Lent 3A              Victoria Kempf                         2/24/08

An excellent, although heart wrenching, recent movie is “Away from Her.” It’s about a long-married couple facing the wife’s Alzheimer’s disease. As the story progresses, the wife does not recognize her husband and begins a relationship with a patient in the facility to which she has been confined.

The husband visited every day. All day, at times. He watched her, spoke to her, and grieved at the loss of her, not only to the disease, but to another man.

How, we ask, could he have endured the pain? How could he have devotedly watched from a distance as she drifted away from him like a ship sailing to another port?

I guess the quick answer is love. But even love, when thin, can fade when tested in such a harsh way. The better answer might be depth of love, with an emphasis on depth.

It came from the depth of their history, their experience together, faith in their relationship, and from the power of deep commitment.
 

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A ship sailing on the water sits deep, with weight below the surface. Called ballast, this weight added to a vessel lowers its center of gravity, and enables the ship to ride steady and balanced.
Ships with insufficient counterweight will tend to tip, or heel, excessively in high winds. On larger modern vessels, the keel is made of or filled with a high density material, such as concrete, iron, or lead. Traditional forms of ballast have been stones or sand, and frequently water is used to weight the ship, allowing for discharge and addition when needed.

Strange to think that you might need more water in a boat in order to keep from capsizing into more water.

The love exhibited in the movie “Away from Her” was a love deeply weighted, able to withstand life’s storms which included a past infidelity, and present disease.

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The people of Israel in the OT lesson today didn’t have much ballast. They cried out to Moses asking “is the Lord among us or not?” and Moses had to steady himself against the waves of distrust they generated by trusting in his own ballast – his relationship with God.

Who would guess water can come from a rock? Who would have enough faith to do such as silly thing as strike a rock in the hopes that water will gush forth? When you’re in the desert and complaining about no water, where do you put your hopes? In this story of faith, the water came from the ballast of Moses, from the depths of the weight of his faith.

Is the Lord among us or not?
 

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The Epistle today has one of the most powerful passages about the ballast of faith in the whole New Testament:

Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that 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.

“Is the Lord among us or not?”
 

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A woman sits alone by the side of a well in the country of Samaria. The well is deep and sustains the town. The woman is alone because she has been married to disappointment and abandonment many times. Her life has capsized again and again into stormy waters, and she wears her disillusionment as a defensive shield, keeping her from more sorrow.

A man approaches and asks for water, for refreshment, for relief from the dry burning sun.

The long-standing chip on her shoulder prompts a lively discussion between her and the man.
We never learn if the man ever did get his drink of water, but the woman at the well learns that there is a water for the soul much deeper and more sustaining than even the village well offers.

“Is the Lord among us or not?”

The disciples found Jesus by that well – disciples who had left their boats and their lives of fishing behind. Jesus had urged them to move on, to chart new seas with him, to fish for people from a boat of faithfulness, weighted with the power of God to hold steady, to sustain and protect.
 

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In each of these stories, there was journey from one country to another. A man and a woman take their marriage on a journey into unknown territory; a people struggle thirsty as they wander through a desert in search of a new home; a woman leaves behind her self-protective wall of isolation and reenters society as a witness to the presence of God sudden in her life.

“Is the Lord among us or not?”

Benedictine writer Esther de Waal has written a marvelous little book called “To Pause at the Threshold.” In it she recounts her present life on the border of England and Wales, ever aware of the danger and promise of living on a borderland.

She writes: “All our lives are inevitably made of a succession of borders and thresholds, which open up into the new and promise excitement or fear. The traveler encountering unknown places has all the exhilaration, the thrill of another country… I have become aware of the continual movement of crossing over thresholds into the new, while still of course being part of what is left behind.”

She says it’s about “openness to change, ready and willing to move forward, living without defenses rather than hiding behind barriers.”

She speaks of transformation – always at least a little scary – that “to be transformed implies letting go of control for a while in the hopeful expectation that something worthwhile may result.
It means taking the risk that old certainties might be replaced by a new way of seeing the world.”

She asks: “Am I willing to cross the threshold of new understanding by being open and receptive, not closed in and defensive?

She writes: The most profound threshold …is between the inner and the outer, between going deeper into the interior self and emerging to meet the world beyond the self without protective defenses, as friend not foe.
 

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So the questions today for both self and community might be:

What is under your surface? How much weight is below, in the depths? How balanced are you?
What is the ballast that holds you steady? Will you weather the storm? Survive the desert journey? Leave behind your disappointments and fear of abandonment and emerge a witness to Christ?

The ultimate question is: “Is the Lord among us or not?”