Pentecost 4 – 21 June 2015 - Year B

Pentecost 4 – B – 21 June 2015

Grace to you and peace from our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

The text for our meditation is written in the 4^th Chapter of the Gospel according to St Mark: Verse 38 – 41:

³⁸Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, "Teacher, don't you care if we drown?" ³⁹He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, "Quiet! Be still!" Then the wind died down and it was completely calm. ⁴⁰He said to his disciples, "Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?" ⁴¹They were terrified and asked each other, "Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!"

Let us pray: Father, guide the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts, that through your Holy Spirit, your Word of truth may speak to our hearts and assure us to ‘be still and know that you are God’. In Jesus name we pray. Amen

It was Jesus’ idea to go to the other side of the Sea of Galilee that evening. The fishermen might have had another plan. They knew the shiftiness of the winds that blew across the mountains. They knew how quickly storms could kick up in the evening. They respected the sea, even feared it. Fishermen and sailors tend to be a superstitious lot when it comes to the sea. They know how quickly a boat can capsize and a man can drown. At the time of the text, the sea was symbolic of Death itself, the great Deep, Tehom, the swirling chaotic waters filled with great sea monsters, Leviathan and Behemoth and Rahab. They might have overruled Jesus. What does a carpenter know about sailing, anyway? But this was the Jesus who healed people with a touch and cast out demons with a word. So after seeing what they had, the Disciples decided to go with him and took Jesus into their little boat and set out on the Sea; But, as the air cooled, the winds soon picked up, howling over the hills and blowing like a mighty breath over the water. It was an echo of Genesis 1:3 all over again, when the Spirit of God blew over the swirling, chaotic waters of creation: Or the Exodus, when the breath of God parted the waters of the Red Sea. 

At that point though, the disciples weren’t thinking theologically or even scripturally. They were thinking, “We’re going to sink.” The waves were swamping over the sides; the disciples were being tossed around. Matthew, the Tax Collector, accustomed to the firm ground under his feet, was probably turning a sickly gray-green colour, leaning over the side, contemplating feeding the fish. Even the fishermen were panicked. “All hands on deck! Start bailing! We’re taking in water! Whose idea was it to go sailing, anyway?”
Their eyes turned to Jesus. There He was in the back of the boat, on the captain’s cushion, with His arm draped over the rudder, sound asleep. He couldn’t have been more at peace, but, the problem is He was asleep – Jesus! You have to wake up! Jesus may be a miracle worker, but he can’t save us if He’s asleep. “Rabbi, snap out of it. Don’t you care if we perish?” How can you sleep at a time like this? Wake up and grab a bucket before we go under!

You see, the ancients thought the gods slept. That’s when bad things happened, when the gods were asleep at the wheel or distracted in some way. The practice of many pagan religions involves attempting to rouse the gods up from their afternoon nap. Make a big noise, get their attention. It even creeps into Christianity. Even though scripture tells us “the prayer of a righteous man availeth much,” some figure that more prayers availeth even more. Get lots of people to pray. Never mind what they believe, or even whom they are praying to. Make a big religious noise, and maybe God will wake up to our need! 

The ocean event in our text is not without precedence in the Bible. In the book of Jonah, when Jonah’s ship was sinking, all the sailors on board got together and had an ecumenical prayer service. It says that everyone prayed to his own god. They threw the valuables overboard to lighten the load, and probably to bribe the sea gods as well. But Jonah was below deck, in the inner part of the boat, sound asleep. And the captain of the ship came down and woke Jonah up. “How can you sleep? Get up and call upon your god! Maybe he’ll listen to you and save us.”

There was raging panic on this boat as well. But in this case God’s chosen messenger was in no doubt as to the cause and the solution. When the sailors try to figure out who’s responsible for this mess Jonah has no hesitation in confessing, “I am a Hebrew, and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land.” That kind of exclusive talk put the sailors on edge maybe they were appealing to the wrong gods.  …..“So what are we supposed to do?” they ask. Jonah doesn’t tell them to all join hands and sing Amazing Grace. “It’s because of me,” Jonah says. Throw me overboard and the sea will be calm.” The sailors were a bit reluctant to throw a paying customer overboard, so they tried to row their way through the storm but they couldn’t. Finally, exhausted and at wits end, the sailors pray not to their own gods but to the Lord - “We beseech thee, O Lord, let us not perish for this man’s life, and lay not on us innocent blood; for You, O Lord, have done as you pleased.” They tossed Jonah overboard and immediately the sea became calm. And it says, “Then the men greatly feared the Lord, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.”
The rest, as they say, is history. Jonah gets swallowed by a divinely appointed big fish who deposits him up on the beach three days later, and God sends him off to preach to the pagans who all come to accept the great and true Lord.

The certain faith and plight of Jonah was known to the Disciples as it is known to us. Jesus peace or Jonah’s plight goes unnoticed by the Disciples as the wind whips and waves crash over the sides of the boat - they are in a panic. They wake Him up, and Jesus shouts at the wind and the sea the way someone might scold a barking dog. “Be quiet! Be still!” The same words He uses with the demons. “Be still.”  - The wind and the waves know their Master’s voice and are obedient. They have no choice. Jesus is the Word that called them into being; the same word of authority spoken by God to overcome chaos at creation. The same Word God spoke to calm the sea in which Jonah sailed.

That’s the power of Jesus’ Word. It’s a creative and redemptive Word: A Word that creates; a Word that saves; a Word that heals and casts out demons, and calms the storm.
Jesus looks at His disciples - dripping wet, fearful, seasick, panicked. “Why are you afraid? Don’t you yet have faith?” He asks. “Don’t you trust me? Do I have to keep proving myself to you? Don’t you trust that I am who I say I am?”

Mark says the disciples were “filled with fear,” no longer over the storm. Now over Jesus. “Who is this man, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” – Are these Disciples slow or what? As Mark records from Chapter 1, they have witnessed Jesus miracles and authority over demons; he taught them clearly the mysteries behind the parables: He has revealed the Kingdom of God to them. Now they are unsure about this man Jesus and fearful and awe struck.

Who is this man? He’s the Lord of creation, the Maker of sea and dry land, the creative Word. That’s who He is. He’s more powerful than wind and waves; more powerful than cancers and clogged arteries and terrorists and demons. He has dominion over governments and corporations; and all the Disciples saw and all we see emanating from this all powerful God/Man is pure unadulterated love and grace; how could we doubt or be afraid? ……. And yet we are afraid, aren’t we? I am. When my boat is about to capsize. When the doctors say, “I’m sorry but there’s no more we can do for you.” When the economic winds begin to howl and all our safety and security goes overboard, we buckle and start to sound like the faithless disciples. Thank God for these grace filled Gospel accounts; through them we come to know the disciples as men of “little faith.” That changes our perspective on ourselves as “little faith Christians.” We have so much in common with the Disciples: We panic as well, and want to wake Jesus up, forgetting that He neither slumbers nor sleeps.

We forget when Jesus was at His best; when His grace and love prevailed most.  This God/Man Jesus reconciled the whole world to God in the sleep of His death on a Friday afternoon. There’s the power of God to save. When Jesus appears most powerless, most out of it, most unable to do anything constructive. When He’s hanging dead and naked on a wooden cross and all the people are standing around mocking Him and spitting on Him and insulting Him, that’s when He is most powerful to save.

His death is our victory over death. It’s the death of the Lord of all, the Word who subdues wind and waves, who takes up our sin and lets Himself be subdued by Death. Like Jonah thrown into the Deep, Jesus dives headlong into our death so that when we sink, and we all inevitably will sink into the sea of death, we are not alone. Christ is there to catch us. Jesus is with us, so that awake or asleep, we belong to Him. We are safe in His death. Those fearful disciples in the boat; you, me, the terrorised world; we are all safe in the death of Jesus who made peace with the world by dying on a cross.

The question for us here this morning is this: Will we trust a sleeping Saviour? Or are we going to try to rouse Him, impress him with our self righteous actions? Will we trust that the death of Jesus has already reconciled this sinking ship of a world to God and live like reconciled people? Will we trust that sinless Jesus became our sin in His death so that in Him, raised from the dead, we are the righteousness of God? Or will we continue to try to shoulder the burden of our sin, atone for our sin, justify ourselves before God’s bar of justice? Will the love of Christ constrain us to say “Christ died for all and therefore all died,” even when the religious monopolies of the world object and say, “It can’t be that easy.”

Will we dare to proclaim an all-encompassing Saviour in Jesus Christ who atones for the sin of the whole world in the face of religious exclusivist that says “only if you join me will you be saved?” Will we who live in a culture that believes there are many paths and many saviours, put our trust in the God of the living Word and along with the author of Hebrews “hold fast the confessions of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful”?

Friends, there is no doubt that in this life we are in a small boat on rough threatening seas; we live in constant peril, as Romans 8: 36 tells us “³⁶As it is written: "For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered." – This is borne out by our trials, tribulations, our illness; just the sheer uncertainty that for whatever reason our human hearts may not be beating by this time tomorrow. We do our exercise, we take our vitamins, we are aware of obesity, we are safety conscious, and this is great, but in all honesty, there is not one human who can guarantee, that in spite of all that, our human hearts are still going to be beating this time tomorrow. What can we do? – try and save ourselves like Jonah’s shipmates? – Use up all our human effort in an attempt to bail out our boat? Or shall we panic, and blame God for our situation, saying that he is asleep and does not care?  - These were the actions of the Disciples in our text, and Jesus response is recorded in Psalm 107: 19 – 20:  “¹⁹ Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he saved them from their distress. ²⁰ He sent forth his word and healed them; he rescued them from the grave.”

Our Triune God is not sleeping, he hears our cries and petitions for help and as in Psalm 107, ‘He sends forth his word and rescues us from the grave’. He sends forth His Word of great comfort and hope in the Holy Scriptures; He sends forth His Word in the sacrament of Holy Baptism; He sends forth His Word in the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament Holy Communion. In Romans 8, Paul does tell of our vulnerability, but he also goes on to tell us the good news of life: ³⁷No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. ³⁸For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, ³⁹neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Yes we are in the bobbing little boat of life, but if we remain in the grace of God’s Word, we can be assured that we will always be in the same boat as our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and with Him at the helm we can be assured of a calm into eternity that is beyond all human understanding.

There is a sailor’s hymn verse that says it all:

Jesus, Saviour, pilot me
When asleep You seem to be.
When death’s waves crash o’er my head
Let me trust the Word you’ve said:
“In my death you safe will be,
By my cross, I’ll pilot thee.”  Amen.

The love and peace of our great Triune God that is beyond all human understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen

Merv James