A Fast from All Things Familiar - Luke 3:1-6

I’m no prepper. I have only a few cans of food in my pantry, my water filter is more for taste than survival, and my arsenal is limited to a pocket knife. Nonetheless, I am always curious to learn a skill or two for life after Industrial civilization—a time that will come someday, whether in a few years or in a couple of more centuries. That’s how I found myself listening to Peter Michael Bauer’s “Rewilding” podcast. Bauer is from Portland, where, upon learning of ecological collapse in his teens, he dropped out of high school and joined a group of friends who learned wilderness survival together. Since those days he’s lead various workshops, teaching such essential skills as basic fire starting, picking locks, and how to make a salad out of common yard weeds.

The episode I heard, was an interview Bauer had with Eli Loomis, the director of the Boulder Outdoor Survival School, or BOSS. The school was developed by a group of wilderness enthusiasts who wanted to learn and then teach others the basics of survival if you happened to find yourself lost in the wild. For a couple of thousand dollars, you can be dropped in the deserts of Utah for two weeks and be deprived of all resources. With the help of a skilled guide you then learn to make shelters, find water, and keep yourself warm. Since food is pretty low on the survival ladder (most people can go a month without it), participants often go hungry for the duration, even as they hike many miles each day.

While many of you might not consider such a program appealing, those who participate find that it is one of the most transformative experiences of their lives. There is something about having all comforts stripped away and being brought to the bare realities of life that can help recover the truth of who we are. And so, even though they are hungry and exhausted at the end, many participants in the BOSS program say that they have never felt so alive as they did in the wilderness.

As Bauer and Loomis talked about the BOSS experience, Bauer brought in a phrase that has been echoing in my head ever since. He spoke of his teenage experience at a tracker school where the leaders described the time as a “fast from all things familiar.” That is what the wilderness brings—a letting go of the everyday realities of life, the routines of comfort, the subtle compromises that help us get along with so much that is wrong with the world.

I think I was so captivated by that phrase because the idea of a “fast from all things familiar” is a perfect call for Advent, a necessary step in awakening to the life of God’s kingdom that has come and is coming still among us. Advent has long been understood to be time of repentance, which in its truest sense is a call to change our hearts and lives. In order for that change to come, however, we have to step back and see our lives for what they are. We must fast from the familiar to see what is essential and what is right.

Our readings today are invitations to such a fast. They are an invitation to the wilderness and its best lessons. In some places, the wilderness has come to have a negative connotation. I often read Christian writers who talk about wilderness time as something to endure and get past, a description of any negative experience. But the wilderness in scripture is always the place where we learn our freedom, it is the grounding place of renewal. It may be hard. It may be uncomfortable. It is often dangerous. But it is only by entering the wilderness that we find our way into the life God offers us.

This was true for the people of God in Malachi’s time. They had been through the disorienting experience of exile in Babylon and they were now returning to their homeland to rebuild. Like many of us in this moment, they were saying together—when can we get back to normal? They wanted to get back to the Temple and recover their worship there. But Malachi’s message in this time of rebuilding is: Let’s not get back to normal. Normal was what ended us up in exile. Normal is a religion that is big on rites without love of God and neighbor. Malachi wants the standard not to be what was, but what should be. Moving through the reorientation born of the fast from all things familiar, he calls for a standard of right relationship—the just and loving life of God with God’s people. He predicted a day when God would come and refine Israel’s worship. It is that day that John the Baptist proclaims along the banks of the Jordan.

John the Baptist is the voice of one crying out in the wilderness. He is strange, an outsider, and as such his invitation is away from the safe confines of the familiar. He does not go into the cities or villages to proclaim his message of repentance. Instead, he stays at the margins and invites all those who see the need for renewal to come out to him. It is from the wilderness that he makes way for the coming of the Kingdom, it is through a fast from the familiar that he prepares the people for the coming of the Messiah.

And Luke puts the church in this same role for Christ’s second coming, the new Advent for which we wait. We are like John the Baptist, readying the way for God’s kingdom to come in its fullness. If we are to take up this task, then like John we must go to the wilderness. We should enter into a fast from all things familiar, letting go of the safety and security of our desire for the normal. Like Malachi and like John, we should make our standard what is good, and just, and right instead of what is comfortable and normal. Both prophets know that the only safe place is life firmly in the loving will of God and that all else is an illusion that is bound to disappoint.

We are given an opportunity in this time of continued uncertainty to leave behind the fantasies of the familiar and journey into the wilderness. It is there, in this season of waiting and expectation, that we can find ourselves fully alive, stripped of all that keeps us from God. The wilderness is the training ground for freedom, the space where we are changed and made ready for the promised places of God’s goodness. Let us let go of our desires for getting back to normal and ask from the grounded place of the desert what is good and loving, what do we need to do to make way for our savior who is coming into the world. We should, after all, become preppers, but not the sort that stockpile weapons or even the kind that learn to start fires with nothing but a stick and some pocket lint. We are to be preppers not for disaster but for redemption, for the healing of all things. So lets go to the wilderness and join John in proclaiming: “Prepare the way of the Lord.” Amen.