Sermons

Against the Wind

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church  June 22, 2003                                                 Mark 4:35-41

This coming Tuesday, beginning at 4:30 p.m., Third Church will host the regular stated meeting of the Presbytery of Genesee Valley. Though all of us can’t vote at a meeting of this governing body, we can all be present, and so I would encourage you to drop by, even for a little while, to witness the presbytery in action. Dinner is at 6:00; worship begins just before 7:00. Special thanks to the many volunteers for helping make this happen, including especially Jan and Jim Chisholm and Otto Muller-Girard, Jr.

As you read in this morning’s bulletin, today marks Crista Miller’s last day with us as assistant organist. While we fully support Crista’s call back to a fuller focus on her academic life, we will most surely miss her, and all that she has contributed to our life together. She is a fine musician and has contributed greatly to our ministry of music. The good news is that we will see Crista from time to time in the next year. Crista – thank you for your service with us, and every good blessing to you.

*****

One cannot help but hear another story as this morning’s gospel account is read. (Mark 4:35-41) Just last week, a tragic boating accident claimed more than ten lives in the Tillamook Bay on the north coast of Oregon. It happened so close to shore, within view of onlookers.

On a personal level, I cannot help but remember another story as this morning’s gospel account is read. It happened to us several years ago, on a church trip to Scotland and Northern Ireland. We were slated to travel from the Scottish port town of Oban to Northern Ireland, to Ballycastle, to visit the Corrymeela community.

The ferry trip, made several times each day, was intended to last a couple of hours. It did not. But it was worse than that. The trip started out a bit bumpy, and then increased and increased. For a while, the ship’s staff seemed unfazed, but after an hour or so of very rough water, one could sense even their own nervousness. The boat’s stabilizers were extended, seeking to provide some support. No use.

Now I am not a water person, so a bit of hyperbole might be at play, but things became continually and considerably worse. People began falling while walking, then falling out of their seats. The several physicians on board soon had plenty of seasick people to which to attend. The most memorable moment for me came when a giant crash echoed throughout the boat – the entire supply of the ship’s china had crashed to the floor, sending broken glass everywhere. Still, the ship’s crew was steady, at least on the exterior. Later, they would admit that the severity of the wind and waves was a first for them.

There are many other stories to tell of this trip – my own focus for approximately two hours on a two inch piece of carpet; my spouse’s more noble and less panicked response. Stories of people helping people. Memories of people seeking not to appear alarmed when in fact people were thinking difficult thoughts, if not ultimate ones. It was much more than a few choppy waves, and because no one expected it, no one was quite sure how to react.

At the end of what became a nearly five-hour event, we reached land, grateful and exhausted. We plopped onto the bus and reached our destination. After naps and dinner, our group re-convened for evening prayer. The order for worship was revised just a bit, and I read this very same passage, from Mark’s gospel. At first people chuckled at the connection. Then, as the story unfolded, they took notice.

After the initial public events of Jesus’ ministry, Mark tells us, Jesus gets into the teaching business. Parable follows upon parable, connecting every day life situations to the picture he seeks to paint of life in God’s kingdom. And then Mark moves on to a series of stories – miracle stories – that focus on the Sea of Galilee. These stories seek to tell us that Jesus has power over nature and demons and death, even. (See Pheme Perkins in The New Interpreters Bible Commentary, “Mark,” page 579 and ff.)

After a full day of teaching and preaching, Jesus and the disciples need to get to the other side of the lake. Into the boat they go, a not unexpected or unusual mode of transport. And the problem is not the boat, or the body of water upon which it is traveling. The problem is the windstorm that whips up, unwelcome, unexpected. Waves beat into the boat, we are told, and it was in danger of being capsized.

The disciples, we can only imagine, are panicking beyond panic, “freaking out,” as we say in my house. They are no doubt used to choppy water. Fishing off of these boats, in this very water, is their livelihood, after all. So this must have been more severe, more serious, even to the point of being perceived as life threatening.

And though it’s not the main point, it’s a good one. Jesus is ASLEEP. Any minister with any grandiose designs on leadership might be disappointed at this moment. The disciples think they are about to die, and their leader is asleep. The disciples wake Jesus from his peaceful slumber. Teacher, don’t you care that we are about to die?!?!? And he woke up. Sometimes I envision Jesus as a little annoyed that he had been raised from his sleep, or a little bemused. Other times I perceive him as purely concerned for his followers.

Either way – he is awake, and he rebukes the wind. He reprimands that most elemental force, admonishes it to calm down, almost like a parent imploring an out-of-control child to keep still. And the wind listens, and it is calm. And we arrive then at the gospel moment of the story.

“Why are you afraid?” Jesus asks. “Have you still no faith?” And the disciples, whose task it seems to be in these gospel stories to only grasp Jesus’ true identity and purpose slowly and haltingly, ask themselves simply, “Who is this that even the wind and sea listen to him?”

Mark’s point seems to be this, that if the disciples truly grasped who Jesus was, his person, his vision, his mission, that they would not be afraid. And yet they, surrogates for the church throughout all time and surrogates even for us, do not grasp fully.

This story is told not to convict us, but to convince us, and rather to bring us ever closer into the story of who Jesus is and why he does what he does.

And to my mind, is has a great deal to do with fear. Not the absence of fear, mind you, but our response to fear when fearful things happen to us. When we are afraid in our lives. When things take unexpected and unwelcome turns, and we are afraid.

It is a key biblical element. Jesus’ life story is framed by this experience. The angel appears to Mary to tell her that she will bear a son, and she is scared to death. The women appear at the tomb on the third day and they are scared to death. Each time, angels, messengers, appear, and in words that offer comfort and other things, say simply “do not be afraid.”

Our response might be – “easy for you to say!” Fair enough. Unless we face those moments in our lives where waves seem to be crashing all around us, we cannot gauge our response, or what we will think of this God who asks us, like the wind itself, to be calm. Fair enough. Except those experiences happen to us all the time.

We, or someone we love deeply, receive that most difficult word from a doctor. We have worked in a place, in a particular and familiar environment, for decades, and suddenly that environment is taken away from us and we wonder what we shall do. We invest time and energy in a relationship over many years, and that relationship evaporates, and we wonder how we will continue to find human connection.

Fears are with us all the time. Fear is with us all the time. I cannot suggest that the life of faith, coming to church, reading the Bible or praying, will erase fear from our life. It will not. It does not. We can embrace, though, what the story seems to suggest. That fear is met in a new way when Jesus is awake in our lives. That God’s hope for us is not to be immobilized by fear, incapacitated by it. That God calls us to live our dreams and not our fears.

Writer Reynolds Price was struck by cancer and has written thoughtfully and poignantly about it. And he ponders the ultimate questions for us, the ultimate questions, taking many forms, being “why does the wind blow?” Why do bad things happen? War, disease, death, hardship. Why? To the question “does God care,” Price writes: “A created universe which has evolved the staggering richness of life that we observe on this one planet can scarcely permit the phenomenon to die in eventual cold silence like a candle forgotten in a room deserted by all other life…” (“Letter to a Man in the Fire,” in The Best Christian Writing 2002, pages 277-278)

That is to say, there is too much evidence all around that God cares, and too much testimony in this morning’s story to suggest anything other than Jesus seeking to travel with us, in front of us, behind us. Jesus is in the boat with us, but he is also in all of the boats that have made this trip before and that will make the trip after us.

God’s endeavor is not to pluck us out of situations when they seem choppy, but rather to send this human one, made frail in flesh and strong in weakness, to transform and redeem each moment that is fraught with peril and filled with fear. So that we may live our lives as free and forgiven people, in the face of all our fears.

There are no easy answers to these questions. Easy answers would not be true to life or true to the God who is “attuned to our needs and fears.” But the good news is that God is attuned to our fears, and that Jesus is in the boat with us, and that the wind, though real and fierce, is simply wind. It is neither our journey nor our journey’s end, but a force to be rebuked by the one who is both journey and destination.

And for a little while as we travel together, wind and water and fear will be all around. But we live for that day, when sea meets horizon, and creatures and creator are one. And Jesus, whom we know as many things, and whom we know even as pilot of the boat, will cast all fear to the wind and welcome us home. Amen.