A sermon preached on Mark 4: 35-41, at Wesley Memorial UMC on June 24, 2018.

One morning last week while we were having breakfast with the news on, I actually said to Woody, “Isn’t that enough for me to be appalled by right now?”  I was tired, I was still working on that all-important cup #2 of coffee, and the news was relentless.  Again.

It feels like I can’t come up for enough air to withstand it sometimes.  Just when I think “this is the worst it can get,” I’m proven wrong.  Again.  Late last fall, I held my breath each morning to see what famous man had been accused of sexual assault.  When Woody or a student or a colleague would say, “Did you see what happened?” I would brace to hear who it was.  After one of our hardest years, in Charlottesville right now we are putting people on trial who were defending themselves and our city during last summer’s white supremacist rally.  The residents of Flint, Michigan, stilldon’t have clean water.  Ordinary citizens are living in tree houses to protest energy companies seizing their lands for pipelines – pipelines which are supposed to be the safest most spill-proof ever, and which, inevitably do spill.  Our president cruelly decided to take children away from their parents at our southern border and house them in cages, claiming he was powerless to change this policy.  Then, whimsically changed it again when almost the entire country spoke out.  Now those families get to stay together – but their detention will be indefinite, which itself is illegal.

It’s relentless.  I know there has always been bad news.  I know that in some American communities and in some other parts of the world, sadly, they are used to incessant bad news as the norm.  I can remember riding in the car with my parents when I was about 8, when the news on the radio said a word I didn’t yet know: “rape.”  I’m sure that day, when they had to define that word for me, my parents thought the news was too much and too bad.  Still, it does feel like we are in an especially torrential time. 

Like the disciples in the boat crossing the Sea of Galilee, the weather has gone menacing and the waves are lapping into the boat, threatening to sink it.  It’s not that they don’t know how to handle a boat on choppy water.  Jesus chose several fishermen to be his disciples, so these aren’t nervous sailors.  Mark tells us “the boat was already being swamped”[i]when the disciples approached Jesus about the situation.  Where’s Jesus?

He’s right there in the same boat with them – but he is napping through all of this commotion.  On a pillow.  That’s the part that really gets me and, I imagine, the disciples.  This story is told in all three of the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke)[ii]but Mark is the only one who includes the pillow.  That pillow delights and confounds me.  As a reader at a safe distance from those events, I love it.  It’s a delicious detail and it means Jesus was really settled in for a good solid nap.  But when I consider the perspective of the disciples, I think it must irk them just a wee bit to see that not only is Jesus managing to sleep his way through the storm, but that he is resting his head on a pillow.

The pillow is a symbol of incomprehensible rest and relaxation.  How could anyone sleep through the threatening storm?  How could anyone allow themselves to relax and become peaceful enough to sleep with all of this raging weather?

When the disciples approach Jesus, they don’t ask for his secret meditation app so that they, too, might relax.  They don’t even ask him to quell the storm.  They blurt out, accusingly, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”[iii] 

That pillow really got to them.

What does Jesus do?  He wakes up, rebukes the wind, and calms the sea.  Then, he turns to the disciples and says, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”[iv]  One biblical commentator describes the scene like this: “Faith means trust. Jesus seems to imply, ‘Don’t you have any trust that you’re going to be cared for? I’m telling you that God has come near, that the kingdom of God is breaking in, and you’re worried about the wind?’”[v]  In their fear and panic, the disciples don’t even ask for what they need.  They don’t ask for help.  Instead, they accuse Jesus of not caring enough.  You know, Jesus, who is right there in the same boat and the same storm with them.

They are crossing from the Jewish to the Gentile side of the lake.  Right before this in Mark’s gospel, Jesus tells parable after parable, all illustrations and promises about God’s in-breaking reign or kingdom.  I think the commentator is on to something with her rephrasing “’I’m telling you that God has come near, that the kingdom of God is breaking in, and you’re worried about the wind?’”  Maybe there is something about being exposed on the water in a ferocious storm, while also heading away from known territory and into unknown territory that overtakes the disciples’ common sense and faith.  Maybe some unfaithful questions lodged in their hearts and minds:  Where are we?  What’s going to happen next?  Why are we going to those places?  Who are those people?

I’m conflicted about fear and its role in faith. It’s obviously an impediment since the first thing almost any angel or messenger of God says anywhere in the Bible is “Fear not.”  Whatever other message they have to impart, most begin by reminding folks not to be afraid by what comes next.  But a lot of fear is involuntary.  If I hear a noise in the dark when I think I’m alone, something primal and automatic takes over in me.  I don’t engage in a rational self-debate about whether that may have been a tree limb or an intruder, I’m already gripped by fear and on alert.  And, whichever way that scenario turns out, fear is at least useful in alerting me to something that could be dangerous.  How is it unfaithful or “un-trustful” to experience fear, especially when it’s not a conscious choice?  And yet, some of my most faithful moments involve me feeling fear and choosing to act against the advice of that fear.  Finally saying “yes” to God’s relentless call to ordained ministry falls into this category of fear. 

What if Jesus is telling the disciples that fear is playing an outsized role in their actions on the boat?  What if he isn’t chastising them so much as illustrating in the midst of a real-life example how giving in to fear obscures what’s really happening?

Because it seems to me that the disciples miss the rather important fact that Jesus is in the same boat with them.  Literally. They are so fearful – and perhaps so rankled by that pillow and the “nerve” of Jesus to be resting when they are fretting – that they miss the point that Jesus is resting.  What if, instead of accusing Jesus of apathy, they had pushed their fear aside enough to wonder at Jesus’s nap?  Maybe they would have thought,Well, if he can sleep now, maybe I’ve mis-assessed the situation.  Maybe we will make it across the lake after all.

Fear about what comes next is causing us to mis-assess, too.  There are some in our country who are so fearful about what will happen “if we let them in” that they want to close all borders to all people and operate on lock-down. There are others who are so fearful about our government’s actions on the border that we think we are abandoned – we forget Jesus is in this boat with us, too.

Last week at Annual Conference, right before our closing worship, I was hurrying from the upstairs bathrooms back down to the convention hall.  When I got to the escalators, there was a little girl standing at the top, holding onto the glass side, yelling down to her sisters who were already near the bottom of the escalator.  They had gone on without her and she was scared to step onto the moving steps.  As I approached, I noticed a white man standing a couple feet back from her, not offering help and not pushing past her to get on the escalator.  I don’t know how long he’d been there, but he seemed to be wrestling with how to help. The little girl was black.  When I got to the escalator, I bent down and said, “Do you need someone to hold your hand?”  She shot her hand straight up for me to hold, still looking forward, to her sisters now impatiently waiting for her at the bottom of the escalator.  No look, no questions asked.  I talked her through the scary moment of stepping out onto the forming step:  “OK, we are going to step onto that part right there.  One, two, three, ok now…”  I kept holding her hand and telling her she was doing a great job.  By the time we were halfway down, she looked at me and said, “I used to be scared to do this but now I’m not.”  When we got near the bottom, we did the one-two-three again to step off and then I hi-fived her and told her that she was very brave and that it’s hard to have courage when we are scared but that she did it.

Her fear was transformed into confidence. She had it all in her the whole time; she just needed someone to stand with her while she learned to do it.  She needed a hand to hold so she could feel her own bravery and faith.  My hope is that, besides being her own moment of personal growth, it will be one of many such moments when she can rely on grown ups and on white people to befriend her and stand with her.

I was rushing back for worship that day and I don’t know why I took notice of that little girl in need of a helping hand.  I do know that I’ve been trying to pay attention. Ever since the Black Lives Matter movement began, I’ve been challenging myself to take a second look.  At my own motivations or preconceptions, and at the way someone “looks” to me on the street, at what I assume about him or her based on only a first glance.  Like most white people in our culture, I have absorbed racist notions I didn’t recognize as such.  It’s one thing to be scared when confronted by someone with a gun; it’s another thing entirely to walk around assuming that all black men are dangerous.

Centuries of racist fear-mongering have encouraged us to see threats instead of people.  I recognize this sin in myself and I see it in the bad news from the border. Surely we need immigration reform, but when we see threats in the innocent faces of children and we think indefinite detention in cages is the best way to proceed, our fear has obscured our vision and compromised our faith.  When a Salvadoran family scares us more than a government without compassion or justice, we are afraid of the wrong thing.

There is a ferocious storm out there and it’s scary as hell and I’m not in a position to tell you to have no fear.  I’m scared, too, no matter what the angels say.  But we have to act in spite of it.  In the face of it.  Against it.

These are dangerous waters but we are not alone, and we follow the One who told us that when we welcome the stranger, we welcome Christ.[vi]  Those faces we see crying for their parents are Christ’s.  When the morning news is relentless mayhem and your fear tells you God is absent or not acting quickly enough, remember that the pillow Jesus is sleeping on now is on a floor in a tent in Texas, covered by a space blanket. And he is waiting for us to offer to hold his hand.

Thanks be to God!

 

[i]Mark 4:37, The Harper Collins Study Bible (NRSV)

[ii]Matthew 8:23-27 and Luke 8:22-25

[iii]Mark 4:38b

[iv]Mark 4:39-40

[v]Hearing Mark: A Listener’s Guide,Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, © 2002 Trinity Press International, p. 37.

[vi]Matthew 25:31-46

 

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photo credit: “Asleep in the storm, Ely Cathedral,” © 2013 by Steve Day, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.