In the Desert, Prepare the Way of the Lord

In the Desert,

Prepare the Way of the Lord

Retreat address given to Sheffield Diocese Ministry Team Quiet Day

29 January, 2009

by David Runcorn

Mark 1:9-13

The gospel of Mark opens with a missionary call - ‘Prepare the way of Lord’. And as a team involved in developing ministry and mission that makes for a succinct vision statement.

But notice where we are told to be doing this. ‘In the desert’. It is strange how that bit of the text goes missing.

Even Jesus must obey this call a few verses later when, newly baptized, in the passage that frames the season of Lent, he is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness.

In the desert prepare the way …

But does this actually make any sense to you?

In the scriptures there is no way to God that does not pass through the desert.

Yahweh is a God of the wilderness.

And in the gospel there is no way in to the presence of Jesus without going via that strange, wild figure of John the Baptist – there in the wilderness, on the edge of civilization, on the edge of all accepted norms of personal hygiene and healthy eating – and possibly on the edge of sanity. It is very hard to know what a ministry selection conference would make of him.

(His Diocesan Director of Ordinands would have already suggested he does a placement in a church of a more catholic tradition.) Clearly a Pioneer ministry route for him - but let’s face it, no one wearing camel’s hair is ever going to be a fresh expression.

In the desert prepare the way …

Is this making any more sense to you yet?

Here we are with a gospel to proclaim, a church to rebuild, a culture to engage with. The task is huge, the needs are urgent - and we are being called away to the least inhabited, most unproductive, hostile, sterile, Godforsaken places on the face of the earth.

What sort of mission strategy is this?

There’s no point in improving your after service coffee, strengthening the welcome team , jazzing up your church notice boards, doing all age worship or booking your leadership team on training days for ‘Leading your church into a Wadi ….’ There’s no one out here!

So what’s the point?

Well there is no point.

And that’s the point.

The desert confronts all our assumptions about relevance, usefulness, strategic thinking, effectiveness and importance. I don’t mean that strategy is not important – but the gospel starts with no sensible strategy at all in our terms does it?

The desert, like God, is use-less . It is not for understanding in terms of what we think is use-ful or significant. The desert, like God, is outside all that stuff and supremely indifferent to it.

But if the desert is where the salvation of our God will come to us, then, as Andrew Harvey has written, ‘it is the things that ignore us that will save us in the end.’

I sometimes wonder if the Mission Shaped Church report had started here, in the desert, where the gospel, and Jesus’ ministry, starts, how it might have proceeded and what kind of shape would have emerged. But desert dwelling does not make it as one of the ‘marks of mission’.

So I find myself asking what a Desert-Shaped Church might look like and what would be its marks of mission?

Some years ago I was given a copy of a check list that an anonymous priest used to assist him in discerning a call to join a new church or community. What would you expect on such a list?

His questions included these three:

Is its desert dry enough?

Is its wilderness wild enough.

Is its darkness deep enough’ …. ?

If you asked those questions of a church or organisation today what qualities and priorities would you be looking for and what would be the signs of their presence?

In the scriptures the desert is a vital place in the formation of God’s people and it still is today. The desert is where God does mission.

Thomas Merton actually defined Christian life and prayer as ‘a preference for the desert’. Well a preference for what?

To ‘prefer the desert’ must mean being willing to dwell at some level, in places the world knows no way of valuing and finds no hope in.

It means being challenged as to how we measure or recognize what we want to call ‘growth’.

It means learning to honour and pray from what is dry, empty, unblessed, unlovely.

It means giving a strange priority of what is unseen, what is in the dark, in silence and even what is found in the apparent absence of God.

Walter Brueggemann is underlining the importance of this when he writes of the period leading up to Israel’s exile and the destruction of Jerusalem. He suggests their deepest crisis was not foreign armies or political alliances. It was that increasingly they could only relate to God in terms of their own needs, pre-occupations and agendas until no real relationship was possible. God finally had to break with his people in order to begin the task of re-building it at all. The glory must depart. He connects this to the rampant consumerism of our own age which leaves us ‘so preoccupied with God being for us, our programs, our needs and agendas … that we do not attend enough to God’s hiddenness – God’s own Godness …’ (Hopeful Imagination, 1992, SCM p70)

In such an age as ours the desert is a tough but essential place of redeeming and formation.

For the desert is ultimately a place for those who seek nothing but God.

So it is there we learn a radical dependency and trust. The wilderness is a place we can do nothing of ourselves to subsist. It takes us out of our comfort zones and any ways in which life or ministry can be self-securing.

It is a place where our idols and false securities are exposed for what they are and broken. If you go into the desert with a false god there will be no one to save you.

This is much more than spiritual consumer preference – it is a matter of life or death.

It is a place of simplifying and stripping – you take anything into the desert you don’t absolutely need and you will soon dump it. There is no room for luxuries at all. And if you go into the desert without clearly knowing what you need you will soon be found out.

But this de-cluttering and stripping leaves a space God apparently finds hospitable, and where beyond belief, the humble Christ makes his home among us and ministers through us.

Finally the desert is where we are called to do mission – because it is where God does mission.

Pete Rollins is a theologian in the Emerging church network. In his book, How (not) to speak of God (SPCK) he puts the challenge like this:

For too long the church has seen itself as the oasis in the desert of life – offering water to those who are thirsty. In contrast the emerging community appears more as a desert in the oasis of life, offering silence, space and desolation amidst the sickly nourishment of Western capitalism. It is in this desert, as we wander together as nomads, that God is to be found. For it is here that we are nourished by our hunger.

So here, in the desert that is our present context – we wander as signs of a strange, glorious and mission-shaped contradiction. Beyond all expectation and hope, the renewal of the world begins here. And if it is found here, beyond all life, then surely no life that will be left out - and all flesh shall see the salvation of our God.

Thanks be to God.

The Revd David Runcorn is a freelance writer, speaker and consultant in areas of spiritual development, vocational guidance and ministry development. He is an associate minister at St Peter’s Church, Littleover, Derby, and his web site is here.