“Worse Case Scenario”

February 27, 2005

Scripture Reading:   Exodus 17:1-8

The Third Sunday in Lent

Rev. Dr. Carol Kerr

 The Worst Case Scenario is the title of a bright yellow book that appeared in books stores a while ago.  Maybe some of you have seen them.  Each page has some scenario that is about the worse case you can imagine.  Then the editors find experts to give advice if you ever find yourself in one of those situations.  They tell you the best way to get out of it.  For instance, How to jump from a moving train.  You know just in case the worse case scenario happens to you.  You are on a train to Boston, a terrorist hijacks it and you want to jump off.  The book suggests bending your knees, leaping perpendicular and away from the train, then roll like a log.  Don’t say you never get anything from the sermons that you can take home with you!  At least you can now you can quit worrying about terrorist hijacking your train!

The book became so popular that they have made a Worse Case Scenario game, produced by University Games.  You have two teams and each team competes against the other to get the right answer.  Then your team progresses along the board.  So I though since we are a smaller group today, it being vacation and everything, that we could take advantage of it and have the congregation be two teams, the right and the left team, antiphonal teams.  I am going to ask you a couple of worse case scenario questions and we will see which team wins. 

Ready?  How to ram a barricade with a car.  A.  Drive over a curb to gain height, then strike the barricade at a slight angel as fast as you can.  B.  Backing up between 30 and 45 mph, aim for the lock, or any other weak point in the barricade.  C.  First sideswipe the barricade to create a weak spot, then drive into the weak spot at a speed of at least 55 mph. (Don’t try practicing this in our parking lot after church!)

Next.  How to escape when tied up:  A.  If you are bound with cloth rope, wear it away with your fingernails. B.  Flip on to your side and bend your knees to get your feet behind you.  Use your hands to untie your feet.  C.  When being bound, take a deep breath.  Pull your shoulders back, and flex your arms and legs to expand your body.  Wriggle free once you are alone. 

Last one for now.  How to foil a UFO abduction:  (Hopefully this is not on the same day that you had to escape from being tied up by the terrorists, then jump out of the moving train!)  A.  Never travel alone in the woods.  No UFO abduction has ever involved more than seven people.  B.  Dress like a tourist and carry cameras and a map.  Appearing willing to go with the aliens.  C.  Focus your thoughts toward the alien.  Tell it, “Leave me alone.  Go away, I have a virus.” 

The Bible is full of worse case scenarios.  Think about it:  Adam and Eve get caught eating the forbidden fruit, the worse case disobedience.  Cain slays Able, the worse case sibling rivalry.  The world gets destroyed by flood, the worse case ecological disaster.  The Hebrews are starving to death, they go to Egypt for food, then they become slaves for generations.  Worse case there.  You begin to think the Bible was written by a bunch of doom and gloom paranoids.  Just when you think it can’t get worse in the Bible it often does.  Such as, they escape from Egypt but then they get lost in the wilderness and practically die of thirst.  This is the happy scene where we picked up in today’s scripture lesson.   Maybe we should rename the Bible – “A Series of Unfortunate Events” like the movie that just came out.    

O.K.  Teams, let’s try again.  Let’s see how good we would be at finding water in the desert.  How to retain fluids in the desert:  A.  Even if you have no fluids, eat what you can.  B.  Do not talk, and breathe through your nose, not your mouth.  C.  Drink alcohol if you have it. 

Next:  How to collect dew for drinking:  A.  Leave a glass out overnight to collect condensation and dew.  B.  Absorb/sponge moisture from grass and leaves with any absorbent material, and then squeeze it into your mouth or container.  C,  Just before dawn, lick as many leaves as you can find.

Next:  How to use birds to find water:  A.  Look for bird feathers on the ground; they often indicate that water is nearby.   B.  Look for birds diving straight down.  Their destination is often water.  C.  Look for flocks of birds circling during the day; they are likely circling over water.  

We could make our own worse case scenario game out of the Bible.  Except the solutions would look very different than the ones that the experts gave to University Games.   O.K. teams ready?  When dying of thirst in the wilderness with your children and animals, and a stuttering old man is leading you who is equally lost what should you do?  A.  Pester the man and ask for his credentials.  B.  Go back to Egypt. C.  Tell any UFO that comes that they are free to rescue you and you haven’t had a virus in years (you were just kidding the last time!)  D.  Trust in God. 

At first glance it seems that any answer would be better than D.  D seems passive and incomplete.  It seems naïve and magical thinking.  Yet this is the one that Moses opted for, and this was the one that worked.  God told Moses, of all things, to take his staff and strike a rock at Horeb and water would gush out of it.  When lost and in dire circumstances trusting in God seems in fact the most lame of all solutions.  Yet, this is what the Bible tells us to do over and over.  Actually the Bible would make a bad Worse Case Scenario Game because for every predicament the answer would always be D. Trust in God.

Funny thing, even though it seems counter intuitive to trust in God when I hear real stories from people who have undergone the worst of all circumstances trusting in God often became the one and only thing that pulled them through.  For instance, Rev. Dwayne Hopkins was in a motor cycle accident last year.  A car hit him from behind, and he says as he was flying in the air and landed he suddenly had the most overwhelming sense of the presence of God.  He knew he was going to be alright.  How to survive being hit by a car?  Trust in God.  A parishioner I once had who had been diagnosed with MS said that the moment she heard the diagnosis she had an overwhelming feeling that everything was going to be alright.  This rock bed conviction hasn’t left her since, and it has been years.  She is one of the most spiritual person’s I know.  How to survive having Multiple Sclerosis?  Trust in God.

Another example is Mabel who I read about in The Life You’ve Always Wanted which we are going to use for our Lenten study (starting today!).  Mabel is about the worse, worse case scenario that I can think of.  She lives in a convalescent hospital that on the best of days is understaffed and over filled with senile, helpless and lonely people.  It smells of sickness and stale urine.  Mabel’s face was an absolute horror.  Her eyes had an empty stare and white pupils because she was blind.  There was a large hearing aid over one ear because she was almost deaf.  One side of her face was eaten by cancer.  There was a discolored and running sore covering part of one cheek, and it had pushed her nose to one side, dropped one eye and distorted her jaw so that the corner of her mouth was at the bottom of her mouth.  She drooled constantly.  She was so ugly that supervisors would send incoming nurses to her figuring that if they could stand the sight of her they could stand anything. 

In spite of the worse case scenario of her life Mabel was offered a flower and said she wanted to give it to someone else because she was blind and could not appreciate its beauty.  So she was wheeled in front of one of the few alert patients and she gave it to him saying, “Here this is from Jesus.”

It turns that Mabel picked D. on the worse case scenario game of the Bible.  There are other options she could have picked and no one would have blamed her.  She could have picked…  A.  Be bitter and angry.  B.  Sue the doctor who didn’t catch the cancer.  C.  Give up and die as soon as you can.  Rather she picked D.  Trust in God.  Because of this she did extraordinary things even in her terrible circumstances.  Her entire life consisted of following Jesus as best as she could:  patient endurance of suffering, solitude, prayer, meditation on Scripture, worship, fellowship when it was possible, giving when  she had a flower or a piece of candy to offer.  Anyone who knew Mabel knew that in this worse case scenario there was a fifth option for themselves.  That would be option E for those who knew Mabel.  Option E happens after option D happens.  Option E is be aware that you are standing on holy ground. 

Imagine being in her condition and saying, “I think about how good God’s been to me.  He’s been awfully good to me in my life, you know…I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied.”   Option E, when you are around Mabel you are standing on holy ground.

In the New Testament reading today we find a woman, a Samaritan woman, who was living in another kind of wilderness.   People learning of her story would immediately recognize that she herself was the worse case scenario.  To start with she was a woman.  Conventional rabbis did not waste their time back then teaching theology to a woman.  Plus, she was a Samaritan.  At that time Jews had no dealings with Samaritans.  They were considered the lowest of the low.  They were racial mixers, collaborators with the Romans.  To make matters even worse she is (to use a not too charitable phrase) “woman with a past.”  She has more husbands that poor Elizabeth Taylor.  Not only unlucky in love, but worse case scenario in love.  Or, maybe she didn’t divorce them, maybe if we are wildly charitable all her husband died on her.  Even so then she would be the most unfortunate widow ever.   

She was wandering lost in a different kind of wilderness.  Worse case scenario question.  If you are despised, dysfunctional and desperate what do you do?  A.  Go get water from a well and wash the dishes?  B. Change your identity and leave town.  C.  Divorce your husband and try for #6 who will solve your problems.  D.  Talk to the stranger standing next to the well and take him up on his offer of “living water.”  

Trust in God.  Trust in Jesus no matter how bad the situation is.  That is the message of the Bible, the Old Testament and the New.  Anne Lamotte in her autobiography Traveling Mercies (which our book group read this fall) had her own experience of Jesus at the well.  Her life had deteriorated to a morass of fear, self-loathing and booze. 

After a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner,…the feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there; of course, there wasn’t.  but after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond a doubt that it was Jesus.  I felt him as surely as I feel my dog lying nearby as I write this.  And I was appalled…I though about what everyone would think of me if I became Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen.  I turned to the wall and said out loud, “I would rather die.”  …

And one week later, when I went back to church, I was so hungover that I couldn’t stand up for the songs, and this time I stayed for the sermon, which I just thought was so ridiculous, like someone trying to convince me of the existence of extraterrestrials, but the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape.  It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling – it washed over me.

I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home…I walked down the dock past dozens of potted flowers, under a sky as blue as one of God’s own dreams, and I opened the door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head an said, …”I quit.”  I took a long deep breath and said out loud, “all right.  You can come in.”

The game Worse Case Scenarios has a question that goes like this:  What are the six P’s of survival?  The answer is B.  Proper prior preparation prevents poor performance. 

The Bible worse case scenario game could come up with a card like this.  What are the six T’s of survival?  Trust in God transforms tears and thirst to timeless triumph!