“Why are you afraid? Have
you still no faith?”
We sometimes get the word
“faith” mixed up
with
ideas we have in our heads.
We think “faith” is
agreeing with something we’ve heard.
But the world in the
Bible isn’t about signing on to doctrines.
It’s about trust that
turns into courage.
Faith means trusting God,
so we have the courage to live our lives.
The great 20th
Century theologian Paul Tillich called it
“the courage to be” – the chutzpah to face the day.
Today’s lessons are about
courage.
In our Gospel lesson, the
disciples were in a little fishing boat
on the Sea of Galilee.
It is 13 miles long, 8
miles wide, and 141 feet deep.
You don’t want to be out
in the middle of it when a storm blows up.
This was a really big storm
and a really small boat.
The situation was scary.
The disciples woke Jesus
up and said,
“Don’t you care that we are perishing?”
They interpreted his calm
as apathy.
It had not occurred to
them it might be confidence or trust.
So Jesus told the storm
to be still.
Then, Mark tells us,
“there was a dead calm.”
It didn’t just settle
down. It was “a dead calm.”
Apparently that display
of divine power over chaos
scared them even more,
because Jesus asks them
in the present tense,
“Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”
Remember when Jesus says
“faith” he isn’t talking about something
we think in our heads.
He means something we
decide in our hearts.
He means trusting God, putting
our hope in God,
so that we can face head on whatever life throws at us.
This story happens on a
big body of water.
In ancient literature bodies
of water
always stand for the chaos in life.
In physics it’s called
the law of entropy,
which means things tend to fall apart.
In regular life, it’s
Murphy’s Law,
“whatever can go wrong, will.”
The sea stands for
accidents, illness, crime, death, racism, bad bosses,
lost jobs, gossiping neighbors, and all the life-wrecking
forces
that shoot up out of nowhere like sharks to
take a bite
out of our happiness.
That’s what the deep
waters mean in the Bible.
Take the 69th
Psalm:
“Save me O God for the waters are come into mine soul
I sink . . . . I come into deep waters where the floods
overflow me.
. . . . They that hate me without cause are more
than the hairs of mine head.
They that would destroy me . . . are mighty.”
We can’t get through life
without the waters coming
into our
souls.
So much can go wrong.
Even when things are
going right, we are afraid it will fall apart.
We therefore walk thorugh
life looking over our shoulder
to see
what disaster is gaining on us.
The problem is that when
we are looking over our shoulder
we can’t see where we are going.
Living in fear doesn’t
make for much of a life.
But Jesus came that we
might have life and have it abundantly,
-- John
10: 10 -- so he offers us the option of living by faith.
The most frequent
commandment Jesus gave his disciples
was “Do not be afraid.”
The Bible repeats the
commandment “Do not be afraid” 365 times,
once for each day of the year.
It isn’t an easy
commandment.
The earliest manuscripts of
Mark end with the women at the tomb.
An angel said to them,
“Do not be afraid. He is risen.
Go tell the disciples he will meet them in Galilee.”
But the women ran from
the tomb and did not tell anyone anything
“because they were afraid.”
It is impossible to not
feel fear.
Fear is programmed into
our cerebral cortex.
Feeling fear is instinctive.
But the Bible doesn’t t
say, “Do not feel fear.”
It says “Do not be
afraid.”
Do not give into your
fear.
Do not identify with it.
Trust in God.
In the words of John
Wayne,
“Courage is being afraid but saddling up anyway.”
That is precisely what
faith means:
“being afraid but saddling up anyway.”
So where do we get the
courage to saddle up for life?
It happens when we fall
in love with God
“in all things and above all things” as the Prayer Book
says.
When we fall in love with
the source and destiny of the whole creation,
we forget about ourselves and the fear calms down like
the storm
in today’s Gospel lesson.
My favorite verse of Job
is sometimes translated,
“Even though he slay me, I will trust in him.”
Our foundation is that
God is God, God is good, and God is forever.
The sea in our Gospel
story stands for evil and chaos.
But the wind stands for
God.
Mark doesn’t use the
ordinary word for wind or storm.
He uses the word for a
whirlwind.
It’s the same word used
in Job to describe the whirlwind
God appears as at the end of that book.
Today’s Gospel isn’t
about just a regular storm at sea.
The lesson applies to the
ordinary storms of life,
but especially the storms that happen
when God moves against evil of any kind,
when God sends his people to speak against injustice
or the mistreatment of his people.
That invariably stirs
things up and makes a storm.
Being faithful to God in
a watery world of fear and chaos
is dangerous.
We saw that in Charleston
this week.
Those of us who are old
enough to remember 1963
cannot read the news of Charleston without remembering
the
bombing of a Black Church in Birmingham.
At the eulogy then, Dr.
King spoke of courage. He said,
“(The victims) say to each of us, black and white alike,
that we must substitute courage for caution . . . .
We must be concerned not merely with those who
murdered them but with the system, the way of life,
the philosophy that produced the murderers.”
I do not know the heart
of the killer in Charleston,
but from his own words it sounds as if
the dry rot of fear had decayed his soul.
That dry rot can turn any
of us toward bitterness
and mean-spirited resentment.
It can turn us inward
into a kind of stingy self-focus.
But Jesus calls us out
from that tomb.
Jesus calls us to come
forth, to live boldly,
loving God in all things and above all things.
That’s why it isn’t a
political agenda but faithfulness to Christ Jesus
compelling the Church to demand
that hospitals teach their patients’ families how to care
for them
when they go home, and to demand
that the
state provide home health care so the elderly and disabled
can stay with their loved ones
instead of nursing homes.
It’s why we save
immigrants who are legally entitled to be here
from being defrauded by unethical lawyers and
notaries.
When those godly winds of
justice blow,
it stirs
the waters of fear and bitterness,
the kind
of fear and bitterness that feed prejudice
and mean spirited resentment.
Standing with Jesus is
risky.
But we saddle up anyway.
That’s faith.
When God sends us against
the world,
we saddle up.
