Sermon: Blooming Desert
Texts: Isaiah 35:1-10; Luke 1:46-55
Date: December 12, 2005
Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church


It may be a challenge in a wet and dark season, but I am asking you this morning to put yourself into a desert.  Imagine yourself there.  Maybe you've spent some time in a desert, and that place will be easiest for you to conjure up in your mind.  If you haven't been to a desert, you'll have to go from pictures in books or the Discovery Channel or Wile E. Coyote territory.  I'm going to give you a moment of quiet to find yourself in the desert. 
Where in the world are you?  What do you see and feel and hear and smell there? 

I have visited a few deserts, but the ones I am most familiar with are the sage lands of the prairies.  Miles and miles of scrubby brush and rock, thrown like a blanket over hills or over flat land, monotonous, monotonous.  A settler in Montana wrote this of his new home in a self-published book called Cry of the Homestead:

I've reached a land of drought and heat,
Where nothing grows for man to eat.
We do not live, we only stay,
We are too poor to move away.
Oh, Montana land, bare Montana land,
On your burning soil I stand.
I look away across the plain
And wonder why it never rains.

Doesn't your heart go out to that poor old homesteader, lured west by the promise of free land and a better life, only to find that he has "reached a land of drought and heat, where nothing grows for man to eat"?  You can hear in his verse, can't you, the desolation that has been absorbed from the outer landscape into his very soul: "We do not live, we only stay, we are too poor to move away." 

The homesteader's sad verse is a bridge from the outer desert to the inner desert.  Once again, put yourself into the desert.  Can you call to mind a time when you were desolate, not quite living, only staying in a dry and desperate place?  Can you recall a spiritual drought you endured, whether for a period of hours, days, weeks, months, or years?  I'll give you a moment of quiet to locate yourself there. 

Where in the world are you?  What do you see, feel, hear, smell in that desert place?  Maybe you didn't have to travel very far to get from this sanctuary to that desert.  Some of us brought the desert in here with us this morning, whether you can tell by looking at them or not.

 
The prophet Isaiah speaks of the highway called the Holy Way which is for God's people.  "A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way."  There where?  One wishes this Holy Way would be all picturesque and beautiful, colored green in the highway maps as the scenic byways.  One wishes the Holy Way would nothing but eye-popping mountain views and breathtaking ocean overlooks.  It seems, though, that this Holy Way cuts right through the desert.  It wends through the wilderness, at least in part. 

 
That is to say, if you find yourself in the desert, it doesn't necessarily mean you have lost your way.  The Holy Way goes right through that desert.  There's no overpass, no underpass, no bypass.  The highway on which God's people travel goes right through those dry and desolate places.

Some believers have come to think that God leads them to the desert to teach them something they cannot learn another way.  Carlo Caretto wrote about his belief that the desert was a necessity for his soul's health, in order to practice detachment from daily life.  He says, "The Lord conducted me into the real desert because I was so thick-skinned.  For me, it was necessary…I feel him here, searching me out, coming to meet me, I feel him embracing me already, like someone who has been waiting for a long time knowing I would be coming…A horizontal line with a bit of sky above and a bit of sand below is all that is needed."   Some believers have found that when they are stripped of the comforts of home or the comforts of a secure, unruffled life they come face to face with God in a way that they have not done previously.  They see in their desert experiences, whether physical or spiritual, evidence of God's purpose and leadership.

Other believers experience their sojourn in the desert as more haphazard than purposeful, and doubt that God chose them for tragedy or illness or loss that leaves them -plop- in the middle of dry dunes.  Is cancer, for example, a desert road chosen for you by an unseen divine navigator?  Or does the onset of illness lead you into a desert through which God accompanies you, and yearns to lead you out?  Thoughtful believers may see such a desert experience either way, and may find scripture to under gird either theological viewpoint.  To both kinds of believers it is clear that the Holy Way cuts through the desert.  Into each life, a little sand must fall.

The promise in Isaiah's prophecy this morning is for both kinds of desert sojourners, those who sense God's choosing and those who sense God's accompanying.  The promise is for the unbelievers as well, who sense nothing but absence as far as God is concerned.  This is the promise: "The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing…For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water…" [Isaiah 35:1, 6b-7a]  Even the desert will bloom.

Have any of you seen the desert bloom?  What does it look like?    I recall being in a corner of the San Diego Wild Animal Park last spring that is cultivated with desert plants.  They were blooming with weird, unearthly flowers, brilliant colors.  A lot of the plants looked like they sprang from the imagination of Dr. Seuss-maybe he got some of his inspiration in the desert.  You just had to stop and gape, they were so strange, so unexpected.

Have you seen the spiritual desert bloom in your life?  Isn't that kind of the way of it?  When the spiritual desert blooms it isn't transformed magically into a bed of roses or a vast field of tulips.  The blooming is singular, unexpected, breathtaking.  Grace comes to us like a life ring, in a look of love, a song, a phone call, a peek of sun breaking through clouds.  A sign comes from some quarter, and to our great surprise the desert is blooming.  An AIDS patient, for example, wrote, "Ironically, I have risked more since my diagnosis than before; that is, risked in the important ways that open us to growth.  I have had to risk looking inward; risk letting myself be loved; and most of all, risk speaking publicly of my new growth and understanding.  I have grown more in the last year and a half than I ever would have imagined possible."   The desert may bloom in such encounters with one's self forced by the desert sojourn.

 
The desert may bloom in encounters with others as well.  The same AIDS patient wrote that in the first month after his diagnosis, when the news was still pretty raw, one church member, a woman whose children were about his age, said to him that if there were any way she could die in his place she would.  Imagine what it meant to him to hear love expressed that way.  The desert sometimes inspires an unexpected flowering of love between people.

Listen to this poem by Eleanor Kline Heath:

Sand, sand, sand
Sagebrush, greasewood, mesquite
Ghostly tumbleweeds that
Appear from nowhere
Cactus that warns "touch-me-not"
Drab earth-tones
From here to forever
Hot, dry, forbidding

Comes a sudden storm,
A miracle!
A rainbow spreads its glory
Linking earth with heaven.
The sand is polka-dot carpeted,
Ethereal blooms on spiny cactus,
Sagebrush touched with
A soft purple haze.
In awe, I worship God,
With gladness praise him.

So my private deserts
Deluged by sudden storm
Are not destroyed but bloom
Love, joy, peace, patience,
Self-control.
In awe I worship God
With gladness praise him.

The Montana sage desert blooms in the spring with a flower called the bitterroot.  They look quite delicate, with lovely pink-white flowers that fan out like daisies.  They are one hardy plant, though.  When Lewis and Clark brought back samples of bitterroot, botanist Frederick Pursch honored Lewis by naming it Lewisia rediviva,  referring to the plant's ability to resurrect itself and survive for more than a year without water.  The Salish people used the bitterroot as a medicine to combat pleurisy and heart trouble and to strengthen the circulatory system.  Women boiled its roots into a tea and drank it to increase milk flow after childbirth.  The bitterroot represented the first fruit of spring and its arrival often ended winter hunger.  The Salish people believe that in ages past the plant saved them from starvation.  They have a story about it.

Long ago, when the people were experiencing a famine, an old woman, who had completely run out of meat to feed her children, went down to the Clark Fork River to weep and sing a death song.  The Sun, rising above the eastern mountains, heard her cries.  To comfort the old woman, the Sun sent a guardian spirit in the form of a beautiful red bird.

The bird appeared and softly promised, "A new plant will be created from the tears which you have wept on upon the soil.  Its petals will take the rose from my wing feathers and its center from the white of your hair.  Your people will eat the roots of this plant and regain their strength.  The food will be bitter to remind them of your sorrow, and each time the flower blooms they will say, 'Here is the silver of our mother's hair upon the ground and the rose from the wings of the spirit bird.  Our mother's tears of bitterness have given us food.'"

Isn't that a mysterious, enthralling legend?   I am fascinated by the divine/human partnership in the story of the blooming of that Montana desert.  The tears of the woman combine with the gift of the spirit, and the desert blooms, and the people are fed.  This is a true story!  Countless times I have heard believers tell how their tears of grief have washed their eyes clean to see God in their lives in a new way.  An easy way is not always conducive to spiritual growth and insight; it's often our unchosen trials and tribulations that wind up revealing the grace of God to us.  Our tears mix with the gift of the Spirit and the desert blooms.

And there's something about that divine/human gift that does indeed feed other believers as the bitterroot has fed generations of Salish people.  We go through desert times when all we see is sand, sand, sand, sagebrush, and tumbleweed from here to forever.  How sweet it is when believers who have traveled the Holy Way through the desert before us tell their stories of how they saw the desert bloom, how waters broke forth in the wilderness through the grace of God, how God saved them.  It nourishes the hungry soul, the lost one, when a fellow traveler can tell their story of endurance and salvation.  The tears of our mothers and fathers on the Way combine with the gift of the Spirit to feed the hearts hungry for good news. 
How vital it is, fellow travelers, that we tell our companions about our journeys through the desert.  Tell how we found ourselves in the desert.  Tell how we saw the desert bloom and tasted living water on parched lips.  Tell how we were lowly and lifted up by the outstretched hand of the Almighty. 

We have a charge from Isaiah, listen: "Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees.  Say to those who are of a fearful heart, 'Be strong, do not fear!  Here is your God…He will come and save you.'" [Isaiah 35:3-4]