Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Mark 4:35-41

Last night, we flew home after a week of vacation.  The plane was quite late because of the weather here in the Twin Cities.  At one point, the pilot apologized for the bumpy ride. We were apparently zigzagging through the thunderstorms that were moving across the country.  They tried to get over them, but there wasn’t a way to avoid the updrafts that construct those storms.

As the plane bumped up and down, I remembered one of my teachers explaining the scientific explanation as to why a plane stays in the air.  It’s the difference in air pressure above and below the wing that literally keeps the plane held up in the air. Between the services, someone told me that this is called the Bernoulli effect; while another person told me that my explanation was “a little superficial.”

Either way, the look on my face must have suggested that “suction” as a means of keeping me, everyone else, and all our luggage held aloft at 35,000 feet wasn’t really satisfying.  “Think of it this way, then,” she said.  “The turbulence is really just waves in the sea.” The plane is on a vast ocean of air, just bumping along. That always helps while the turbulence is about the same as a choppy day on the lake.  When you can look out the window and see the wings flapping, albeit it slightly, it’s really not as satisfying.

Now this is the moment when you’re thinking, “When did he write this sermon if he’s using yesterday’s return flight as a sermon illustration?” This is not the material question for the sermon. The main question that I ended up thinking about as bumped across the tops of the nation’s cumulonimbus level of challenges:  Was Jesus not afraid?

The text says that the boat was already swamped.  It was full of water.  The storm was raging.  The disciples, who are experienced fisher folk, were terrified. They waited until the last moment to wake Jesus. The ship was going down, which is usually when most of us pray, “Why aren’t you helping me?”

When Jesus opened his eyes, was he as calm and collected as just about every sermon on this text suggests?  We’ve always said, “He’s at peace.  He trusts God.” And, as it turns out, the disciples and the rest of us, prove once again that they just don’t have enough faith.  If they did, this subtle message seems to suggest, they wouldn’t be afraid or they would have already spoken out to the storm, putting it in its rightful place.

Over the years, I have increasingly disliked these interpretations that put us on one side of the flapping wings of our crisis, and Jesus on the other.  “We’re not like him,” we are forced to announce.  “If we had more faith; if the storm didn’t terrify us so much, we could do something to stop it.” The very fact that we have these crises is a big confession that we’re a big, wet, sinking mess.

BUT, as we bumped across the clouds, held aloft by some mysterious force, my question became, “What if Jesus really was afraid?”  What if Jesus is just as human as we are, as human as he is divine?  Now, hold on to your flotation device.  Here’s my thinking, which you can feel free to throw overboard if it doesn’t work for you.  Jesus is just as afraid as any one of us would be.  But, and here’s a difference between us and him: he is so quick to go deep into his very own identity, his abiding and deep connection to God’s Spirit.  He goes there so directly. He goes way back to the creation, when God speaks to the waters, divides them, calls forth the light, and fills the earth with the kind of spirit that makes it stand up and live.

Mark assumes that Jesus is standing on a tradition under him.  The very setting and language of this story calls us to Genesis 1: the power and the beauty, and the peace, of God’s presence.  Jesus sees this power flowing up and through him, through his voice, through his body and out into the storm.  This story is held aloft by Psalm 107:  You stilled the storm to a whisper; and silenced the waves of the sea.” Maybe that was Jesus prayer, knowing that if God had done it before, surely we can trust that it will happen again. He goes to his core history and identity in order to look directly into the storm. Then he says, “Peace, be still.”

I’ve told this story before, and I’ll probably tell it more times.  When I was going through a storm of my own, zigzagging around the thunderclouds of homophobia embedding in the church’s policies, Bishop Gene Robinson called me and left a message.  “I have a pillow on my couch, embroidered with the words, ‘Sometimes God calms the storm.  Sometimes God lets the storms rage and calms the child.’”

That calm comes from the deep place of life that will always be raised from the dead.  Calm comes from the God who called every living thing “good.” The fullness of God’s love, which we see flash in this person, Jesus, so like us and so full of God, is within us, too, in all the “other boats” that we inhabit.  Afloat, in baptismal waters, held up by the mysterious and awesome power of God, you are God’s beloved child.  That identity, who we are, who Jesus is, is ultimately our best place to stand in the storm.

Tomorrow morning, this building will be filled with as much chaos as a storm and the sounds of children’s voices for vacation bible school.  The theme is, “Created to be.”  This is one of our commitments at Gloria Dei: to give our children what they will need to face the storms that are brewing, or will come up suddenly in their lives. We will take them back to the first moments of creation, that moment when God sighs in such deep delight. “Oh wow, this is so good.” We will tell them so many times that maybe when they really need it, they’ll believe it. “You are God’s created, and beautiful, and beloved child.”  That’s your bedrock.  That’s your peace, your calm, your default.  When you need love and hope the most, it will be there.  it will always be there.

So much in life tries to teach us that these things are not true.  Sometimes the storms are wild and rageful enough that we can’t imagine that we can face them or do anything about them.  Yet we have this powerful image of Jesus, standing up in the boat, channeling the deepest place within him, and facing it, and living into the next day.  Even on the cross, at the moment of death, after burial in a tomb, there is a love that raises us into a new future.

Precious ones:  you are enough.  You are loved.  In the plane, in my head was the hymn text, ”No storm can shake my inmost calm.  How can I keep from singing?” (Which I didn’t do out loud on the plane.)

I would have suggested that we sing that hymn, but we chose a better one, “Who is This, that Wind Obey Him.” Susan Cherwien, raised into eternal calm and peace last year, wrote the beautiful text. Tim Strand wrote the music.  It’s an experience, phrase by phrase, of the moving water. The tune will carry us out onto the lake. You can feel the ebbing and flowing of the waves on the sea. Take in the harmonic resolution at the end of each verse.  It’s the end, and our beginning.

Peace, be…still.