Sermon preached at The Church of the Redeemer, Addison NY on Sunday, June 23, the 5th Sunday after Pentecost: Mark 4:35-41.
The heart of this Gospel
story is not the miracle of Jesus ordering the wind and the sea to be at peace.
The heart of this story is not the miracle. It is the question,
Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?
Hey, wake up and do something! We’re going to die!
Here is a fundamental
problem for the believer: A storm is
raging in our lives, and God seems to be asleep.
It is a problem as old
as the Scriptures. There is an interesting passage in the prophet Isaiah,
chapter 45. Isaiah delivers a speech on
behalf of God that ends with a very strong statement about God’s presence:
They pray to you, saying, “God is with you and there
is no other; there is no god besides our God.”
And the very next verse is this statement:
Truly, you are
a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.
And there is our frequent dilemma:
God is real. God is hidden.
Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?
The psalms are full of
this question.
Psalm 42: I will say to the
God of my strength, “Why have you forgotten me?
Psalm 22, the question that Jesus cries from the cross: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
And the devastating Psalm 88: But as for me, O Lord, I cry to you
for help . . . Lord, why have you rejected me? Why have you hidden your face
from me?
It is true that every
psalm that asks God, “why are you sleeping,” resolves in the end to a firm
belief in God’s presence. Every psalm, that is, except Psalm 88, whose final
words are, “Darkness is my only companion.”
So, the believer’s
dilemma. God is real. God is hidden. God acts sometimes, we are sure of it, and
God, like Jesus in the boat, sometimes seems to be asleep.
Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?
There are three things
we can do with this problem.
One, we can reject God,
or reject even the idea of God. St
Teresa of Avila, in the midst of a time of trial, railed against God: “If this is how you treat your friends, it is
no wonder that you have so few of them.”
Now this did not cause Teresa to reject God, but her insight is that it
does cause many to do so.
Second, we can go in the
opposite direction and deny that God is in any way hidden, asleep, or
forgetful. We say very well-meaning things like, “God has a plan and everything
happens for a reason.” I know for some of you that is a very real expression of
belief and I have no desire to take it away from you.
But I do think that it
can be taken too far, to attribute to God things that are much more the fault
of human beings and to deny other people’s experience of God’s absence.
There is a third way, a
kind of middle ground. We can live with the mystery. We can accept that many
things in life are beyond our control and beyond the control of God. I know that sounds like blasphemy. But if
human free will is indeed a gift from God, that means that God has given up
control of everything. It is why at the
end of the book of Job, after Job questioning God and railing against what
seems to be an uncaring attitude, the only answer God can give is,
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the
earth?
To live with the mystery
of life, not as an act of ultimate despair, but as an act of ultimate hope.
Jesus may seem asleep,
but he is in the boat with us, and we are able to call out to him, and if he
does not still the storm around us, he can still the storm within us. This is the message of the 23rd
psalm:
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of
death, you are with me. Your rod and staff they comfort me.
Or, in the words of our final hymn today, we keep singing,
When the storms of life are raging, stand by me; in
the midst of tribulation, stand by me; in the midst of faults and failures,
stand by me; in the midst of persecution, stand by me; when I’m going old and
feeble, stand by me.
The hymn never pretends to speak for God. It does not promise that
everything will be all right. It just
offers that stubborn hope in the face of life’s mystery and call on God to
stand by us. Some days that is all we
can do. But it is enough.
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