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Mark 4:35-41

One of the hardest things I've ever had to do was to conduct the funeral for my sister-in-law a couple of months ago. Mimi was only 43 when she died and the last five or six of those years were horribly crimped and contorted by a severe case of M.S., which left her paralyzed from the neck down and which ultimately cost her life.

It was a tragic ending to a tragically disease-distorted life. Clearly no one could have seen the kinds of ravages M.S. had wrought on her body and wished to have her back from the death that finally freed her. But that intellectual understanding didn't make her death at far-too-young an age any less painful.

I was the best man at Tom and Mimi's wedding - the first and quite possibly the only time that will ever happen. They were married at the United Methodist Church in Le Mars, Iowa - the same place in which her funeral was held some 20 years later.

And so, inevitably, the memories came flooding back - memories of Mimi dancing up a storm at the wedding reception - in stark contrast to her later immobility. Memories of her as a young mother taking good care of her children, only to have the M.S. force those children to have to help take care of her years later. The ironies were everywhere along with a heavy sense of wistfulness.

My job at the funeral was to help the others get through their pain even as I had that pain myself. Although the odd thing was that I wasn't really feeling that pain most of the time. Instead, I was being surprisingly matter-of-fact and professionally-distant from it all.

In fact, I stayed that way all the way through the funeral service. When it was over, I walked down the aisle and into a side room by myself. It seemed odd how detached I was feeling, so I sat down to think about that and the very instant I did, uncontrollable tears began to flow. It was as if I had put all my feelings on hold until the service was over and then they came crashing in all at once. It was a truly overwhelming experience.

And those same feelings of being overwhelmed and out of control are in essence what the disciples were experiencing on the Sea of Galilee during our gospel lesson. All of a sudden, they were caught up in an incredibly violent storm. Now remember that a least four of the 12 disciples had been commercial fishers making a living on that very lake. They had seen it all and done it all. So it must have taken an unbelievable storm for them to panic and assume they were dying, but that's what happened in this story.

You might wonder why those experienced fishers were out in their boat in such a storm in the first place, but the fact is that when they set out, there was no sign of the storm to come. Scholars tell us that there's something about the geology of that region which allows sudden, intense storms to form almost instantaneously - possibly due to the cold air off the mountains to the north and the Mediterranean Sea to the west mixing with the super-heated air from the deserts to the east over the basin of land that forms the lake.

As one author [Paul Kabo] puts it, "The weather is volatile in such a region. Storms build and sweep down out of the mountains, exploding upon the lake. It is quite unpredictable. In a boat down on the lake, it is not possible to see the storm coming. In one moment the lake is calm but in the next moment, there are waves pounding your fishing fleet.

"[... And so] Into [Jesus'] peaceful boat ride comes one of those sudden and violent storms so typical of this lake cradled between mountain and desert. Waves whip high, piling water [into] the disciple-laden boat. How anyone can sleep is a mystery of the ages. This Jesus must have [experienced] exhaustion beyond the storm's rages."

The scene in the boat is one of frantic rowing and bailing, of panic and terror. And yet there, in the midst of all that frenzied activity lies Jesus, peacefully sleeping as if he doesn't have a care in the world. The contrast was simply too much for the disciples. If nothing else, they could use an extra pair of hands bailing water, so they could delay the apparently inevitable sinking of the boat for as long as possible.

So they roughly wake Jesus up and scream at him over the fury of the winds, "Don't you care that we're dying?" And then Jesus does something totally unexpected - he commands the storm to be still and it instantly obeys. Now inevitably, when preachers deal with this text, they stop here to point out the obvious.

You and I can't calm a storm with a mere word, so clearly there is something unusual about Jesus. In fact, according to the Old Testament, only God has control over the very elements of the created order. Yet, here is a human being with that very power.

Therefore, this incident reveals to the disciples that Jesus had some sort of unique connection to God. In fact, the disciples later came to believe that Jesus is God-in-human-flesh, not that they could have said that that night on the boat in the electric stillness after the storm. But there was no denying that Jesus was someone extraordinary.

The second point that preachers inevitably make with this text is that Jesus was there in the boat with the disciples. He hadn't sent them ahead and left them to their fate. Instead, he was right there with them as they faced all their dangers and fears and pains.

Clearly that was an important point to the early church as they faced intense persecution during the first 300 years of their existence. To give you an idea of how intense things could be, it's said that when Constantine, the first Christian emperor, called a church-wide council in the city of Nicea, 318 delegates arrived.

Of those 318, less than a dozen had not suffered the loss of an eye or a hand, or been crippled while being tortured for professing their Christian faith. And that was true even though the persecution of Christians had stopped some 15 or 20 years earlier when Constantine had made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire. But during those times of incredible, the story of calming the storm served to remind the early Christians that Christ was with them when they were undergoing trials.

And, of course, that same promise is true of us today, although our trials are very different than theirs were. Peter Perry offers this look at some of the storms we face today:

"Look over there! See the family that lost a loved one in the Gulf War? See how they try to balance their pride for his sacrifice with their grief? See how they question whether the sacrifice was worth the incredible cost? And look there! See the storm there? See how that man is trying to cope with his wife's dementia. They've lived together for 57 years. How can he put her in a nursing home? But how can he go on caring for her with all of her growing needs?

"Or there! Look at the storm centered in that young couple's life. They've been married for three years and they are wondering if marriage was a mistake. Their lives are stormy with angry words and lonely nights. There's a storm there in that woman who lives to feed her addiction. One more hit and then she'll stop. That's what she says to herself every night. She knows it will kill her. She knows it will scar her children. But just one more hit. that's all."

Those are, of course, just a few of the personal storms we face in this life and our gospel lesson does have the implication that Jesus is here, facing our problems with us and actively transforming them. However, I don't think that's really the ultimate point of this story. Because the story doesn't end with Jesus dusting his hands off and saying, "There. I made everything better for you. Now you can relax."

Instead, Jesus says, "Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?" That, to me, indicates that there's another reason Jesus was asleep in the back of the boat besides sheer exhaustion.

I think the real point is that Jesus was sleeping because he trusted that the disciples could handle whatever came up. He placed himself in their care and his comment to them after stilling the storm was a sign of his disappointment that they didn't trust in themselves enough to take care of things without his direct intervention.

It seems to me that that's an important point for us to remember when we come across the many larger, systemic problems of this world. Here's how Barbara Bundick describes some of those problems:

"Let's start with some basic facts about the world we live in. Wealth is not distributed equally. Let me quote you the statistics from the Internet's Hungersite: 'Every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger; 75% are children under 5.'

"And that's just hunger. Let's not talk about the Middle East. Let's not talk about chaos in Afghanistan, anti-Americanism in Iraq, and entrenched hostility between the Israelis and Palestinians. Let's not talk about al-Qaeda operatives here in the United States, casing out the Brooklyn Bridge. Our church faces challenges. Our country faces challenges. Are we up to it?

"Let me raise the stakes even higher. We live in a country that worships mammon, that urges us, again and again, to buy, buy, buy. The message behind every commercial is that what we have is not enough. Our life will not be complete until we buy whatever the commercial is selling. One ad shows a young, handsome man standing in a waterfall, being baptized by the living springs of God's creation. His brand new SUV is by his side. The voice-over says, 'Finally. A car that will save your soul.' Oh really? How many of you have had your souls saved by a car? Another commercial promises to help people with severe credit card debt to consolidate their loans and get their life back in order again. So far so good. But then the commercial promises that they can use the money they've saved to buy yet another extravagance - say, a back yard pool. People who are digging themselves out of credit card debt don't need to be buying swimming pools.

"Face it, folks. In this culture we're spoiled. At a church meeting I once attended, I listened to a speaker talk about attracting new people to your church. 'You have to have air-conditioning,' he said. 'These days, people can't have a religious experience without air-conditioning.' What a sad commentary on our culture.

"[...] God does not call us to a life without challenges. God instead calls us to stand up for what is right and true, and to do so in spite of all the overwhelming forces to the contrary."

The fact is that God has rested the world in our care. God has given us everything we need to make to difference and it's up to us to either use those gifts or not. What will you do when God's trust rests in you? Amen.