With Lent fast-approaching this year, our Liturgical Arts Team met early this month to consider the liturgy for the season. Reflecting on the lectionary, practices and traditions, and our needs as a community, we sensed that the Spirit was calling us to reflect on the theme of wilderness. For us concept of wilderness as a place of growth and experience of God is poignant for such a time as this. Being called, gathered, sheltered, nourished, led, and transformed in the wilderness means that, for this Lent, how we are being formed and equipped as the people of God—what our identity and life together is now and will become—is founded in listening for God’s voice and direction, having trust in the process of growth, and actively participating in that process.

Wilderness as a place of call is not unusual for the Hebrew Bible; going into the wilderness is less about seeking rest and solitude, and instead about being reformed or transformed. The Hebrews wander the desert for generations until they are formed by the covenant, God’s covenant transforms the people of God in relationship to God’s world and other peoples and nations, God’s hand of shelter and providence transforms wild and parched deserts into arable land for settlement and stability, God reforms the people by sending them into the wide and wild world. Wilderness itself is a place where human limitations and God’s creativity and dependability are revealed. A people that walks in the wilderness must listen and discern. A people that does not settle lives by what resources can be found, and depending on the rhythm and ways of life that it cannot control.

In our own time, nature excursions are about getting away from the noise and hurriedness of our ways of life. This is often how we understand the wilderness in Scripture; we may consider this more comfortable way of viewing nature, instead that we ought to remember “wild” can mean outside of human control. We have the Romantics and Victorians to thank for this way of seeing nature as something to be respected in its vastness, but also a place to exert control. Humans must control the wilderness if it is to be habitable. Our sense of nature in a controlled environment—that it yields gifts for our wellness is not out-of-step with the more ancient views, but it is influenced by our own sense of the fact that nature is a tamed or an ordered wilderness, where we take what we seek from it, not necessarily that we go to hear and attend what God seeks from us.

We carry our provisions to get us through. Depending on God to feed us and nourish us and give us direction—not taking what we want, but only what God gives us is a matter of trust. For a world constantly in need of hope, and, which can look at the “civilized” world as unnatural and even wild, the church offers a place to grow out of the ways of life that distort the reality of not only our dependence on God, but each other. That Christ’s church is a place of wildness and wilderness, speaks not to our common understanding of nature as isolating, but full of connections and relationship-building. That the wildness of God’s grace widens the eye and allows us to see how little control we exert in this life without consequences. And, that we are drawn together means that growing in the wilderness means depending on each other and throwing off self-serving love for the love of Christ.

This Lent, we can walk together through this wilderness season in worship, by receiving, praying, and connecting ourselves in devotional practice (sign up to receive Devotions), by connecting beyond ourselves with Thursday-night LIVE Project courses and discussions, and joining for Friday-night dinners and low-stakes conversations that build our community. Lent can be a time to commit to growth, even if it is not necessarily letting go of the mainstays of life during other seasons. In this wilderness season, let’s lean into our formation as God’s people.

 -Pastor Thomas