I have already preached this year on
the terrors of sitting in a tiny boat, battered by wind and waves. I have talked
about the storms and chaos of life that leave us clutching onto the closest
piece of security with all our might. Yet, here we are again in a little boat
with the disciples, and here we are again, afraid of drowning.
Last time, I joked about my fear of
riding in boats and airplanes and in anything, actually, that does not allow me
to have a firm footing on solid earth, but I didn’t admit that, as a preschool
child, I was even afraid of washing my hair. I was so utterly terrified by the
idea of lying down in the water to rinse away the shampoo that, for several
years, the only way that my mother could get my hair clean was to put on her
bathing suit and stand with me in the walk-in shower in the guest room. To this
day, I can still remember the terror of the tub. I can feel the slippery
bathtub bottom and can hear the churning of water pouring from the faucet with
the frightening power of Niagara Falls. I can see the spiral of water slurping
down the drain with a force that just might take me with it. I can remember
lying helplessly in my mother’s arms, head tilted back vulnerably, deafened by
the water that covered my ears, blinded by the soapy splatters in my eyes, and
thinking reproachfully in my panic: “Mama, don’t you even care if I drown?”
What on earth would make a cherished, pampered
3-year-old think that her loving mother, either through incompetence or malice,
would let her drown?
“Teacher, do you not even care that we are perishing?” cry the frightened
disciples to the sleeping Jesus in our Gospel lesson. When the boat starts
rocking and the wind starts blowing on that lake in Galilee, they too are afraid
of drowning. It is true that fear is a force as powerful and irrational as a
windstorm. Its paralyzing presence pushes us back to our most basic, reactive
animal level. When we are afraid, our brains turn into a neon sign flashing the
word “Survive!” Those “fight or flight” reactions kick in; our bodies tense up;
and our rational thinking shuts down. When we were hunters and gathers out in
the wilds living alongside saber-toothed tigers, we needed to be able to
respond quickly to danger in order to survive. In an emergency, we still need
to be able to react quickly and instinctively to escape physical harm. Fear is
not all bad, but when we are afraid, our brains don’t have time for higher
level functions like trust and reflection. Our Gospel story, however, is about more
than just the havoc that fear can cause in our lives.
Notice that the disciples don’t reach
over to Jesus and say, “Teacher, wake up! We need you to calm the storm and get
us safely to shore!” They don’t even ask for Jesus’ help. They assume the worst
of him; they assume that he does not care if they drown.[1]
Just as I did not trust my loving mother to keep me safe in the bathtub, the
disciples do not trust their loving Lord to save them from the sudden storm.
They have been with him as he has healed and driven out demons. They have heard
him call them his brothers and sisters. How can they assume that he doesn’t
care?
I was very interested to learn that
the vocabulary of our Gospel story closely parallels another storm story in the
Bible: the story of the Hebrew prophet Jonah. You all know the story of Jonah
in the belly of the giant fish, but do you remember how he gets there? After
refusing to go prophecy destruction at Nineveh as God has commanded him, Jonah
flees by ship. That is when a great storm arises, and his fellow sailors are
terrified. The Gentile captain of the ship goes to Jonah, who is sleeping
through the whole thing, and says: “What are you doing sound asleep? Get up,
call on your god … so that we do not perish!” Even though he is in a panic, the
Gentile ship captain reacts not by throwing up his hands in helplessness, not
by crying, “Do the gods not care that we are going down?” but by seeking help
from Jonah’s foreign god. The heathen ship captain reacts with more trust than
does the wayward Jonah— and with more trust than Jesus’ clueless disciples when
they are in similar danger. It is not merely irrational fear of the dangerous
waters that destroys our trust; it is a mysterious blindness to God’s loving
presence in our midst.
Furthermore, in the Jonah story, God
does not speak to the stormy sea in order to save the sinking
ship. Instead, after praying for guidance from Israel’s god, the sailors take
Jonah, the source of God’s displeasure, and dump him into the sea. It is only
then that “the sea ceased its raging.” In the Jonah story, it is Jonah’s disobedience
that causes the storm, and it is only by his repentance, his acknowledgment of his guilt and his willingness to turn around, even by being thrown into a
stormy sea, that the ship can be saved.
God does ask us to repent and to amend our ways. But
guilt can also consume us. It can paralyze our souls just as fear can paralyze
our brains. I know, because I was a champion at feeling guilt as a little kid. From the
moment that I opened my eyes to the world as a newborn, I think that I felt
responsible for the world and everything in it. If something went wrong, I
assumed that it must have been my fault. If my parents were upset, it must have
been because I had somehow done something bad. Anything short of total
perfection in what I did or thought or said was total failure in my eyes. I knew
my guilt and assumed that I just might deserve to be drowned in a bathtub. So I
was on my guard. All the time. “OK, this, this
is the moment when the punishment is coming,” I thought at every turn. It was
my guilt that fed my fear.
So I wonder if the disciples in the
boat with Jesus are worried that their guilt, or the guilt of the person
sitting beside them, is the cause of the storm. I wonder if any of them think
that God just might be trying to feed them to the fish at the bottom of the
lake? They certainly know the story of Jonah. They certainly know their own
individual inadequacies and imperfections as disciples. Jesus, however, who
loves them, is certainly not worried about their worthiness. He is calmly
asleep, unconcerned with guilt or blame or divine punishment for his bunch in
the boat. And when the disciples wake him up, Jesus cries, “Peace! Be still!”
to the wind, to the waves …. and also perhaps to the misguided guilt and shame
that stir up his friends from within. A priest friend of mine always says that
it is very easy to convince people that they are sinners; the difficult thing
is to convince people that they are loved. Jesus died to convince us that we are
loved. And he, as one whose love will indeed lead to his death, is not worried
about the failings of the motley crew in his boat--even ours.
I
just heard this week about a group of death-row inmates at Angola prison in
Louisiana who are performing a passion play called “The Life of Jesus Christ.”[2] Those
who have been found guilty in our courts, murderers, drug dealers, “dead men
and women walking,” are being brought together and are finding inner
transformation through the repeated performance of Jesus’ story, a story that calms
and sustains and re-creates. They are finding their true identities as beloved children
of God in inhabiting the characters that they play, characters who are touched by
God’s love in Jesus Christ: the leper who is healed, the faithful disciple,
even Judas the betrayer and Jesus himself. A prison is like a boat, floating on
a sea of chaos and buffeted by all of the waves that society heaves upon it. It
is a boat groaning under a load of fear, violence, guilt, and desperation … and
it is one in which the hope of God’s presence is difficult to recognize. In performing
and preparing their play, however, these prisoners have awakened the sleeping
Jesus who is there with them. In the words of Scripture he actively responds with peace, with calm, and with a love
that heals both the oppressor and the oppressed. And we, who are so quick to condemn ourselves
and others, we watch the miracle and are left trembling in awe as we stare and mumble, “Who then is
this, that can change and heal the human heart?”
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