| PROPER 7, YEAR B | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Job 38:1-11 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32 |
Mark 4:35-41
O Lord, make us have perpetual love and reverence for your holy Name, for you never fail to help and govern those whom you have set upon the sure foundation of your lovingkindness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
All week, I have been watching Jesus sleep
in the boat. At first I didn’t want to wake him. I wanted to feel faithful
enough to let him get some rest. But my heart was
grumbling silently, “Don’t you care if we are perishing?” as I watched the waves churn
around us.
Early in the week, I learned that it is “world
refugee Sunday” today. Immediately, I could see in my mind’s eye all of the rickety, under-equipped boats guiding furtively from
the shores of oppression to the longed-for lands of freedom. I could hear the
hungry cries of the children inside the boats. I could see the adults packed in
together like sardines by unscrupulous traffickers out to make money from the affliction
of others. I could see how the boats hung too low in the water. I knew that their
engines were fueled by a volatile mixture of thin hope and sticky greed. I
could see the clouds gathering on the horizon; the wind beginning to pick up;
the waves getting taller; and the boats beginning to take on water. I could see
the Holy One in the back of those boats, too, cloaked in the robes of Jesus—or
maybe even the prophet Muhammad? Anyway, God had been invited by the faith of
the refugees to make this difficult journey with them. And God was sleeping. “Wake up!” I wanted to
holler. “Don’t you care if the boats are sinking? Don’t you care if these little
children drown?” But I didn’t say anything.
A few days later, I read part of Pope
Francis’ encyclical about caring for creation. He doesn’t mince words about the
precarious physical state in which our rampant consumerism is leaving our world.
Immediately, I could picture the earth, floating in space like you see in the
NASA photos, a big blue and white boat filled with 7 billion people, bobbing
obliviously as the storm clouds gather and the celestial waters threaten to
rain down chaos once again. And there at the right hand of God, asleep on cloud
pillows, is Jesus. “Hey, how can he be sleeping at a time like this?” I
wondered. “Hey, Jesus, don’t you care if we are all perishing by our own hand?”
I mumbled in prayer. But not loudly enough to wake him.
And then, on Thursday, I heard about the
shooting at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston. Even in my shock and sadness, I
remembered right away that the boat is a common metaphor for the church, that “nave”
is from the Latin word for “ship.” And I could see my brother and sister
disciples gathered in that historic Charleston nave with Jesus, listening to his
teaching. They were floating along and trying to get to the other side, to the side of
faithful life and practice. They could hear the distant rumbles of the thunder
of racism, the storm of hatred that circled around them every day. How well
they knew that the waters they navigated were dangerous ones, waters that could
indeed turn deadly in an instant. But they invited Jesus into their boat with
them, just like they invited the young white man with the backpack. “Come on
in. Join us on our journey, friend,” they offered. Out in the middle of the
sea, far from the safety of any shore, the tortured face of their white guest
closed off like a bank of gray clouds. He took a gun out of his backpack and
waved it in their faces. The storm was suddenly upon them in all of its
destructive force. The winds howled and the historic boat sank precariously under
the waves of blood. And there in the back pew, their beloved Jesus was asleep. Asleep
amidst the din of gunshots. Seriously, God? This time, it was all too much for
me.
“Wake up, Jesus!” I screamed over the
winds. “Don’t you care that they are perishing? You’re supposed to calm the
storm! You’re supposed to save the disciples in the boat! You’re supposed to
bring peace! Wake up now!”
I
would like to make this sermon all about God. In my indignation about all of
the storms that plague us, I would like to kick the can back up to heaven. I
would like to turn on God and shake God with my words until some sense drops
down into my trembling hands. After unspeakable suffering has crushed Job’s body
and soul, that’s what he does. He finally cries out to God to wake up and
answer him. In today’s first reading, we finally hear God rouse himself and come
to Job in a whirlwind. But God comes full of questions, rather than answers. God’s
rush of unanswerable questions about the mysteries of heaven and earth is not
meant to crush Job, however. It is meant to encourage him to believe that the Creator
of the universe can construct new possibilities where none seem to exist, where
we cannot even fathom them—even in the midst of horrible suffering.[1]
How
difficult it is to have faith in new possibilities when everything seems
impossible—when refugees drown and the earth sinks under its own filth and
racism kills right and left! How difficult it is to hang onto Jesus’ quiet,
steady faith in God—the faith that allows him to sleep peacefully in that storm-tossed
boat! No matter how much I long for a divine miracle to fix our problems, I
have had to admit to myself this week that it is much easier to fall down on my
face in response to sky-shattering divine action than it is to imitate Jesus’
trusting faith in the hidden power of God’s love. By beating on God’s door for
a miracle, I am taking the easy way out.
It
was a quote from St. Augustine’s 4th century sermon on this Gospel story
that drew me up short. Augustine, reading scripture as allegory, writes that
the Jesus who is sleeping in the boat is the Jesus in each of our hearts. “The people sailing in the boat are souls
crossing the present age on a paltry
piece of wood,” he writes. “…We are all of us temples of God, and every
one of us is sailing a boat in his heart … So as the wind blows and the
waves break, the boat is in peril, your heart is in peril, your heart is tossed
about…[B]y giving way to someone else’s evil, you suffer shipwreck. And why is
that? Because Christ is asleep in you. What does it mean that Christ is asleep
in you? That you have forgotten Christ. So wake Christ up, remember Christ; let
Christ stay awake in you, think about Him.”[2]
Is Jesus asleep in the boat of my
soul, I wondered? Like the disciples, I have invited him in, made him
comfortable. I have asked him to travel with me. I have been especially glad of
that invitation during times when I have entered dangerous seas, assuming easy protection.
But have I so bored him by lack of attention that he has fallen asleep? Is my
inner life so carefully protected that he has no choice other than slumber? When
did I quit talking to him? When did I quit listening? I understood, suddenly,
why I was afraid to wake Jesus in the boat this week. It wasn’t that I wanted
to let him rest. It was because I knew that he would expect something out of me
if I woke him. He would expect me to change. He would expect me to act.
The families of the nine murder
victims in Charleston were certainly not afraid to wake Jesus in their souls
this week. Crushed and crying, half-dead themselves with grief, they cried to
Jesus, “Wake up! Don’t you care that we are perishing?” And he rose in their
hearts and said, “Peace, be still.” And filled with the strength of Almighty
God, they faced their loved-ones’ killer, and they raised their trembling
voices to the nation, and they forgave the man who killed their parents,
husbands, wives, and children. They asked God for mercy on his soul. They
begged him to repent. They let God replace hatred with love. They showed us all
what it looks like when we live out the teachings of our Lord in our lives,
what it looks like when we are brave enough to imitate Jesus. They showed us
the possibilities that arise even out of suffering when we trust in the power
of Love, rather than the power of guns, to make all things new.
St. Paul knew that a Christian life is
no charm against suffering. He tells us in today’s epistle that we are in for “afflictions,
hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless
nights, [and] hunger” when we let Jesus in the boat with us. But Paul, like
Augustine, also knows that the real miracle of peace takes place without
fanfare when we open up the tenderness of our hearts to him and to one another.
“We are treated as impostors, 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, and yet possessing everything.”
Before suffering can be transformed,
we need to dare to wake up Jesus—not to find out if he loves us, but to ask him
to change our hearts.
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[1] Samuel E. Balentine, Job (Smyth and Helwys 2006), 634.
[2]
St. Augustine of Hippo, “Sermon 63” found at http://corinquietam.blogspot.com/2012/08/st-augustines-sermon-63-wake-up-christ.html.
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