My first non-class sermon in a year
Also, I should ask, do you want to continue my earlier music quiz and I can put up further lines for the ones that haven't been guessed yet, or do you want to wimp out and have me just put up the answers?
Grace and peace to you from the God who was, and is, and is to come. Amen.
Who, then, is this that even the wind and the sea obey him?
You have to admit, the disciples had had a long day. Jesus had been teaching to a crowd for hours, telling parable after parable. When the crowd got a break to eat, Jesus had taken the disciples aside to explain the parables to them, to make sure they understood what he was trying to say. After all this, in order to get away from the crowd for awhile, Jesus has them take a boat out to cross to the other side of the sea- and granted several of the disciples were fishermen by trade, and so they were good at this, but apparently this was a crossing at night, and that had to be stressful even without the terrifying windstorm.
And it must have been a doozy. Because, ordinarily, I am the last person you'll find making assumptions about how someone's going to behave based on their gender, but in this case- well, think about it. You've got twelve grown men awake, in a boat, and their boss is asleep in the back after a very long day, and several of them worked on boats for a living when they weren't following Jesus around the countryside- I've got to think they were about as likely to want to wake him up as they were to stop for directions. That must have been quite the storm. Certainly their question tells us they're afraid- “Don't you care that we're dying?” sounds like fear thinly disguised as anger and abandonment issues to me. Just who did they think they were traveling with, after all?
I sort of hate to put it this way, but we're going to be hearing a lot of the Gospel of Mark over the course of the next couple of months, and enough of the stories involve the disciples that I feel there's something you should know about them. They're really kind of stupid. If you ever want to make a list of the many and various ways that people have misunderstood Jesus Christ and His message, go through the Gospel of Mark and you can use the disciples as a checklist. They constantly get it wrong. On the few occasions where they finally figure something out, you find they've forgotten it ten verses later. They aren't exactly geniuses in the other Gospels, either, but it's in Mark where they really fail to shine. Personally, I find this comforting, because Jesus never gives up on them, either. I like to have this kind of proof that despite our various failings, God loves us anyways.
So the disciples being so royally confused in this reading isn't that surprising. And, to cut them a little slack, according to this Gospel they hadn't been traveling with Jesus for very long when this happened- Jesus heals several people during the first couple chapters of Mark, but this is the first nature miracle they've seen, and probably the most dramatic up to this point. So if they didn't expect this kind of a display of power, and they were pretty surprised by it afterwards- well, it seems understandable. We're human- we see patterns in life, and from those patterns we start to expect we understand how the world works. The sun rose yesterday, and the day before that- and the thunderstorm the day before that made it kind of hard to tell, but apparently it did then too- so we expected it to rise this morning, and we figure it probably will tomorrow, too. So it's natural that we would do that same thing with each other- and that we would also do it with God.
Which is apparently where Job really messed up. It does seem a little unfair that today's reading should give us just God's slap down of Job without giving us the back story- but to be fair, there are thirty-seven chapters of back story, so I can't blame them. The extremely short version is that Job was a good man, God caused bad things to happen to Job for reasons I could preach eight sermons on and therefore won't go into right now, Job's friends all tried to pin the blame on him and were unsuccessful, and finally Job ranted at God for awhile and asked God, literally, what in God's name God thought God was doing. And today's reading was God's answer. Well, the beginning of God's answer- the full answer goes on for five chapters and actually manages to not repeat itself. Which says something about the extent of God's power- which would be the point.
Job was confused, on a very basic, fundamental level, about what was happening to him because it violated a very simple concept that he thought was a law of the universe- it violated the idea the God rewards those who are righteous, and, presumably, punishes the wicked. Job was righteous- it says so right in the first verse of the story that he was blameless and upright. When his friends tried to tell him that he must have done something wrong to earn this kind of treatment, Job disagrees with them, and then God disagrees with them, and in the end they have to get Job to pray for them in order to avoid God's anger. So we can take it as read that Job was a good man. Which leads us, inescapably, to the idea that God does not, necessarily, reward the good and punish the bad. And God's reaction to this idea is to point out that God is the one who shaped the universe, and we are not. Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
God is in control, and we are not. The disciples, in today's reading from Mark, get the same lesson in a different way. Jesus controls the wind and the waves with three words, and according to every picture of this story I've ever seen, one outstretched hand. Whatever the disciples expected from him, this wasn't it. Jesus didn't do this to reward the disciples for being good or faithful- He points out they're being pretty dim and that they lack faith. This also wasn't an end all be all solution- there have been storms on this sea since, there will be more in the future. Jesus responded to fear by creating peace where there was none before.
We're in Iowa, and landlocked, and while we certainly do get the occasional thunderstorm they generally aren't generally as life-threatening as they would be if we were in deep water in a wooden fishing boat. But we see plenty of storms, nevertheless, they just take different shapes. The current protests in Iran, a presidential election that divided families and raised the collective blood pressure of the country for months, the controversy right in our own church about who should and who shouldn't be a pastor that threatens the unity of the Lutheran church- and plenty of other denominations who are watching us for their cues. On a smaller scale, we see storms in the lives of teachers who can't afford supplies for their students, the constant struggle of the families and loved ones of those overseas serving our country, and in small towns fighting against a decline. These storms are here, and they're real, and most of them don't seem to be going anywhere. Where is God, in all this?
God is here. This same God who determined the measurements of the earth, who laid its cornerstone, who shut in the sea and prescribed bounds for it and said to it, “This far shall you come and no further”- this is the God who is here. This same God who stood in a boat in a storm with twelve slightly stupid friends, and said, “Peace, be still” and there was peace. Not forever, not an end to all storms, but a calm that meant safety. This same God does act, and does calm our fear, and is in control as we never can be. God is here, and so I say again, grace and peace to you from the God who was, and is, and is to come. Amen.