St. David's United Church

A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped.  But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”  he woke up

and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace!  Be still!” 

Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. 

Mark 4:37-39

When I discovered that this was the lectionary reading for Father’s Day, it seemed a perfect fit.  Because at bottom this story is about trust, and men don’t always find it easy to trust.  We’d rather not have to rely on trust because we have everything firmly in control.  But this story is about trust not because everything is in the right place and everyone is behaving exactly according to plan and all is right with the world.  This kind of trust sticks around even when everything’s falling apart and disaster is crashing over the boat like a steel-cold wave. 

          To be honest, I find it difficult to trust the invisible Reality of God even in the best of times.  When life has suddenly pulled the chair out from under you, I want something to hold on to.  It’s a natural response.  When you’re losing your balance, you reach out to grab something to steady yourself.  People have done that a thousand different ways over the millennia: a stone idol, a graven image, a lucky charm, tickets for a prayer wheel – anything that gives us a sense that we’re not in this alone and that there’s a power greater even than this storm that rocks our boat.

          And this is a guy story.  This is a story about a bunch of guys who were fishermen by trade crossing a familiar sea.  Now, in the mind of people in first century Palestine, the sea had many connotations.  It was on the one hand the source of food, a garden of nourishment.  At the same time, it was a garden with teeth, and with an unfeeling capriciousness it could devour you at a moment’s notice.  Many had lost a relative or friend to the belly of the sea.

          For these peasants exposed to the power of the elements, the sea conjured an image of chaos: an untamed, lethal force.  In the Canaanite tradition, the god of chaos was also the god of the sea.  The Jews would have known this.  So now we see how the story takes on a different dimension and parts ways with historical fact in order to speak directly to the soul.  When Jesus asks the disciples to cross to the other side, he’s inviting them to go through chaos. 

          We don’t have to be sailors to understand this feeling.  It’s a reality that anyone knows who feels exposed and vulnerable to the forces of nature.  I understand why men used to be kept in another room when a baby was being delivered.  It’s a powerful process of nature that leaves most men feeling utterly helpless. I can understand how it would be best for the guys to just get out of the way and smoke cigars as they pace a room down the hall. 

          But for those privileged enough to be with their partner through labour and delivery, it’s an invitation into mystery.  Or, possibly, even controlled chaos.  I remember times when the girls were being born and the First Nations saying suddenly made a lot of sense: “In labour,” they said, “you knock on the door of death and come back with a baby.”

In the delivery room, I felt I could have been with the disciples in a boat on a stormy sea.  Things seemed out of control – they were clearly out of my control.  There came a point when all breathing and imaging exercises seemed utterly pointless, and I feared for the very life of my wife and child in a very long labour.  “Jesus, wake up!  How can you sleep in this storm?!”

          Being in the delivery room as a child is born is, of course, only an introduction for what is to come.  Because to be with a child is to be with mystery, a being that you are in relationship with but cannot control.  Suddenly you find yourself up to your elbows in dirty diapers and bottles and cribs and soothers and jumpy chairs and more paraphernalia than a Coast Guard rescue boat.  Before long they’re in high school and speaking a teen language that is supposed to perplex adults; they’re discovering forbidden web sites and think they’re 16 year old friends are far smarter than you and they’re asking for the keys to the car and are dating and are coming home far after curfew and are exposed to drugs and alcohol and now a new kind of chaos enters your house and your mind and as the waves splash over the edge of the boat you wonder if you’re going to sink.  “Jesus, wake up!”

          And he does.  Jesus does wake up.  But the point is not so much that he takes you out of the storm, because circumstances don’t suddenly change on the spin of a dime.  David Ewart is the minister at Capilano United, and I appreciate his read on this story from Mark.  “The real miracle of this story is not Jesus calming the storm,” he says.  “The real miracle is Jesus’ calm while the storm is raging.”  His calm is not simply the suppression of fear. That can be a helpful survival technique when you’re caught in a dangerous situation: suppress the fear so you can act.  However, after the fact, you might collapse in a heap of trembling nerves.

          The calm Jesus exhibits is a different kind of tranquility as he rides over the sea of chaos.  His calm arises from his sense of an interpenetrating and unkillable connection with God, his Father, Abba.  Thus, the moral of this story is not: run to Jesus when you are in a crisis and he will make the storm go away. Rather the moral is: run to Jesus when you are in crisis and learn from him the source of his calm.

          Remember, the authors of the gospels were not in that boat; those fishermen, the disciples, were likely happily illiterate and did not see their role as scribes so two thousand years later we could read about their adventures with Jesus.  Believe it or not, they weren’t thinking about us at all.  There was no one there taking notes when they safely arrived on the other side, no one there with a camera when Jesus appeared to Mary at the tomb, no one there to interview the disciples who encountered a stranger on the road to Emmaus.  These stories were told and retold and passed from village to village and, anywhere from 30 to 60 years later, were finally written down. 

          The Gospel of Mark was likely written in Rome, where Christians were being persecuted.  This community, scholars believe, were mostly poor and utterly vulnerable to Romans eager to send them to the coliseum, into the rink with lions.    This story would have spoken to them.  They knew what it was like to be faithful disciples in the boat with Jesus when a storm kicked up; and they knew that feeling of Jesus being asleep in the stern as the storm raged. 

          The story from Mark reminded this small band of Christians struggling in the heart of the beast of the empire who Jesus was.  Jesus is the one who is with you no matter what.  Jesus is the one who brings calm in the midst of the storm.  Just as Yahweh, the God of Creation in Genesis chapter one, hovered over the waters and tamed the forces to bring life out of chaos, so Jesus, like God, finds the creative life in the midst of disaster.

Because the story spoke powerfully to the soul of the early Christians, it was included in all four Gospels.  And not only then, but also now.  Anyone who has unwittingly sailed into a bad storm can find in this story a tether of hope, because right here is the heart of the Good News for anyone who swims in anxiety.  Michael Lindvall writes, Time and time again in Scripture the word is, ‘Do not be afraid.’ It is, you might say, the first and the last word of the gospel. It is the word the angels speak to the terrified shepherds and the word spoken at the tomb when the women discover it empty: ‘Do not be afraid.’ Not because there are not fearsome things on the sea of our days, not because there are no storms, fierce winds, or waves, but rather, because God is with us….even though there are real and terrible things in this life, they need not paralyze us; they need not have dominion over us; they need not possess us, because we are not alone in the boat.  (Michael Lindvall, quoted in “Weekly Seeds” a UCC lectionary site found on “Text This Week”)

Having read the story, one would think that when the invitation comes to cross the sea to get to the other side, we might politely decline the offer.  After all, we know what happens, and who wants to go through a nasty storm if you don’t have to?  OK, so there might not be a storm that day, but who wants to take a chance?  It’s so much more comfortable and familiar on this side of the water.

It’s natural to think that, but that’s not the way of discipleship.  One who follows Jesus has to go, eventually, across the sea.  Or life becomes stagnant.  The soul dulls. 

When we find ourselves pacing the shoreline, wondering what to do next, feeling drawn to the crossing but nervous about the potential dangers, Jesus answers simply.  Frederich Buechner reminds us what Jesus said to the disciples he says to us: Go….Go for God’s sake, and for your own sake, too, and for the world’s sake. Climb into your little tub of a boat and keep going.

Christ sleeps in the deepest selves of all of us, and in whatever way we can, we are to call on him as the fishermen did in their boat to come awake within us and to give us courage, to give us hope, to show us, each one, our way. May he be with us especially when the winds go mad and the waves run wild, as they will for all of us before we’re done, so that even in their midst we may find peace, find him.” (Buechner’s sermon can be found in his collection, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons.)

       There is a way to be still, even when still in the storm.