David Orendorff,  Exodus 17:1-7 

It started as a great promise. After generations of death at work, death in child birth, death by slaughter of the innocents, death by poverty, and death at the word of someone powerful Moses had been sent by God to set the people free. And now, these “free people” were in the middle of some apparently God forsaken desert with no water and no hope. It was not the first time Moses had led them into trouble. They had been chased by the armies of Pharaoh and petty kings of nothing kingdoms. They had been without food where there was no food. At one point Moses deserted them for over a month while he climbed a mountain to talk with Yahweh. What kind of savior had God sent them? What freedom was this that kept them homeless and on the edge of death?

It started as a great promise. After starting out to be a writer he had found the job that combined his writing with a love for public justice. He wrote grants for the state and facilitated community meetings for reaching consensus on aiding the poor. But then there was a reorganization, and new management, and a glass ceiling for people of color, more friction in the office, and budget cuts, and depression, until he could no longer work there. And so he quit, not knowing what was next.

It started as a great promise. The first marriage had been disastrous. He had run off with another woman leaving her to raise two children by herself. But now, what was really a lifetime later, she had met another man. And they had fallen deeply in love. And it was a good love, a long lasting love, a love that would endure. After years of struggle she had found someone who loved her. And they married. It took five clergy to do it; two Catholic Priests and three United Methodist Pastors. It was terrific. But then on Christmas after only eight years she began to have headaches. The headaches weren’t treatable by the usual methods, and so there were tests that showed two tumors growing rapidly in her brain.

In the short time I have been here, I have come to know many of you. I have heard many of your stories great promises turned sour. I know that what began as a road to heaven led to great desert places. I have been there in the desert for some of your lives. I listened while you told me of your children’s struggles, the pain of your office, of broken relationships and of illnesses. I have set with a few of you in death. I have known your deserts and I have had my own.

I hate the desert times, the wandering, hopeless, exodus to a promised land unseen. I hate how it can destroy the joy of life. I hate how it can be a place of no visible hope even when it is Moses, or God, who has led us there. The desert burns the life out of all it touches. It brings the people to grumbling, and warring and the threat of death. It destroys the garden and leaves us hungry for hope. It makes the people want to turn back to Egypt, even if it means returning to slavery. The desert is a place of desperation; a time when the people lose faith in leaders, in themselves and in their God. The desert question comes and will not be stopped, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken us and led us to this cemetery? Where is God when we are broken, bleeding and dying?”

You have been there. You know the agony. You know the question. You know.

It is Moses who goes for us before God and says, “The people are perishing. They are ready to stone me. You must save us!” And God answers prayer with:

Go on before the people and take with you some of the elders of Israel; and your staff with which you smote the river, take it in your hand and go.
Behold, I will stand before you there on the flinty rock at Horeb, and you shall strike the flinty rock, and there shall gush water out of it that the people may drink.”

It is an absurd answer. God tells Moses he has what he needs in the staff. God has already taken all the action necessary, now it is Moses who must act, who must strike the flinty rock. How can water come from flinty rock? Fire comes from flinty rock. Weapons come from flinty rock. Only a fool would believe that water would come from flinty rock. For a dying people, there is no hope in flinty rock.

This is not the first time it has seemed hopeless. It seemed hopeless when Moses led these same desert wanders to the edge of the sea of reeds and the whole of the Egyptian Army was closing in on them. All that stood between the people and death was the staff that God had given to Moses. Moses took that staff and struck the water and it parted, making dry ground and providing a way to safety, a way to follow the promise.

And so now, when there is no water, but only dry ground, Moses takes that same staff, the God given rod, strikes the flinty rock and water pours forth.

My friend did quit his job with the state. In the quitting he heard God call him to ordained ministry. At 55 he began seminary. At 58 he graduated. He is now retired but serving a small United Methodist church part time. His wife, an attorney, supported him and then discovered her love also for God things, and her own call to ordained ministry. She too graduated from seminary and was ordained a United Methodist Elder subsequently serving two small churches in Utah. God gave them everything they needed for this exodus and daily God brought water from the flinty rock.

And my friend, Carol, who never thought there could be a second marriage of such joy found renewed love in her second husband. But the cancer in her brain was winning and Lent 1999 became a time not only for her to prepare for Jesus death, but also for her own. She died on Easter morning. I am sure she was raised with Christ on that Easter day.

Her husband, Gerald, grieved for this was also his second marriage after a disastrous first marriage to which he lost his children in a bitter divorce. The marriage to Carol was a bit of heaven he had not expected and for which he was very grateful. Her death was very hard on him.

But a few months later he began to date a woman to whom Carol had introduced him. Carol had told me and others that she hoped Gerald would come to love this woman and that he might be restored in her, might have his own resurrection. And it happened. He fell in love again and married the woman his wife had picked for him. The love he had became the love he has. Everything that was needed for water to come from flinty rock had been provided by God.

God urges us to strike the hopeless places of our lives and the life of the world with the gifts we have been given and to expect possibility where none seems to exist. God turns broken lives into love, turns lost futures into a calling, makes death an occasion to celebrate and brings water from the flinty rock.

The film “Paradise Road” is closely based on a true story. During World War II several European and American women and children were forced to flee Singapore as the Japanese arrived. Sadly, they were captured and placed in a prison camp. The conditions were horrible and many died. One of the women was Margaret. Margaret was a missionary to China and was trained in music. She comes upon the divine idea of a camp orchestra to lift their spirits and to defy their captivity.

They have no instruments and no musical scores, but they have everything they need. The instruments are their voices. The music comes from their memories and Margaret begins to create musical scores for them. They rehearse in secret and hide the musical scores they have written for when caught rehearsing they are severally punished. They risk everything to practice life with the gifts they have.

Margaret is caught with some of the music she has written, is confined and tortured. As the scene plays her torture in the background we hear the women’s chorus/orchestra singing. Slowly the scene fades from the torture of Margaret to a full concert of the imprisoned women.

It is the first anniversary of their capture and they have gathered on the parade ground to perform Dvorak’s “New World Symphony.” The guards move in to break it up, but are so moved by the beauty of the music that they become the audience. Eventually even the camp commander comes to the concerts.

The concert ended and the camp commander asked if the vocal orchestra wouldn’t perform a Japanese folk song. Margaret, the tortured woman, begins to say, “Yes,” but Adrianne says, “No.” Adrianne says to Margaret, “You don’t hate them do you?” “No,” says Margaret, “Why not,” asks Adrianne. “Margaret answers, “I’ve tried, but I just can’t bring myself to hate people. The worse they behave, the sorrier I feel for them.”

Margaret also writes poetry for the endless funerals. One of her poems has survived to us.

How silent is this place
The brilliant sunshine filters through trees
The leaves are rustled by a gentle breeze
A wild and open space by shrubs
Pink tipped mauve blossomed is all grown
A hush enfolds me deep as I have known
Unbroken save by distant insects drone
A jungle clearing,
a track through which we bare our load to him
It is our paradise road
How silent is this place
How sacred is this place”

This is water formed from flinty rock.

Every desert place is a paradise road, a sacred place. Whatever we suffer, however thirsty we become, God has supplied us with all we need to make good of evil. The flinty rock shall yield water in the desert, and we shall drink and live.

Shalom and Amen.