Have You Still No Faith?

Posted by Pr. Seth for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost
Texts: Job 38:1-11; 2 Corinthians 6:1-13; Mark 4:35-41

---

Reading this story, Mark is hoping we will laugh at the disciples a little bit. Sure the storm was powerful—it must have been if the seasoned fishermen are afraid—but they had JESUS in their boat! We know from the opening line of Mark’s gospel that he is “the Son of God;” and so we know that this little old storm is nothing he can’t handle. Mark sets us up to laugh at the silliness, the ignorance of these poor buffoons in the boat with Jesus. After the miracles they have seen and the parables he has just taught them, how can they still not trust him to keep them safe through the storm?

Mark wants us to laugh at them because as we laugh, we learn something about ourselves. The distance Mark creates between the disciples and us reinforces our own understanding of who Jesus is, of his power and his authority; so when we begin to sympathize with them, to understand the depth of their fear and why they felt it, we might see that same silliness, that same buffoonery in our own faithlessness and be able to grow into greater faith, perhaps even while laughing at ourselves a bit.

The disciples are right to fear the storm’s power: it could easily kill them. Their fear is a healthy response to the danger they are in. It is their lack of faith in Jesus’ ability to protect them that causes them to lose hope in their fear. As readers of Mark’s story, we know that Jesus has the power to calm the storm and save them; but Mark is challenging us to consider whether Jesus also has power to calm the storms we encounter and so to save us.
​
We all know that there are many types of storms that arise that do not involve literal wind and waves. Storms of despair in arise from troubled marriages and terminal illness; whirlpools of grief or depression may threaten to suck us into the abyss; political battles rage like thunder and lightning. In these past weeks, the fight over immigration policy has become a particularly heated topic that has tugged at our hearts and stoked the fires of outrage. When these storms arise, we find ourselves in the boat with the disciples, faced with the same problems. Where will we turn for salvation? In whom will we place our trust?

The easiest and most common response is to, like the disciples, give into fear. Whether we fear for our lives, for our safety, for our way of life, when we panic and believe that those things are perishing, we make foolish choices. Like the disciples, we look past the sleeping Jesus in the stern for deliverance. 

"The Wave" by Cindy Beals. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

In our fear we often look for scapegoats, for someone we can blame and throw out of the boat and sacrifice to the storm. The voices around us now tell us that all the problems we face are due to terrorists, to immigrants, to an ineffective Congress, to an autocratic president, to the Republicans, to the Democrats—but it’s all the same tired old trope: still the storm by sacrificing the guilty.
In our fear, we dehumanize those whom we deem to be dangerous—immigrants, for example—so that we can feel righteous as we respond to the threat they pose with “zero tolerance” in the name of safety. This kind of fear-mongering betrays a lack of faith in the one who is asleep in the boat with us. It relies upon fear to motivate and activate us in a way we do not trust reason or morality or common sense to do. 

​But when we look down on those who fear, when we laugh at them as we laugh at the disciples, write them off as cruel or heartless or ignorant or stupid, that is also a lack of faith. When we become unable to love people because they are flawed in a way that we have decided is evil, we become blind to the same flaws in ourselves. “God is love, everyone who loves is born of God and knows God,” John writes; but “those who say ‘I love God,’ and hate their siblings are liars; for those who do not love a sibling whom they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen.”  That lack of love is itself a lack of faith in God.
And so we are all guilty of faithlessness. To have faith in Christ means to trust Christ and to follow him even when the storm is raging. On the Sea of Galilee, the disciples learn that Jesus has power even over the wind and waves. The unasked question as Jesus draws ever nearer to Jerusalem and the cross is whether the disciples will use what they learned about Jesus in the storm to understand what is going to happen at Golgotha. 

​The cross is a continuation of this story in the boat: human beings, in our fear, seek salvation from everywhere but where we ought to be looking. At Golgotha, Jesus becomes the scapegoat: the Pharisees and priests think, “if only we can silence him, if only we can destroy him, our troubles will be solved;” but Jesus exposes how destructive and absurd and ultimately futile our fearful scapegoating is. From the cross he gives us an alternative. Instead of reacting out of fearful panic, instead of throwing around blame and attacking our problems with force and violence, Jesus shows us a way forward through perseverance, forgiveness, and love. The disciples learn today that Jesus has power over the storm of wind and waves; does he also have power over the storm of human sin and death? Again, with the benefit of hindsight, we know the answer; but the same question is posed to us: will we use what we learn in Mark’s story to navigate the storms and crosses that lie ahead of us? 

At Jerusalem, Jesus dies, yes; but in doing so he also reassures us that death holds no more danger than the wind and waves on the sea. With Jesus in the boat with us, we are assured that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

For even as humankind struck out in fear and hate to subdue and silence God, God in quiet and patient love used our very attack against God to reconcile us to God. In his death, Jesus shows us the power of love over hate and gives us more reason to love one another than we have to hate and fear each other: for now we can look at one another and see not just political ideologies or ethnicities or citizenship statuses, but people—people for whom Christ has given his own life.
Faith in God gives us the ability to see one another as God sees us. This is why our hearts break for people beset by war and oppressed by restrictive governments, for people fleeing their homes to seek a new start elsewhere, and for families separated at the border. God’s love for us allows us to see these people not as problems to be solved but siblings to be welcomed and cared for; not immigrants or terrorists or criminals, but people for whose lives Christ has died to save.

​That is why we get so angry at those who cannot see the same, why our insides churn and rage against those who would use Holy Scripture to justify such terrible mistreatment of those whom God loves. It’s really tempting to stand up here and denounce how terrible those people are for doing what they’ve done and talk about how wrong they are; but ultimately that is neither helpful nor loving, it only serves to divide us further. 

​That is where we fall off one side of the political spectrum to the right or to the left: when we begin talking about how wrong “they” are and how right “we” are; because we are all a little right and a little wrong. That is why we all need each other! God knows we need each other! That is why God wants us to be reconciled to one another, why Jesus died so that we could be reconciled to one another. Without being reconciled to one another, we cannot be reconciled to God.

In the mercy of Almighty God, Christ died for us while we were still sinners. The truth is that Jesus Christ died for Donald J. Trump. Jesus Christ died for Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions. To forget that truth, to let our anger and outrage give way to fear and hate, is to be as faithless as they, to dehumanize them in the same way that they have dehumanized the people at our borders. To forget truth that is to turn away from God.

Like those dear, befuddled disciples in the boat, too often when the winds rise and the waves roll our faith melts into puddles in our boots and we retreat back into the same animal fear that has ruled us for millennia. We may cower in the face of the storm, we may fear and hate and despise and reject, but Jesus does not. For as often as those disciples flunk faith, Jesus never sends them away, never gets fed up and leaves. He remains with them in the boat, all the way to Jerusalem and beyond.
That is why we finally trust in Jesus and not ourselves; not even the best or smartest or strongest among us. Trusting in Jesus to deliver us does not mean sitting on our hands waiting for God to do all the work. It means trusting Jesus enough to follow him, to carry our own crosses while striving for peace and justice for all who are oppressed; to suffer afflictions, hardships and calamities, to endure beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights and even hunger if that’s what it takes because we trust and hope that it is by loving and Jesus loves and doing as Jesus does that God’s kingdom may also come about in and through us.

Like fear, anger is not a sin; it is only when anger displaces hope that it becomes harmful. The hope we have is not in the capricious political will of narcissists or in the power of governments but in the powerful love of God that silences winds and stills waves and opens tombs. When our anger leads us not to fearfully condemn and dehumanize but instead to fearlessly love all of God’s beloved and to join in the work of bringing humanity together in the love of Christ, then our anger is not a sin but a sign; a sign of God’s kingdom breaking into the world.

This is the question Mark wants us to ponder about ourselves. We know that Jesus can still the storm. We know that Jesus turns his face toward Jerusalem and goes to love the unlovable, knowing that he will die. Knowing all that we know, having the benefit of hindsight, will we follow? Or have we still no faith?