This sermon is based on Mark 4:35-41 and Job 38:1-11. An audio version of this sermon may be found here.
Jesus rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. Jesus said to the disciples, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?"
Our gospel reading this morning tells the story of a miracle of Jesus — and one that New Testament scholars often classify as a “nature miracle”: not a healing, not an exorcism, not something we might be able to understand as psychological or psychosomatic in origin, but a demonstration of power over nature, power that is, quite precisely speaking, supernatural.
But as with all of Jesus’ miracles, the nature miracles are not just about power, they’re not just gratuitous thaumaturgy, they’re not intended just to shock and awe. Jesus’ miracles always have a point, they always have a meaning, they are always signs that point beyond this immediate earthly moment to reveal something divine. The point of Jesus’ miracles is always to reveal that Jesus does what God does, that Jesus is God doing immense, cosmic, Godly things on a human, earthly, intimate scale.
And that is true for the miracle of stilling the storm, too: this episode is intended to reveal to us that Jesus does what God does. And fortunately for us, our reading from Job this morning shows us precisely what it is that God does.
In his speech to Job, God tells about the origins of Creation, the first moments of the becoming of this world, the primordial acts that made all other acts possible. And among the first acts of Creation was God “shutting in the sea with doors,” giving it boundaries and bars, telling it how far it could come and no farther past the shore. Now, in almost all ancient Near Eastern mythologies, including the mythology behind the Bible, the sea is a symbol for chaos, for destruction, for the wild, reckless, disregarding energy that bursts out and overwhelms everything in its path, that breaks down and washes away and dissolves all relationships and all connections and all meaning. The chaos waters threaten to undo all that can be done. So in order to do anything in Creation, God must first restrain the waters, God must first give boundaries to the sea.
But notice what God is really doing here. God does not destroy the sea, God does not simply eliminate the chaos waters, God doesn’t merely impose order on chaos and make it cease to be chaos. God allows the wild, restless energy of the stormy sea to remain, but God does not allow it to remain by itself: God takes that energy that would overwhelm and dissolve all relationships and God sets it in relationship, God gives it a shore to define it, and clouds and darkness to clothe it, and earth-foundations it can energize but not overwhelm; and all the rest of Creation depends on this first relationship between the energy of the sea and the stability of the earth. God relates the unrelatable, and in doing so creates something new that never was before.
And that is the creative power of God at work in Jesus when Jesus does what God does and stills the storm. What God did in the first moments of Creation on a grand cosmological scale, Jesus does on Lake Galilee, in the weather, on his disciples’ scale. Jesus sets a boundary that the storm cannot pass, Jesus creates a relationship that the chaos waters cannot overwhelm and dissolve, Jesus takes the wild reckless energy of wind and wave and transforms it into the deep energy of peace and steady calm — and perhaps more importantly still, Jesus takes the wild chaotic energy of fear that threatened to overwhelm the disciples, and by relationship with himself transforms it into the deep energy of awe and wonder and worship and faith. In stilling the storm, Jesus does what God does: he relates the unrelatable, and in doing so creates something new.
And that is what faith in Jesus empowers us to do, too. When we follow Jesus, we do as Jesus does, and Jesus does as God does, and the creating grace of God is with us to face the storms of chaos, and by relating them to create something new.
On Friday morning Lee and I went to Temple House of Israel for the funeral of Don Chodrow. It was a deeply sad occasion: Don died too soon, and we lost someone who was an important part of this community, and a friend to many, and (among many, many other things) a good friend and supporter of music here at Trinity. During the funeral service the cantor sang a song. I don’t know a thing about the history or tradition of that song, or what the words meant, or even if they were words, or just evocative syllables for singing. But I knew that the song was sad, so sad, with a haunting melody in a minor key; and it was is if that song reached into our hearts and pulled out all the grief and sorrow and tears we all were carrying, as if it gave voice to all the sadness we would hide away; that song was a lament in the purest, simplest meaning of the word. And I thought to myself that we don’t have that sort of thing in our funerals: we don’t lament, we don’t take a moment to simply say “We are sad, and God knows we are sad, and we will sing our sadness to God.” There is something profoundly healing in that, and I think maybe our funerals could learn something from it. Because the other thing I thought about that song was that it was not only sad, it was not merely sad; it was also beautiful. Those haunting, minor-key notes tugged on my heart and lifted up my soul and gave courage to my spirit — the simple beauty of the song gave its own kind of joy, even when the theme of the song was something so sad. I think that song was a gift of the creating grace of God. I think that by God’s creative power that song faced into the stormy chaos of sadness and sorrow that threatened to overwhelm us, and it set that sadness in relationship with beauty, and through beauty with joy, and in doing so it created something new: it created a moment to experience, even in sadness — no, because of sadness, to experience yet more vividly the infinite preciousness of the goodness of life. In that song in a Jewish funeral on Friday, I learned something deeply moving, deeply important, about what my faith in the creating grace of God revealed in Jesus means to me.
And I think our faith in Jesus can mean that for all of us. Because the Good News of the Gospel is not that we will never have to face chaos-storms in our lives. The Good News of the Gospel is not that bad things will never happen to us good people. The Good News of the Gospel is not that God will rig the cosmic game so that we are always healthy and happy and prosperous and the best of the best of the best among people. No, the Good News is that the creating grace of God is with us, the Good News is that by faith in Jesus we can do as Jesus does, and Jesus does as God does — and that means that when storms and chaos and sadness and sorrow and loss and depression and grief and illness and confusion and doubt and fear rise up and burst forth and threaten to overwhelm us — and they will — when that happens, we can with Jesus face the chaos-storm, we can with Jesus say “Peace! Be still!”, we can with Jesus set that chaos in relationship with deep foundations of courage and compassion and wisdom and beauty and joy and trust and faith that can never be overwhelmed — and in that relationship we can create something new, we can create moments to experience the infinite preciousness of the goodness of God’s good gift of life.
May it be so with us. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment