The Pros And Cons Of The Wilderness

In talking with James, this line between the positives and negatives of the wilderness was the space we wanted to target for our sermonic moment. There was one more step that I wanted to take in preparing for this sermon though; because my lay committee has often encouraged me to work with personal stories more regularly, it was important to me that I include my own experiences with wilderness in my part of the sermon. As a boy growing up in the rural south-eastern U.S., I spent a lot of summers wandering around in the woods. Walks to the river near-by, the waterfalls, and building dams in the creek were regular parts of my childhood. Any story related to those times would have been useful for this sermon, but I could not think of anything that demonstrated the great experiences that I have with wilderness balanced with some of the fears that society attaches to wilderness. The week before the sermon happened to be Thanksgiving week. At home, this is a really important a week for my dad and I because we often watch the epic Robert Redford movie, “Jeremiah Johnson,” and do a lot of deer hunting. Dad and I watched “Jeremiah
I clearly have my own experiences with wilderness that I can say a lot about, but those stories could be part of the gap between the pulpit and the congregation because it would be difficult for my congregation to converse with me about wilderness if I spend all of our time telling them about my experience. Delivering this sermon with James as a dialogue gave me the chance to investigate how others experience wilderness, and made for an interesting step toward encouraging others to think and converse about how wilderness effects our lives