To the Boats! (Sermon)

“To the Boats!”

Mark 4:35-41

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

5/28/17

In Mark 4, Jesus has been teaching in parables – those wonderful stories that illustrate timeless and transforming truths about who God is and who we are as God’s creatures. Then, Jesus says, “To the boats! We’re going to the other side.”

Now, that should make the disciples wary. In biblical stories, when people cross a bodies of water things tend to get interesting. But at Jesus’ word, the disciples pile in like a bunch of lemmings. Before long, they’re not hearing another parable. They’re living one. A powerful storm sweeps in. It reaches its foamy fingers over the sides of the boat and tries to swallow them whole. Jesus, however, is curled up in the back, asleep.

Teacher! cry the disciples. Wake up, and help us! We’re dying here! Or don’t you even care?

         Don’t you even care? I imagine that, in one way or another, most of us have asked God that uncomfortable question. Most of us have felt the cold, wet hands of fear pounding against our boats, threatening to take us under. We look for signs of that loving, powerful, ever-present God that preachers and Sunday School teachers talk about, and if we find Jesus at all, he’s sawing logs in the back of the boat. If we do find him, we probably don’t want to hear him ask, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”

Last week we talked about trust as indispensable not only to faith, but also to Love. Trust allows us to embrace life’s challenges, and to let go of the fear that keeps us bogged down in comfortable sameness, in selfish judgment of others, and in Love-choking apathy toward suffering.

The disciples face something a bit more immediate, though. Their fears aren’t tied to anything abstract, but to the powerful forces of nature trying to kill them! In their situation, letting go may seem like denial or giving up. And we can understand that. Whether we’re talking about one particular storm, like last night, or hurricane season, or climate change, or famine, or terrorism, or nuclear saber-rattling, or anything else, we have more than enough madness to make us want to keep paddles in hand, bailing buckets at the ready, and swimmies on both arms.

When the storms are bigger than our boat, we can’t just shut our eyes and let go of all that worries us. But today’s story suggests that Jesus does exactly that. He lets go, and even finds rest in the midst of the storm. That suggests to me that a truly Christlike faith has nothing to do with escaping the storms. Instead, faith is the art of Christlike letting go and finding rest even in the midst of them. Resting in the midst of a storm means entering the present turmoil as the pathway to a peace that can be experienced in no other way than by navigating that urgent reality.

Remember the psalmist’s testimony: “The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?…Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear…I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living…be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” (Selected from Psalm 27)

Remember Paul’s teaching: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For…We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves…groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” (Selected from Romans 8)

         Between Genesis and Revelation, the phrase “Fear not” appears, in one form or another, 365 times – once for every day of the year.

Throughout scripture, God’s Spirit is saying to us, “Peace! Be still!”

All too often, God gets disfigured by testimonies portraying God as a Santa Claus who exists to grant happiness to good people. Faithful living has nothing to do with avoiding the reality of brokenness and outright chaos in the world. No, I think Jesus sends us into the world’s raging brokenness and capsizing chaos. And he doesn’t send us as warriors armed for violent conquest over enemies and evil. Jesus sends us out as witnesses who are trying to learn the art of loving and trusting God’s peace-crafting, stillness-breathing holiness, even in the midst of the storms.

If I went around and asked each of you who has made the greatest difference in your life of faith, many of you would tell stories of people who entered some storm and helped you to find peace in the midst of it; and that peace helped you find passage through it. That’s why we invite people actually to get involved with Family Promise guests, and with the recipients of food at JAMA and Loaves and Fishes. That’s why ASP asked us to make lunches for the families we helped, and to eat with them. That’s why we do youth ministry. We hire someone to jump in the storm-tossed boat of adolescence with the kids we love and on whom we depend.

The final verse of this story quietly proclaims Resurrection. After Jesus calms the storm, the disciples are “filled with great awe.”

“‘Who is this,’ they ask, ‘that even the wind and the sea obey him?’”

As the body of Christ, do we inspire awe?

I consider Shane Claiborne a modern-day prophet. He makes a meager but extraordinary living in inner-city Philadelphia by jumping into all kinds of boats rocked with grief and fear. In 2009, the very secular Esquire magazine asked Shane to write a letter to “those who don’t believe.”¹ He opens his letter with a parable about walking through downtown Philly with some out-of-town friends. They watched “street performers, artists, [and] musicians.” Next to a magician doing some “pretty sweet tricks,” says Claiborne, “a preacher…[was] yelling into a microphone.” Next to him lay “a coffin with a fake dead body inside.” The preacher’s message: Believe in Jesus or go to hell.

“He wasn’t as captivating as the magician,” says Shane, who wanted to “jump up on a box beside [the preacher] and yell…‘God is not a monster.’”

“The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus,” says Shane Claiborne, “the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination.” He laments the Church’s increasingly un-fascinating presence in the world. “We have given [non-believers] less and less to disbelieve,” he says.

I have to agree. How fascinated and fascinating are we? We proclaim Incarnation and Resurrection, for God’s sake! What kind of awe do we really feel and inspire? The disciples who make the greatest difference are those who are truly stirred, awakened, and maybe even surprised by their own fearless actions on behalf of others. And it seems to me that such “fascinating” witness almost never occurs without genuinely trusting God in the midst of some storm, some new adventure, or some immediate new need. And that means letting go. It means being present with and for the people and the creation around us. And while that means trusting outcomes to God, it also means working toward outcomes that are consistent with the Jesus of scripture – that revolutionary, restful, fascinating, incarnation of divine Love, without whom we are nothing, without whom we have decent, orderly, respectable, and lifeless churches.

Let’s be one of the many hands that Jesus, God Incarnate, waves over the world’s suffering in redeeming Love. In the process, we may find redemption in the midst of our own chaos.

Clouds are gathering.

Things are getting interesting.

Let’s go to the boats!

¹This and all following quotations come from: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a6646/shane-claiborne-1209/