The Rev. Rob Fisher
St. Dunstan’s Church, Carmel Valley

Lent III

Texts: Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit – Amen.

A few days ago I found myself on the rugged, rocky shore near Asilomar, where the Monterey Peninsula juts out against the full force of the ocean.

It was not a calm day.  The waves were well over ten feet tall, crumbly, disorganized, and relentlessly thrashing the clusters of rock that surround the shore.  The water near the shore was a churning soup of white.

I stood down on the sand near a cloudy but still pool of water.  It was so still I wondered if it was really connected to the rest of the ocean, and sure enough it was.  Yet there were many protecting rocks for the waves to get past before their energy could reach this little tide pool.

From where I stood, the waves rose high and threatening, well above my eye level.  I could see that the water level dropped a bit with every successive passage through the rocks as it got nearer and nearer to me.

The pool remained still, and protected.

Even the largest, most impressive waves were reduced to tiny bumps of water, hardly more than trickles, by the time they made their way to the pool at my feet.

I kept waiting for the wave that would be so large it would cause this little pool to really rise–and finally it was not a single wave but a pounding of three giant waves in a row that overcame the rocks and caused a rush of water to fill all the pools on the sand so quickly that I had to leap up onto a rock to protect my shoes.

An unbidden image for me was of course the terrible wave that hit the coast of Japan.  The thought of it and the people who perished, brought a sick feeling into my gut.

I had another image come into my heart that was related to the first one.

I imagined the waves as the pain and suffering that we know out there in life, and that we hope won’t reach us.

Inevitably, one day or other, it does.

When we say “For thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, for ever and ever” we affirm the image of God as the powerful rock who can protect us from all harm.

And when the harm of the world slips past God’s best protection and we feel the pain it brings, we are like the Israelites in the wilderness–we are gravely disappointed.  Some even turn on God and say, where were you?  Some might even say, “Is God with us or not?”

***

In this morning’s passage from Exodus, the Israelites’ specific problem is that they are without water.  They are thirsty

Isn’t it interesting that water can take life—and it can be a fearsome thing—but water is also necessary for life!

When the Israelites were without enough water to live, they started to panic.  They clearly forgot all that God had done to protect them up to that point, and they said accusingly: “Is the Lord with us or not?”

The people of God were saying to God, “What have you done for me lately?”

“Sure, God, you saved us from slavery in Egypt, and then when we were hungry you gave us miraculous food to eat—the manna from heaven—which kept us nourished but not over-full.  What about now?”

And in fact, it might be a fair question for even us to ask: Were the people really going to die of thirst?

We don’t know what God was planning on doing.  As far as the story goes, he did not provide them the water until they demanded it.

But to answer the question, we need to go back to the relationship.  Were the people ever left without what they needed?

No, the people always received what they needed from God.

They may not have always gotten what they wanted, but they got what they needed.

***

The psalm actually relates to the reading from Exodus.

The whole first part of the psalm praises the goodness of the Lord until the last words of verse 7, “O that today we would harken to his voice!”

Have you ever been that person who is giving good advice to a friend or loved one who is about to go down completely the wrong path?

And you can see a mistake about to be made while your friend cannot.

You give the best advice you can, but sadly it falls on deaf ears.  Perhaps this person is not ignoring you, but he simply cannot hear the advice you are giving.

O that today he would harken to your voice.

I wonder if this is exactly how God feels.

The psalm goes on to say: harden not your hearts, as your forebears did in the wilderness, at Meribah and Massah, where they asked “Is the Lord with us or not?”

They put the Lord to the test, says the psalmist, even though they had just seen his works on their behalf!

***

Paul says that we “boast in our suffering, because suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

Paul speaks directly across the ages, as much to us today as back to the Israelites whom he had studied and known as his very own forebears, who suffered and did not understand.

They suffered because their life in the desert was hard, but it was much worse for their lack of understanding.  Their suffering was devoid of hope and growth.

They thirsted for water for their bodies while God was ready to give them spiritual water for their souls.

Paul is wise.  Paul knows that it is all connected.

One thing begets another.

Our suffering is not left hanging and empty.

Even our suffering is redeemed.

It is important to say that God does not want us to suffer.

But suffering is part of our world.  A world without suffering is not a possible world, and even God cannot make a world exist that is impossible.

The good news is not that we will never suffer, because that is not the truth about this world.

The good news is that even when we do suffer, God is with us.  While God cannot protect us from suffering, neither can God protect himself from suffering.

Whenever we find ourselves in the wilderness, and suffering, we can be absolutely sure that God knows what we are going through, and God can feel it, too.

Remember the friend to whom you were trying to give good advice?  Remember how the advice fell on deaf ears, and your friend went ahead and made that big mistake?

The mistake was not yours, but you suffered, too, naturally because you love your friend.

That is what compassion means.  The prefix “com” means together, and “passion” means suffering.  God is compassionate.  God suffers with us.

Paul wraps up his thoughts here on a positive note.

Christ died for us, enduring the ultimate suffering, precisely at a time when we humans were treating him like an enemy.  He reached across the divide and reconciled us anyway, even at our ugliest moment.  He said, “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do.”

To Paul, and to us, it is an incredible and amazingly hopeful fact.

paul says, “For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of [Jesus], much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.”

***

What if the pool is not suffering, but life?  And the rocks are what we have put in place to protect us from suffering?  And they end up protecting us from the reality of life.

Because sometimes suffering and real life come hand in hand.

Lent is many things, and one of those things is a walk in the wilderness for forty days.

We are in the middle of that walk.

In this walk we open our eyes to reality, and with it we may reacquaint ourselves with the suffering that life can bring.  But so long as we are being honest, and we never forget that we are in the hands of a God who is compassionate, our suffering will lead to better things.  It is all connected.

Even at this time, during the wilderness days of Lent, our goal is not to suffer.

Our goal is to know the unprotected truth, the reality of life—including the good and the bad that comes with it—and to find God even here, in the beauty of this desert wilderness, this place of rugged honesty.

—Amen.

Click HERE to see the actual waves I was talking about: