Hit the rock

3 Lent A 2014
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Lent/ALent3_RCL.html


You’ve heard of a rock and a hard place. Today Moses is right there.

He’s stuck between some dry, silent rock in the wilderness and the rocks about to come whistling through the air right at his head. Moses has taken a gamble on God, and the people have taken a gamble on Moses. All that gambling, that long-odds game, has led them to some patch of dry sand and a stupid rock thrusting up from the ground.

Today we would say blandly, “It’s time for people to give voice to their concerns.”

That they had made it that far was amazing. See, some religious leaders have successful careers by staying right where they know there is food and water and shade. They keep their people happy by promising that the food and water will never run out, that the shade will never wither, if they just stay where they are. Then they take retirement, right before the shade does wither and the water and food run out.

But then there’s Moses’ kind of leader, who leads people into the desert, betting on God.

It’s not easy out there. If Moses had been an Episcopal rector, his Vestry would have asked for his resignation, talking about things like good judgment and prudence and talking in the parking lot about the good old days back in Egypt. When the people are at the end of whatever faith they had and come at Moses, Moses loses whatever faith he had in God’s appointing him. In the desert, it’s not easy being stuck between a big rock and small flying rocks.

So God says, come out a little further, and hit that dry rock baking in the sun with your staff.

Strange thing is, although Moses did what God said, and the water gushed out, tradition says that God was pretty irritated with Moses. Some say that Moses hit that rock twice because he wanted to make sure.

Faith is utterly easy, even cheap, when there is shade and food and no real worries. Maybe that’s not faith at all. Faith gets real when you’re in the desert, between a rock and more rocks. Anyone here ever been there?

But the desert is where faith gets real. We’ve all been there. This congregation is there now. It’s tough. But it’s where faith gets real.

Faith gets real in the hot sun when a full-blooded woman meets a stranger by a well in the Gospel. Some say that our Samaritan woman may have been an outcast among her own people because of her many loves. That’s why she was at the well alone in the heat of the day—usually the women would go as a group in the cool of the morning. I can’t help but love this lady—she’s very for-real, no illusions. In the Bible men and women meet and court at wells, and it feels like she is both mocking and flirting with Jesus at the same time. She’s taken her chances with life, she has few illusions, she’s taken her lumps, she’s nobody’s plastic saint.

And in her personal desert of choices and love and pain and loss and rejection, in the presence of a man who should despise her, she finds her own rock in the wilderness.

She strikes that rock with her words. And living water gushes out. The word can be translated “leaping water” like a fountain. She forgets her bucket and her errand. This stranger knows her, and still speaks with her as if she is the only person in the world. In an act of intimacy he reveals his heart and his purpose to her, and he invites her to drink.

Only in the desert truth of our lives, when we take a gamble on God, can living water be revealed.

We are these people, thirsty wanderers in the desert, real people and not just prettied up for Sundays, trying to look like someone we are not. In the desert we lose all those illusions about ourselves. But we’ve come to the desert to strike the rock, to engage the Christ, to take a gamble on God. If we feel the dry wind and we find ourselves standing before the rock of stone-cold reality, then we’ve come to the right place. We’ve come where we can have our faith become real, where rocks can become fountains, where the Stranger-who-is-Christ before us can hold all mystery and all hope.

Strike the rock, ask the question, take a gamble on God. See what happens. See what happens, congregation.