Loading...'We do not sail alone'
The Reverend Canon Patricia M. Grace
Proper 7 – 4th Pentecost – Year B – Mark 4:35-41
June 21, 2015 – Church of the Ascension
It’s been that kind of week, you know?
Tuesday, an old friend called to tell me that her baby daughter – ten months old, had been diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder – a disorder that would render the child, most likely, blind and deaf – and a range of other, incapacitating developmental disabilities. This sweet little girl’s life expectancy would not exceed her grade school years. My friend, who’s a priest, was already having a tough time with God. Her life has been beset lately with serious illness and deaths in her family.
“I’m struggling, really struggling,” she said to me, both of us in tears, “to keep believing that God is even real – and if real, is not some absentee landlord.”
The rest of the week I spent much like I always do – working with parishes in times of transition, listening hard along with their leaders to discern God’s will for them, but God felt this week, to all of us, a bit obscure, beyond reach. God’s messages, if coming at all, seemed like cryptic ciphers that defied our understanding.
And then, Wednesday, the shooting in Charleston – nine faithful souls, gunned down as they dwelled together in the word of God – their names flowing through my folded hands in prayer, like beads in a rosary, Susie, Clementa, Twanza, Sharonda, Cynthia, Daniel, Myra, Depayne and Ethel Lee.
Our brothers and sisters in the faith, rewarded by a brutal death, rewarded by death for their kindness, no, their absolute delight in welcoming a stranger, seemed like enough to push a person toward the edge of despair, no doubt an experience all of us have shared at one difficult time or another. It was enough to make me dwell, not in the Word of God, but in the reality of the world around us. We live in a country where school shootings have occurred, on the average, every five weeks since December, 2012 – the date of the horrific events at Sandy Hook.
Among all the developed countries of the world, our rate of violence against our own children in their own schools is astronomical.
In 2013, the last year for which we have complete statistics, the FBI recorded 5,922 hate crimes – those are the ones reported. The real total is much higher. 6,000 crimes of hate – violent action against people because of their ethnicity or race, their gender, their disability, their sexual orientation or because of the God they have chosen to believe in.
We know these crimes are not ones that occur only somewhere else – or to people we do not know – right? It’s not even been four full years since 33 students were murdered at Virginia Tech – way too close for comfort – my best friend’s nephew was late for class that day, thanks be to God, or he would have been counted in that number.
It’s been just seven years since James David Adkisson walked into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church on a Sunday morning – right down the street from here and killed two people, wounding six, during a children’s play.
I don’t know about you, but my reaction to the Charleston tragedy, and the earlier issues of my week is not just a sense of impending despair, but a feeling closely akin to being capsized.
I want to know why – I want to know how – and I want to do whatever it takes to make it all stop, to make it all better. I also want revenge. And if the truth really be told, I want to know where God is in all this.
I want to call out, in the words of the wind and wave-soaked apostles in today’s Gospel:
“Don’t you care, Jesus, good teacher, that we are perishing?”
And I am tempted to ask as well…in the silent breaking of so many hearts, “Dear Lord, are you asleep at the switch?” You quieted the winds and the seas, why do you not stop the not-so-natural disasters of our time?
And it’s there – right there, in the midst of the raging chaos of our hearts – as we, like those first followers, are overwhelmed by stormy seas that we are given some other words in today’s Gospel.
Words that are actually questions – offered in the soft voice of Jesus, now fully present and in charge in the storm, “Why are you afraid?” he’s asking. And, “Have you not yet learned to hold on to your faith?”
Now some hear those words as a rebuke, but maybe, just maybe, Jesus is posing the question for another purpose: maybe to call his first disciples – and us, too – back on track.
Maybe our cries have not just awakened Jesus from sleep, but us to his presence. Because it’s then – then! – when we let him be present to us, that he can offer us, when the tempests of our day threaten to swamp us – not quick or easy answers, but vital questions to ponder. “Why are you afraid?” “Have you not yet learned how to hold on to your faith?” Jesus stops to ask us questions that might bring us back to ourselves and to him, to the heart and soul and mind of the matter.
Jesus offers us questions that, if pondered, can help to right the terrifying listing of our boats, that might bring us back to a peace-filled place, to a place calmed and stilled by him.
“Why are you afraid?” he queries quietly – not in criticism, but to really raise the issue.
If we can understand what it is that frightens you, he seems to be saying, we might be able, together, to figure out what to do about it. Could it be that one answer to that first question from Jesus – is that we are afraid because we are not in control, and we expect to be?
Could it be that we’re afraid because we know this load is beyond our ability to handle and that things are not supposed to work this way – sweet little babies and their grandmothers and good church-going people are not supposed to suffer, blamelessly.
Our powerlessness in the face of serious illness, random violence and unbridled hatred, is terrifying. And maybe, if we were really honest, we might admit to Jesus, in our raging storms of terror, helplessness, and frustration, that we’re afraid because we’ve placed our confidence in human agency, our own power, our own will – rather than in the One who, indeed, not only controls the winds and the seas, but is the Ruler of all life, itself.
We may not yet have learned how to hold on to the faith that tells us that.
We may not yet have recognized – or maybe we’ve just forgotten that faith is not absolute certainty about how things should or will be.
Faith is not an insurance policy against the storms of life.
Faith is the trust that there is real substance in the things that we hope for, the things that we yearn for, and the things we’ve been promised by God, God’s self but as are, yet, unseen.
Faith is the trust that Jesus will always be in the boat with us, and with the Father and the Spirit, is in command of the whole universe.
Faith is the assurance, the deep down belief that we can hold onto when times are bad, the belief that regardless of the tsunamis in life that threaten us, we will never sail alone.
We will never sail alone.
The good news is that while Jesus recognizes that the size of our faith may not yet be up to the task, he did not ask, “Where is your faith?” Instead, he wonders – with us: “Have you not yet gotten where you need to go?”
No, Lord – not yet it seems, for a lot of us.
But Jesus’ way of asking reminds us that the journey of faith, is just that something that grows and is realized over time, over distance – a journey that has lots of hills, dales, and bends in the road.
Jesus seems to understand that the route to a lasting, solid, reliable faith includes some occasional side trips to nowhere – with, and at times, some seemingly unreadable maps.
He seems to understand that this faith journey will involve times of wandering off the true path or episodes of willfully taking a wrong turn, and often, so often, our failing to ask for directions.
He seems to understand that it is, “not yet” rather than “no way.”
And so, perhaps he offers to us the same direction he gives to the wind and the sea: “Peace! Be still!” Remember, he may be saying, that I am the one in command so have faith in that – and remember – God’s people have been swamped before – shipwrecked, stranded, upended – oh, yes! – but never, never, never left by God for dead in the deep.
The story of God’s people – our story, our Holy Scriptures, tells the same tale over and over – God works through lots of little people who routinely have not one iota of an idea what to do and lots of people of too little faith – yet!
Our story includes these same people whose faith grew stronger when they learned to put their trust in God. Abraham, Moses, David, Jonah, Job, Mary, Peter, Paul and John, to name a few, who, “through afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good…” as Paul reminds us, learned to hold on to the faith that assured them that God was present – active, even when God seemed very far away or to be paying no attention.
They learned, like many of us have, that God works with all of us by bolstering from within, by empowering us, through close relationships with God and each other, by dwelling with us, asleep or awake, in all the sun-filled and storm-tossed days of our lives.
This is the truth that we know in faith – the faith that we are encouraged by Jesus to hold on to – a faith, not yet perfect, but well worth working toward.
Frederic Buechner, writer and theologian, puts it like this: “Go….Go for God’s sake, for your own sake, and for the world’s sake, too. Climb into your little tub of a boat and keep going. “Christ sleeps in the deepest selves of all of us, and can always be found there through whatever way we can call on him. And we can call on him as the fishermen did in their boat to come awake within us and to give us courage, to give us hope, to show us, each one, our way. May he be with us especially when the winds go mad and the waves run wild, as they will for all of us before we're done, so that even in their midst we may find peace, we may find him.”
Believe in that. Hold on to that. Share that faith with the whole world.
We do not sail alone!
