British composer Ralph Vaughn Williams’ setting of Psalm 90 is forever seared in my memory.  I cannot pray this psalm without singing the music, which I first learned at Pacific Lutheran University as a member of Choir of the West.

The psalm is a community’s heartfelt plea for God’s compassion in the face of tribulations which threaten to drawn down the curtain of despair; a lament in which the human soul plaintively yearns for God’s merciful accompaniment.  Vaughn Williams captures the essence of the psalm’s longsuffering reflection on life’s brevity from the vantage point of one who has experienced the full complexity of human community.  How fitting that the subtitle of the psalm is “A prayer of Moses, the man of God,” for Moses spent the better part of his years shepherding a reluctant and complaining people through the wilderness and toward a future land of promise which he would never experience.

During my continuing education sojourn up at Holden Village last month, one of the presenters was Fred Niedner, professor of Biblical Studies at Valparaiso University.  I’m always happy to see Fred’s name on the docket for such conferences because he’s a scholar who excavates the Word deeply, uncovering hidden veins of riches which never fail to enrich my understanding of scripture and undergird my faith.

At the conference Fred reminded us that WILDERNESS is the longest story in scripture.  Wilderness is an in-between place, a place of transition. Teasing back the layers behind Israel’s constant “murmuring” at God and at Moses, Fred taught us that the Hebrew word for wilderness, mid-bar, comes from the Hebrew word for “word” (da-bar).  To get to wilderness you begin with “da-bar” and add to it a preposition that means “away from,” “apart from,” or “without.”  What you end up with, then, is a word for “wilderness” that translates, “the place where words don’t work anymore,” “the place where meaning eludes us,” “the place in which we don’t have the words for what we’re experiencing.” So wilderness, then, is to be understood as a place beyond or without words.

All of us have stood in that wilderness place in our lives, that place which no words can accurately describe; that place where our experience of loss or rejection or betrayal or abandonment leaves us “without words.” In those times it may seem to us, as it did to the psalmist, that we are bearing the weight of God’s wrath; or we may find ourselves desperately casting about looking for someone besides our selves to blame; or we may feel so numb that all the possible explanations or reasons for our experience fall hollow on our ears.

No one gets out of the wilderness without dying.  That’s the hard lesson God’s people keep on having to learn over and over again.  The life of faith is a long pilgrimage in which we continually let go, more and more, ceding control of our selves, our agendas, our possessions—all we have so carefully gathered and sought to preserve—into the hands of God, and are left standing in the buff with only a bare-naked trust to hold on to.

The leaves of autumn are instructive for us in this regard, for this is the time of year when they give what they have back to the tree, and then let go.

The gesture of thanksgiving you see me make each week during the Great Thanksgiving in the Eucharistic liturgy, is a gesture built upon the idea of lifting up what I have—what we have together—to the heavens.  The subtext of that simple refrain—LIFT UP YOUR HEARTS – WE LIFT THEM TO THE LORD—is that what we have been given we cannot hold forever.  We must give it up.  We must heave it toward heaven.  Our liturgy teaches us how to do this, week after week.  It is a rehearsal for the times when we have no words.  And when that time comes, as it has and it will, we are met by the Word made flesh, who offers his life for our sustenance, and shows us, like the leaves, what it means to give up his life on a tree.

Your servant in Christ,

Pastor Erik