Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 25, 2006

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It seems such a simple little story--and such a miraculous one. Jesus and his friends get in a boat and set off across the Sea of Galilee, headed for the distant, opposite shore. As they sail across this large lake--the Bible usually calls it a sea, but we’d call it a large lake--a great storm comes up. Even a large lake can get dangerously rough when the wind blows hard enough. The boat is being swamped, and Jesus and his friends are in mortal danger. Jesus rebukes the wind and the waves, and the storm subsides. Then his Disciples wonder: "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?" I’m sure Mark meant the question to be rhetorical. The only possible answer is: God, or at least someone endowed with the power of God. It’s such a simple little story, a miracle story about who Jesus is; or so it seems at first glance. So is that all there is to it? Should I sit down now and be quiet? You can probably guess that I don’t think that’s all there is to it and that I’m not about to sit down and be quiet just yet. So bear with me as we explore just what more there might be to this little miracle story about Jesus calming the sea.

Like all great Bible stories, this one has many layers of meaning. It certainly has a literal meaning that says this really happened and that it demonstrates that the power of God was in Christ Jesus. But like all great Bible stories, this story comes to life and gains the power to change our lives when we see that it isn’t just about something that happened a long time ago to other people in a place far away. The story comes to life and gains the power to change our lives when we see that it is also about us, right here, right now. It is a story of a journey, but not just a journey by a boat across a far away lake 2,000 years ago. It is the story of our life’s journey, and it is the story of the role that Jesus Christ can play in that journey. It has a lot of really good stuff to say about our life’s journey, so let’s take a closer look, paying attention to some of the strange little details in which this story is so rich that we may have overlooked the first time through.

This journey begins where all journeys begin, at the beginning. Jesus initiates the journey. He says to the Disciples "let’s go." Let’s leave the place where we are and move across an open expanse to another place on the distant shore. That’s how it is with our life journeys too. Our life journeys begin with God, whom in the story Jesus clearly represents. God starts us and sends us out across the open expanse of our lives, headed toward the far shore of return to God.

So the Disciples started out, and here there’s one of those strange little details I mentioned. Jesus initiated the journey, and the Disciples agreed to go with him. So you’d think the story would say that Jesus took them with him. It doesn’t. It says: "They took him with them." And that’s how it is with us too. God sets us out on our life’s journey; but if we want Jesus to go with us, we need to bring him along. It’s also true that God comes with us whether we knowingly bring God along or not; but if we want Jesus to come along, that is, if we want to know that God comes with us, we need to do something to make that happen. We need to bring God’s presence with us to our consciousness. We need to think about God’s presence, to turn to God, to invite God to join us. We do that mostly by praying and worshipping. That, I think, is why the story says: "They took him with them," not he took them with him. This is a mutual journey. God sends us out, but what happens after that is at least partly up to us. God’s grace is unconditional, but we can either be aware that we live in that grace or not. We can invite God to be our conscious companion, or not.

Moving on we come to the big, dramatic, meaty part of the story. Once Jesus and the Disciples are out in the open water, they run into big trouble. Mark tells the story with his characteristic sparseness of detail: "A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped." Probably like me, many of you have been in a small boat out on Puget Sound or some other body of water roughly comparable to the Sea of Galilee when the weather turns nasty. It can be pretty frightening. Yet in Jesus day it must have been a lot more frightening than it is for us. I imagine people then didn’t have the safety devices we have now. I’m sure they didn’t have Coast Guard approved life vests, for example, and they certainly didn’t have radios or cell phones with which to call for help. They didn’t have gasoline or diesel engines either. I know that back in my boating days, when things got a little dicey, my thought was more often "In Mercruiser we trust" than "In God we trust." I always figured that I could ride out almost anything Puget Sound could throw at me as long as my 454 cubic inch, 330 horsepower GM engine with a Mercruiser stern drive held up. First century Galilean fishing boats didn’t have 454 cubic inch, 330 horse power GM engines with Mercruiser stern drives. They didn’t have any engines at all. They only had sails. They were much more at the mercy of the waves and the wind than most boaters are today. I mean, even sailboats usually have an auxiliary motor today, but when that great windstorm came up, and the waves began beating into the boat, and the boat was being swamped, Jesus and his friends were in big trouble. Their lives were definitely in immediate danger.

That’s how it is with our souls on our life journeys too, isn’t it? Life is easy when all is well, when metaphorically speaking the sea is calm and the winds are gentile. Like a sailboat ride on Puget Sound on a peaceful, sunny day, life can be very pleasant. We can relax, do what we want to do, and go where we want to go. We may be aware of the potential for trouble. We may know at some level that there are always threats to our lovely tranquility lurking somewhere, but we don’t think about them much. When things are good in our lives and with our souls, we just enjoy the peace and quiet. We may go to church. We may pray occasionally, out of habit, or because we think we should, or maybe even because we want to; but basically in these times we don’t feel like we need Jesus much. We’re quite content to let him sleep in the back of the boat.

Problem is, those threats to our peaceful lives don’t stay lurking in the background forever. We all get hit with great windstorms at times. We’ve all experienced them. Maybe they’re things that happen to us in our lives. We lose a job or lose a loved one. We become seriously ill, or a loved one does. We suffer financial reversals and discover we can no longer keep on living as we like. Or maybe the storm is inside our psyches, inside our souls. We lose hope. We feel powerless and meaningless. We get depressed or suffer anxiety attacks. We lose our faith and our ability to see the good in a world full of so much evil. Storms like these, and so many others, can and do make us feel like our boats are being swamped. We feel despair and just want to give up trying. It feels very much like Jesus is asleep in the back of boat, offering no help at all.

Which is exactly what he was doing when the storm came up in Mark’s little miracle story. He seemed quite unconcerned about the storm. He was sleeping through it. On those nights when I can’t sleep at all, I envy him that ability to sleep through trouble, but his friends in that sinking boat sure didn’t. They were mad at him. I think Mark understates their reaction when he only has them say: "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?" My reaction would have been quite a bit more vociferous. I might even have used language that it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to use up here in this pulpit, if you catch my drift. There they were, trying to keep the boat as head up into the wind as possible and bailing for all their might, fearing for their lives. And there Jesus was, calming sleeping through it all.

I imagine that they were more than a little irate, but I also think that Mark is making an important point with that detail of Jesus being asleep until his companions woke him up. That’s how it is with us too. Jesus may be coming along for the ride on our life’s journey, but if we want to get the help he has to offer us, we have to wake him up. He’s not going to step in and calm the storm just because he can. That’s not how it works. I don’t know that I can tell you why that’s not how it works (or at least I’m not going to try to do that this morning), but it isn’t. Mark knew that too almost two thousand years ago. So in his metaphor for our lives’ psychological and spiritual journeys, he has Jesus asleep until the Disciples wake him up.

When they did, the miracle occurred. He "rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be Still!’" And the storm subsided: "Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm." It struck me as I was writing this that a dead calm wasn’t exactly what they needed either, since a sail boat can’t take you anywhere in a dead calm, but I guess Mark wasn’t a sailor. Still, the point is made. When we turn to Jesus in those times of trouble in our lives, he can and will calm the storm. The Disciples in the boat received the gift he had to offer when they talked to him to wake him up. It works that way for us too. We can receive the gift of peace that Jesus has to offer when we talk to him, when we wake him up in our souls and turn to him for help. The only difference is that the Disciples could talk to him directly as a living physical person in their midst. We do it by praying to him directly as a living spiritual person in our midst, and it works the same way.

There is, however, one point that we have to be clear about. In Mark’s story the cause of the Disciples’ distress, the windstorm and the waves, went away. This story is however, as I’ve been suggesting throughout this sermon, much less about an actual historical event than it is a metaphor for our life journeys; and because that’s primarily what the story is, it isn’t really talking about Jesus making the causes of our troubles go away. Maybe he does that sometimes, but mostly he doesn’t. Here’s what he does do. Here’s what the story is really about. Jesus calms the storms in our souls. The water in Mark’s story is a symbol for our souls. When troubles come, when the wind blows hard in our lives, our souls become troubled just like the water of the Sea of Galilee. Our souls become agitated. We become fearful, and we can find no spiritual rest. When we turn to Jesus in our distress, what we find is spiritual peace in the midst of whatever is happening in our lives. We find peace in the face of illness and death, our loved ones’ or our own. We find hope. We find courage. We may even find joy. That’s what Jesus calming the storm means. In him we can find that inner peace that so often eludes us. So be still my soul, your God is on your side. Amen.