different from us, yet so much the same.

The group in the land rover was excited, especially the kids, as we chased after the wild dogs. Another guide had radioed us to say he seen the little lost impala, truly a deer caught in the headlights, and it was only a matter of time before the two connected in destiny. It seemed inevitable, and we were the spectators, along for the ride, some of is wanting to see what was coming next, others dreading it absolutely but all of certain we knew what was ahead. And then all of a sudden, as close as that altar is to my pulpit. Right there next to us, appeared a great lioness. And those wild dogs were out of there. Scattered, gone, for now that hunt was over because everyone got it that this was one of those wilderness moments where the order of things had just been reversed.

It was like the bible story this morning about John the Baptist. He was the wild dog, the one the tourists were following, the one everyone was interested in, the one who had people’s absolute attention.

And then appeared a lion in the wilderness, a creature stronger, and greater and more powerful than a wild dog. And the wild dog bowed before the lion, understanding that his role now was to step back, and let the other come forward.

In life, we can get caught up in chasing the wild dogs, in thinking that the hunt we are on is the most important quest in the world. Only to be confronted by Jesus, the lion in the wilderness, who ought to call all our chases to halt, with his power, his grace and his majesty.

When the lion appears in the wilderness, or here in Glen Ellyn, you’ve got to know: You are not the king of jungle. And thanks be to God.