Boats in the Storm

2024-39
sermon preached at Church of the Good Shepherd, Federal Way, WA
www.goodshepherdfw.org
by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Rector
Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 7B), June 23, 2024
Job 38:1-11 ; Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32 ; 2 Corinthians 6:1-13 ; Mark 4:35-41

We live in stormy times. I’m fond of saying that life is an epic adventure. But you don’t have an epic adventure without hardship and suffering—your own, or that of those around you. Once the story is read, you may be able place the worst episodes in perspective.

But we can’t do that from where we’re sitting. We look around our nation and the world, and people are suffering. It’s especially blatant and unmistakable right now. We are part of broken human systems, and in many ways, we are complicit in them. We’re in uncharted waters in the middle of a storm.

And most of us at Good Shepherd find ourselves in the same boat. Whose boat is it? I’ve got news for you: if you’re baptized, you’re not in any boat that belongs to your family or nation or ideology. You’re in Jesus’ boat.

How do we, as Christians, respond to these stormy times?

Some of us content ourselves with saying, “Well, I go about my life and try to be a good person.” Unfortunately, that alone does next to nothing to address injustice, and sometimes, naïve niceness may actually help perpetuate it.

Others of us fret and fuss and fume, flailing about busily to do something—anything—to make the anxiety go away. We don’t respond; we react. And the net result isn’t always positive.

Between these two extremes, a lot of good work does get done to alleviate people’s pain and despair. But meanwhile, where is Jesus? This is his boat we’re in, after all. We were counting on him to be our pilot, to steer our ship safely to shore. Instead he’s in the stern, asleep on a cushion! “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

When the disciples cry out, Jesus immediately wakes up and calms the storm. I find it annoying that the storm hadn’t disturbed Jesus’ sleep up to this point, but he does wake up, and he does help.

Some biblical commentators suggest that the gospel writer—Mark in this case—intends us to understand this is not as a natural storm, but as the product of evil forces. Jesus and his disciples are on their way to the country of the Gerasenes, where Jesus will send an unclean spirit out of a man and into a herd of pigs. Could this storm be an attempt to prevent Jesus’ arrival? In response, Jesus contends against evil and makes no peace with oppression. And if these commentators are correct, Jesus’ calming of the storm sends a warning to the forces that seek to oppose him on the far shore. Where Jesus goes, things get set right. Where Jesus goes, justice follows.

As Christians who know this, we come to church to find Jesus, imagining that we might wake him up and receive relief from the storm. But is this our experience? When we cry for help, does Jesus come to our rescue?

Well, first of all, just because there’s a storm doesn’t mean that Jesus is absent or asleep. Indeed, from Jesus’ reaction to the disciples—“Why are you afraid?”—I’m led to believe that they all would have been fine even if Jesus had remained unconscious. Jesus doesn’t calm the storm to save his friends from perishing. He calms the storm because they ask him to. It may be that the storm of the disciples’ own anxiety is far more dangerous than the storm raging around their boat.

Remember that at the heart of our faith is Good News: the news that in coming to be among us, in living and dying as one of us, Jesus has reconciled the entire universe to God. We can imagine all sorts of theories as to how this has happened—and we do. And we can splinter into tens of thousands of denominations and argue about how it works and what it means for the living of our daily lives—and we have. But that’s not the point. The point is that Christians dare to believe that Jesus has made everything right, and that even if the work doesn’t appear to be finished yet, it’s a fait accompli.

It’s easy enough to say it. But do we believe it?

Maintaining trust in God, even in the face of Good News, is very difficult when the storms of life are raging all around us. This leap of faith is difficult for us because we are in pain. If the Good News is so Good, why is there still injustice and suffering? This is the big question of all theology.

Job knew it, though his answer from God was, “Shut up and know your place!” I don’t like that answer. As for me, the simplest answer I’ve been able to find is that much of this injustice and suffering continues because we inflict it, and because we allow it. If we want there to be less injustice and suffering, we will work to end it.

Yet we can never stop all the world’s pain through our own efforts. That’s impossible. We can only do what we have time and energy for. And during such stormy times, we can’t always work out what to do next, and sometimes we just want some comfort.

I pray that you find that comfort here at Good Shepherd on a regular basis—and friendship, and belonging, and a community of folks to help carry you through your own storms.

But I also pray that you find sufficient challenge: challenge not just to believe with your head and your heart, but to live the Gospel by actively relieving people’s pain—as individuals, and in organized groups. So much of that work already goes on in this place, and everybody is invited into it. As Christians, we have a duty to each other and to everybody in the world: a duty to love, not just with fuzzy feelings, but with bold actions. Comfort and challenge: these are two things to pray for and to balance.

Paul knows this as he writes to the Corinthians. His list of hardships reads like a resume:

As servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger …

That’s the challenge part. Then he moves to the comfort part:

… by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute.

So it went for Paul. How’s it going for you? If you were writing to the Corinthians, what hardships would you list? Health crises, family drama, divorce, death of loved ones, lost job, meager income, self-doubt, anxiety, depression?

And what grace-filled moments of calm? Sunday worship, a visit from a friend, holidays with family all behaving for once, a compliment from a stranger, good news from the doctor, a direct encounter with the risen Christ?

By the way, I notice that our Gospel text also says, “Other boats were with him.” Now, I might just be making this up, but I like to think that Mark, writing for the early Church, included this sentence as a way of including those who were preparing for baptism into the Body of Christ. They weren’t in the boat yet, but as they learned about the faith and heard the Gospel, the text gave them another boat to imagine themselves into, also under Jesus’ care. Maybe you find yourself in one of these other boats, trying to figure all this out.

But whichever boat you’re in, we’re all in the same storm, and Jesus is here. We are surrounded by dangers and wonders, and sometimes it feels like we’ll be washed overboard.

And then there are moments of surprising calm and peace, and with that calm comes a promise: we will be brought to the harbor we were bound for. “Now,” comes Paul’s voice, “now is the day of salvation.” Not just someday in the far-off future, and not just at the end of your earthly life: now. You are saved from the storm even in the midst of it.

How is your relationship with God stretching and growing? And how are you responding in the wider world outside of your private prayer life? Does it strengthen you to understand that Jesus is in the boat with you—to know that there is grace even in the storm, and that you are loved eternally and through every storm? Even if your life ends in a stormy time, the comfort of former times may still come to your aid.



It is my honor to be sailing these stormy seas with all of you. We sail on with Jesus as our captain. And when our anxiety becomes too much to bear and we cry out for help, may Jesus wake, stand on the prow, and cry out, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped!” Amen.