Transformation, Wilderness and Baptism

A portion of my Chapter Talk to the Company of Jesus, January 11, 2009, the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus.

Mark 1: 7-11: 7 And he preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. 8 I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. 11 And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

Divine Experiment Begins
Back in October, I a group of pastors from Huntington began regular Friday morning prayer meetings at a location just two blocks from our home. Today will be the beginning of something called the “Divine Experiment”. Seven local churches have come together to seek God’s face for 21 days. During this time, there will be morning and evening prayer meetings at the Douglass center and a ‘Daniel Fast”, the focus of which will be to get ourselves right with God and get the worldliness out of the church. As a result of this experiment, we hope to attract a more tangible Presence of God to our churches and community.

Friday evening and Saturday, we attended a seminar in which the speaker, Rhonda Hughey, talked about Transformations that are happening around the world in places like Fiji and the Canadian Arctic Circle. In these communities, the people have come together and recognized their need for God, turning to Him in prayer and repentance. Many remarkable healings and manifestations are taking place, and there is often a sense of the “Manifest Presence” of God in these places.

Significantly, part of the process of getting to that place is becoming dissatisfied with the status quo in our lives and leaving ‘Egypt’ to seek the ‘Promised Land’. Rhonda reported that in Fiji, it usually takes about three weeks for a community to go from desperation, through the Divine Experiment and into Transformation of the people and the very land itself. In America and other European places, however, there have been NO Transformations, even though some communities have done this Divine Experiment several times. That’s not to say that the results of the prayer have not been remarkable.

In many cases, marriages have been restored, finances have miraculous appeared, and churches have developed wonderful friendships across denominational lines. But the hoped- for community-wide Transformation has not as yet taken place. Instead, some communities have found themselves in the ‘Wilderness’, in which God seems to be purging out of them more and more worldliness.

This has been distressing to some, but it should also be expected. We know that Purgation is part of the process of Spiritual Growth, and that when one decides to pray more, to fast and to ‘go into the desert’, God begins to transform us from the inside out. And this of course is often painful. But the result of the process is an increased sensitivity to God and a purer life. The experience of monastics through the ages has born this out, starting with the Desert Fathers especially, and also noticed through the Benedictine cenobitic tradition, the Celtic love of ‘disserth’ places and the Franciscan experience of seeking God with abandon. Our Gospel reading today reminds us that the culmination of the desert experience for Jesus was being Baptized in the Jordan – in the Holy Spirit – in order to begin His earthly ministry.

I would seek your prayers for myself, my church and the six other Churches that are participating in the Divine Experiment over the next 21 days. I pray God may grant you all the blessings of the desert as you go about your daily asceticism of marriage, family, work and life and ministry.