Third Sunday after Pentecost

June 21, 2009

By Pastor John Marboe

The Holy Gospel according to St. Mark. (Mark 4:35‑41)

When evening had come, [Jesus said to the disciples,] “Let us go across to the other side of the sea.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. 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. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

The Gospel of the Lord.

Our Gospel text today I find very difficult to believe, very difficult to believe. I have a hard time with it. Not the part where Jesus stills the storm with a word. That part is not hard for me to believe. I can easily believe that Christ was able to speak a word and calm the waves and the wind and make a storm stop. That’s not the part that I have a hard time believing. The miracles in the Gospels, I don’t have much trouble with at all.

In fact, one of my favorite authors, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk and author, writes this:

“The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now” (Touching Peace. Paralax, 1992).

The miracle isn’t to walk on the water. The miracle is to walk on the earth, in peace. And I know people who do that, so I don’t have trouble believing that people can also walk on water.

No. What I have trouble believing in this story has to do with the fact that I have been at sea in a terrible storm, and I cannot believe that somebody could sleep through that. Or if they could sleep through that, I can’t believe that anyone would be able to wake them up for any reason. But this is the story before us today.

I will tell you the story where I was terrified at sea. It was the mid ‘80s. I was living in London. With friends, I had gone on a holiday over to Holland for a few days; and it was the middle of winter, it was near to New Year’s. We decided, to save money, that we would sail back to England on New Year’s Eve, leaving at ten o’clock at night and then arriving early in the morning.

Well, the weather was pretty bad, but we boarded this ferry. To say it was a ferry is a bit of an understatement. It was a very large ship. It was 350 or 360 feet long, full of cars and people and cargo. We set out from the harbor in Amsterdam at ten o’clock at night. And as we got out of the harbor and hit the North Sea, we started to really feel the weather. That huge ship, 350 feet long, began to rock back and forth and began to bounce with the swells, literally bounce with the swells.

The storm increased in severity through the night, so that we were told that the winds were gusting from between 70 to 100 miles an hour, and the swells were reaching 35 to 40 feet. We, to save money, hadn’t rented any beds or berths. We were sleeping on sort of lounge couches in the main bar area. The ship rolling, rising and slamming with the waves.

The day crew had decided that, since it was New Year’s Eve, they were going to party, no matter what; and they were all soused. So they were spinning records on the record player, which would skip; as the ship bounced up and down. But these oblivious crew members were dancing and having a great old time doing the bunny hop around those of us who were just trying to keep from getting sick. You can imagine the scene. It really was terrifying, really terrifying. What we didn’t know at the time, but found out when we got home and turned on the news, is that the identical ship to ours, that had put out just after we had from the same port, had gone down that night. Most of the people on board were lost. It was a very dangerous night. Believe me, none of us slept. Those drunken crew members were able to sleep eventually. But, I guarantee you, nobody could have woken them up.

There’s something primordial and terrifying about the idea of being lost at sea, to be shipwrecked. It’s a metaphor, in fact, for being completely unraveled in life, undone, unglued, having a complete breakdown, losing it, however you might want to describe that. Tales of seafaring and shipwrecks are terribly important to us. Think of the great stories of seafaring and shipwreck, of being lost at sea. Think of The Odyssey; think of Moby Dick; Jonah and the Whale, from the Bible; Mutiny on the Bounty; Robinson Crusoe; the many, many pirate tales; the song of the Edmund Fitzgerald; the Titanic display at the Science Museum; the movie The Perfect Storm. You could go on and on and on, these stories, these narratives, about being shipwrecked at sea, being caught in a storm at sea. They grip our minds.

Jesus and his disciples are making a night crossing on a sea in a boat, and there arises a wicked storm. So strong, so terrible is this storm, that his disciples—and remember now, these are seafaring guys, at least some of them, they are fisher-folk; this is their sea; this is what they do in life—they’re terrified. The story tells us that they are undone; they are in panic. The boat was being swamped. And Jesus, I love this little detail, he’s asleep on a cushion, on a cushion in the back of the boat, not the front but the back. Now, listen carefully to what transpires.

They awaken Jesus, terrified, and they say to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” They don’t say, “Teacher, help us!” They don’t say, “Is there anything you can do about this, Jesus?” They don’t say, “Well, I guess this is goodbye.” They don’t say any of those things. They say, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

Now, I’m going to bring in another story from the Gospels that may not seem to fit at first, but I will tell you why. It’s the story Mary and Martha; you know the story where Jesus goes to Mary and Martha’s house. You know the story. Mary is sitting at Jesus’ feet, listening to his teaching, while Martha is busy serving. Martha finally, in frustration and rage, comes to Jesus and saying these very same words that the disciples said, “Do you not care that I am doing all the work here?” “Do you not care?” An interesting way to address Jesus. Ever feel like saying that? “Do you not care?”

With Martha, Jesus kind of ignores the issue at hand, the issue about who is doing more work. He looks at Martha and he says, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted about many things.” Well, that’s at Martha’s house, and things aren’t quite so dire as they are for the disciples out in the boat in the storm, where it’s life and death. But the words are the same: “Don’t you care?” The disciples say “Don’t you care that we are perishing?” Jesus wakes up, and he speaks to the wind and to the waves, and immediately, it says, there was a dead calm. He dispatches with the issue at hand fairly easily. Then he just as he did with Martha he turns to address them, “You,” he looks at them and he says, “You.” He ignores the question that they asked, and he says, “Why are you afraid?” Not “Why were you afraid?” “Why are you afraid?”

Now, what’s interesting is that the word for “afraid” here is not the word that typically would be used for the kind of occasional fear that comes upon us, when we are nearly hit by a car, or when a dog is chasing us. It’s not that kind of a word. It’s a word that is more like “cowardice.” So what Jesus asks his disciples is: “Why are you so cowardly?”

As with Martha, the crisis produces an opportunity for Jesus to speak to the way in which they are living their lives. To Martha, he says, “You, Martha, are so worried all the time. There’s a much better way to live.” And to his disciples, “Never mind the storm. Are you, are you going to be driven and tossed by your fears in life?” And then he says, “Do you have no faith?”

Suddenly, this is a much more interesting story than a simple miracle story. This is a story about fear and about faith, about life and about death. And what’s startling, and even just a bit distressing to me, is this: how unimpressed Jesus seems to be by what most of us would think of as legitimately terrifying circumstances; pretty unconcerned about that.

Life doesn’t get much more intensely frightening than being at sea in a storm. In the story, Jesus has an easy time calming the physical storm. What he can’t so easily do is still the tempest in the human heart. And that is the storm that Jesus really cares about.

So the disciples say, “Don’t you care that we are perishing?” To which Jesus essentially responds, “No, not so much as I care that your faith in God has not taken hold yet.” “No, not so much as that I care that you are afraid and that that fear dominates your lives.”

This text doesn’t lead me to answers and advice, but rather to confession. I realize in reading this story how far I have to go in faith and in conquering fears in my life. I identify far more with those disciples than I do with Jesus, that’s for sure. But this passage is here not for condemnation, but for encouragement.

Imagine yourself in a boat, imagine yourself in that boat, imagine all of us in that boat; imagine even the whole human family in that boat. In calm seas, life is good. In calm, sunny skies, life is good. It’s lovely, it’s enjoyable; we feel safe. But we know that the sea and the wind can overcome our little boat in a heartbeat. And this is the fear that we all have to face. It’s very basic. It’s our fear for safety, for security, for sanity, for solid ground on which to stand, for ourselves and for the people that we love.

But life is not solid ground. Life is a ship at sea. Life is uncertain, and the dangers are real. We live in a dangerous world, a world of nuclear proliferation, of hostilities among nations, of environmental degradation, of an inhumanly fast pace in life, of economic troubles, of pandemics, of greed, of conspiracies, of accidents, of crime, of breakdown and loss. And our faith in God doesn’t solve or fix all of that.

But our faith in God can be the end of being driven and tossed and dominated by our fears of such things, so that, despite the storms that rage around us, those storms will not rage also within us, and that the peace that passes all understanding may keep our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus.