2 Pentecost B      Mark 4:35-41            22 June 2003

Rev. Roger Haugen

 

There is a picture found on one of those pages in old Bibles.  It is painted in those dark colours from the Renaissance.  It is a picture of large scale.  The picture is large and full of detail, ominous clouds, waves breaking over the bow of a small boat.  Only secondarily do we see that there are people there.   Terror is clearly written on the faces of the people.  You can almost taste the fear of the disciples madly bailing.   One’s eyes travel over the action packed picture, taking in the scene and the story of disaster, picking up on the terror, until you come to one corner of the picture -- and there is Jesus, sleeping calmly.  Then you notice the disciple standing over him. His face betrays fear but also anger and betrayal.

 

We know the expression on his face.  It is fear, that deep gut-wrenching fear we know few times in our lives.  It is that dry-throat fear that comes when someone you love is in life-threatening danger, or you personally are looking death in the eye.  His look betrays the sense that it shouldn’t be this way.  After all, after all they have done, with Jesus in the boat they should be in no danger.

 

What do we know about fear?  We begin life with the world by the tail.  We explore our independence with those first steps and the world opens up.  With adolescence, there seems to be a need for no one, nothing can stop us, we are on our own!   Through high school and young adult years, nothing can stop us, life couldn’t be finer.  We have our dreams, and it is only a matter of time until we accomplish them all.  Life is mapped out, careers started and on track, marriage, children, a home, the right car.  All set to happen pretty much as planned.  The idea of failure or suffering is the furthest thing from our minds.

 

A teacher once said that he doesn’t talk of death or dying to anyone under thirty because they have no sense of their own mortality.  Before thirty we feel untouchable, suffering is a foreign language we have no need to learn.  We see no need for anyone else, “I can take care of myself, thank-you.”

 

Somewhere along the way, that confidence is shaken.  It may begin slowly.  Maybe a gnawing feeling deep within that life isn’t unfolding as it should.  There is nothing we can put our finger on, just a feeling.  Maybe, a career seems snagged.  Younger people are passing us by and we know if we were ever laid off, we might not find work.  We might stand in front of the mirror one day and see wrinkles we were sure weren’t there yesterday.  Somewhere along the way, our hopes and dreams slipped away.

 

Harold Kushner, a rabbi, writes of a man who came to him two weeks after attending the funeral of a man with whom he worked.  Their lives were very similar, worked in the same area, talked from time to time, kids about the same age, that sort of thing.  The man died suddenly one weekend and now two weeks later he had been replaced at the office, his wife was moving away.  Life went on as though he never existed.

 

The man hadn’t slept for two weeks.  He kept on thinking that it could have just as easily been him.  He knew the one day it would be him.  He feared that his life would have no lasting value, that all the safety he had craved wouldn’t save him.  Maybe he was coming to his rabbi just as the man in the boat came to Jesus, feeling betrayed and frightened.  He only wanted peace and found himself in a storm.

 

Peace is something we crave.  Peace from the storms of life – disease, economic struggles, family and relationship problems.  There are storms of faith.  Our comfortable ideas about God are often shaken by events in life.  Faith answers to questions that worked in other circumstances no longer satisfy.  We may try to build a Titanic faith with all the bases covered, with black and white answers to all known questions when suddenly we hit an iceberg that wasn’t foreseen.  We sing “When peace like a river attendeth my way” looking to the church for stability in a hectic life and equate stability with “the way things used to be.”   We look to the church for stability and discover storms.  We want God to affirm our plans and discover God has other plans.  We want Jesus to agree with our choices and discover that Jesus asks us to examine our attitudes and fears and act according to his commandment to love one another.

 

We come looking for peace and find a storm.  We can be like the disciple standing over Jesus in the boat, feeling betrayed as well as frightened.  Our hope comes as we recognize that life is lived in the midst of the storm and know that Jesus is with us.  This is the heart of what we claim as Lutherans.  We put the cross front and centre in our worship space, in our worship and in our thinking.  It is on the cross that Jesus meets us in the most intimate way – dying for us.  It is in suffering that we find that Jesus is most certainly with us.  It is in suffering that we discover whom it is that will not let us down.  It is in suffering we discover that all else which we think is stable and will save us is false.  It won’t be our job, our pension, our ability to look after ourselves, but it will be Jesus sleeping calmly in our particular boat waiting for us to depend upon him to give us the “peace which passes all understanding.”

 

One of our gifts to the world as Lutherans is the understanding that it is in suffering that we experience God most clearly.  That Jesus meets us in the midst of our suffering and seeks to lead us through whatever might happen.  Jesus said, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.”  Peace comes not from avoiding pain and suffering but in knowing that we are not alone in the midst of it.  The writer of “When Peace Like a River” wrote the hymn after his wife and children were lost at sea.  People who have come to terms with cancer know that it is God’s promise of eternal life that gives them hope and peace.  We are not alone, Jesus has not and will not abandon us. Jesus is there to say those words we so desperately crave, “Peace be still.”  Too often the last place we look for peace is to that quiet spot in the boat where Jesus is sleeping, only too willing to answer our prayer and bring peace.  He simply asks us to give up our dependence on our own efforts and look to him who is our only hope for peace.

 

Jesus has marked us as his own and promises that we will not be forgotten or forsaken.  Should we be tempted to forget that, we have stories such as today’s to remind us.  We have scriptures that remind us.  “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”  Notice it is through not around the valley.  We sang in our psalm, “The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble.”  We have our liturgy that use the language of death and dying because it is only through death to so much that we can have life as God intended it for us.  We sing hymns that often come out personal experience of tragedy to speak to the hope that comes through suffering as others have depended on God’s presence in the midst of suffering.

 

Today’s Gospel reminds us of those times when we have been “righteously indignant” at God for what appears abandonment in our particular time of need.  Our storm may seem every bit as dangerous as the one in the picture.  We are not alone.  We simply need to look for Jesus in the corner of our boat.  Notice how peaceful Jesus is.  Notice how he is not nearly as worked up about our storm as we are.  Listen to his words and find peace and hope, “Peace!  Be still!”  These are words for us, words that will follow us through whatever storms life has in store for us.  Words that truly can bring peace and hope.