June 25, 2006, Third Sunday after Pentecost
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 107: 1-2, 23-31; Job 38: 1-11; II Corinthians 6: 1-13; Mark 4: 35-41
“Why are you afraid?” Jesus asks.
Is he kidding?
People die horrible deaths in storms like these, or at the very least they
catch nasty colds. Ships go down, investments are lost, arrivals are delayed.
Storms cause discomfort, inconvenience, sometimes devastation. Is he kidding?
Why would you not be afraid, or at least a little anxious?
This week my boat was flooded and tossed by storm after storm. Within
one forty-eight hour period two old friends announced their impending divorce
after twenty-five years of marriage; another friend was diagnosed with a bad
cancer; another friend who had moved away was about to move back but canceled
the plan at the last minute; and another person very important to my life and very
dear to me is leaving. On top of all that, the church got hit by lightning, terrifying
the children at Maple Leaf, frying our phones and fire alarm system and zapping
our church budget.
I spent one sleepless night in that forty-eight hour period clinging to the
gunwale as the towering waves crashed over my bow. I kept asking myself all
night, “Why are you afraid? You are supposed to be a man of faith.”
And I kept answering, “Why would I not be afraid?” Divorce devastates
people we love. Cancer is always a scary word to hear and “bad cancer” is far
worse. Absence and loss mean missing and grieving. Financial stress can tinge
everything in our life with its tension. One urgent call conjuring the image of the
church building burning down can jolt the heart with a searing pain. And behind
all our storms we hear the constant distant rumbling of war and global warming
and oncoming mortality. It can mount up to a tsunami of suffering coming toward
us sometimes. Why would we not be afraid?
Please don’t tell me that if I just cry out to the Lord in my distress my
friends won’t divorce or die or leave, and our finances will take an unexpected
turn for the good, and war and global warming will be no more. As I said in my
sermon on unanswered prayer two weeks ago, the numbers are against that. Yes,
some who go down to the sea in ships and feel their courage melt away in the
storm and cry out to the Lord in their trouble do find that God brings them out
from their distress. Sometimes it seems the Lord does make the storm be still and
the waves of the sea hushed. As the Psalm says, “Let them thank the Lord for his
steadfast love, for his wonderful works to humankind.” But don’t let them tell you
it always works that way. Much of humankind drowns in the same storm praying
in the same way to the same God.
Why are we afraid? Why would we not be afraid?
And let’s just imagine that in the midst of our peril on the sea, we suddenly
remember that Jesus is sleeping in the stern, and we have the wits to crawl back
and cry out to him as the disciples did: “Teacher, do you not care that we are
perishing?” And let’s imagine that we see Jesus wake within us and rise up and
say to the situation that threatens to overwhelm us, “Peace! Be still!” Imagine if
just like that the wind ceases and the waves flatten out. Isn’t that just a little scary
in itself?
Think of a violent, breath-taking thunderstorm you have experienced, the
kind of power that makes you tingle and your hair stand up and makes you take a
step back from the window or race inside for cover. Imagine someone you know
walking out into the tempest and in three short words and a quick gesture, it all
stops dead still. Wouldn’t that freak you out even more than the storm? “Who is
this person?”
Even someone with just a little power can unsettle us. If you are talking to
a mind-reading psychic and something embarrassing pops into your mind that you
really would not want them to know you are thinking, it is a little unnerving.
Imagine confronting a power that can control the weather and heal skin diseases
with a touch and raise people from the dead, a power that knows everything about
you. Imagine standing before God as Job did and hearing the Old Judge say,
“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your
loins and I will question you and you shall answer me.” Why would you not be
afraid of that kind of power?
The Hebrew Scriptures say, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of
wisdom.” Some people soften it by saying that “fear of the Lord” really means
awe or respect, or that the fear is only of being separated from God’s love. Those
are both good, useful interpretations, but plain old fear of the Lord makes sense as
well. It is the beginning of wisdom because until you feel that fear, you probably
are in denial. You probably are trying to pretend that God does not exist or is a
tame, manageable force—maybe greater than you are and a mystery to you, but
like electricity in your home, a power you can control with the flick of a switch. If
we have not felt the fear of the Lord, or if we have not felt the fear of an
approaching death or loss or pain, we are probably numbing and dumbing
ourselves down with the intentional ignorance of denial.
Fear is wisdom pounding on the other side of denial’s locked door. Denial
can be useful— I recommend it sometimes. Fear is even more useful because it
begins to move us toward considering the truth of what is before us. So I
recommend a little fear, too. It is a start. But if we stop there, then fear progresses
from being the beginning of wisdom to being wisdom’s end.
The 1960s popular science fiction novels about the planet Dune had a
saying: “Fear is the mind killer.” But the books went on to say that if you let fear
go and follow it as it runs screaming through your brain, it will lead you to the
way out of fear, to the calming truth beyond fear.
We are vulnerable, we are sensitive, we are exposed to terrible storms and
we feel their suffering keenly, and so of course we feel afraid sometimes. Why
would we not be afraid? Why would we not be afraid of an all-powerful God who
could save us or watch us drown, over whom we have no control? The good news
is that the fear of the Lord is only the beginning. There is more.
If we go beyond the mind-killing initial impact of that fear and let it pass,
we find that it leads to the calm of surrender and trust. At first a God who saves
some but lets other good and innocent people suffer looks like a cruel, heartless
tyrant to be feared and hated more than trusted and loved. But if we fear God
attentively and persistently enough, in time we will learn more of God than just
what we fear. We will begin to see beyond the limited horizon of this storm that is
overwhelming us right now. We will begin to see beyond the horizon even of
death. We will come to see that above and beyond all such clouds a light shines
that no darkness can overcome completely or forever. Surrounding every peril at
sea is a vast, everflowing ocean of mercy.
If we go beyond fear into the wisdom of faith, we find a perspective that
can bring us calm in the midst of turmoil, and that is a great thing. We can turn to
the thought of the Jesus who calmed the storm and find the storm in our heart
become calm. But there is more to it than that.
There is not only perspective; there is power. It is not our power, but it is a
power that can flow through us. It is not a power we can control to avoid suffering
or death, but it is a power we can trust to transform our afflictions so that they
become full of the light of God.
The Apostle Paul suffered terribly in the service of Christ. In today’s
passage from II Corinthians he lists beatings, imprisonment, riots, sleepless nights
and hunger. The perspective and power of God enabled him to endure these trials
and transform them. Paul lists some of the transformations he experienced. He
says, “We are treated as imposters, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well
known; as dying and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as
sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing,
yet possessing everything.”
As rhetorically potent as Paul is, we might still not be convinced if we had
not experienced something like this ourselves. I imagine that most of us at one
time or another have felt ourselves about to go down in some inner or outer storm
of life when we cried out to God in our distress and felt calmed, and felt a higher
power working through us to transform what was awful into some new and
unforeseen good.
I could add my testimony to yours. I had one sleepless night this week in
the grip of my fear for those I love and for the church I love and for my own
impending suffering. That fear led me to cry out to God, and to open my heart and
mind wider to God’s presence. Jesus did not hush the tempest around me. I am
looking at the same towering waves, I am going down into the same pit of
suffering and grief, but I am full of trust now. I am calm now. The perspective
and power of God have transformed things for me once again. I can sleep, and
maybe now if someone comes asking for my help, I will be able to get up and have
the same calming power flow through me.
Why are you afraid? Well, who would not be afraid? And yet fear is not
the end. After all we have heard and seen and experienced of God’s perspective
and power, how can we not have faith?
Let us pray in that faith that leads us from fear to the Spirit’s perspective
and power—the same that we saw in Jesus, flowing through us. Let us pray in
silence…
Sermon 06/25/2006