2/21/21 “The God of the Water is The God of the Wilderness” by Nancy E. Petty

Mark 1:9-15

The text message read: “I have a friend who is transitioning and is having a really difficult time with their relationship with God and being transgender because of their upbringing in the church. Parents are not supportive. I asked if my friend would be interested in connecting to Pullen since they are so amazing and inclusive. My friend would love to make a connection with you. What should I do?” I replied: Give your friend my phone number.

Five minutes later, I received another text. “Hey there. Happy Valentine’s Day. This is (let’s call this person Em). My friend gave me your number.” Given that it was Valentine’s Day and Karla had set a beautiful table for our Valentine’s dinner I responded to the text asking if it would be okay if we scheduled a time the next day to talk. In our conversation the next day, I listened as I heard a story all too familiar. Another young adult struggling to reconcile their gender identity with the faith they had grown up with. How do you ever erase those tapes damning you to eternal separation from God if you are anything other than heterosexual? How much energy and courage it takes to consider that the stories in the Bible, our sacred texts are not always about what our Sunday School teachers and pastors taught us. How long it takes to feel safe again in the presence of scripture, much less a zapping God who is ready to send you to hell for loving another.

Had their faith not been so important to them, there would be no struggle. But this seeker, authentically searching and desperately wanting to feel God’s presence in their lives, kept saying to me over and over, “I used to feel God’s presence but I can’t feel God now. God seems so far away. I can’t feel God in anything and I don’t know why. Is it because I am transgender?” No matter how gently or emphatically I insisted that our relationship with God is not dependent on sexual identity or gender identity the response kept coming back, “I want to feel God’s presence and I don’t feel anything and I don’t know why.” I tried to ask curious questions: Can you tell me about a time when you did feel God’s presence in your life? What was that like? Was there something different about that time in your life? What would it feel like to sense God’s presence?

I refrained from those messages that at one time I might have given. Messages like: God is always present. If we can’t feel God’s presence it’s because we have moved away from God. God doesn’t move away from us. Or something like, “God is there, you’ve just got to keep searching.” Even if that’s true, and I’m not so sure, those messages, I find, aren’t very helpful when God feels so far away. They only affirm and validate that we are the problem. That something is wrong with us if we can’t feel God’s presence in our lives. Those messages, I have learned, only intensify the feelings of separation that are already being felt.

Em’s words and why question have stuck with me all week: “I used to be able to feel God’s presence and now I can’t feel God at all and I don’t know why.” Who among us hasn’t felt this spiritual conundrum—moments of feeling the profound presence of God and other moments feeling the absolute absence of God? It is the Psalmists who writes: “O Lord you have searched me and known me…you discern my thoughts from far away…” AND, it is the Psalmists who also writes: “How long, O God? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” Our spiritual ancestors have well documented this dance between feeling the presence and absence of God. It is not new but rather a normal dimension of any relationship. What is unsettling about this relationship dynamic is the way Christianity has explained it and how we have interpreted it.

We have been taught the absence of God is the result of something we have done to cause God to go away from us—some discretion or sin. Not true. We have also been taught that we go away from God when we sin. Maybe. Maybe not. And worst of all, for some of us, we have been taught that God’s absence in our lives is the result of who we are—that because of who we are God doesn’t love us and therefore not present to us. All I can say is that all of that is bad, even abusive theology. Our relationship with God is not game of “you do this and be this and I’ll be there” or “you do this or be this and I’ll not be there.” Part of being human and being in relationship with God is to know both God’s presence and God’s absence. 

Another way to say that is, The God of the Water is The God of the Wilderness. On this first Sunday of Lent we read that after Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan by John, and after coming up out of the water and seeing the Spirit descending like a dove on him and hearing those affirming, ever-present words, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased,” we are told that that same Spirit immediately drove Jesus out into the wilderness for forty days, to be mercilessly tempted by the Tempter. The God of the Water is The God of the Wilderness!

Much like this theme of the absence and presence of God throughout scripture, so is the interplay between the images of water and wilderness. Despite a few exceptions (floods and angry seas), water in the biblical text is a metaphor for life, renewal and transformation. The Torah is often compared to water, for without it, Jewish believers would perish. In the New Testament, water cleanses and blesses. “Whoever drinks of this water shall thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I give him shall never thirst, as the water I give him shall become a fountain a water springing up to eternal life.” Our spiritual mothers and fathers created a narrative and an understanding in which God’s presence was represented in water. God was present in the water.

Wilderness, we have been taught, carries with it the absence of God. We read of God’s people wandering in the wilderness, seemingly lost and forgotten. It was in the wilderness that the whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Aaron and Moses saying: “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill us.” This is a picture that is often present in scripture of a people seemingly abandoned by their God.

It is really difficult to get the whole picture when we are only looking at snap shots. When we read that Jesus was immediately driven into the wilderness after his baptism to be tempted, we are prone to think that this was a time when Jesus experienced God’s absence. After all wilderness experiences are about barren times, being alone, struggling with our temptations, God being absent. But is that really true? Or, it is time to rethink “the God of the wilderness.” It is time to look at the whole picture—to see the bread raining down from heaven in the wilderness?

I don’t know why it is that sometimes God can feel so close and present and other times God can feel so far away and so absent. All I know, is that has been my experience throughout my faith journey. I have been on the mountain top with God and I have descended into the deepest, darkest depths of despair where, like the Psalmist, I have cried out, “how long, O God, how long will you hide from me.” For many years in my faith journey, I, like the young adult who recently reached out to me, wondered what I had done to cause God to go so far away. I labored over the question, “Why?” “Why, God, can’t I feel you?” Funny, I never labored over the “why” question when God felt so close. I never wondered what I had done or not done to cause God to be so present to me. I simply accepted it.

I have come to believe that The God of the Water—the present God blessing us, affirming us and calling us the beloved, is the same as The God of the Wilderness—the God who can feel far away, distant, even absent to us. For me, it has been helpful to reframe what is behind each of those feeling—the presence or the absence. I have come to understand, at least for me, that what is at the root of both of those feelings is a strong desire and longing to connect with God. Jay, in his focus, named it. Lent, and I would submit every season, is about the longing and desire to connect with God. And when I understand this longing, this desire, I can transcend the false dichotomy of either/or—feeling God’s presence or not feeling God’s presence. I can begin to understand my feelings as a longing, a desire to connect with God and in that awareness there emerges so many possibilities for connecting regardless of where I stand, in the water where I can feel God or in the wilderness where I feel alone.

And so, on this first Sunday in Lent, I ask: What are the possibilities of connecting with God for you this Lenten season? Are those possibilities in a more focused time of prayer? What are the possibilities in keeping a fast? In almsgiving? Are there possibilities in giving something up: chocolate, alcohol, CNN. Or taking something on: joining the Fight for $15, taking on a practice of noticing your white privilege and committing to one way you can give up some of your privilege for racial equality. Will you fast from those spiritual teachings that keep you oppressed in a theology that leaves you with self-hate? Will you pray for your own healing? Will you give up the lie that’s there’s not enough for everyone and lessen your grip on what you think you need? Will you, as Rev. Battle challenged us last week, to risk loss and failure and disappointment to try something bold and courageous for God’s commonwealth here on this earth?

Lent, and every season of our spiritual journey, is about connecting with God—the God of the water and the God of the wilderness. It is the longing, the desire for this connection to God that defines us—not whether we are standing in the waters of affirmation or feeling alone in the wilderness. Whatever you give up or take on this Lent, see it as your longing, your deepest desire to connect with God.

To Em, and to all of us, I would say: faith is staying on the journey—whether in the water or wilderness—and trusting the longing, while staying committed to discovering all the places that offer the possibility for connection to the One who created us. Lent is about nurturing the longing.