Water From Rock
Mark 1:9-15
A Communion Meditation by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart

Lent is a time to sing broken Hallelujahs, silent Hallelujahs, to pray imperfect prayers, to pause before praise, and go where the pain is.  Lent is a time to practice getting lost, to live with wild beasts and ministering angels, to dive deep into the wilderness of this world, to risk living between a rock and a hard place.  

Jesus was baptized and immediately led into the wilderness... the wilderness of Palestine, limestone places of refuge and danger and holy encounters, places of temptation.

Throughout Lent, one of our Baptismal fonts has been placed at the center of the sanctuary. In the United Methodist Church, we baptize by full immersion in water, or by pouring water, or by sprinkling water. Baptism in any form and at any age immerses us in newness of life. And baptized, we follow Jesus in the wilderness.

Baptism is not spiritual insurance or a safety net.  It places us at risk.  Baptism is not a prophylactic application of water to preempt any need to wrestle with God, to be tempted, to fail, to feel, to be formed by struggle, by sin, by loss, to let go of the illusion of control.  The waters of Baptism flow from rock.  Living waters tear open heavens, wash away mountains, burst open who we are that we might become who we were created to be.  

Lent is a time to stop pretending ... to stop pretending that we are already there.  Joan Osborne's song "Hallelujah in the City" begins, "I have been unfaithful. I have been untrue."  Leonard Cohen's song, "Hallelujah" ends, "It's not a cry you can hear at night. It's not somebody who's seen the light.  It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah."

In her new book, An Altar in the World:  A Geography of Faith, Barbara Brown Taylor, writes, " ... most of us do not know the first thing about the spiritual fruits of failure.  When we fall ill, lose our jobs, wreck our marriages, or alienate our children, ...  Even those of us who are ministered to by brave friends can find it hard to shake the shame of getting lost in our lives.  And yet if someone asked us to pinpoint the times in our lives that changed us for the better, a lot of those times would be wilderness times.  When the safety net has split, when the resources are gone, when the way ahead is not clear, the sudden exposure can be both frightening and revealing." (p. 78)

Recently, I was at a national ministry training event and a woman from St. Louis struck up a conversation with me... until I said I was from Berkeley.  At that point, the woman paused, with a puzzled look, and asked, "Are there Christians in Berkeley?" I assured her that there are.  But as our conversation continued, and our differences in belief and practice became glaringly evident, she probably left thinking that she had been right in the first place.

We are Christians who live with ambiguity and complexity, who thrive in pluralism and paradox, who have experienced the wilderness and the radically inclusive good news of Jesus Christ, who work for peace and justice with a high level tolerance for the anxiety of our time.

Now while fear is attached to an object or specific threat, and is color coded nowadays,  anxiety is a general state of dread, worry and dis-ease.

Christian Theologian Paul Tillich wrote that human beings must confront three dimensions of anxiety:  anxiety of nonbeing (or death), anxiety of meaninglessness, and anxiety of condemnation.  

In the face of anxiety we sing, "Welcome, Everyone to the Love of God!"

Elie Wiesel said: "While it is hard to live a life of negation, it is harder to live a life of affirmation, but the life of affirmation is the only one that makes any sense of the ambiguities and evils of our day."

Lent is a time to stop hiding.  Our Hallelujahs may be broken, but let's sing them boldly.  Let our Hallelujahs resound, yea even from Berkeley, -- Oakland, Richmond, Emeryville, Pinole, El Sobrante.  Let Hallelujahs resound subversively, paradoxically, with dissonance and dancing, even from rock and hard places.

Bernard Manning tells this story:  (adapted)  A water-bearer carried two large pots.  One of the pots had a crack in it, while the other was whole.  At the end of the long walk from the stream to the Master's house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.

Every day for two years, the water-bearer delivered only one and one half pots of water.  One day the cracked pot, ashamed of its imperfection and limited usefulness, spoke to the water-bearer:  "I apologize to you.  The crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to the master's house. All this work and I do not serve you well."

The water-bearer felt sorry for the cracked pot, and in compassion, he said, "As we return to the house, I want to you to look at the beautiful and colorful wildflowers along the path."  The cracked pot admired the beauty, but at the end of the path, still felt bad about its brokenness and apologized once more.

The bearer then said, "Did you notice that there were flowers only on your side of the path, not on the other side? That is because I have always known about your flaw, and so I planted flower seeds that you have watered everyday.  If you were not just as you are, these beautiful flowers would not grace this path and the table of the master."   (Ruthless Trust, p. 133)

As I reflected on two powerful films of the past year, I realized that one ... "Revolutionary Road", a story, place of apparent affluence and privilege ... led to desolation, empty promise and even death by bread alone.  The other film, ... "Slumdog Millionaire" ... is a story, a place, of brutal poverty and cruelty that gives birth to broken hallelujahs because of tenacious, self-giving, love.  

Let's come to love‚s table ... to the welcome table ... carrying our prayers, our stones, our stories. Let's come to the table bearing one another's joys and sorrows, trusting that God will always be with us, bear with us, break through to us and bear us into new life.  Not for our own sake, but for the sake of the world God so loves. Amen.