Of Faultlines, Oases, and Sheltering Grace
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on The Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany by the Rev. Holly Huff, Deacon.
A friend of mine just traveled to a wedding in Palm Springs, California. She was telling me about her trip, the hotel she stayed at, the pool surrounded by palm trees, the mediocre food, her friends’ lovely ceremony. The weather was warm but shockingly windy. Outside the fancy resort hotel, true desert windstorms whipped around the whole weekend, and each time she came back indoors from wedding events her face was covered in a fine layer of black sand pellets.
The day after the wedding, she took a jaunt out to the Coachella Valley Preserve and spent an afternoon wandering through the Thousand Palms Oasis. True to its name, there in the middle of Mojave desert, in a truly barren landscape without even scrub brush or stunted attempts at life, nothing but sand—there, improbably, were lush green palm trees, leaves fanning out providing shade from the sun, and below them cool, clean water. It’s a stop for migrating birds and a place of refuge for animals eking out a survival in this harsh habitat. The oasis cut a dramatic lush green line against the empty sandy valley. Why do the trees grow there, and no where else? What gives life in the desert?
The San Andreas fault line runs through the Coachella valley and in places that crack through the earth is visible. This disturbance is the access point; it makes a way for the source of improbable life. Aquifers deep below the ground’s surface flow up through that crack, along that tumultuous line of struggle, conflict and pressures, and water flows from the crack in the rock. The palm trees rooted there at that unlikely stream grow into a green refuge, and the birds of the air make their nests. An oasis.
The Hebrew scriptures are filled desert landscape imagery, and you can hear the same preciousness of water in that context. Psalm 1 opens by saying the one who trusts in God, who delights in the Lord, is like a tree rooted at the bank of a river. A tree that flourishes and bears fruit, that stays green and does not wither, even in hot and unlikely terrain. Jeremiah contrasts this flourishing tree with the sad little shrubs choking in the salt flats—something we know about here—trust in yourself, rely on yourself and you’ll wither on the sandy desert surface. But it’s possible, he is telling us, to live in touch with currents of living water that flow no matter how desperate the surrounding landscape.
What makes the difference? The fault line, the crack, the disturbances that reveal the frailty of our projects of self-reliance. Our small self wants to be great, to do it all by our power, to never be in need or dependent. On one’s own in the world, a lone cowboy silhouette against a desert sky, tugging eternally on those bootstraps. (The point of the bootstrap metaphor, of course, is that you can’t ever pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It’s impossible to lift yourself by yourself—you are still where you are, under the illusion of not needing anyone.) We are primed by our culture and upbringings to value working hard, trying to be good, as if we could earn free grace by putting in little more effort, huffing and puffing away, and still alone on the smooth desert floor.
Suddenly—earthquake. It’s frightening to see the ground shake, yes, but it doesn’t have to be. Earthquakes don’t kill people, they say, buildings kill people. When the fragile yet crushing structures of illusion we have built fall—great is the fall thereof! But in the desert, no problem. A fault line emerges, as the ground we thought was stable shifts under our feet and now here is this emerging divide. A break, a cleft in the rock. The towers of self-reliance falls inevitably in every life, as what we can’t predict and can’t control—that is, everything, life, God, reality—emerges in the valley of our awareness. It is difficult and disorienting, this emergence. Difficult to face the falling apart. We feel so much fear at the loss of control.
But this is salvation. The faultlines through self-sufficiency and self-reliance deliver us from trusting in mere mortals, from making our own flesh our strength. When I am weak, then I am strong: as today’s collect says, O God, you are the strength of all you put their trust in you. We entertain angels unaware. What knocks at our door, sometimes knocks down our door, is none other than the living God, through whom all things were made, come to appear suddenly in his temple. You, the temple of your body, your life, all that God has made you to be and called blessed, and now here is this tectonic interruption of a love far too generous and embracing to leave you in your loneliness, your outsized cowboy boots, and so so thirsty in the sun..
Jesus said, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” (John 7:37-39). Water for the parched, bubbling up from aquifers deep within the strata of things. A whole ecosystem becomes possible: migrating birds stopping through on their journey, the swallows finding a home to build their nest at the side of God’s altar—and God’s altar usually is at the place of greatest brokenness, disturbance and weakness. A thorn in the flesh, those pieces of ourselves we would disown if we could—certainly not for lack of trying! Paul asks the Lord to remove that thorn in his side, so he can achieve under his own power, reach his potential! But the Lord tells him, no, lean on me: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor. 12:9) To depend on the Lord is to be a tree with roots sunk deep into source, water flowing in the unlikeliest of places.
What are those experiences of yours you are most inclined to disown? To cut off, leave behind, refine away, purge, cast out? I’ll finally be in control of my life if I could just get a handle on or get rid of this one thing? Is it possible God is in it? What might happen if you return to that fissure, those cracks and fault lines, listening for the sound of running water?
I imagine we might hear what the multitude gathered from Judea, then Jerusalem, and from Gentile Tyre and Sidon heard, refuge in the desert:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
“Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
“Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven.”
These Beatitudes, words of blessing, are not transactional promises: if you do this then you’ll get that. Not a promise of earned reward. A great crack runs through that framework of exchange, and the blessing is simply given, given as refuge and sustenance in the desert to those who are at the place of the weakness, who attend to their need for God and depend on God. The poor and the hungry, those who mourn, those who are derided and cast aside. Blessed are you.
We have to be open enough to receive that blessing—“woe to you who are full now, who are rich,” who fancy yourselves self-sufficient. When we “trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh our strength” we are like shrubs in the salt lands, stunted in the heat and pelted by sand, and Jeremiah says “they shall not see when relief comes.” Not that relief doesn’t come, but that when we are caught up trying to do it all ourselves we won’t see when relief comes. There is always relief available. Leaving the particularities of geology aside, in God’s good creation and in our lives there is no salt land so deserted there is not a current of still deep water running through it. But let us put our trust in the Lord and see the relief—like palm trees planted by water, unlikely precious freely given water, flowing up in the fault lines of our suffering. “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.”
As always, Christ shows us the way. He is the way, and he is the first fruits of the resurrection, of that river flowing up to new life. The tree of life and the cross are one and the same—even there he is rooted to the wellspring of love between Father and Son into which we too are baptized through the Spirit. As the carol Jesus Christ the Apple Tree puts it, “The tree of life my soul hath seen / Laden with fruit and always green.”
Self-reliance is a heavy burden. We walk around like Atlas, thinking we carry the world on our shoulders, and the hot sand blows against our faces. If we don’t do it, who will? Who indeed. The world is always held. Grace is sufficient. Your life rests in God’s palm, whether you know it or not. “Come to me, all you who labor and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” There is a shelter where the palm fronds fan out over the water. Rest in that shade and find our life. “My grace is sufficient for you.” Let God make of our life an oasis for others, to shelter them with the same extravagant, gratuitous love, blessedness without reason, that has been poured out on us. Amen.