Recently I have been honored to walk alongside Minister Tim Carson at Broadway Christian Church and share messages and images of the El Salvador series of paintings. During this season of Lent it has been an interesting journey to revisit and speak about these paintings because they hold many experiences and perspectives Dave and I held from seven and a half years of life in El Salvador. Some paintings are not so fun for me to think about, nonetheless, for me this Lenten season has been about emptying myself of myself, daring to tamper with fears of the unknown and yet again trusting in something much bigger than me.
Here below you will find a transcribed version of the first Sunday sharing of Lent. For those that could not be present I hope you enjoy...
The Way of Wilderness: Lenten Expressions- Tim Carson and Jenny McGee
Introduction: Throughout the season of Lent, we are going to foster a conversation between the ancient wisdom of our Scriptures and the contemporary art work of Jenny McGee. We believe something important will reveal itself at this intersection. The entire collection is based on Jenny’s experience of serving with her husband, Dave, in El Salvador. And the spine of the entire collection is the well-known hymn, “Here I Am, Lord.” You will find it in your hymnal. I encourage you to open it and have it ready in your lap. Today we will be dealing with and singing the chorus. Week by week, we will work our way through the song – chorus, verse 1, verse 2, verse 3 – and the art piece or pieces that accompany them. Each week, after we have shared the art in worship, we will hang it in the narthex, so that by the end of Lent, the entire 20-piece collection and story will be there. But I will let Jenny tell you more about this in a few moments.
Let us pray together. Now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Exposition of Text: This Scripture is quite familiar to us all, always presented in the common lectionary on the first Sunday of Lent. It is Jesus in the wilderness meeting his time of testing and temptation. Immediately after Jesus’ baptism he is propelled into the wilderness of testing. As he fasts and surrenders himself to God, he meets the temptations that every soul meets.
On the one hand, there is the temptation to turn stones into bread, a clamoring after security. We do this – clamor after security – even though we know living by our security needs alone is never enough and will not give us the fullness of life. Jesus said, “People do not live by bread alone but by every word that issues from the mouth of God.” There are more than just our material security needs. When our security is put at risk, when we face hunger, thirst, and deprivation, how easy it is to put our physical needs ahead of the deeper things of faith. Take ten supposedly civilized people and put them in a room with rations for three and see how civilized they stay. The temptation is to turn stones into bread, to honor our security needs. That is the first temptation.
The second is what I call “temple jumping.” There is the temptation to erase all uncertainty from the path of faith. We want to test God, to make sure everything is predictable, safe and in order. We want to put a prayer nickel in the cosmic bubblegum machine, turn the crank, and angels will fly down and rescue us at the last moment before our feet hit the stones. Even if we jump off the temple wall, angels will scoop us up before we bloody a thing. But faith does not provide certainty; it gives trust in the face of uncertainty. Don’t test your God in this way. Don’t ask for the proof of certainty.
The tempter is very crafty. He quotes Scripture a lot. He quoted Scripture to Jesus from the Psalms. He reminded Jesus, “After all, it says the angels will swoop you up and keep you from striking your foot.”
You know; anything good turned 30 degrees in one direction can become bad. Jesus says, quoting Scripture, “You shall not put your Lord to the test.” But we do that. We want to erase all uncertainty from faith. We want to create little systems – religious strictures – to keep everything tidy and in place where we can call on the angels any time. We like to think we can control all of this. That’s what we do when we do temple jumping. That’s the temptation. But, Jesus says, “Don’t test your God in this way. Don’t ask for proof, because when you do, you are not trusting. You are testing.”
Those are two different things. Instead of testing yourself, you are testing God, which defines the relationship wrongly.
And then there is the ever-present will-to-power. The tempter takes Jesus up to the top of the mountain and says, “Ah, all the kingdoms of the world – here they all are. The world is your oyster. Oh, by the way, if you will bow down and worship me.”
That is just a small little caveat there. What are we willing to compromise to have all of that? For fame, wealth, power, status, control … what are we willing to compromise to get them? Some have compromised themselves entirely. Some have sacrificed their families on the way to the illusory top. Some have broken every legal and moral stricture to have what can be had. “Bow down and worship me, and all of this will be yours,” the devil says. Will we?
Jesus says, “No. You shall worship only the Lord, your God.”
We go out into the wilderness, alone with ourselves, our fears, our deepest instinctual drives, our memories, our creaturely needs – absent all the structure around us that keeps us coloring inside the lines – out in wilderness, and every temptation rises to the surface. It’s essential we pass through, we must. We have to do so.
Jenny, tell us about wilderness, about El Salvador, about “Here I Am, Lord,” about this art, about you.
Jenny McGee: Good Morning. Tim’s thoughts and reflections about “wilderness” take me back to the year 2002, when my husband and I got married, and we decided to extend our honeymoon by visiting the country of El Salvador for three months. Little did we know that three months turned into a seven-and-half-year journey there.
Visiting El Salvador certainly was a wilderness to me. It was the very first time that I had left my comfy, cozy home in Missouri. I felt like a stranger in a very strange land. El Salvador is in Central America. It compares to about the size of Massachusetts. But, can you imagine 7,000,000 people squished into that small country? They say it is the number two most deforested nation in the Western Hemisphere, next to Haiti. It is not the safest place to live. I think we Dave and I left, we gave both sets of parents some very high levels of anxiety, and maybe a few ulcers.
It was definitely an exciting experience. I do believe it was a time that God used an opportunity to carve out a new space for Dave and me to jump in and trust at the deepest way we ever had. We were financially, linguistically, and physically at our most vulnerable. But through our work with Enlace, which means “Link,” we were connecting to something much bigger than ourselves. We worked with rural Salvadorans and rural Salvadoran churches who were interested in serving their communities selflessly. They are very passionate about serving their communities.
Dave and I also found a personal refuge in the only English-speaking church that we could find in El Salvador. It was during one worship service that the worship leader asked us to take our hymnals and turn to page 44. “We are going to see the song, “Here I Am, Lord” by Daniel Shutte. I got so excited and so flooded with nostalgia, because I remembered hearing this song in church as a child. I remembered sitting in church and dreaming about the places that I would love to go and serve. As the chorus rang out: Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord? I have heard you calling in the night. I will go, Lord, if you lead me. I will hold your people in my heart.
Inside, I was wanting to scream out loud, “Yes, God. Here we are! Here we are in El Salvador, and I will go!”
Well, I really wanted to go – I wanted to go back home to my safe and cozy place in Missouri, but Dave was the center. He was totally cool about staying. I was thinking, “Yes, God. I will stay, but you have to lead me, because I am very terrified at this point. How, exactly, do you want me to hold your people in my heart?”
During that time, I had these precepts that in developing or third-world countries that is where doctors and nurses go. That is where development workers and anthropologists go. But I was a graphic designer and an artist, and pretty full of myself, in fact, at that time, as well. I remembered thinking how can I hold God’s people in my heart. The idea came to me to use the song, “Here I Am, Lord,” as the backbone and the infrastructure of a series of 20 paintings that collectively sing the song, “Here I Am, Lord.” But, individually, they also speak of different experiences David and I had, and those experiences we had together as well as some social or political or economic difficulties that many Salvadorans face.
After that idea hit, I remember the feeling of walking on a tightrope, which my husband did teach me how to do. I remember that feeling of sheer excitement but also total fear of what I was getting into. I knew I struggled with the confidence as a painter. I wasn’t trained as a painter, but I had the courage, and the song reminded me, “Yes, God, I will go; I will journey into this, but you have to lead me.
So, the first painting is of this tree. There are letters below that were hand cut and sing the chorus. The tree in the painting represents the time in my life when I felt so lonely, so scared and frightened. The tree is in a space where everything around it was vacant. It was how I felt. It felt new. It felt terrifying. But the tree, even though it was being challenged and facing struggles, it is not dead, in the painting. It is fully alive. It has tons of leaves. It is blooming. It is blossoming. Somehow, it is being sustained.
Brother Lawrence, a 17th century monk, reminds us that the secret to the life of a tree is that it remains rooted in something deeper than itself. The green, in the painting, to me was the color that reminded me of growth and nourishment.
The nourishment that God gives us, even in the most challenging and darkest times, reminded me that God is with us giving us life.
Tim Carson: Thank you, Jenny. I look at the tree, which I love. I love all of the paintings in this series, but maybe this is my favorite. It is hard to say. Whatever is in front of me is my favorite.
Application: It reminds me of a book I am reading. There is a Jewish scholar by the name of Avivah Zornberg. I have been reading one of her books on reflections on Exodus. She talks about the inevitable rise and fall of the Exodus experience of passing through the waters and then being ushered into wilderness, and how that is a necessary pattern. There is exhilaration in being liberated from Egypt. Miriam was dancing on the side of the sea and talking about horse a rider falling into the sea. But as soon as the last note of her song sounds, the Israelites are grumbling, and fearful, and anxious. Some were saying, “It wasn’t so bad in Egypt, after all. Maybe we should go back there.”
Zornberg talks about how wilderness is characterized by its vast emptiness. There might be beasts there and natural formations, but it is the empty space, the vacuous emptiness that most defines what it means to be in wilderness, to move past the exhilaration from waters to wilderness. The most terrifying space in life is empty space. I don’t know why we Americans have such difficulty with empty space. That is part of our story: frontier, going into the wilderness, making it to the west coast, then we went down into the oceans, then we went up into space. We are not good with emptiness. We want to fill it with something. We are terrified of emptiness. That’s where all the temptations come. They come in the void of emptiness.
Jesus’ temptations arise in a similar way. When left all alone, with nothing but the chaos of emptiness, the mind turns to security needs, stone into bread, and to creating mechanisms of certainty where we can control God, and to self-aggrandizement. Grandiosity sets in, and we want the power of the world.
Zornberg says that God allows the people to wander in endless emptiness, and rather than trusting God, they begin to test God. “God, are you really there? Give us a sign.”
How many of us have said, “If I just had a sign, then I could trust. Send me a sign. But there is a big difference between trusting and testing God.
When I look at your tree, Jenny, and I see how alone it looks, absent props and distractions, planted with such spaciousness around it, I think of how each one of us finds ourselves in the wilderness…and more than once! Over and over in life, we find ourselves there.
How often have those persons who are new to the faith experienced first flush of exhilaration of the faith? What happens when you first come to faith, you receive the consolations of the Spirit – the consolations of being nearer God. That can only feel wonderful. But soon enough, after that, like leaving the sea or Jesus at the River Jordan, going in there, there comes a time of wilderness. It is the time of spiritual emptiness. And people are generally unprepared for this, especially if they don’t have a spiritual director or mentor to tell them about the wilderness that inevitably follows this first flush of the joy of faith. They so often misinterpret this dry time as a loss of faith. You can hear people saying, “I think I am losing my faith. I think I have lost it.”
It is not loss of faith. It is, rather, the John of the Cross’ “Dark Night of the Soul.” It is going into a time where God seems to be absent. It is the seeming absence of God. But, here is the paradox. In the absence, is the presence. Or, to put it another way, it is the presence of something absent. God appears to be absent, but that is a place where we are drawn to seek God even more, so that our faith will deepen more. We are not left just with the consolations of faith all the time, because then we would not have the motivation to seek out God even more. So, that which seems to be absent is really full of the presence of God drawing us there.
Here’s what I think: I think we have a kind of approach/avoidance response to the emptiness of wilderness. We want it, and yet, we flee it. We flee the emptiness when God is in the emptiness, in the places of wilderness. And today we flee in countless ways.
We submerge the inner voice speaking in the silence with noise, a never-ending data stream into our TVs, radios, iPods, and handhelds. We flee the emptiness by trying to fill it with all manner of other things, the source of our many addictions. We flee the emptiness as we attempt to build things in it, as we try to manage it, as though we could manage God. We try to somehow convince ourselves that we are somehow in charge. But wilderness is not about being in charge. Wilderness is about surrendering and having nothing that you claim for yourself, so that you can find God.
We are terrified of the wilderness, and yet it is there we may find God next, and God may remake us for the next leg of the journey. What if, rather than distracting ourselves with substitutes, or fleeing, or trying to organize or control the wilderness with our own creations, we waited there to find our center of gravity. An athlete knows that, whatever the sport, one has to find his or her center of gravity. A musician never just sings a note or plays a note. They find the center of the note, the ping to all relating sounds around it, the center of gravity of the note. In spiritual life, we seek and wait for the center of gravity, the presence of God, like a tree rooted in something deeper than itself?
I invite you, like a tree, to root yourself in something deeper than yourself. I invite you to close your eyes and to quietly sit in your wilderness for a moment. Send your roots deep into the earth. Let your branches reach to the heavens. Be where you are. Be who God has made you to be. Just be there.
Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord? I have heard you calling in the night.
Monday, April 18, 2011 at 08:29PM 
