Calming the Storms
M15
Job 38:1-11
Ps. 107:1-3,23-32
2 Cor. 6:1-13
Mk. 4:35-41
“Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He stilled the storm to a whisper and quieted the waves of the sea” (Ps. 107).
It was exactly like a bad dream of a dinner party in which you in which you couldn’t stop yourself from saying something thoughtless and insensitive. This morning I preached about suffering at the 8:00 a.m. service. I looked out at my friends there and almost everyone in the room had lost a spouse or child or parent in the last few years. My first story was about a man who committed suicide and none of us could recover from it.
In her book The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes about her experience after her husband’s death and her daughter’s fatal illness. Like C.S. Lewis she describes the way that grief isolates us and destroys language. Grief creates distance and this morning at 8:00 a.m. we were lost in it.
Sometimes people ask me how I manage to handle the suffering I face in ministry. Often I do not handle it well. Harold Brumbaum our former rector and I have talked about how difficult it is as priests to fully empathize with people who are suffering without being overcome by it. Our readings today provide a way of talking about personal pain and Christianity.
1. Avoiding suffering. The physical act of preaching can be exhausting. I have it easy. I preach very short sermons, to a small, attentive and forgiving congregation. And I have a microphone. Still, watching and adjusting to your responses, thinking of the right word, planning what is coming next takes a lot of energy. Imagine what it was like for eighteenth century preachers like John Wesley. In his diary he guessed that he traveled 8,000 miles and preached 5,000 sermons every year.
After a similarly punishing schedule of sermons and healings Jesus feels physically and mentally exhausted. I love the way that the Bible puts it, “leaving the crowd behind him, they took him with them, just as he was.” When I first was ordained this last clause was a mystery to me. Now I think it means that he simply never had the chance to rest. Despite the dangers of a building storm Jesus falls asleep in the stern.
I remember surfing at Kanaha on the Northshore of Maui when winter waves higher than our house were draining a razor sharp reef. A set would come in and I would frantically paddle up these mountains hoping that I could just reach the top before the wave broke. There is nothing like this kind of experience to remind us how completely God’s hand sustains our fragile life. I’ve never been tempted to sleep at a moment like this.
But seasoned sailors guided the helm of Jesus’ boat. He trusted the expertise of these fishermen. He put his life in their hands. I wonder what would have happened if Jesus had not been with them.
I imagine that they would have used all their skills, made good decisions and somehow pulled through. Instead Jesus’ very presence on the boat gave them an odd kind of permission to panic. Rather than relying on their own inner strength and expertise they immediately look to Jesus to take their problems away. Jesus says, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” I don’t think he says this to be cruel but to make explicit the temptation that we all feel to wallow in dependence when God calls us to exercise courage.
Parents constantly have to decide when it is appropriate to help their children and when to let them work out their problems on their own. A half dozen times a day Micah or Melia ask for help with something that they should do themselves. Sometimes it is hard to discern if and how to intervene.
When I was a child, three neighborhood bullies were working me over when my mother walked by on the sidewalk. As she went by she said that dinner was ready. The moment she turned the corner the boys continued humiliating me. I went home in tears because she hadn’t helped. She explained that she did help me by giving me the excuse to go home with her right then. She knew that by intervening more forcefully it would only have made everything worse during the next time they confronted me.
Our own personal security is a central organizing principle of this community. Too often secular suburban life teaches us to deal with suffering by avoiding it. The sad fact in this time and place is that sometimes when things go wrong people stay away from you as if your pain were somehow contagious. As human beings God made us to survive suffering. Walking with Jesus means having the strength of Jesus and facing pain in the way that he did, that is, with some measure of confidence in God’s love.
2. Sources of Fear. At birth a child is afraid of two things: falling and loud noises. Everything else that you fear is something that you learned to fear. Mostly you are afraid because the world taught you to be. Try listing the things that you fear most. At the top of that list are probably noble worries about people you love. Further down are some of the fears we have difficulty admitting to ourselves.
One of our deepest fears, in this ultra-capitalist culture, is the fear of failing. In so many ways we define what is good as success. Performance then becomes the way we define, identify and group people. Where we live, how live, what we do and most importantly how we regard ourselves and others arise out of our worship of success.
From college, I remember bumper stickers that said “Berkeley Engineering.” Maybe I didn’t get it but I thought that they implied, “it is not enough to be bragging about being smarter than all the people who didn’t get into Berkeley. I’m smarter than all the other non-engineers here too.” Perhaps I thought this because I was just insecure myself.
Of all the organizations that you belong to the church is one of the few places that doesn’t have grouping people according to their success at the heart of its mission. Yet even here I cannot stop evaluating our performance in thoroughly world terms.
If somehow through magic our worship of success could be deleted from our character, we wouldn’t even recognize ourselves. Would you have chosen the same major, career, friends, spouse or home? Imagine who you would become if fear of failure no longer motivated you.
The apostle Paul shows us what it might be like to replace our obsession with personal success with a passion for God’s Kingdom. Sometimes, I think that is why he is so hard to understand. To friends in Corinth he writes, “We are treated as imposters, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see – we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” Instead of referring to the world, he sees his life in relation to God’s Kingdom.
You too could have nothing and possess everything. Like Paul you could be a person transformed by freedom from fear. You too could see that Jesus’ failure as a Messiah, that is as a kind of first century global dictator, represents a huge success for the human race. Because of his crucifixion we see failure as “both real and not final.” To put it in Rowan Williams words, “resurrection is the transaction in human beings that brings about the sense of a selfhood [that is] given not achieved.”
3. The Promise of Jesus. Christianity is not just a religion of ancient texts. In the catacombs and in early house churches we have images too. One of the most powerful examples of these are pictures which depict the church as a kind of boat awash in the storms of this life. Although we will all suffer, some of us will face tragedy far beyond failure, exceeding what we think we can bear. It threatens to obliterate our identity and even our existence.
For Christians this sometimes feels like we have fallen out of the boat of faith. One of the greatest blessings for me is that I get to witness how Christians reach out to brothers and sisters who waves have washed overboard. As Christians we never need to face our tragedies alone. We are never strangers to the world or to each other as the body of Christ.
In a very practical way, prayer helps me when the suffering seems overwhelming. I pray at all different hours of the day. I lift up all my concerns to God. When I cannot control my response to sadness, when my thoughts are thinking me, the Jesus Prayer gives me a deep peace in my heart. It is simple, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” After years of slowly repeating this prayer, it calms me and I feel the strength of Christ.
The church and prayer can help us but so can our faith. Death always has a certain kind of hold on our house. We pray for everyone at Christ Church who has died. Recently though our six-year-old son Micah has been very afraid of death. He asks when we, his parents, will die. Most of my answers have to be that we do not know what will happen to us or when. But most of the people who I have been with at death were by that time ready for it.
When I was a little boy like him I was afraid of shaving, of driving a car, of having children and adult responsibilities. But by the time I was old enough I was ready for all of these things. I expect that dying will be like that too for most of us. If we are not ready, God will help us to prepare. Just in the same way that we have faith in God to care for us every day, we have faith that he will continue to love us after we have died. In terrible tragedy faith may not be enough but it can help.
In conclusion, I hope this morning to remind us that we are equipped to handle suffering, that our life doesn’t have to be organized around the principle of avoiding pain. Second, I pray that your faith in Jesus will give you freedom in a society distorted by its fear of failure. Finally, when you face real tragedy I hope that the church, your habit of prayer and faith will draw you near to the Christ who says to all creation, “Peace, be still.”
_____________
John Wesley, The Heart of John Wesley’s Journal. Ed. Percy Livingstone Paker and Augustine Birrell (NY: Flemming H. Revell, Co., 1903), 392, 97.
Rowan Williams “Resurrection and Peace,” On Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 273, 271.
Job 38:1-11
Ps. 107:1-3,23-32
2 Cor. 6:1-13
Mk. 4:35-41
“Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He stilled the storm to a whisper and quieted the waves of the sea” (Ps. 107).
It was exactly like a bad dream of a dinner party in which you in which you couldn’t stop yourself from saying something thoughtless and insensitive. This morning I preached about suffering at the 8:00 a.m. service. I looked out at my friends there and almost everyone in the room had lost a spouse or child or parent in the last few years. My first story was about a man who committed suicide and none of us could recover from it.
In her book The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes about her experience after her husband’s death and her daughter’s fatal illness. Like C.S. Lewis she describes the way that grief isolates us and destroys language. Grief creates distance and this morning at 8:00 a.m. we were lost in it.
Sometimes people ask me how I manage to handle the suffering I face in ministry. Often I do not handle it well. Harold Brumbaum our former rector and I have talked about how difficult it is as priests to fully empathize with people who are suffering without being overcome by it. Our readings today provide a way of talking about personal pain and Christianity.
1. Avoiding suffering. The physical act of preaching can be exhausting. I have it easy. I preach very short sermons, to a small, attentive and forgiving congregation. And I have a microphone. Still, watching and adjusting to your responses, thinking of the right word, planning what is coming next takes a lot of energy. Imagine what it was like for eighteenth century preachers like John Wesley. In his diary he guessed that he traveled 8,000 miles and preached 5,000 sermons every year.
After a similarly punishing schedule of sermons and healings Jesus feels physically and mentally exhausted. I love the way that the Bible puts it, “leaving the crowd behind him, they took him with them, just as he was.” When I first was ordained this last clause was a mystery to me. Now I think it means that he simply never had the chance to rest. Despite the dangers of a building storm Jesus falls asleep in the stern.
I remember surfing at Kanaha on the Northshore of Maui when winter waves higher than our house were draining a razor sharp reef. A set would come in and I would frantically paddle up these mountains hoping that I could just reach the top before the wave broke. There is nothing like this kind of experience to remind us how completely God’s hand sustains our fragile life. I’ve never been tempted to sleep at a moment like this.
But seasoned sailors guided the helm of Jesus’ boat. He trusted the expertise of these fishermen. He put his life in their hands. I wonder what would have happened if Jesus had not been with them.
I imagine that they would have used all their skills, made good decisions and somehow pulled through. Instead Jesus’ very presence on the boat gave them an odd kind of permission to panic. Rather than relying on their own inner strength and expertise they immediately look to Jesus to take their problems away. Jesus says, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” I don’t think he says this to be cruel but to make explicit the temptation that we all feel to wallow in dependence when God calls us to exercise courage.
Parents constantly have to decide when it is appropriate to help their children and when to let them work out their problems on their own. A half dozen times a day Micah or Melia ask for help with something that they should do themselves. Sometimes it is hard to discern if and how to intervene.
When I was a child, three neighborhood bullies were working me over when my mother walked by on the sidewalk. As she went by she said that dinner was ready. The moment she turned the corner the boys continued humiliating me. I went home in tears because she hadn’t helped. She explained that she did help me by giving me the excuse to go home with her right then. She knew that by intervening more forcefully it would only have made everything worse during the next time they confronted me.
Our own personal security is a central organizing principle of this community. Too often secular suburban life teaches us to deal with suffering by avoiding it. The sad fact in this time and place is that sometimes when things go wrong people stay away from you as if your pain were somehow contagious. As human beings God made us to survive suffering. Walking with Jesus means having the strength of Jesus and facing pain in the way that he did, that is, with some measure of confidence in God’s love.
2. Sources of Fear. At birth a child is afraid of two things: falling and loud noises. Everything else that you fear is something that you learned to fear. Mostly you are afraid because the world taught you to be. Try listing the things that you fear most. At the top of that list are probably noble worries about people you love. Further down are some of the fears we have difficulty admitting to ourselves.
One of our deepest fears, in this ultra-capitalist culture, is the fear of failing. In so many ways we define what is good as success. Performance then becomes the way we define, identify and group people. Where we live, how live, what we do and most importantly how we regard ourselves and others arise out of our worship of success.
From college, I remember bumper stickers that said “Berkeley Engineering.” Maybe I didn’t get it but I thought that they implied, “it is not enough to be bragging about being smarter than all the people who didn’t get into Berkeley. I’m smarter than all the other non-engineers here too.” Perhaps I thought this because I was just insecure myself.
Of all the organizations that you belong to the church is one of the few places that doesn’t have grouping people according to their success at the heart of its mission. Yet even here I cannot stop evaluating our performance in thoroughly world terms.
If somehow through magic our worship of success could be deleted from our character, we wouldn’t even recognize ourselves. Would you have chosen the same major, career, friends, spouse or home? Imagine who you would become if fear of failure no longer motivated you.
The apostle Paul shows us what it might be like to replace our obsession with personal success with a passion for God’s Kingdom. Sometimes, I think that is why he is so hard to understand. To friends in Corinth he writes, “We are treated as imposters, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see – we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” Instead of referring to the world, he sees his life in relation to God’s Kingdom.
You too could have nothing and possess everything. Like Paul you could be a person transformed by freedom from fear. You too could see that Jesus’ failure as a Messiah, that is as a kind of first century global dictator, represents a huge success for the human race. Because of his crucifixion we see failure as “both real and not final.” To put it in Rowan Williams words, “resurrection is the transaction in human beings that brings about the sense of a selfhood [that is] given not achieved.”
3. The Promise of Jesus. Christianity is not just a religion of ancient texts. In the catacombs and in early house churches we have images too. One of the most powerful examples of these are pictures which depict the church as a kind of boat awash in the storms of this life. Although we will all suffer, some of us will face tragedy far beyond failure, exceeding what we think we can bear. It threatens to obliterate our identity and even our existence.
For Christians this sometimes feels like we have fallen out of the boat of faith. One of the greatest blessings for me is that I get to witness how Christians reach out to brothers and sisters who waves have washed overboard. As Christians we never need to face our tragedies alone. We are never strangers to the world or to each other as the body of Christ.
In a very practical way, prayer helps me when the suffering seems overwhelming. I pray at all different hours of the day. I lift up all my concerns to God. When I cannot control my response to sadness, when my thoughts are thinking me, the Jesus Prayer gives me a deep peace in my heart. It is simple, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” After years of slowly repeating this prayer, it calms me and I feel the strength of Christ.
The church and prayer can help us but so can our faith. Death always has a certain kind of hold on our house. We pray for everyone at Christ Church who has died. Recently though our six-year-old son Micah has been very afraid of death. He asks when we, his parents, will die. Most of my answers have to be that we do not know what will happen to us or when. But most of the people who I have been with at death were by that time ready for it.
When I was a little boy like him I was afraid of shaving, of driving a car, of having children and adult responsibilities. But by the time I was old enough I was ready for all of these things. I expect that dying will be like that too for most of us. If we are not ready, God will help us to prepare. Just in the same way that we have faith in God to care for us every day, we have faith that he will continue to love us after we have died. In terrible tragedy faith may not be enough but it can help.
In conclusion, I hope this morning to remind us that we are equipped to handle suffering, that our life doesn’t have to be organized around the principle of avoiding pain. Second, I pray that your faith in Jesus will give you freedom in a society distorted by its fear of failure. Finally, when you face real tragedy I hope that the church, your habit of prayer and faith will draw you near to the Christ who says to all creation, “Peace, be still.”
_____________
John Wesley, The Heart of John Wesley’s Journal. Ed. Percy Livingstone Paker and Augustine Birrell (NY: Flemming H. Revell, Co., 1903), 392, 97.
Rowan Williams “Resurrection and Peace,” On Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 273, 271.
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