sermonboy.com

Proper 7

Mark 4
On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’ 36And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. 37A great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. 38But 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?’ 39He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. 40He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ 41And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’


Sailors are a superstitious lot. For example:

It is unlucky to depart on a Friday.
It is lucky to depart on a Sunday.
It is lucky to have children onboard.
It is unlucky to have women onboard.
An emerald will protect a sailor from the perils of sea, and a silver coin placed under the masthead ensures a successful and profitable voyage.
Flowers onboard are bad luck.
It is bad luck to carry a corpse, or to lose a mop or pail overboard.
It is bad luck to see a dolphin during calm seas, but it is good luck to see one dolphin chasing another during rough seas.
It is back luck to whistle, change the name of a boat or name a boat for anything other than a woman.
Black cats are lucky on a ship.
Cats with six fingers are lucky when sailing to America.
It is unlucky to paint your boat green or eat fish at sea.
This one is weird: According to British sailors, if your were born at sea, you automatically belong to Stepney parish in London.
Finally, sailors must avoid redheads on the way to a ship as they bring bad luck.
And one final one: it is unlucky to sail with a minister.

I could go on, but I won’t. My brother may read this sermon and never let me sail again. If you sift through the various superstitions you will begin to see the pattern: anything the reminded sailors of death or had even the loosest association was considered bad luck: flowers, clergy, even Friday with an implied link to Good Friday.

The sea, you see, is and was a dangerous place, something we tend to forget in our age of GPS and helicopter rescue. A quick glance at the past and you begin to get a sense of the source of all that superstition. He is bit of a quote for Derek Lundy’s book, The Way of the Ship:

In 1861, a reasonably typical year, 1,170 British vessels were wrecked, including 30 in one day. From 1874 to 1883, Britains maritime losses totaled 699 ships and 8,475 men. The last notable storm in the age of sail was the Great Gail of 1894. Over two days, from December 21 to 23, eighty-two British flagged sailing vessels were wrecked or foundered. In 1905, nearly 5 percent of all British ships were lost: 501 vessels (p. 85).

The sea is scary, and all who sail her had cause to be scared. And it didn’t start with Magellan or Sir Francis Drake: The very word for "sea" in Hebrew comes from the name of the evil god in the Babylonian creation story. So there, encoded in our spiritual DNA is a healthy misapprehension of the sea, a scary place where little good can happen.

There is little surprise then, when the reaction of the disciples goes from fear to anger: “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?” Apparently this is also the moment that the disciples invented sarcasm, something teenagers have been grateful ever since. The twelve find themselves confronted by their deepest fear, far from shore, in a frail craft with 13 onboard.

It helped, at this moment in the story, that Jesus had a unique relationship to the physical world. Scripture reminds us again and again that the normal limitations placed on you and me were not placed on the carpenter from Nazareth. He healed the sick and raised the dead and stilled the sea and multiplied the fish and walked the water and saved the wedding when only water remained. He was not bound by the laws of physics or time, and he had no countenance with the normal limitations of human life. Even death was not death to him, and he remains the head of this church because he had no time for what we call space and time.

Then why the fear and anger? The disciples were increasingly aware of the strange power their Master possessed, and yet they felt only fear. They knew the sea was no match for the power of the Most High, and yet they expected the worst. It seems even faith is no match for the folk wisdom of men in boats.

But there may be more here: more than superstition and a healthy fear of the sea. It may be that they were coming to expect saving, that they were ready for an intervention before they woke Jesus and demanded action. Perhaps the sarcasm was impatience: impatience that things had progressed to gale force and could get more dangerous before Jesus finished his nap.

They would not be the last to make the mistake that having a relationship with Jesus Christ will somehow protect you from harm. They would not be the last to assume that being ‘saved’ meant being saved from physical harm and instead of being saved from meaninglessness and despair.

In time the great thinkers of the church took up this question and formulated an elegant response, this one from Julian of Norwich:

He did not say,
‘You shall not be tempest-tossed,
You shall not be weary,
You shall not be discomforted.’
But he did say, ‘You shall not be overcome."

Faith does not save us from trials or temptations, and we know there is trouble everywhere: our job is to never get discouraged, knowing that Jesus is both companion and guide, true north and the brightest star. Our job is to accept that storms will come and try to be brave: brave knowing that we have each other on this journey and we have a Savior-Pilot who knows these seas.

***

Lake Simcoe, like the Sea of Galilee, is a round shallow lake that is given to sudden storms and treacherous conditions. My mother loves to tell people that when I was two or three and things got rough up top I would quickly retreat and most often be found hiding in the bathroom (“in the head” she would say, being very nautical). It seems I was destined to preach this sermon, well acquainted as I am with rough seas. Even a morning cruise on the Sea of Galilee, early in 1996, was cut short because a sudden storm forced us back to shore.

I continue to blog for emergingspirit.ca and last week I wrote about the “elephant in the room” at Toronto Conference. There, we gathered 500 of the best and brightest in the church and said not a word about the true state of the church. We debated banning Israeli academics from visiting Canada, we debated whether we could debate a garbage dump in Tiny Township, but we didn’t debate the state of the church. The closest United Church to my house has 14 members and gets most of its revenue from a dance studio, but we didn’t make time to debate the state of the church.

So it’s one thing for the foolish disciples to cry out in the face of the storm, but we pretend there’s no storm at all. Julian says we’ll be tempest-tossed and we debate debating Tiny Township. Don’t get me wrong, I’m opposed to garbage dumped in the middle of the purest water in Ontario, but when it comes to the acknowledging the state of the United Church in Toronto, we’re sitting on the toilet down below. I don’t know this neck of the woods well enough yet to know, but I can tell you that on a really good Sunday in Scarborough, about one-half of one percent of the population is in a United Church. Surely in a city of 500,000 our message should resonate with more than 2,000 people.

It’s bad luck to pretend there is no storm at all. Add that to the list.

Next year, next church year, we’re going to put on our foul weather gear and PFD’s and head out into the storm. We’re going to acknowledge that storms are a part of life, and we’re going to skillfully navigate through the wind and sea. We’re going to trim and tack until we’re certain we’re sailing toward the mark, and then check our sails again. We’re going to sea with Jesus the Christ, confident that we shall not be overcome.

I want to give the last word to an old Hebridean saying, from a people well versed in the way of the sea:

"Round our skiff be God’s aboutness, ere she try the deeps of sea, sea-shell frail for all her stoutness, unless Thou her Helmsman be.”

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 5:27 PM