Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 21, 2009

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.

Jesus calms the storm. It’s a familiar story, one of the best known in the Gospels. Jesus and his Disciples are in a small boat on the Sea of Galilee when a violent storm comes up. The boat is about to be swamped, drowning them all. So the Disciples turn to Jesus, wake him up, and he calms the storm. In broad outline at least the metaphorical meaning of this little miracle story is pretty clear. We all experience storms in our lives, metaphorically speaking. When we turn to Jesus for help, he can calm those storms. That doesn’t mean he keeps bad things from happening. It means that he can give us the strength, peace, and courage to face whatever comes our way in life. I developed that meaning of the story in more depth in the sermon I gave on this text three years ago titled “Be Still My Soul.” It’s on the website. You can look it up.

In that sermon I ignored some parts of this story. I ignored the lines near the end of the story where Jesus asks the Disciples “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And I ignored Mark’s concluding comment that the Disciples were filled with awe and asked “Who then is this that even the wind and the sea obey him?” I’ve always thought that these lines were simply a transparent appeal to Mark’s readers to have faith in Jesus, who is God or at least has some of the power of God. But last week a friend suggested to me that there is more to these lines than that. At least, there is more to the fact that, when the Disciples wake Jesus up, the first thing he does after he calms the storm is ask them a question: “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” That detail suggests that the spiritual dynamic that this story addresses is perhaps more complex than “Jesus has the power to still our metaphorical storms.” We wake him up in our inner self—that’s the meaning, I think, of the detail that he’s asleep and the Disciples have to wake him up—but then he turns to us with questions. Mark makes the first question be “Why are you afraid?” There is I think a lot in that question, and that’s what I want to explore with you this morning.

Why are you afraid? The question addresses our relationship to the storms in our lives. Specifically, it addresses our inner relationship to the storms in our lives. The question challenges us to look inside and to consider a number of questions. They are questions that we might not be comfortable considering, for they are questions that require us to discern our own role in creating or perpetuating those storms. It’s so much easier to blame external factors for the difficulties we face in our lives. It’s so easy just to assume that how we’re reacting to those difficulties is nothing but a normal, rational reaction. It’s so easy to assume that what we feel—the fear, the anger, the upset, the indignation, whatever our emotion is—is simply how it is, is how anyone would react, is something over which we have no control.

But Jesus’ question to the Disciples won’t let us off so easy. It suggests that what they were feeling as they battled the storm really wasn’t a necessary reaction to their situation. It suggests that perhaps their fear was something of their own making. It suggests that perhaps their fear was grounded not in the objective situation but in their subjective reaction to it, that their fear was grounded not in the objective situation but rather reflected some shortcoming on their part. I’m sure they didn’t want to hear it. I’m also sure it was something they needed to hear.

Now, there certainly are circumstances in our lives over which we have no control. There are storms that we can’t stop and that we can’t avoid. Illness, natural disasters, setbacks of myriad kinds, and finally death itself are simply realities of human life. None of us here this morning has yet experienced death, but we all will one day. All of us here, to one extent or another, have experienced other storms in our lives. We’ve all been sick, I suspect. Most of us have lost loved ones to death. Many of us have failed at one time or another at something we’ve undertaken. Many of us have lost jobs or suffered other financial reversals. Many of us have experienced family dissention and discord. I’m sure there are many other kinds of setbacks that some of us have experienced. Those things are situations that arise over which, to a considerable extent, we have no control.

There is, however, one thing over which we always have control. That thing is how we react to the things that happen to us in our lives. We can react with fear, anger, hatred, despair, disappointment, jealousy, envy, or any number of other negative emotions. We can let those negative reactions to things overwhelm us. We can let them defeat us. We can let them keep us in a constant state of turmoil. We can allow them to perpetuate hurts and intensify pain. If you’re like me—and in this respect I suspect that you are at least on occasion—you let your negative emotions keep you riled up and unhappy at least some of the time.

The thing is, we don’t have to do that. We don’t have to get stuck in all of that inner negativity. We can, to the contrary, simply acknowledge that what is just is, and let it be what it is. We can acknowledge the things that we can change and the things that we can’t change, as the famous Serenity Prayer used by Alcoholics Anonymous uses. I begins God grant me the serenity to accept those things that I cannot change. It’s a prayer that contains great wisdom even for those of us lucky enough not to have to deal with alcoholism. It points to the fact that we can control how we react when we are faced with the storms of our lives. It says that we can react to those storms in a way that does not leave us in inner turmoil, that does not perpetuate hurt, that does not keep us in pain. That’s a truth that I think Jesus’ question to the Disciples get at as well. It’s not that there are no real storms in our lives. Not at all. Jesus didn’t say to the disciples that the storm wasn’t real or that they weren’t in danger. Rather, he said that they hadn’t needed to be afraid.

Yet if the storm is real, if the danger is real as it so often is, how can we not be afraid? Perhaps, as I used to, you think that in this story Jesus is saying that the Disciples hadn’t needed to be afraid because they should have known that he could calm the storm. I now think, however, that there is a deeper meaning here. I hear in Jesus’ questions the assertion that we need not be afraid even when the storm is real and it’s not going to stop. We can set fear aside, we can set all of our negative, disruptive emotions aside when we have faith in God through Jesus Christ. Not because the storm isn’t real. Not because we aren’t going to die. That’s not the point. The point is that we can control our emotions, we can set fear and all the others aside, even in the midst of the storms because we know that God is with us in the midst of the storm, entering it with us, holding us in it, waiting for us beyond it. That’s why we can set fear aside, because as Christians we have faith that in and through Jesus that God is with us, in and beyond the storms, in and beyond whatever befalls us in this mortal existence.

So: Why are you afraid? There’s no need to be. We can’t always control what happens to us in life. We can always control how we react to what happens to us in life. For us Christians that truth is grounded in our faith in Jesus Christ. Have you still no faith?, Jesus asked. Not faith that the storm would stop but faith that God was with them in the storm. God is with us in our storms. That is the lesson this morning. That is great good news indeed, and for that great good news we give God our thanks and praise. Amen.