5th Sunday after Pentecost – Proper 7 Year B – Bill Harkins
The Collect
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 loving kindness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.
The Gospel: 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?”
In the Name of the God of Creation who loves us all, Amen. Grace to you and peace, and welcome to Holy Family as wecontinue our journey into the season after Pentecost. It is a journey of trust, and of the challenges of being faithful. I was reminded this week by an old, dear friend of the words of TS Eliot, from Little Gidding: We shall not cease from exploration…And the end of all our exploring…Will be to arrive where we started …And know the place for the first time. These are such lovely, even hauntingly beautiful lines, and they remind us, dear one’s, that some journeys are less Odyssean than Abrahamic. Odysseus wanted nothing more than to return home to Ithaca, and Penelope, and all that he knew. Sarah and Abraham, on a journey of faith ending we know not where, arrived at a place they called home, and knew that place for the first time.
Today’s Gospel story might be seen as primarily about authority, or faith, or grace, or healing. It is, of course, about all of these. And as I thought about this story over the course of this past week, I began to place it in the context of our observance of Juneteenth, and I found myself wondering whether, in this age of polarization, systemic racism, and conflict, we have made much progress. On my more difficult days I identify with the disciples in the boat who are frightened, and feeling that things are out of control. I wonder if this is not the nature of many of our journeys. And I wonder when to trust God’s provenance, and let go of my need to control things I cannot control—a central theme of any 12-step process. Today’s Gospel prompts in me some very human questions about fear, and control, and trusting God. When do we allow our fears to inform and guide us to calmer seas, and when do we face our fears and proceed on the journey despite them?
A number of years ago I joined my sons on a trip to climb Mt. Baker, in the Northern Cascades. We spent several days on the mountain, training in glacier and crevasse techniques, preparing to summit this lovely jewel of the Cascades. On the day of our summit attempt, we arose at 2am, put on our crampons and roped in together, and began climbing up the glacier through the night. We came within 500 feet before encountering storms we saw moving in off the Pacific, and, after consulting with our wise guide, we made the group decision to return to camp. I was so disappointed, and told my sons as much the next day. Our older son, a gifted and experienced climber, said “Dad, the first rule of mountaineering is that you never intentionally climb into a storm. We made the right call.” His wise younger brother nodded his agreement. “Besides, he said, just look around.” And he was right. I had almost allowed my desire for the mountain top to blind me to the moment at hand. Mt. Baker, high above us, glistened in the sunlight and seemed alive after the storm—and indeed it was alive—and the Roosevelt-Deming glacier lay stretched out below us, glimmering like a sea of diamonds in the clear mountain air. The meadows spread around us fulsome with wildflowers, and marmots called from their mounds, alert sentinels in this glorious mountain aerie. For a while we were silent, listening only to the wind, and I was able to be fully present with my two sons. What I most needed was right there all along…connection, love, a small taste of heaven. And in order to see it, I needed to give up my over-functioning agenda. I needed to “deny myself” in order to find myself, and to be present with my sons.
The disciples were of course sailing into a storm, rather than climbing into one, and it would not be the last time. They must have thought “this is not exactly what I signed up for on this trip,” and, “what was I thinking?” When Jesus told them that he was to be rejected, abused, and even murdered, Peter rebuked Jesus. Peter could not imagine such a thing happening to a Messiah. Perhaps he envisioned the great and powerful things that Jesus would do when his “Messiah-ship” came to its fruition. Perhaps he imagined himself standing beside Jesus as a trusted assistant, sharing the glory. Surely, suffering was not a part of Peter’s dream for Jesus, or for himself or the others. And that humanity is, I suspect, one of the reasons we are drawn to Peter throughout the Gospel accounts. We can easily see ourselves acting likewise. We know that taking up one’s cross is no easy task. They were all weary, and afraid, and uncertain. Jesus asks that we become disciples too, and we have his promise that nothing can separate us from God’s love. I was focusing too much on myself and my agenda atop Mt. Baker. Perhaps the best way to “deny ourselves” as a form of spiritual discipline, is by getting ourselves off our hands, doing the work we have to do, handling our tasks joyfully so that when we are called to do God’s work our issues do not get in the way.
I think we made the right decision that day on Mt. Baker in returning to camp. But, I wonder, when is God calling us to proceed in the face of uncertainty, and risk, and possible danger? How do we know when to climb into the storm? In 1986-87 I was doing a chaplaincy internship at Egleston Children’s Hospital at Emory, now CHOA, and Vicky and I were trying to decide what to do next. I had been accepted to law school, and into a doctoral program in psychology and religion, and I hoped the year of chaplaincy training would help me decide. I was as confused as these choices might suggest. I had worked in a psychiatric hospital with children and adolescents, where Vicky and I met, before heading to Vanderbilt Divinity School, where I continued to study psychology and ethics, took a few courses at Vanderbilt law school, got my Master of Divinity degree, and pondered next steps. In late December of 1986 a small group of civil rights activists marched in Cumming, Georgia, to protest a long history of racist housing, economic, and educational practices in Forsyth County, and they were assaulted with rocks, bottles, and racial epithets. On January 25, upwards of 20,000 marchers filed into downtown Cumming in support of the first marchers, and I was among them. At one point we slowed to a standstill, and through the helmeted National Guard troops I saw a group of young white men, screaming at us words I cannot repeat here, and throwing rocks and bottles over the phalanx of troops.
They were looking at me and my colleagues, waving their Confederate flags—the flag of my own ancestors…one of whom was wounded at the Battle of Atlanta—and their faces were filled with rage. I remember feeling both scared, and a bit self-righteous, and I began to say things, in my heart, about them, that were just as uncharitable as those things they were saying to and about me. You can use your imagination here. And then I realized what I was doing. I was relegating these young men to the status of the “other”—just as they were doing to me—and I was engaging in the very behavior we were marching to protest…the very hatred and injustice that resulted in the Juneteenth narrative. If I called them “white trash”—and worse—was I not in fact committing in my heart the same injustices we sought to end by marching through the snow on that cold January day? I was. And this was hard for me to hear, even if I was the one saying it… maybe especially because I was saying it…to myself. And this revelatory self-reflection, this confession of things done and left undone, could not have happened had I not chosen to show up authentically on a stormy sea of epic proportions. I had to ask God’s forgiveness for this. I needed some healing, and I had to ask for it. I needed to ask Jesus to calm the sea of brokenness born of fear, just as the disciples in today’s Gospel.
Compassion means to do “Hesed”—love and justice—in relation to the suffering we encounter. It means to take action: and faith-in-action is the key here. This is different from “belief,” which is an act of intelligent assent only. “Faith”, however, is a verb—an act of the whole person. It is an attitude of wide-open, expectant trust that moves toward action. This is the same kind of both/and faith that impelled Jesus to calm the storm that day, and also to proceed into Jerusalem knowing full well what the outcome would be. I recall once in college, while on a track and field trip, the conditions were, frankly, awful. The track was old and poorly maintained. The infield, where field events would take place, was overgrown with tall grass, and pitted with rocks. We voiced our complaints to our coach whose true vocation was that of a classics professor at our college. He paused, and told us the story of runners from Crete who visited the island of Rhodes for competition. In similar fashion, they complained of the conditions of the playing field. Laconically, the Coach from Crete said, “Hic Rhodos, hic salta.” Translated, this simply means, “Now you are in Rhodes, you will do your jumping here.” Put another way, the writer Frederick Buechner has said that the grace of God means something like this: “Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party would not have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and difficult things will happen. Do not be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. I love you. There’s only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can by yours only if you’ll reach out and take it.”
Both of these desires occur in what my colleague Walter Brueggemann has called a “narrative of scarcity”…in which the past is barren of miracles and the only way to get anywhere is to invent and reinvent yourself and scramble for whatever you can get. A past without gifts and a future without hope give us a present as an arena for anxiety— anxiety endlessly stirred by those who generate the theology of scarcity. This anxiety paralyzes us so that we cannot act, and we do not reach out for the gift of grace that is ours. Let us go forth with courage my friends—with vitality and wonder—into the unknown new creation made possible by our saying “no” to a narrative of scarcity and anxiety, and “yes’ to the world to which the Gospel text points. It is a Resurrection world, in which there is meaning and hope in each of our lives and, yes, in each of our deaths, both small and large. On both that day on Mt. Baker, and in Forsyth County, I had to die a little to myself. I had to give up a self-righteous need to be “right,” and make a choice to be in relationship. I needed to be curious about what form that might take, but I was clear that name-calling and stereotyping was no longer an option, even if I believed I was on the right side of an issue. God promises that God’s word of love will be the last, best, and strongest word. God promises that God will make all of creation new, and that we will be a part of that new creation. Dr. King said that the moral arc of the universe is long, and bends toward justice. I hope that is true. In one of my favorite of his poems, a poem ultimately about resurrection, Wendell Berry says:
Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer’s end. In time’s maze
over fall fields, we name names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed’s marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
What we need for our long Pentecost journey is here, and when we find that place in ourselves of peace, and pay attention to this moment of grace, no matter the storm, we arrive back home, and know that place for the first time. What we need is here. Amen.