Storm at Sea

This sermon was preached at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Worcester on June 20, 2021. The readings for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost can be found here.

Not too long after September 11, 2001, I got on a plane just up the street at the Worcester Airport and headed to Atlanta, Georgia. My best guess is that it was mid-late October, weeks (and not months) after 9/11. I was enrolled in a D.Min program at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur and at that time Delta had direct flights from Worcester to Atlanta, which made it pretty easy.

Shortly after take-off, the flight attendants started running up and down the aisle. There was smoke coming out of one of the restrooms and they looked, well…terrified. Not at all under control. All of a sudden the plane (which had reached its cruising altitude) headed down, pretty sharply. The pilot told us that there was going to be an emergency landing in Hartford. And that’s what then happened in pretty short order. Let me tell you, it’s not a long flight from Worcester to Hartford but it felt like forever. We landed, were surrounded by fire trucks, and we got off the plane. I later learned it was an electrical fire – not an act of terrorism and also not someone smoking a cigarette. It was real, and yet all was well.

I cannot think of a time when I was more frightened in my life, before then or after that. Nothing happened, really. I’ve certainly had more turbulent flights in my life and that’s scary too. But the timing, so close to 9/11, and the looks in the eyes of those flight attendants and the rapid descent and then the fire trucks was a pretty scary combination.

Now I am not going to do an open mic here today, but I want you to think of a time in your life when you were scared. Really scared, that it might be the end. I bet many of you – maybe even all of us, have at least one story. I don’t want to re-traumatize anyone here. But what I want you to do is reflect with me on how that felt. Because it’s easy to make fun of the disciples in the gospels; the gospel writers in general and in particular, Mark, seem to encourage that. None of them seem to be the sharpest blades in the drawer. They get it wrong at least as often as they get it right, including and maybe especially Peter, the so-called “rock.” It’s tempting when they do to be dismissive of them.

But in the story before us today, there is a lot more going on than a few waves washing into a boat. Mark tells us that they are going “to the other side.” The Sea of Galilee is really a lake, and on the other side of that lake are the gentiles – the Geresenes to be precise. In fact when they get there the next story will be the healing of the Geresene demoniac. This journey across the lake is for the sake of racial reconciliation. It’s about crossing to the other side to face fear of the unknown, fear of the foreigner, fear of the ones who are different.

The storm was no doubt real, but it doubles as metaphor. Sometimes life is stormy. And not just the personal struggles we will all inevitably face. Not only the difficulties of losing a loved one or facing unemployment but also the social struggles of racial and economic injustice. The kind of struggles still going on in the land of the Holy One. Crossing the lake that day is not unlike crossing the boundary from west Jerusalem into east Jerusalem, or going into Gaza or the West Bank, or Bethlehem.

The storm is sometimes life itself, in a time of pandemic perhaps or a time of social turmoil. This boat ride from hell is a stand in for what it’s like to wake up afraid and go to bed afraid, for yourself or for you kids or for your neighbor whom you love. When Jesus calms the sea – when he says “silence!” and “be still!” this is more than a magic trick, and more than a miracle story. Jesus is taking on the chaos of this world.

There is a book written years ago by a scholar named Jon Levinson called Creation and the Persistence of Evil: the Jewish drama of Divine Omnipotence. I read it a long time ago and it’s a nuanced and wise book but as I remember it, the premise is pretty straightforward: God isn’t done with creation yet. God started ordering the chaos of this world in Genesis and after six days rested. But on the eighth day God got up again and went back to work. There are forces in our world that do indeed work to destroy the creatures of God and draw us from the love of God. You can call them racism or homophobia or economic injustice and that’s right, but the Bible calls them evil and they all seek to destroy the creatures of God.

In this little parable today, we are being reminded that Jesus is king of creation. Even the wind and the seas obey him. We are reminded that while fear can paralyze us, the opposite of fear is faith. That is, trusting that Jesus is worthy of our trust. In the Bible (as well as, I imagine, in what Karl Jung called our ‘collective unconscious’) the sea represents danger and the forces of chaos. Remember back to the first creation story, when God parts the sea and creates dry land – it’s an ordering of the chaos. The fact that it is nighttime when Jesus and the disciples get into a boat to “cross to the other side” only heightens the awareness of danger in this story.

The boat is a metaphor for the Church. There are six boat trips in Mark, two of which are narrated at some length. Notice how well the metaphor works—even if it is at times a bit overused. The image is not static. It suggests that the Church is called to set out on an adventure, called to trust the Holy Spirit to blow us in the right direction. There are times when we will feel seasick and afraid: the Greek word used in the fourth chapter of Mark could in fact be translated as “timid.” I know no one at St. Luke’s has ever been timid. But it is my experience, as a parish priest and in diocesan work that too often church people can be timid. One might even suggest that the disciples are tempted to be timid landlubbers who would rather hang around Galilee than set sail on dangerous waters at night into unknown territory. Jesus is saying, however, that the antidote to our timidity is to put our trust in Him, as the One whom even the winds and the sea obey.  

Notice where Jesus is: he is in the boat with the disciples. In their anxiety and timidity they cry out because it feels as if God isn’t paying attention. But the truth is that Christ is present; he’s right there with them in the boat. He simply refuses to join the disciples in their anxiety. Sleep, in the Bible, is often a metaphor for trust in God. The anxious and the guilty toss and turn at night, while those who have done what they could do and have let go of what has not been done and put the rest in God’s hands can sleep like babies. So it is that the psalmist can pray:

In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for thou alone, O Lord, makest me dwell in safety. (Psalm 4:8)

I think that the key point in this narrative from the fourth chapter of Mark’s Gospel is that it makes a theological claim about Jesus: like God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, Jesus has power over the destructive forces of chaos that threaten to destroy the people of God. “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” He is Jesus, the Son of God, and He is worthy of our trust. We therefore need not be so timid and afraid.

The disciples no doubt remembered and told this story because it helped them to overcome their fears after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. In those early years of the Church’s life together, as they continued to cross new boundaries, I imagine that they remembered this story for the same reason we tell stories about those times when we were afraid and it all worked out: so that maybe the next time we are in a boat and the waters rage we will be a little less afraid. So that maybe next time we’ll have a little more faith.

Remember that none of the four gospel writers claim to be eyewitnesses with clipboards in hand. They aren’t making a documentary about Jesus’ life. That’s not the genre of what a gospel is. Mark isn’t on the shore watching all this unfold so he can write it down exactly as it happened in order to report it to us. That is so fundamentally important for us to remember if we mean to make any sense of Scripture.  Rather, like the whole of the gospel narratives, these stories get told and re-told over decades as the Church tries to find its way in the world guided by the Holy Spirit. Mark, the earliest of the four gospels, doesn’t get written until forty years or so after the Resurrection. So already, by then, the story is laden with meaning. It has become quite literally, “good news.”

The stories get organized and shaped by the communities that face their own boundary situations, their own challenges and fears. We think that Mark’s community lived in the very heart of the Roman Empire: a small, fledgling community of house churches that faced persecution and possible extinction. It must have felt to them at times that even if Jesus was in the boat with them that he was definitely sound asleep on some cushion in the stern. It must have felt to them at times as if somebody needed to wake Jesus up! Because as they tried to build communities that included Jews and Gentiles, slave and free, male and female, it surely must have felt at times as if the boat would capsize under the conflicts that emerged. Living into this new creation of Jesus isn’t easy. It requires courage and patience and incredible trust and its messy trying to get there.

And so I imagine someone saying:

Hey, remember that night when Jesus and the disciples crossed the Sea of Galilee into the Gentile world, and it felt scary to them? Remember how Jesus calmed the waters and stilled the winds and calmed their hearts and called them to fidelity and trust? I have this sense that he’s here, right now, with us; that it’s still true. That he’s alive and hasn’t deserted us at all; that he is here among us as a non-anxious presence among us. Maybe we will be alright too…

And so it goes, from generation to generation. So here we are today, after the wild ride of this pandemic. Jesus is here too and he is not anxious about the future. He’s got this! He knows that transitions are the path to new and abundant life, and new possibilities. None of us are Jesus; we are followers. We are disciples. Some days we will feel timid and some days we will feel afraid and some days we will feel hopeful. But we keep on telling the stories of our faith, the stories that remind us that faith casts out fear and from that place we carry on to the work that lies ahead.

Jesus still says to us: “why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” Like the Church in every age, we are called to rise above our timidity and fear and to put our trust in Christ alone and to do the work we have been given to do. To love God, and to love neighbor. With God’s help.