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If you drive through the city of Chicago, you’ll notice that
there are a handful of streets that are a little odd and don’t quite seem to
fit the city grid system. In 1833, the
Illinois and Michigan Canal Commission drew a city plan for Chicago which
established a street grid for most of Chicago’s streets. These streets like Wilson and Western run
north/south/east/west. However, there is
the odd street here and there that doesn’t quite match the grids.
Lincoln Avenue, which runs on a diagonal just west of us
here, comes to mind. While I know that
some people know how to “work the diagonals in the city,” I would be lying if I
say that I’ve never been tripped up by one of them. I’ve had my fair share of
times where I’ve turned on one of these diagonal roads off the traditional city
grid, and suddenly gotten myself turned around and stuck in a mess of one way
streets and dead ends.
Our Bible story today has Jesus thrown off the predictable
grid of his kingly life and tipped sideways onto a diagonal street. This story of Jesus’ temptation in the desert
happens pretty early on in his life. Right
before this story, things are going pretty good for Jesus: Choirs of angels sang when he was born, people
were amazed by him when he taught at the temple. No one has yet scorned him or spit at him. No
one has tried to run him off a cliff or tried to trick him. Most recently in the pages of scripture, he was
baptized and God’s voice cried out from the heavens and declared that Jesus was
precious and beloved. Things have been
going good when suddenly Jesus is thrown off the predictable grid and into the desert
wilderness for 40 days.
Wilderness comes in all shapes and sizes. Barbara Brown Taylor writes that, “the only
way you can really tell if you’re in one is to look around for what you
normally count on to save your life and come up empty.” That’s a wilderness. I’m pretty sure that
we’ve all known some sort of wilderness before.
Maybe it looks like walking out of work with the news that
your employment is ending. Maybe it’s
the stress of having a family member who is really, really struggling or sick. Maybe
it is staying too long in a bad a relationship.
When we talk of the ash of Ash Wednesday that we wear on our foreheads, we
are speaking of the wilderness ash of grief and weary exhaustion, sin that
sickens us and our world, the things that imprison us, the fears that eat away
at us. Needless to say, no one looks for the wilderness. I certainly haven’t. No one looks for the
street that turns you sideways off the grid and disorients you. And yet, scripture tells us that Jesus is led to the
wilderness by the Holy Spirit. Author,
Kaitlyn Curtice explains that[i] in
her Native American tradition, around the time of puberty, a young man may
leave for a wilderness experience—sometimes accompanied by an elder, sometimes
alone. The book, American Indian
Healing Arts, explains it like this: “[the
youth] goes off by [themselves] to seek a vision. [they]
spends four or five days and nights fasting, alone with [their] thoughts, on a
windswept butte or within a shallow pit. [They] learns to deal with fear and find out
about his own personal strengths.” Caitlyn Curtice goes on to explain that “A vision quest [like
this] draws a person deeper inside [themselves] and at the same time allows [them]
to look at [themselves] from outside. So much does a person learn in the
process that in many tribes it is thought to be essential to the proper
evolution of a healthy life path.”
Pete Catches, a noted Lakota medicine man, once said, ‘I do
believe every young Indian, about high school age, should do a han ble che
yapi (vision quest) to get direction in life, to know what life is all
about.’ Jesus, out there in the wilderness, Curitce says, “learned something
about himself.” It was a kind of “communion with the wilderness that taught him
about himself and prepared him for his coming ministry and journey. We cannot know what kind of conversations happened
in that quiet, but I can imagine there were a lot of thoughts coming in and out
of Jesus’ existence. And in his struggle with spirits— evil and good, past and
present—(Curtice writes) he found himself, and his voice, and his own spiritual
journey unfolding.”
When the glaciers receded from this area which is now
Chicago, some 10,000 years ago, they left in their wake carved valleys, hills
and ridges. Some historians suggest that,
once upon a time, Lincoln avenue down the block, for example, ran along a
slight geological ridge. Ancient Indigenous
peoples created and traversed these trading trails along high ridges in order
to avoid the boggy marshlands and wetlands.
Our
city of Chicago is built on land that was home to Indigenous tribes for
hundreds of years. Potowatomi,
Mishigama, Inoka, the Iliani tribes. In 1833, the
same year that the Illinois and Michigan Canal Commission drew a city grid plan
for Chicago, the Treaty of Chicago was struck which granted the US government all
of the land west of Lake Michigan and extended up to Lake Winnebago in
Wisconsin. Turns out that these diagonal streets like Lincoln and Elston
Avenues follow the ancient contours of the earth pretty closely. There’s
Milwaukee Avenue which was once, historians say, a buffalo route that led to
the Chicago River.[ii][iii] For those of you who know your city streets, Rush
street is another well known diagonal downtown, it’s part of a trail which
originally started at the North end of the Michigan Avenue bridge at the
Chicago river, ran up that diagonal of Rush street and then cut over to Clark which
also bends into a diagonal at North Avenue and heads north out of the city.[iv] These old Native American trails that we know
of as our diagonal streets follow the ancient natural contours of the land. These paths navigate the valleys and the
crests, the ridges and the uneven surfaces.
Yeah, today’s roads have been straightened a little. But they’re there. Originally they meandered
a little more, taking their time in the dangerous areas, routing safely through
the wetlands.
This road of
wilderness which we all have known and will know has been walked before. The Israelites wandered in the wilderness 40
years, Jesus sat in the wilderness for forty days. The journey of wilderness, even
when it is uncomfortable and a little frightening, Curtice writes, is
sacred. Yes, Jesus and the Israelites
were delivered, YES, they were delivered,
out of the wilderness but they were
delivered new, changed and transformed. Jesus, after walking the contours of his
heart, stumbling on the unstable ground, and reflecting on the route before him
came out of the wilderness a new version of himself. Because God is faithful and with us, and even
comes to us in the ash of life.
I wonder if something about Jesus’ belovedness had sunk into
his bones when he was out there in the wilderness. Was God’s voice somehow sharpened? We will
never know, but I do wonder if he came out steadier, more peaceful, more
convicted, more resolute, and more certain that he was deeply beloved to God.
It was only after this very intense experience in the
wilderness, that we hear from scripture that Jesus was “filled with the power
of the Spirit, and returned to Galilee.” As we walk the contours of our hearts
this Lenten season, as we think about what to cultivate in our souls and what
to let go of, I wonder how we might be shaped and emboldened by God… How God might prepare us as disciples for ministry?
This Lent when you are traveling around the city, and you run
across one of these diagonal streets over in the Square, or riding the bus or
downtown or even driving the diagonal Kennedy expressway out of the city (which
is also an old Native American trail), I wonder if you might pause and slow
down and remember to walk those offbeat contours of your own heart. Just as
Jesus began in his wilderness, so we will begin in ours, again and again. Because
while, yes, this holy life we live is laced with wilderness and ash, it is also
painted with beauty and hope. Blessed be
the journey.
[i] https://kaitlincurtice.com/2017/05/08/jesus-us-a-shared-wilderness/
[ii] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1997-12-18-9712180088-story.html
[iii] http://interactive.wbez.org/curiouscity/chicago-native-americans/
[iv] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1997-12-18-9712180088-story.html
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