Scripture: Mark 4:35-41
Given on 06/24/2018
Growing up on the coast of North Carolina, I spent a fair amount of my time in fishing boats. We owned an old Jon boat that had a trawling motor on it for fishing the lakes around my house, a bass boat that we would take out on the Lumber river or the intracoastal Waterway, and a canoe that we could use in the ponds that dotted the county. However, my greatest joy growing up was any opportunity that we had to go out on the ocean and fish along the gulf stream of the Atlantic Ocean. That was where the biggest fighting fish existed. Now, the gulf stream was in between 30 and 70 miles off the coast depending on where you were embarking from and that usually meant anywhere from 2 to 3, 3 and a half hours, of riding to get there before any actual fishing got to be done and I am convinced that in another life I must have been a sea captain or maybe a pirate because while 2-3 hours of sitting doing anything else would have been unbearable to my 12 year old self, something about sitting in the back of a fast moving boat, getting sprayed by the water that would come off the boat every time it hit a big wave, watching the flying fish rise out of the wake of the boat and sail effortlessly alongside of us, or just looking out at the immensity of the ocean was both relaxing for me but also joyful. And I think I was born with sea legs because from a pretty early age, I was comfortable walking along the sides of the boat, releasing the outriggers, and sending the fishing lines up to the top of them. There are few feelings in this world as exciting as looking out the back of a boat when an 80lb wahoo hits your tackle and pulls out 100 yds of fishing line before you’ve even had a chance to set the hook or a sailfish getting hooked and jumping 15 feet in the air trying to spit the bait before landing back in the water and making a run for the bottom and no greater sense of accomplishment as standing next to a catch back on the dock, seeing the other fishermen gather around you as you tell them how hard it was to bring this one in, how big the one that got away was, and listening as the fishing tales of previous catches and misses began.
There is one particular occasion out on the ocean that I will never forget as long as I live. We had gotten up early in the morning, you have to when you have such a long ride out to the gulf stream and you don’t want to spend the vast majority of your day cooking in the Carolina sun with little protection, and had made our way out to the dock. The weather report came in that the seas were breaking 4-6 ft. Choppy but manageable and after some debate we decided to give it a go. And I don’t remember what kind of fish we caught that day (or if we caught any at all). I remember my dad had one of the new guys working at the bank with us who had determined that manly men didn’t take dramamine and so had spent the better part of the day at the back of the boat losing breakfast and last night’s dinner and I’m guessing all his meals from the previous week. He had made a bad decision. But by 2:30, 3:00, it was decided that it was time to head back in (probably as a sign of mercy for the manly man who had turned a shade of green that doesn’t easily occur in nature.) And so we turned around and started to head in. As we grew closer, the waves were growing larger by the minute and what was a choppy 4-6 feet had grown into a dangerous 8-12 as a storm head had formed in between the shoreline and us, too big to drive around. The only choices we had were to stop and run the risk of being flipped over by the increasingly growing waves or press on back to the marina. We chose the latter. What followed was 3 hours of the most harrowing boating I have ever done. We lost count of the number of times that the boat popped into the air by waves and smacked down back into the water. In such a situation one begins to wonder if a boat can be cracked in half by the force of the waves and the impact of returning to earth and more importantly if we were going find out on that day. To make a long story short, we pulled into the slip a thoroughly beaten group of fishermen on that day with the manly man vowing to never set foot on a boat again and me kissing the ground in an overly emotional sign of gratitude to the gods of boating luck. And I’m pretty certain the visiting member of our gang of would-be mariners decided that he was quite done with life out on the water. I have thought about that day over the past week, I can’t help but wonder if that’s how the disciples felt in our scripture for today.
The story for today comes after Jesus has just spent time speaking before an ever growing crowd along the shores of Lake Galilee. And you get the sense that even early on in his ministry, Jesus’s words, his charisma, his magnetism draw people to him in a way that the Jewish folks hadn’t seen in a long time. For the folks in my Wednesday evening Bible study (which meets every Wednesday at 6:00 in the Sunday school classroom where there are still spaces available), I use the image of a parched desert being offered some water for the first time in a long time—the sand soaking up the water again and again and continuously wanting more and more, never really able to be completely full or satisfied. When Jesus spoke, he talked about seeds getting planted in the proper soil, about letting their lights shine before God and one another, he described how the time was coming for the faithful to begin to harvest from the seeds they had sown, he told them of how things could be if they had the faith of a mustard seed, more than anything, he talked to them as if they were a people who mattered, who were important simply because they existed, and who were the beloved of God, and by the end of all that, the son of God was tired. And you have to imagine fairly well peopled out for the day. Because you have to think that even those who speak to people for a living, musicians who play a different city each night, writers who go on book tours, politicians who go from place to place stumping for votes, they all get tired, drained, and don’t want to be around anyone but their closest friends and family. They need to feel the security that comes from being only with loved ones until your battery is recharged and you are ready to face the outside world again. And so Jesus turns to his disciples, his closest friends, his inner circle and says, “get me out of here.” So it is that they load up onto a boat and head out to the middle of the lake where the crowds cannot follow Jesus anymore. And you can almost see it, can’t you? You can almost see Jesus, grabbing a corner seat in the back of the boat, sitting down on a well-worn but comfy cushion and feeling the breeze coming off the lake run through his hair, and against, his face, and through his nose and ears, until before too long he is sound asleep. And it is only then that the waves kick up, that they thunder starts rumbling, maybe lightning hits the water around them, and they know that this could be trouble. Maybe it is the little boat being tossed about, maybe it is the wind swirling in all directions around them that causes their panic, maybe it is the sight of water cresting over the bough of the boat, and there is no worse feeling, no more disconcerting feeling, there is no great challenge to the security that one feels while on the water than to see the space between boat and body of water be breached over and over again until it feels like the whole of the boat is going to sink. And you have to remember, these aren’t novices learning how to steer a sailboat for the first time, these aren’t even weekend boaters who hook up a trailer on the back of a pickup and drive down to the closest put-in for a day of skiing and sunbathing, many of these guys are harder fishermen who have, no doubt, seen enough to discern the difference between when it is time to start heading in and when it is time to start really panicking. And maybe at this point of panic that the disciples all band together to begin the difficult task of bailing out the boat, each one grabbing whatever they could to get as much water out of the boat as possible. Exhausted, they start counting members, making sure everyone is pulling his weight when they realize that in the midst of this great storm, Jesus is still sleeping. Incredulity washes over all their faces as one by one they drop whatever they are using to bail out the boat and rush to the back to wake Jesus up. “Don’t you care, Jesus?,” they all ask. “Don’t you care that we took you out to the middle of the lake, gave you a place to rest away from all the crowds, away from all the demands of a great teacher and messiah, and now we are all going to die out here?” There is no indication that he snaps into action following the approach of the disciples. There is no indication that he feels any sense of panic or trepidation at all. All it says it that he rebukes the wind and speaks to the sea. “Peace! Be still!” and the New Revised Standard Version of the bible says that everything was dead calm. I love that turn of phrase. Dead calm. As if the bubbling chaos of the storm that had thrown all the disciples into a panic, and churned the powers of a big lake up into a frenzy, had dropped buckets of rain, and tossed the boat around, all that came to a screeching halt. And all Jesus could say was, “Why were you so frightened? Have you no faith?” And the disciples, we are told, became filled with great awe. Who is this that even the wind and the sea obey him?
I was having a conversation with a friend the other day and we were talking about what it means to have faith. And the topic had come up as I had said to the person, what do you do on those days when belief does not come easy, those days when your faith in God, in creation, in humanity is tested beyond its breaking point. I am sure that if we are honest with ourselves, we all have those days at least once in awhile. Maybe they come after some horrible disaster has overwhelmed some destitute part of the world. A few years ago, an earthquake devastated the country of Haiti. Haiti is the poorest country in the Northern Hemisphere and when it struck many persons of faith were at a loss for how to explain it. Natural disasters are particularly damaging to the poorest populations who can’t build sound structures. For me, anytime there is a mass shooting but especially a shooting in a school I find my faith is challenged. Being one who has seen up close and personal the amount of grief and anguish that can arise in the aftermath of a school shooting, I am transported back to where my 7-months pregnant wife and I stood on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, VA on April 16, 2007. To try and conceive of a loving God in the midst of knowing that people are in desperate pain is almost impossible. And of course, on a daily basis, people are carrying pains that no one can possibly know about and maybe they aren’t fully aware of themselves, and so I posed the question to my friend, how are we to have faith when the exigencies of the world make it almost impossible. And my friend, much wiser than I, just said, “What else are you going to do?” And I am struck by the truth found in those simple words, “What else are you going to do?” What else are you going to do when the waters of life crest the bough of the boat? What else are you going to do when the seas upon which you are sailing begin to toss your little vessel from one side of the compass to the other? What else are you going to do when the thunders roar and the lightning flashes and lights ups the sky and the rains pelt you and the winds feel as if they are going to topple the whole of the world? What else are you going to do than return to Jesus, peacefully sleeping on the back of the boat, ask him, once again, to restore your faith, to help you feel awe at his power, to say, “Peace, be still,” until the whole of your life is dead calm once again. What else are we going to do? Because to exist as if the opposite were the case, as if Jesus weren’t there, as if God wasn’t mighty, as if all there was in life was a course of periods of varying storms and calm, good times and bad, struggles and ease, but all without a North Star upon which to gather ones bearings, without a moral arc of the universe to bend towards justice, with no light to shine in the darkness that the darkness may never, ever over come. To live like that is to have no foundation, no meaning, no reconciliation, no redemption, no great feast of God sitting at the end of the age where all God’s children will sit and be fed, where there will be no more tears, no more pain, no more hurt on all of God’s Holy Mountain. And even now, it is springing up all around us. Like new buds pushing through the soil, the bright sun rising after days of darkened clouds, or each of us rising out of bed in the morning with the chance to be Christ for one another and the world. That’s the world that we get to inhabit. Even in the midst of the wretched and horrible ways that we too often treat one another. Even as we struggle to determine who is our neighbor, our brothers, our sisters. Even as we, at times, ever so slowly, limp along towards glory land, even then, the light of Christ still shines in each of us, even in the midst of the darkest storms of life, cascading along the path that takes us back home. Glory be to God in the highest and on earth peace amongst all God’s children. Alleluia, amen.
Image taken from: http://www.jsu.edu/news/july_dec2004/Night%20Storm%20From%20Lake%20-%20June%202003%20-0004A.jpg