Sunday’s Reflection - Stilling the Storm

June 23, 2024

Mark 4:35-41

When evening had come, Jesus said to his disciples, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

                The Gulf Stream, Winslow Homer, 1899, Metropolitan Museum of Art

           When I was twelve, my father, who was a teacher, took me out sailing one day in a sunfish sailboat on the Lower Ausable Lake in the Adirondacks. As we shoved off from the dock, my father was at the rudder and I sat in the front to trim the sail. We zigzagged up the fjord-like lake for a good half hour when suddenly a strong wind picked up. Thinking that it would be best to do a jibe (to make a down wind  turn), my father took the sail and turned it sharply, which caused us to suddenly capsize into the freezing water.

            The whole boat flipped forty-five degrees making the sail float horizontally in the water. I scrambled and perched on the hull of the boat now vertical, yelling at my father to DO something. Meanwhile, he clung to the rudder struggling to hang on, helpless to do anything. Eventually, my father managed to flip the boat right side up again, but it was the last time I ever went sailing with him.

            So—I can relate to the time when the disciples shouted at Jesus: "Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?"

            Sometimes, when I read this sea story, I think the miracle was not just that Jesus stilled the storm but that he slept through it! (Let me digress a minute - on second thought, do you really think he was asleep? Maybe he was testing his disciples? On the other hand, he was with a group of fishermen—after all, they were the professional sailors, and he was the carpenter. Maybe he assumed they knew what they were doing, so he relaxed, and being exhausted from feeding the five thousand, he fell asleep?)

            Often, that’s how we feel about God. We feel that God has deserted us, or that God is asleep at the wheel, or that maybe God doesn’t even really exist. This was a question that often came up with some of my patients when I worked as a hospice chaplain. I remember a young 38-year-old mother, with a husband and an eleven-year-old son, who was dying of cancer. She said to me, “Some days I feel like Job. Why is God doing this to me?”

            She didn’t need a theological answer to her question of protest, and I didn’t give her one. I became quiet inside and tried my best to hear her pain and grief. My job was to listen with as much empathy as I could muster and let her have a good cry.

            The storm on the Sea of Galilee is a great metaphor for all the big challenges in life. Most of the time we feel unprepared for these storms—like the death of a parent or spouse or a child, or losing a job or a house, or going through a divorce, or being hurt in a car accident, having a heart attack, facing a cancer diagnosis, or a losing everything in a forest fire. The possibilities for disaster are endless.

            It is often tempting to seek a solution in simplistic, Pollyanna terms: “When Jesus is in your boat, the boat won't sink, and the storm won't last forever!” Unfortunately, this is not always true. Just ask to people of Gaza.

            I once visited a woman in hospice whose husband was dying. She was deeply upset not just because her husband was dying but was offended by the fact that he was mortal. I tried to comfort her and at some point said softly, “Even Jesus had to die…” She was indignant, “Jesus died so we wouldn’t have to.” And she meant this literally.

             Bad things DO happen to good people. Storms and tornadoes destroy people’s lives. Fatal accidents happen. A barge loses power and knocks down the Francis Scott Key Bridge killing six workers. People get cancer and die. We humans are mortal. More than anyone, Jesus knows this.

            It takes a great deal of courage to have faith in the midst of whatever storm we are facing. The writer Dorothy Bernard said it this way: “Courage is fear that has said its prayers.

            How do we find faith in the midst of the storm, when life is at its toughest?  First of all, I think we need to accept the facts about what is happening to us. As they say in AA, “Denial is not a place in Egypt.”  When things get rough, the human reaction is to bury our heads in the sand and to deny or pretend that things aren’t really that bad.

            Even after the Titanic hit the iceberg, the ship’s captain refused to believe the ship was in trouble until the water was ankle deep in the mail room. Only then was it clear to him that the hull had been pierced and the “unsinkable ship” was going to sink. If he had faced the facts sooner, distress calls for help could have been telegraphed sooner and more passengers could have been saved before it was too late.

            So when we find ourselves in the middle of a storm and DO see exactly how big it is, what do we do?  First of all, don’t be surprised. The Gospel tells us that following Jesus or even just living a good life, does not deliver us a storm-free existence. (This is not exactly good news…)

            The good news is that Christ does not save us from the storm but in the storm.

            Most times in life, we think we are captains of our own ship, managers of our own destiny by sheer force of will. We can change jobs, move house, we change partners, but sometimes, when we try to fix things nothing happens, or sadder yet, things get worse.

            Recently, I learned there is a German word for that: “schlimmbesserung”. The literal translation in English means "disimprovement" or "worse improving"—like when you try to make something a better but end up messing the whole thing up. Like my father who tried to jibe but ended up clinging to the rudder for dear life.

             So here Jesus comes into the middle of a storm, perhaps the perfect storm, a storm beyond the skills of these professional sailors. He stands up to the storm and says, “Peace! Be still!” Be still—to the storm—and to us.

             Barbara Brown-Taylor reminds us in her book The Preaching Life: “Faith and fear are not opposites. The storm terrified the disciples; Jesus’ stopping the storm terrified them more. Perhaps this is the point too. You have to pick your fears. Faith is not some well-fluffed nest or a well-defended castle high on a hill. It’s more like a rope bridge over a scenic gorge, sturdy but swinging back and forth, with plenty of light and plenty of air but seemingly precious little to hang onto except the stories you have heard about it: that it is the best and only way across, that it is possible and that it will bear your weight. You can get across. All you have to do is believe in the bridge more than you believe in the gorge.”[1]

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                                     The Lighthouse Keeper, © Jean Guichard, 1989

                                                              Inspirational Quotes

“The storm hits the lonely tree more strongly!”― Mehmet Murat Ildan, Turkish playwright and novelist

     MAYBE 
by Mary Oliver

Sweet Jesus, talking
his melancholy madness,
stood up in the boat
and the sea lay down
silky and sorry.
So everybody was saved
that night
But you know how it is

when something
different crosses
the threshold - the uncles
mutter together,

the women walk away,
the young brother begins
to sharpen his knife.
Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes
like the wind over the water -
sometimes, for days
you don't think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,
after the multitude was fed,
one of two of them felt
the soul slip forth

like a tremor of pure sunlight
before exhaustion,
that wants to swallow everything,
gripped their bones and left them

miserable and sleepy.
As they are now, forgetting
how the wind tore at the sails
before he rose and talked to it—
tender and luminous and demanding
as he always was—
a thousand times more frightening
than the killer sea.[2]

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1) Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Lanham: Cowley Publication, 1993) 94.

[2] Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press,) 97.