The Hopes and Fears of All the Years: Day Four

The Wilderness is Where Stories Begin (Again)

“The desert is that lonely place where we leave our false securities behind.”
- Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs

Text: Isaiah 40:1-5

The people of Judah must have wondered if their God had abandoned them, or worse, if their God had been defeated by the gods of Babylon. Sitting beside strange rivers, harps hung and hearts heavy, they replayed vivid images: Jerusalem burning, the Temple razed, everything familiar reduced to ash. “Will we ever go home again?” they must have asked.

And then Isaiah 40 entered the chat.

Into a community crushed by imperial power, a prophet stepped forward with a word full of both conviction and tenderness: comfort, restoration, and a journey home were coming. That journey, however, would take them smack dab through the wilderness.

Wilderness is a recurring theme in Scripture. It’s not just a nondescript backdrop, either. It’s the place where the values and methods of empire are slowly, even sometimes painfully, stripped away, and something new—something more human—begins to emerge.

Moses spent forty years in the wilderness of Midian after fleeing Egypt. Born into an oppressed people but raised in Pharaoh’s palace, he lived in a tension of two identities: the suffering of the enslaved and the privilege of empire. When he fled after killing an Egyptian to protect a Hebrew sibling, he didn’t just run from the consequences of his actions—he ran into a space where empire’s values were slowly stripped away from him. There, as a shepherd, he learned a different kind of leadership and a different kind of power.

Later, he would return to the wilderness again, this time with the whole Hebrew community in tow. Israel wandered for forty years, learning to trust the God who liberated them rather than the empire that enslaved them. If the Exodus was about getting Israel out of Egypt, the wilderness was about getting Egypt out of Israel.

In the New Testament Jesus follows this same pattern and motif, too. Before he ever preached a sermon, healed the sick, or offered a parable, he spent forty days in the desert. It was a time of testing, a time to decide what kind of Messiah he would be. Would he adopt the tools of empire—violence, spectacle, and domination? Or would he choose another way, one grounded in compassion and justice? The clarity Jesus has throughout the Gospels about who he is and what he’s doing didn’t appear magically; it was forged in the wilderness.

That’s exactly the image Isaiah holds out to the exiles in Babylon. You’re going home, he tells them, but the path of return runs straight through the wilderness. It’s there, and not in the comfort of what is familiar, even if awful—that the values of empire fall away, and the values of God’s new world take root. No wonder Mark opens the earliest Gospel with this very text from Isaiah: “A voice crying in the wilderness.” Mark sees Jesus’s movement as a departure from the old imperial order and an embrace of God’s radically different kingdom. These two ways of being in the world are not two sides of the same coin. They are completely opposite visions and approaches.

Advent, then, is not a season for avoiding the wilderness. It’s a season for trusting it. It calls us to name and reject the false promises of empire. You know, the ones that tell us that our worth is earned, that security comes through force, and that peace is maintained by domination. It invites us to embrace a different vision, a different imagination, and a different hope.

It’s in the wilderness that we start to realize the truth about how deeply entangled we are with the ways of empire. It’s in the wilderness that we begin to dream of another way to live, another way to be human together. It’s in the wilderness that hope becomes daring enough to believe that the world as it is is not the world as it must be.

It was in the wilderness that Moses learned to shepherd instead of dominate.
It was in the wilderness that Israel became a people who trusted God instead of Pharaoh.
It was in the wilderness that Jesus chose the kingdom of God over the empire of Caesar.

Honestly? Life in the United States feels a bit like a wilderness right now—disorienting, uncertain, stripped of the illusions we used to rely on. But maybe that’s not just something to lament; maybe it’s also an invitation to imagine and create something new, something better.

If Scripture is any guide, the wilderness isn’t where the story ends.
It’s where the story begins again.

If you find this interesting you absolutely must read my friend

Kat Armas

’s new book, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World. She goes into this image of wilderness and empire beautifully and profoundly!

Reflection:
What possibilities have opened up for you through seasons of wilderness and waiting?