Lent 2

I’ll never forget my basic training experience in the Army.  I was in 5^th Platoon of D-3-1.  We had the shortest and loudest drill sergeant.  We always finished last in competitions with the other four platoons.  That meant we ate last at chow times, giving us about 10 minutes to wolf down our grub.  We ran around in the dark every morning at 5AM, singing songs about airborne rangers and Baba Reba.  And we got yelled at. A lot.

After many months of this, the time came to go on bivouac. It was the culmination of our long, long basic training experience. After a gazillion mile march through muck and mire, my company arrived at our bivouac site, what civilians might call the ‘campground.’ Our drill sergeants demonstrated just how quick and easy it was to erect a two-man pup tent.  When they were finished, we marveled at its crisp lines and sleek beauty.

Then it was our turn.  My partner, Rick, and I took our pegs, rope, and canvass and yanked, pulled, twisted, and hammered.  I had never camped in my life. Neither had Rick, who was a California surfer dude from LA. Our tent took much, much longer to build than the drill sergeants’ perfect example. And it sure didn’t look like the drill sergeants’ tent. In fact, there was a bit of a droop and sag to the whole thing. But, hey, it was standing almost upright and that’s what counts, right? So we didn’t worry about it and proceeded to crawl in and retire for the night.

Later that evening, it began to rain. In fact, it rained or snowed just about every day I was at Fort Knox. Well, as the rain continued to pelt our little house, the ceiling began to get closer and closer to our faces. The middle of the tent roof started to drop globules of water on us, thus proving that Army tent canvass was not waterproof.

Rick and I were, of course, too tired to get up and go out in the rain to repair the tent.  And, as you might have guessed, we woke up the next morning drenched, with a pup tent flattened on top of us. We were not happy campers.

But can you imagine Jesus weeping, as he sat on a bluff above Jerusalem, over the sight of a city that had ignored the prophets to its peril? “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” he laments, “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you” (13:34).

Watching a house, or a city, or a life, collapse is an emotional experience. Take the Leaning Tower of Pisa, for example.

The work on the tower began August 9, 1173. The builders, contractors, engineers and architects didn’t mean to make it lean. The tower was designed perpendicular and was straightforwardly expected to point plumb straight star-ward.

But tilting became a problem. A sudden and immediate problem.

So, for centuries, the 177-foot-tall Tower of Pisa has looked like it is about to fall over. The combined weight of all the marble stones built into Pisa’s pride pressed bottomward onto and into the soft, silted soils, squeezing water from clay underneath, bulging into the dense sand beneath.

This tower teetered on the extreme edge of disaster for 800 years. All 32 million pounds of marble constantly verged on collapse. Its 5.3-degree tilt was startling, even shocking – a full 15 feet out of plumb.

Finally, computer models proved that the tower was going to fall – sooner, rather than later – and a committee of engineers and scientists set about to right the tilting tourist trap. Thanks to some hi-tech engineering and the current Pisa makers, the Leaning Tower was moved, centimeter by centimeter, in the right direction. Engineers removed bits of clay from beneath the tower through long, thin pipes, at about a shovel-full or two a day. By removing these small amounts from the right places, the tower was tilted back toward stability.

It’s not a perfect or a permanent fix, but sometimes that’s all that can be done with ancient buildings – or even living people. Sometimes the best one can do to stop a sinking soul built on unstable sand is to lend a hand, give a kind word or demonstrate a faithful heart.

After a decade of work in the 1990s, engineers were able to bring the leaning tower back by 17 inches, which is enough to save the structure for several centuries. Of course, it will still lean a little – preserving the tourist trade for tilting tower towns.

This is by design. The Pisa makers do not ever intend to bring the tower into a perfectly upright position!

And therein lies a lesson for us. God does not expect that we will reach moral perfection. Jesus didn’t expect the house of Jerusalem would be fully compliant with the laws of God. He did expect Jerusalem to listen to the prophets. God does expect us to be faithful and obedient.

But perpendicular and straight as an arrow?  

We’re fallen, tilting creatures, redeemed by the grace of God. The tilt has been arrested, and not only arrested, readjusted: We’re now in closer alignment with God’s purpose for our lives.

Of course, the argument can be made: Didn’t Jesus say, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48)? Yes. The word perfect, however, is an interesting one. It’s the same root word that is translated elsewhere in Scripture as “mature” (Hebrews 5:14). Now there’s a vast difference between seeking maturity and striving for perfection!

Jesus looked upon Jerusalem and said, “Your house is left to you, desolate” (Matthew 23:38). You’ve got a mess on your hands, and you rejected all attempts to straighten things out. Now, see what you’ve done!

We, too, need to stop our spiritual house from tilting until it collapses. Because, if we ignore the warnings, it will fall as surely as the Tower of Pisa would’ve fallen and as, indeed, the house of Jerusalem did fall.

Perhaps it’s time to do a soil and soul analysis.

Is our house built on sand? Or rock? Will trouble or temptation undermine your soul’s foundation? Is your life built on The Rock of Ages?

This is a call to recover our spiritual center, to recognize that without God as the center of our lives, everything else becomes rather meaningless.

Perhaps this is what Albert Camus, the French existentialist and author of The Plague and other works, discovered before he died, when he approached an acquaintance and said, “I am searching for something I do not have, something I’m not sure I can define.”

To correct the Pisa tilt, three important processes were inaugurated: extraction, replacement and restraints.

The bad soil needed to be extracted, a solid foundation needed to replace the bad soil, and steel cables were needed to hug the structure, assuring that it would tilt no further.

The spiritual link should not be hard to spot here. We need to get rid of the harmful soil that is contaminating our foundations. (A little soil analysis of self-examination will identify those harmful soils rather easily). After that, we can then rebuild our foundation and let Christ hold us from slipping into spiritual decay. No, we won’t be perfect. But we will be building in the right direction.

If we put off our reconstruction, listen carefully.

You just might hear Jesus weeping over us.