Through It All

Robert Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

June 25, 2006

Text: Mark 4:35-41 and II Corinthians 6:1-13

Can we place ourselves in this story of Jesus and the disciples and hear what God may be saying to us today?

After a long day’s work, Jesus decides he is ready to travel to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. (If you start at 4:1, you will see that Jesus has been teaching a huge crowd while seated in a boat, just off shore.) The disciples obey. They decided to follow him and this means traveling by boat, too. Jesus doesn’t say why he wants to go there. They don’t ask him. If Jesus wants to go there, he must have a reason. They will go with him and see what is next.

So much of our faith journey involves traveling with Jesus. It may be a geographical calling we feel. Missionaries to Guyana from Cuero, Texas! Or it may be to a new arena of service, one that you never would have dreamed you could do. A man who has taught elementary Sunday School in his church for 30 years. It may be a calling that the church leadership senses: to reach out in some undefined way to the youth who gather each day after school at the bus stop in front of their church. Have you ever responded to Jesus’ beckoning without knowing where or why?

The disciples (and apparently others in other boats) load up and head out. It was getting dark. And, as sometimes happens in a body of water between mountains, the wind picks up and a storm comes upon them. The waves are “hurled” against the boat and they are in great danger of being swamped. Some of the disciples are fishermen, so they know the dangers. They have a healthy fear of the sea. In those days the sea was the epitome of chaos and evil, along with being a source of nourishment and refreshment. (Story of sailing on Lake Worth.)

The psalmists often express for us the feelings of being in such dangerous circumstances, internal or external. “Help, Lord, the waters have come up to our necks!” Many times we live with daily stresses (“daily dribbles of woe” someone has called them), and they can be difficult enough. Kids struggling with school, making new friends in a new place. The new co-workers turn out to be just as difficult to work with as the last set. The stock market gets antsy and we do not know whether to sell or buy. But every now and then, or very often for some, the storms really are hurled against us: the loss of a loved one, a serious illness, the loss of a job. Or, what seems to others a little hardship is simply the last straw for us and we feel overwhelmed by the accumulation. And we do not know which way to turn. And we are truly afraid.

It can happen to institutions, too, like the church. A few lean years, a few stormy meetings, the exodus of a few key leaders; or the state decides to build a highway right across the church property and the church has to leave the familiar neighborhood----and the church begins to take on water.

The disciples are up against it. Following Jesus did not mean an umbrella was placed over them, to protect them from dangerous circumstances. It does not mean that for us. It did not, finally, mean this for Jesus either.

I wonder how long it was before the disciples decided to wake Jesus up. He is asleep in the stern of the boat, a place reserved for the helmsman. Have you ever slept through a storm? I have, when I have been completely exhausted. Jesus is human. He is worn out. He is getting some shut-eye. Or, it may be that Jesus’ trust in God’s providential care is so strong that he simply does not worry.

The disciples wake him up, and you can you hear the frustration, even anger, in their voices. “Is it nothing to you that we are going down?!”

When real storms rage, we wonder where God went. We decide to follow Jesus, and we know it will not be a cake walk, but this is ridiculous! If Jesus is sleeping when I need him, maybe I ought to find a leader who is more available. And so we cry out to God when the storms of life are raging, asking God to stand by us, to rescue us.

I try to read one of the psalms every day. I read until a phrase hits me with a word which inspires or corrects or guides me, sometimes a single word. I have been amazed at how often the verses I have read express the sense of desperation I was feeling at the time. Many psalms are full of lament, anger, protest and complaint: Where were you, where are you God? Wake up, pay attention; don’t let the bad guys win! Don’t you care that I am perishing? I am not very adept myself at verbalizing my deepest prayers; the psalms often do this for me. What I have learned is that I am permitted---even expected and encouraged--- by our loving God to cry out in anger and complaint. The disciples had a close enough relationship with Jesus that they could awaken him and scold him for ignoring their common plight. Discipleship with Jesus is not a distant arrangement but a close relationship, as with a wise and caring friend.

What Jesus does next is not what I would have expected. I would have expected Jesus to wake up and say to the disciples, “Quiet, settle down!” But he says this, instead, to the winds and the sea. And they obey. Just like the disciples getting into the boat at Jesus command, the sea and winds obey, too. He uses the same language in rebuking the sea that he uses in exorcising the demons. “Stop seeking to destroy us, leave us in peace.”

All I can say is that, whatever could have been recorded if I had been there with a video camera, the church has passed this story on to us as one of those events (like the transfiguration story) in which the divine nature of Jesus becomes explicit. Think about it: one minute he is sleeping like a mere mortal, and the next he is telling the weather what to do! It is a miracle story, pure and simple, and you can come at it with some skepticism if you must, but the point of the story goes deeper than a nature miracle.

Jesus does care if disciples perish. That is the point. He is accessible to you and to me and to the church in our desperate times. Jesus, through word and sacrament, through prayers and shared life in the community, does hear us and respond to us in our deep need. When he Gospel of John says that “the word became flesh and dwelt among us,” it means that God identifies with us in our stressful lives. No matter where we go, God has been there, is there. He has been to Gethsemane and to Golgotha. When we pray “out of the depths,” God listens.

All I can say is this: our experience teaches us that God does not usually change the weather for us---so far as we can tell. (I am doubtful that other Christian leaders can persuade God to do this either, to punish or reward folks they deem to be beyond saving.) And the weather, the circumstances of our lives, are not always changed. I do not pretend to know why some people are delivered from their great sufferings and others are not. But I do not believe that God turns a deaf ear to us or to any suffering people. We may turn a deaf ear to suffering people. God does not. God hears our prayers and ministers to us, even when the external circumstances may not change.

I do believe and have experienced that God ministers to us by giving us strength that is beyond our own resources so that we can have the power to see it through. One way Jesus comes to our rescue is through the word, the sacraments, prayers and our shared life together. Sometimes God points out to us resources that we did not know were available to us. It may not appear to be miraculous to others, but we may know that One from beyond us has stood by us and he has made all the difference. I have been humbled by the witness of lay members who have gone through troubles that would have destroyed most people. They have borne witness that the One beyond them, the risen, crucified one, has been with them through it all.

When my paternal grandmother died, “What a Friend We have in Jesus” was sung at her service. I was younger and more foolish in those days. I remember thinking, “Why didn’t they sing a great resurrection hymn, like “For All the Saints.” In hindsight, I have decided that “What a Friend” was the best choice. She gave birth to six boys and she and my grandfather raised 5 of them on a hardscrabble farm in north central Texas, during the great depression. Her outward circumstances never changed, but she was buoyed up all her life by her conviction that Jesus stood by her through it all. When she played this hymn on the piano at the Methodist churches in Oran and Graford, it was not just a performance: it was a testimony.

After taking care of the weather, Jesus turns his attention to the astonished disciples. “Why are you such cowards? Don’t you have any faith at all?” This will not be the last time that Jesus rebukes his disciples for not discerning what is happening in his life and work. But it is shocking to hear Jesus speak this way to his friends.

There are times when I have great sympathy for the disciples. After all, the disciples are only reacting normally. Fear can be the right response when your boat is filling up with water! If Jesus is appearing to be too harsh in his critique, maybe it is because he loves them so much. After all, good friends are those who tell us the truth, even we do not want to hear it. Perhaps he knows that their faith will have to be much stronger because of all they will have to endure after he is not with them in the flesh. In fact, by the time the Gospel of Mark was put together, Christians were being rounded up wholesale in a storm of persecution. It is one of greatest miracles that the little community of Christians survived this persecution to tell its story to the whole world.

When did you last feel that Jesus was challenging you to deepen your own faith? To believe that he is in the boat with you, that he will see you through to a new tomorrow? When we can trust that Jesus will not let the forces of chaos destroy his little band of believers, in any age, then maybe we will make better witnesses to the steadfast, sure love of God. When we can believe that even death does not have the last word, but that God’s eternal life is the last word--- and it is life and peace beyond our comprehension--- maybe then we will know the joy of believing when the odds are against us.

Mark records that the disciples were “awestruck.” No kidding? Were they awestruck because of the miracle or because Jesus chided them for not having enough faith? We’ll never know.

Trevor Howard, a pastor in South Africa, says that he was told by a wiser, older friend, when he was rambling on one day about his own experiences of God, that when you meet God, you’ll either shut your mouth, or fall on your face, or both. To their credit, the disciples do just about this. “Who can this be?” they ask. This experience on this inland sea has impressed upon them that this is no ordinary mortal. He is God’s only begotten Son. They will, of course, forget this again, and their faith will falter. Miracles are really never enough to convince us that Jesus is the Son of God. It is only after the cross and resurrection that they will begin to put the pieces together. It is so for us as well.

They will remember, as we hope we will remember that Jesus is more than a teacher. As the apostle Paul puts it “in him, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”

And even if the storms do not cease for us, if Jesus is in the boat with us, there can come a great calm.

Can we believe that Jesus is in our boat and that he does, truly care for us, cares for what we are going through? Can we love and serve this Master, and follow him to the ends of the earth, throughout all the storms of our lives?