Sermon, Proper 7, Year B, 2024
“Christ Asleep in His Boat”, Jules Joseph Meynier (1826-1903)
Do you ever wonder “Why?” and get frustrated with God when life is a struggle and you find yourself in a metaphorical storm tossed boat, wondering if you’ll survive?
In today’s Old Testament reading, Job, a good man, has had his world fall apart and has lost everything, even though he has lived a good and righteous life. Job bitterly complains to God and accuses God of not hearing his cries.
We heard the beginning of what God has to say to Job in today’s Old Testament reading. God speaks to Job out of a whirlwind and wants to know if Job can explain how creation is put together. We could probably explain more than Job, because we can see God’s hand at work in the world around us and we have the ever-increasing knowledge gained by “probing the mysteries of God’s creation,” as a prayer in The Book of Common Prayer states. But still, in the end, only God knows how everything fits together and why things unfold in the ways that they do. Only God has the big picture. And only God has the answers.
Only God, the Creator and Maker of all things, can answer the “whys” of this life. Only God knows why bad things happen to good people. Only God knows the whole story of why bad things happen, or why anything happens.
In today’s gospel reading, the disciples didn’t even have time to wonder why the windstorm blew up so suddenly and waves were filling the boat and their lives were at risk. And there was Jesus, asleep in the stern, oblivious to their distress. So they cried out, “Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?” Just like Job, crying out to God, “I cry to you and you do not answer me; I stand, and you merely look at me.”
The disciples hadn’t even figured out that they were crying out to God when they called out to Jesus. They didn’t even ask Jesus to save them. They just wanted to know that he cared about their distress. “Don’t you even care?”
By this time, the disciples had witnessed Jesus casting out demons, healing lepers and paralytics and others, they had heard his teachings, and his discussions with the scribes and Pharisees. They had heard Jesus talk about his true family. They had all decided to follow him. But they still didn’t get it! They didn’t ask Jesus to end the storm, but only to wake up and care about their situation.
When Jesus wakes up, Jesus does even more than care, to be awake with them in their distress, bailing water out of the boat alongside them. Jesus speaks to the wind and the sea, and says, “Peace, be still!”
And then, disappointed that his closest followers STILL don’t get it, he says to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”
The disciples, full of awe, say to one another, “Who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
At some point in our lives, every one of us will find ourselves in a storm-tossed boat—a great metaphor for the hard times in our lives, when a loved one is suffering and death is inevitable, when unexpected tragedies happen that directly affect and irrevocably change our lives, when we face the physical challenges of living in our mortal bodies, when something we’ve worked and struggled for falls apart in our hands, even when we suffer from feelings of complete helplessness as we watch others suffering and we can’t do a thing about it, and we find ourselves, like the disciples, wondering whether or not God even cares about our desperate situations. We may even wonder if God even cares at all.
We go over and over whatever it is in our minds, worrying it to death. “Why, God?” we ask. Sometimes we can justify what is happening, but more often, our “why” questions, like Job’s, don’t have an answer that we can figure out on our own. Why do bad things happen to us, to others, WHY? Even if we believe in God, we may find ourselves doubting that God could possibly care about what is going on in this world, much less about us.
Today’s readings are completely straightforward and address our doubts. We, like Job, like the psalmist, like Paul, and like the disciples, will all struggle simply to hold on at some point. Today’s readings ask us to go beyond the fear and the why questions, and to pray as people of faith.
Both Job and the psalmist prayed, knowing that God is good, that God’s mercy endures forever, and that God is just. So these people of faith, when finding themselves in trouble, believed that God would answer based on who God is. As the psalmist puts it, “They cried to the Lord in their trouble, and God delivered them from their distress. He stilled the storm to a whisper and quieted the waves of the sea. They were glad because of the calm and he brought them to the harbor that they were bound for.”
As people of faith, we can trust that God will deliver us from our distress. And scripture asks us to consider how God has ALREADY shown, from the beginning of time, that God does indeed care and that God is always working for our deliverance. Then we can think back on the storm-tossed times we’ve already endured in our lives and can see in retrospect that God’s hand was at work even when we, with our limited understanding, couldn’t figure out whether or not God was even there at all. But over and over in scripture, we find that God really does care for us.
In today’s reading from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul asks the Corinthians to open wide their hearts, for his heart is open wide to them. I like this statement because it says something to me about how God feels about each of us.
There is no restriction in God’s affections for us. God’s heart is wide open to us. Always, without limit. God’s love knows no bounds. As Christians, we know that God was even willing to live and die as one of us and to invite us to abide in God’s love so that God could show us without question that God’s love for us is infinite.
So we can open our hearts wide, with no restrictions, to God.
And when we open our hearts, with no restrictions, to God, we can open our hearts, without limit, to the trials and tribulations of this life, with confidence in God’s limitless love. We can proceed with the assurance that God is not only with us, but that God will still the storm and bring us to the harbor that we are bound for, and that harbor is to rest in God, in this lifetime and the next.
God’s timing is a mystery that we will never understand. God will always answer our prayers for deliverance, but God will answer our prayers in God’s time, and in God’s way, which may not be in our time or in our way. It’s hard to open our hearts to mystery, to open our hearts when the storm doesn’t go away, when the storm tossed boat is where we find ourselves day after day after day even as we have confidence in God and cry out in faith. How do we open our hearts to God and to one another when the storm doesn’t go away? The following words of Dr Martin Luther King Jr are helpful here.
The Rev. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. was a person with an open heart for God, a person who could see in his dreams the safe harbor of justice, freedom, and equality for all in this nation. King knew that the safe harbor for his people was still far away, and the winds of prejudice and the waves of injustice continued to rage, and that he was in a storm-tossed boat with his people. King had been imprisoned, and he knew that his work for equality was dangerous work, and that he could be killed, and we know that he was indeed murdered. But rather than to cower in fear and in anger, Martin Luther King had his heart open to the storm itself because his heart was completely open to God, and he believed in God’s power over that storm.
King gives us a way to respond in faith to these ongoing storms in our lives when the safe harbor for which we are bound seems to be only a dream. These words of King appeared in the Friday, June 21st, Center for Action and Contemplation’s Daily meditation, which you’ve heard me refer to in various sermons over the years. If you have time to read the whole meditation, I recommend it. You can find the link in my sermon to the online meditation Read this meditation on cac.org.
In reference to the storms in our lives that are ongoing, King asks, “What, then, is the answer?”
He goes on to say, “The answer lies in our willing acceptance of unwanted and unfortunate circumstances even as we still cling to a radiant hope…. This is not the grim, bitter acceptance of the fatalist but the achievement found in Jeremiah’s words, ‘This is a grief, and I must bear it’ [Jeremiah 10:19].
“Almost anything that happens to us may be woven into the purposes of God. It may lengthen our cords of sympathy. It may break our self-centered pride. The cross, which was willed by wicked men, was woven by God into the tapestry of world redemption.
“How familiar is Paul’s experience of longing for Spain and settling for a Roman prison, and how less familiar the transforming of the broken remains of a disappointed expectation into opportunities to serve God’s purpose! Yet powerful living always involves such victories over one’s own soul and one’s situation.
“Some of us, of course, will die without having received the realization of freedom, but we must continue to sail on our charted course. We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope. Only in this way shall we live without the fatigue of bitterness and the drain of resentment.”
King reminds us that only in this way shall we live without doubting and limiting what God is doing to bring all of creation to safe harbor, to the restoration of peace, to all of us abiding in love in God and with one another.
We can move beyond praying “Why, God?” or “Don’t you even care, God?” We can lay down our fear and to take up our faith–
To live with radiant and infinite hope in God, even in the finite storms of our lives, knowing that in the end, God the creator and maker of all things, is in the boat with us, and will redeem us and restore us and will bring us home to the safe harbor for which we have set sail.