The Sermon for the 5th Sunday After Pentecost

Pentecost 5, Proper 7B

Mark 4:35-41

June 24, 2012

St. Matthias

I recently found an old pair of binoculars - I’d forgotten about.  Remember when you were growing up and how cool binoculars were.  My little brother, me, and our friends were explorers searching uncharted territory in the backyard, space travelers landing on faraway planets, and the smallest bugs, lizards, and tadpoles were giant monsters ready to destroy the world except that we were the superheroes coming to the rescue. 

           Then you could turn them around.  Look through the other end of the binoculars and everything close was suddenly a universe away.  It was all in our imagination. That’s the way it is in life even when we grow up.  Big things can look small and vice versa.  Often times things get turned around so that we aren’t really sure what it is we see. That is perhaps how it looked from a boat with Jesus and the disciples.  Mark tells the story of a storm that you can still witness today.  If you stand on the hills of Golan Heights and look across the Sea of Galilee, you can see the whole picture.  The water will be perfectly calm until the winds change everything.  Then the storms come and the waves rise.  From a distance it looks – well stormy - but up close from the boat everything can be much larger – especially when you are in a small boat. 

           Jesus had been on the shore that day teaching the crowds.  Many people were following Jesus to hear him tell of the coming Kingdom of Heaven, for healing, and for forgiveness of their sins. There were so many people that day that as evening came, Jesus and the disciples climbed into the boat to sail across the Sea of Galilee and away from the crowds.  All started out well.  Jesus went to sleep in the front of the boat.  Then the calm became a storm to the point that the disciples were really afraid.  So, they panicked and woke Jesus.  With all the wind and waves and noise, I can imagine they were yelling at Jesus to wake up.  We would have expected these followers of Jesus to ask for his help – because already they had seen miracles.  At this point in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus had cast out demons.  He had healed Peter’s mother-in-law, a leper, and a man paralyzed since birth who took up his pallet and ran away praising God.  The disciples had seen all this and more, but now when the storms came on the Sea of Galilee, they wake Jesus up yelling at him, “Do you not care that we are dying?” 

           Just as we might have expected Jesus rose, calmed the storm and the waves and their fear.  Then Jesus said to the disciples, “Have you still no faith.”  But can’t you just hear the disciples.  Jesus the waves were huge and the winds were about to turn the boat upside down and it was likely the worst storm that anyone had ever experienced from a small boat on the Sea of Galilee.  I am sure that for weeks afterward the story got bigger and bigger as the disciples told it again and again.  But the end was always the same, Jesus calmed the storm and the disciples were amazed at this messiah who could overcome anything. 

           I will never forget my 4^th grade Sunday School class when I was growing up.  Jay Bolen was our teacher.  He was a lawyer and a master at teaching a rowdy group of 10 and 11-year-old boys.  We thought he was just about the smartest person in the world and we were always trying to ask a question he couldn’t answer.  It never worked.  One Sunday, Jo Batson, my best friend, came up with a sure stumper we thought.  He asked Jay, “If God created everything and can do anything, could God create a rock so big that even God couldn’t pick it up.”  Jay never even blinked.  To this day I can remember his smiling and saying “Yes but would He!” 

Of course, God can do anything.  Yet we are constantly asking the very same question even today.  Our problems are too big for God or God is too big for our problems.  We blame God for not caring if we perish in the storm  - or we flip the binoculars around with the excuse that God’s too busy to worry about us.  Why on earth would God care about us?  “But would He?”

And Christ says to us, “Have you still no faith?”   Can we believe in a Savior instead of a problem solver?  This is what Jesus is asking the disciples from the front of that boat and we today are asked as well if we can believe in God.  This Gospel lesson from Mark is not about solving problems, it is about faith.  And when we stop thinking that God is just a cosmic problem solver and start believing that God loves you and me – then we can begin living this new life with sure and certain knowledge that when the waves rise – God will be there with us.  Nowhere in the whole of the Christian faith or in the scriptures are we told that Christ came so that we might not have any more storms.  Christ came so that we might have life eternal and what that means is that we are never alone.  One of my favorite prayers is the Serenity Prayer.  You have probably heard the short version of it before –

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

But the original prayer written by the great American theologian and ethicist, Reinhold Niebuhr, echoes the message of Christ from that boat to you and me.

God, give us grace to accept with serenity

the things that cannot be changed,

Courage to change the things

which should be changed,

and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Living one day at a time,

Enjoying one moment at a time,

Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,

Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is,

Not as I would have it,

Trusting that You will make all things right,

If I surrender to Your will,

So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,

And supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen.