Getting Through the Storms - 6-20-21
Getting Through the Storms
Job 38:1-11; Mark 4:35-41
Job 38:1-11
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? “Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?— when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?
Mark 4:35-41
On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
Prayer – Gracious God, as we look at the world, there is much that is frightening. Bad people in powerful places, wars and rumors of wars, pandemic and disease, nations raging against nations. Lord, help us not to be afraid of today or tomorrow. Still the storms that rage around us. Speak to us a word that gives us confidence in you and your work, assuage our fears and remind us that life is about getting through to the other side and not staying stuck in our storms – amen.
I cannot help but believe that all of us have experienced something of ‘storms’ over the course of the last year plus in a way that perhaps we never have. And I’m not reminding you of Snowmageddon that nearly froze us all to death at the end of February; or of the rain and humidity and high temperatures of the last several weeks. I’m not even totally pointing my finger at the year plus we have spent in the midst of a Covid monsoon that has impacted the world – a storm of death and disease of the likes we have never seen as a 21st century people. In the midst of snow and rain, heat and humidity, death and disease we have also experienced what it feels like to be isolated and uncertain if it is safe to leave our homes; we have worn masks and washed our hands to the point that we have marks on our faces and our hands are cracked and dry; we have lost friends and family to disease that has seemed uncaring of who it invades and how much it devastates entire families and communities.
Now it is not that ‘storms’ don’t come to all of us because they do. They do, and we can all recount instances of the storms we survived, storms through which we received shelter, storms which left us changed in good ways and hard ones, too. Even so, the constant battering of ‘storms’ both inside and out, which we have experienced in the last year and a half has been unlike anything we have known or experienced in our lives.
For this has been so, hasn’t it, that most all of us at one time or another or at multiple times in the past year or so have looked down to see that our ‘boat was already being swamped.’ If not physically, then emotionally or spiritually. That our identities, perhaps, our futures, or our understandings of how things work in the world, in our lives or the lives of our loved ones were threatened, perhaps even taken by a virus which mysteriously affected one and not another.
Yes, we have known storms, haven’t we? The sort that stripped the familiar landscape bare, forcing us to look at things as they really are, revealing that to which perhaps we were blind before? And even as we limp our way back to some semblance of ‘normal,’ in some ways the same terror the disciples must have felt perhaps hasn’t entirely left us – because of the memory of the wind and water which so threatened, because of the damage left behind, or because the storm has just taken on another form now as we assess the damage to ourselves, our families, our communities, our church and as we seek to move forward into a still uncertain future.
And the truth is, this is the easy part to capture in words because we know storms. We know the uneasiness the disciples must have felt as the storm gathered energy, even though they had come through such storms before. And we recognize the terror in their voices when they awaken Jesus and shouting to make themselves heard while accusing him of not caring at all. Funny how we presume that God just doesn’t care when our shouts of dismay are not answered in the ways we want, perhaps not trusting the God is traveling in the storms with us.
Storms simply are. We ignore them or deny them or fail to prepare for them at our own peril. And yes, we get through the storms, we move beyond them, learn from them, recover from them often with gifts which come from beyond ourselves. But we seldom do so unchanged. I imagine each and every one of us are different than we were before Covid, before the sudden loss of a loved one, before a move to a new place, before we experienced a storm we never saw coming.
On one of our trips back to Fort Worth from the Carolinas and Georgia Valerie and I stopped in Selma, Alabama. We stopped at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and Civil Right Museum there. We were joined by a guide who with powerful enthusiasm and deep hope told the story of her beloved city and its significance in the Civil Rights Movement. She spoke to us of ‘storms’ which had led to loss of life and injury and the battering of hope, the effects of which are still known there today. And she told of the many storms which preceded those you and I probably know best. Only she didn’t stay in a time past which seemed to climax some 60 years ago. No, like any good historian, she stood on the ground that day and showed how what happened then affects her community now. She spoke of how Selma and the people who live there had long been broken wide open by all that happened there. She said they had had to deal with it, with the ‘storms’, if you will, and with each other in the wake of all of it. And as a result, she claimed that they were a decade ahead of most of the rest of us in terms of ‘living and working well together,’ in spite of all that would keep them apart, because there was no way they could ignore or deny the ‘storms’ which had affected them. They were ahead of many of us in getting through to the other side.
She reminded me that we do so much better when we acknowledge the ‘storms,’ learn from them, and remember that something, Someone, with amazing grace and love which so far exceeds our own, is in every ‘storm’ with us, giving us what we need to get to the other side.
There is no doubt in my mind that each and every one of us has experienced no just one storm in your life but perhaps many storms. When the hard weather comes you’d think we could count on the feeling of Jesus working on our behalf, fighting for us, working the oars, bailing the water, but if truth be told, that isn’t always true. During parts of some storms it may seem for all the world as though Jesus is sound asleep. “Lord, don’t you care?” we may wonder silently or even out loud. And it really is all right to ask that question. Every day and throughout history, men and women of amazing faith have cried that question from the darkest places – “Where are you God? Lord, why don’t you answer? Where’s the help? I’m dying here.” Even Jesus cried this prayer of forsakenness from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Sometimes in our most desperate moments, it really does feel as if God is sound asleep.
In many ways I think we have been fooled to believe that faith is a magic charm that somehow protects us from loss or hardship or catastrophe, you know those ‘storms’ of life. Faith is a basic trust or belief – that the God who says, “I will never leave or forsake you” – in fact won’t leave or forsake us. That doesn’t mean that bad things will never happen to us. What it means is that when a storm suddenly kicks up and scares us to death, God will remain in the sinking boat with us, maybe even stilling the crashing waves or maybe even stilling our angst and dismay. The fears of life are always stirring and are often right in front of us, and God is on that journey of life and faith with us.
I think we miss something if we reduce this story to pure wonder and miracles. We miss the reality that life is a journey of faith. It also can lead to what I think is just bad theology – if God is only here to make storms and destruction disappear, then why Hurricane Harvey in 2017? Why earthquakes and tornados and floods? Why Covid 19? Why are there difficulties in all our lives? Because faith in God and God’s faithfulness doesn’t change the scenery? It show us the way through it. We were never meant to stay safely and predictably in the harbor. We are not human beings on a spiritual journey, rather we are spiritual beings on a human journey. (Teilhard de Chardin) And more often than not the journey is mostly about getting to the other side.
In this passage, Jesus is not leading the disciples into danger. Frederick Buechner suggests that Christ is instead saying to the disciples, “Go . . . Go for God’s sake, and for your own sake, too, and for the sake of the world. Climb into your little tub of a boat and keep going . . . because Christ sleeps in the deepest selves of all of us, and . . . in whatever way we can call on him . . . to give us courage, to give us hope, to show us our way.” The winds will still rage. The waves will fill our boats with water until we are sure that we will die. And the boat will rock until we can stand it no more. This is life, this is the normal journey we all go on. And all that is life has God in its very being. We are not on the journey alone. God has given us unharbored faith and has faith in us that we will use it and come through the storms. As Jesus has showed us, it is our faith in God and in the faith that God has in us that in the midst of the darkness, at the height of the storm, we will be able to come through to the other side. Every time we experience a storm and get through it we are in some way changed. We may have suffered, we may have survived unbearable pain, but we have gotten through and that is what the journey is most often about – getting to the other side of through – thanks be to God – amen.