WESTLAKE COMMUNITY CHRISTIAN CHURCH

Ash Wednesday 2001 began the Lenten season in a way that people in the Pacific Northwest will remember for many years. A sudden shift of gigantic rock plates deep within the earth shook the region violently causing more than 20 0 injuries and well more than $2 billion worth of damage. Television news coverage quickly showed images of streets and sidewalks littered with broken glass and various kinds of other rubble. Looking at the after-effects of a 6.8-magnitude earthquake on a house, or a city, or a life, is a sobering experience. Experts said that it could have been much worse and gave much credit to the quake-resistant designs of modern buildings.

Viewing some of Seattle’s earthquake damaged buildings tilting in unnatural angles I was reminded of an ancient and famous leaning architectural wonder: The Italian Leaning Tower of Pisa. The tower was begun in 1173 AD and was designed to be a per pendicular. But the tilting became a sudden and immediate problem. For centuries, the 177-foot-tall Tower of Pisa has looked like it is about to fall over, leaning a full 15 feet out of plumb. The 32 million pounds of marble stones in the tower press ed 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. Fearing that the tower will finally topple-over a team of engineers and scientists have set about to right the tilting tourist trap. Thanks to some hi-tech engineering the Leaning Tower is now moving, centimeter by centimeter, in the right direction. Engineers are removing bits of clay from beneath the tower through long, thin pipes, at about a shovelful or two a day. By removing these small amounts from the right places, the tower is tilting back toward stability. Engineers believe that by this summer they will have been able to bring it back by 20 inches, which is enough to save the structure for several centuries.

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 need to hug the structure assuring it would tilt no further.

The spiritual link should not be hard to spot. We need to build our lives on a solid foundation and let the Word of God hold us unerringly from slipping into spiritual malaise. We, too, need to stop our spiritual house from tilting until it collap ses. Because, if we ignore the need for a solid foundation, it will fall as surely as the Tower of Pisa would've fallen and as, indeed, some structures in Seattle did fall.

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

• Is your house built on sand? Silt? Gravel? Clay? Rock? Or some collection, cluster or conglomeration of these?
• Will your faith stand the shaking of life’s changes and uncertainties? Will trouble or temptation undermine your soul's foundation?
• Is your life built on The Rock of Ages?

The earthquake of last week and the dangerous tilting of the Leaning Tower of Pisa are urgent calls to recover our spiritual center, to recognize that without God as the center of our lives, everything else becomes meaningless.

In the last few lines of what we call the Sermon on the Mount Jesus warns about the need to build one’s life on a solid foundation, "These words I speak to you are not incidental additions to your life, homeowner improvements to your standard of l iving. They are foundational words, words to build a life on. If you work these words into your life, you are like a smart carpenter who built his house on solid rock. Rain poured down, the river flooded, a tornado hit—but nothing moved that house. I t was fixed to the rock." (Matthew 7:24-25, THE MESSAGE).

I pray that your life is fixed on that rock.

Hope to see you Sunday,