Suppose I were to tell you this morning that, before this year is out, you would experience something tragic that would represent nothing less than the most significant upheaval of life you’ve ever known.  Something that would put everything you own at risk, threaten the security of those you love the most and eventually test your most fundamental assumptions about life and security as you’ve always known it to the core.  Suppose I could tell you all that based on information I have and in a way that would leave you with no doubt whatsoever that I knew what I was talking about.  Suppose I could also tell you that, as frightening and unsettling as that experience would be, on the other side, once you’d gone through it, your life would have been changed and enriched in remarkably good ways you could have never imagined.  What would you do?  Would you run as fast as you could in the opposite direction?  Or, would you go ahead and take the next step no matter where it might lead? 

Well, just in case you were worried, I don’t have that kind of information for you this morning, about what might happen to you in the next week or month or year.  I’m not sure any of us wants that kind of information, even if it were available and even though we are probably the most information-hungry culture that has ever lived. 

In fact, before this year is out, there is a good chance that our collective hunger for information will play a role in making Larry Page and Sergey Brin billionaires.  Just a few years ago, Page and Brin dropped out of Stanford University’s PhD program and started an unsophisticated sounding company, Google.  Google is now the premier search engine on the Internet.  If you’re doing research on 18^th century Spain or you need a power washer for your back deck, you can just type those words into the Google search window and virtually anything available on the Internet about those subjects will pop onto your screen within seconds.  Every single minute of every single day, in some ninety languages around the world, Google gets more than 138,000 hits.  When Google goes public, perhaps later this year, the stock offering will probably be worth well over $12 billion (“All Eyes on Google,” Newsweek, March 29, 2004).

We don’t lack for information or resources to get information.  What is at a premium these days, as it always has been, is knowledge about what all the information we already have means.  I’m banking on the fact that most of are here this morning, not because we need more information about what may happen to us, but because we’d like to find some meaning in what has already happened to us or is happening to us even this very morning.  When Teri emailed this past week to tell me that the test was positive, it is breast cancer, she wasn’t saying she needed more information.  In some ways, she’s knows more than she wishes she knew.  Right now, she’s looking for some meaning in all that’s happening to her.  Information about what may come our way would be nice.  Meaning about what has already come our way, well, that’s more like something essential for living, like our next breath or our next meal.  It’s an ancient quest, this search for meaning. 

The children of Israel, the Hebrews, had experienced a major upheaval of life none us can even imagine.  It was an upheaval that put everything they owned and everyone they loved at risk and had even tested their most basic beliefs about God and life to the very core.  Jerusalem, their capital city, the seat of their ancient faith in the God who had created them and sustained them for centuries, had been invaded and destroyed and the Hebrews had been carried off into captivity in Babylon. 

9/11 was horrific enough.  Imagine an attack by terrorists that had left our nation’s infrastructure completely obliterated from coast to coast and every single American carried off into captivity in, let’s say, Baghdad.  We’d probably all be suffering information overload by now.  We’d also find ourselves wondering what all this must mean and even questioning our very faith in the God who had stood by and guided America, land that we love, through the night with the light from above for over two centuries.  Perhaps we’d even successfully fended off those who want to remove “one nation, under God,” from our national pledge only to find ourselves wondering why that God had now abandoned us to the will of Muslim terrorists. 

If we can possibly try to imagine what that must feel like, maybe we can get close to the emotional setting into which Isaiah spoke these words on God’s behalf.  “‘Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.  I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?  I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.  The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches; for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.’”

God’s about to do something new, Isaiah says.  In the meantime, he’ll make “‘rivers in the desert.’”  “‘Rivers’” is kind of an ambiguous term in the original language here.  It doesn’t actually mean raging torrents over massive boulders with spectacular waterfalls.  It’s more like a tiny stream, almost a trickle in the sand.  But, whether running water is a stream or a river has everything to do with your perspective, doesn’t it?  When Jim Baucom was visiting here a couple of years ago I pointed out the Trinity River to him as we drove in from the airport.  He couldn’t believe we called it a river.  Of course, it hadn’t just rained and he hadn’t seen it from levee to levee.  But, he also lived near the James River in Virginia that’s nearly always as wide as the Trinity after it has rained for three days.  What is to us a river was to him just a stream.  But, when all you’ve known is the desert and suddenly you stumble onto a stream, it’s probably going to look like a river. 

When you’ve been alone for months, totally and completely alone, a hug can feel like the best love you’ve ever had.  When you’re flat broke and suddenly you get an unexpected check for $100 in the mail, it can feel like you just won the lottery.  That’s the way it is when God provides.  When you’ve been so stubborn that he let you have your way until you’re about to die of thirst, a cup of water can look like a swimming pool in mid-August. 

Wilderness in scripture is a metaphor for trying times, for suffering, for isolation and loneliness.  The children of Israel knew the wilderness well; they spent forty years there once.  Jesus knew it too; he spent forty days and nights there, with nothing to eat and no one but Satan to keep him company.  But, in every wilderness story there is also a story about streams God makes to see those he loves through to the place where he’ll do something new.  It was manna for the Hebrews and angels for Jesus.  You see, it’s easy to forget this.  But, when we’re in the wilderness we’re still on God’s property and that God can damn a river to reroute the water or send a thunderstorm any time and any place he wants so that even the animals will sing his praises about how God always provides.  He always refreshes us in the wilderness because he is not interested in the wilderness destroying us, only reshaping us. 

When Isaiah preached his sermon, he wasn’t interested so much in giving the Hebrew people new information, but interpreting the meaning of their experience so that they’d understand the purposes of God in it.  We can survive anything as long as we know that our lives have more meaning than is being reflected in the momentary experience.

This past week, Joyce Wascom invited me to join her at Mesquite High School to hear Mike Jacobs.  Mike Jacobs was born in Poland in 1925.  When he was fourteen he was taken along with his family to live in the Nazi death camps.  He spoke of being taken from a fairly normal teenage life and put on box cars normally used to transport cattle, in his words, to a “destination unknown.”  From that day on he and his family were forbidden, among other things, from worshipping their God.  For five and one-half years he lived one day at a time.  He lost his entire family but he was spared because he was young and could still work.  He saw little babies that he rescued from the ghettos taken by the Nazis and murdered.  And, he personally witnessed Joseph Mengele, the doctor of death, separate twin children from their parents so he could use them in indescribably inhuman medical experiments.  He’ll never forget the stench of death from the ovens in the camps.  He held up the striped prisoner’s hat he kept from his years in prison, still dark on the inside from the dried blood he wiped from his own face after being tortured.  Yet, over and over again in his presentation, Jacobs said that he discovered, even at that terribly young age, that you could survive “so long as you have hope.”

Would that be good enough for you?  What if I couldn’t tell you what was going to happen to you this year but I could promise you that we are worshipping a God who gives us hope, no matter what.  Not raging torrents of relief or rescue from the wilderness, but streams of merciful hope in it?  Could I ask you to take one more step toward that?

It’s so tempting to want to offer people solutions to problems, quick and easy answers to complex questions.  When I first came to Cliff Temple the sofa in my office was worn out from years of use, just like a sofa in a good pastor’s office should be.  Darlene and Jerry Evetts donated a new sofa to the pastor’s study.  It’s got big fluffy cushions that kind of swallow you up when you sit down (or lay down to take a quick power nap).  Lots of people have sat on that sofa to tell me their story.  Sometimes, it’s little children telling me about their first steps with Jesus, like Kristen Anderson did this past week.  Sometimes, they tell me heartbreaking stories of how they have just experienced upheavals that have left them questioning their faith in God.  It’s always tempting to offer them solutions, quick answers.  And, it’s always dangerous to do that, too.  Because, if I give them my answers, I might distract them from the streams of mercy only God can give. 

Besides, God did not call me to do something that even he refuses to do, always rescue people no matter what.  The truth is, if we’re going to walk with Jesus, if we’re going to follow him step by step all the way our Savior leads us, almost certainly those steps will eventually lead us into a wilderness of some kind, for reasons we may not know, yet, a place of loneliness and despair and confusion and a place where nothing is for sure anymore because it is only in those places where some things get settled with God about the meaning of our lives and our purpose in this world that just don’t get settled anywhere else. 

Sometimes I am so anxious to rescue people that I’m tempted to tell them what their experience should mean instead of remembering that there is nothing more uniquely or personally sacred than walking with God in lonely places until the meaning of our lives becomes clear, in his and our own way and time.  And, there is nothing I can do to rescue someone God is still working with.  The “wilderness” is “the place where souls are reshaped, and they cannot come out until” that “sacred creativity is done (M. Craig Barnes, “Living by the Word,” Christian Century, March 23, 2004, p. 16).”

Even Mary seemed to know that.  The story of her anointing Jesus feet with perfume worth a year’s income has always been something mysterious to me (John 12:1-8).  It still is in some ways.  Back then, people weren’t anointed with perfume until after they died, when the stench of death was all over them.  Lazarus was there when Mary did it.  He knew the stench of death personally, having been raised from the dead by the same Jesus who was about to die.  Once you’ve smelled death, you never forget it.  It’s like Mary, and maybe no one else, seemed to sense the stench of death in the room, even before Jesus experienced it.  It was her way of blessing the wilderness of death he was about to enter, because she knew he had to go through it.  He had to die so that God could do a new thing for him and through him for all of us.  God could not raise Jesus unless he died first.  If anyone had tried to rescue Jesus, it would have been Mary.  Instead of rescuing him, she blessed him for the journey that she knew he had to take alone.

So, just in case someone has ever promised you that believing in Jesus would protect you or insulate you from that kind of experience, please forgive them for setting you up by offering you something God never offered to his own people or even to his own Son.  And neither can God raise us unless we die first, too.  If we choose to walk with Jesus, at some point in time, God is going to confront us with the stench of our own necessary death to self.  There is no way he can do a new thing in us or through us, in our lives, our marriages, our parenting, our dreams, even our church, unless we first die to the kind of life we believe we are entitled to and keep trying to control into happening.  The apostle Paul longed so deeply for the new thing God could do that he said it this way.  “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead (Philippians 3:10-11).”  No death, no resurrection.

So, if someone set you up to believe differently, please forgive them.  Forget the former things you were promised.  Then, remember this.  Where you’ve been isn’t as relevant as where God is leading you.  Forget the former things.  The bad days and even the good old days are not as significant as what God is about to do.  The new thing.  The resurrection thing.  The difference between despair and hope is found in whether or not we recognize the purpose of the wilderness places in our lives to bring God’s new thing to us and through us.

I can’t tell you what is going to happen to you.  I can tell you my story.  And, this is it.  God has never let anything happen in my life, not once, no matter how terrible it was, that he didn’t bring me out on the other side better, stronger, more hopeful and more full of purpose than when I entered.  I think that’s all he was promising the Hebrews.  If we know we’ll have all we need until we get through to other side of what can be a very hard life and that, when we do, we’ll see God’s new thing he intends to resurrect in us, well . . .