Lord of the Storms
Stacey Simpson Duke
Mark 4:41-45
11th Sunday After Pentecost
31 July 2005
This past week, judges announced the winner of the 23rd annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, “a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the first sentence of the worst of all possible novels.” The contest takes its name and its inspiration from writer Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who the contest sponsors say wrote the worst first story line ever. It waas his novel “Paul Clifford” which began “It was a dark and stormy night….”1
I could begin this sermon with those same words, but I won’t. I would not want any of you nominating me for an award for bad prose, for one thing. But it is true that this morning’s Gospel story takes place on such a night. This is the story of a storm.
In biblical times, a storm represented something more than just the result of a cold front moving in over warm air. It was the wrath of the sea gods, the fury of demons. The sea itself was understood to be utter chaos, the force of disorder always pushing at the seams of life and threatening to overwhelm.
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman writes:
It turns out that the Bible is much more preoccupied with the threat of chaos than it is with sin and guilt…. We have devised ways of forgiveness, or handling sin and guilt, an assurance of pardon, a hug, an embrace. But the storm is not so easy. The storm produces a more elemental, inchoate anxiety, a sense of deep helplessness because you cannot touch it anywhere or handle it or measure it or hold it. It is bottomless in size and beyond measure in force, call it flood, call it Leviathan, call it chaos; all the new scientific theories of the “goodness of chaos” do not touch the deep fear about which the Bible speaks….2
Our modern mind-set notwithstanding, we do have a sort of primal fear of storms and the chaos they represent. These days, there’s a whole field of science and at least one television channel devoted entirely to the study of weather. We chart the course and progress of storms and do what we can to prepare. Such study and preparations might give the illusion that we no longer fear elemental chaos as much as our ancestors, though I tend to think that the fact that we give human names to our hurricanes betrays at least a little of the old way of thinking of sea gods and storm demons.
Despite our modern advances in the fields of meteorology and disaster-preparedness, we humans do still exist to some degree at the mercy of the elements. What’s more, for all our many progresses, the force of chaos itself – and not just chaos in the form of natural disaster - is still as threatening to us as it has always been to humans. We find ways to defend ourselves, and sometimes we can convince ourselves the threat no longer exists. We buy solid houses with good strong locks, and, if we desire to be particularly well-defended, we may include a guard dog or a security system or a gun. We manage our money. We plan for the future. We spend our days in a certain rhythm and routine. All of it gives the impression that we have some sort of control over life.
When something doesn’t go quite as planned, we do whatever we need to to fix it. If a mistake is made on one of our bills, we make as many calls as necessary to get it straightened out. If the steak is not cooked the way we ordered it, we send it back and get another. If the air-conditioner or the refrigerator or the car quits working, we get someone to repair it or we buy a new one. We know how to get things fixed. If we can’t do it ourselves, we find someone who can. We do whatever it takes to make life go according to plans.
So it comes as something of a shock when the forces of chaos break through our barriers and something truly terrible happens. We have built up such strong protections against the hazards of life that we can sometimes almost forget how vulnerable we really are. Then the unimaginable happens. A divorce. A death. A diagnosis. A disaster. It is not what we planned.
The worst part of it may not even be the thing itself, but the aloneness of our suffering. We are sailing along perfectly fine, and then this horrible thing happens, and there is no one who can fix it. The people around us sympathize, but they are powerless to really help. In desperation, we turn to God, and all we get back is silence. Which is worse? The tragedy itself or the fact that God does not seem to care?
The disciples knew something of this experience.
It was nighttime when Jesus suggested to his friends that they go on a little trip across the sea. The 13 of them piled into the small fishing boat and set sail. A storm came up. The boat careened and pitched and filled with water. 12 men tried to steady it. One man lay sleeping.
They all knew the kind of deadly damage these storms could cause. It was a terrifying thing to be in the middle of a deep lake in the black of night while a storm raged. But Jesus slept.
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One sunny afternoon in south Georgia, I was out at the trailer park for Kids’ Club, teaching them Bible stories. This particular afternoon, I decided to do this story from Mark. Like most children, these kids had a flair for the dramatic, so I decided we would do the story in a way that helped them put themselves right in it. I asked the kids to close their eyes and to imagine themselves in the boat. All 15 of them closed their eyes and began to picture it.
“You are in the boat with Jesus and the other disciples,” I said to them, “tell me what it looks like and feels like.” And they began to describe the boat, what it looked like, how the air smelled, how the waves sounded.
I told them that Jesus had gone to the back of the boat to sleep. I suggested that they picture him there and asked what they saw. They told me how he was curled up, how they could hear him snoring.
Then I told them, “A storm has come up. The sky is dark and the wind is blowing and the rain is coming and the waves are crashing into the boat. Tell me what it feels like.”
And they began to holler out, one after another, about how they felt scared or sick, about how big the waves looked and how hard the rain was and how the boat was creaking and shifting and might sink. The boat rocked from side to side and the storm kept coming and 15 kids all kept their eyes closed as they imagined it.
I told them, “The storm is getting stronger, can you feel it?”
“Yes!” they shouted out.
“The sky is getting darker, can you see it?”
“Yes!” they cried.
“The rain is getting harder, can you feel it?”
“Yes!” they replied.
“The water is coming into the boat now and you are rocking back and forth, are you scared?”
“Yes! Yes!” they all agreed.
“How do you feel? What are you gonna do?” I asked.
And suddenly 13 year-old Antonio jumped up, his eyes still pressed shut. “My Jesus just woke up!” he shouted.
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That certainly is the way it should happen, isn’t it? If we were the ones writing the story, we would want it the way Antonio declared it – Jesus would just wake up. When the chaos and destruction threatens, Jesus would be right there, ready to fix things.
That’s not the way Mark says it happened, though. The disciples watch in terror as things only get worse, and their Jesus still lies in the back, sound asleep. Finally, they shake him awake and plead in words that reflect what many of us have felt too, “Teacher, we’re dying here! Don’t you care?”
And without a word, Jesus stands and looks at the storm and speaks to the sea, saying only two things: “Peace. Be still.” And the wind ceases, and there is a dead calm. And then he turns to his disciples and asks, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” Which, in a way, was like saying to them, too, “Peace. Be still.” And they are filled with awe.
Mark writes it like an exorcism story. Throughout his gospel accounts, whenever the demons confront Jesus, he shuts them up in basically the same way. The thing is, ordinary magicians, exorcists, miracle workers – they could all do the same thing. In the presence of the storm-demons, though, the ancients knew that only one force could overcome such power – and that force was God.
They believed that in the beginning of the world there had been a great battle between Yahweh God and the demons of the sea. Yahweh had won. The psalmist praised God’s victory this way: “You divided the sea by your might; you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan….” In Job, we read that God bound all the waters into prescribed seas and told them, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped.” In a battle between man and the sea, the sea would almost always win. But in a battle between the sea and God, God, the protector, was the certain victor.
So when Jesus stood in that little fishing boat with those great waves crashing in and those wild winds whipping around and that angry sea churning beneath, and he said two little words – “Peace! Be still.” – and the storm and the sea obeyed, when a mere man did this, it suddenly becomes clear: this is no mere man.] And so the disciples turn to one another and say, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
This question is for us, his people. And we say we know the answer – this is Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God, Love personified, the Word made flesh, the One who comes to save. We know who this must be, and we know how much he says he loves us, and we know of the power he’s supposed to have. But in the storm we sometimes forget.
Or, maybe we remember, but it seems like he has gone away, or maybe gone to sleep. He does not always act on our behalf when we want, the way we want. He does not work according to our plans. And we wish our Jesus would just wake up.
Perhaps his sleeping is a sign – a sign that he knows something he wants us to remember, too. That no storm is bigger than he is. That with him in our boat, we are always in the presence of the one power greater than anything that threatens us. That the storm may soak us, it may swamp our boat, it may scare the daylights out of us, it may make us sick, it may take more out of us than we thought we had in us – but it will not finally overcome us. We will be rocked, but we will not be overcome. He is confident in the outcome, so there is no reason for him to be wakeful and anxious with us.
He is in our little boat with us, and what he will ultimately say to all the storms of life is the same thing he says to us now: Hush. Peace. Shhh. Be still. And suddenly we see that his sleeping in the stern is a way of showing us what we need most of all to know. “I have stilled and quieted my soul,” the psalmist wrote, “like a weaned child with its mother, so my soul is quieted within me.” And Jesus lies there dozing in the midst of the chaos, showing us how it’s done.
It is so hard for our hearts to be quiet, to be at peace, when the storms of life lash against us. Even the littlest bit of chaos often sets us to spinning and fretting. No matter how ordered we have made our lives, the constant thrum of anxiety just beneath the surface of things threatens to overtake us. Sometimes the storms of life are nothing compared to the internal chaos we grapple with. Peace. Be still, Jesus says. The only question is whether we will listen, and let him be Lord of the storms in our own hearts too.
In the end, every storm of life, every evil force, every cruelty that seeks to drive us to our knees – in the end, all of it will hear Jesus’ powerful words – Peace. Be still. And the winds will cease and the storms will be silenced and all shall be well at last.
Until that time, we row forward, our hearts straining to hear and obey those words he speaks now to us. Peace. Be still. And if even the winds and the sea obey him, maybe our frightened fickle hearts can too.
1
http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/ 2Walter Brueggemann. Inscribing the Text: Sermons and Prayers. 51.
