“And he awoke and
rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" And the
wind ceased, and there was a great calm." St. Mark 4:39
In the
Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
The monument stood right at the
waterfront, eight columns of black granite, each year followed by name upon
name. A central column was marked with
words taken from today’s Psalm: "Dedicated to the memory of those who have
gone down to the sea in ships and who have never returned and as a tribute to
those who continue to occupy their business in the great waters." The small city of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia,
where we vacationed a few summers ago, faces onto the North Atlantic. With a fine harbor, its wealth has long lay
in the region’s cod fisheries, the world’s most abundant for many generations.
But the sea takes its toll, as those
who live on it and by it know better than the rest of us. Fortunes have been made on the waters, but
they have brought awful tragedy as well.
I expect there was a member of every one of Lunenburg’s old families
carved on one of those granite columns.
He might have been a seasoned helmsman or maybe a fresh-faced boy who
found himself in the wrong place when the ever-unpredictable sea showed its
full fury. Even today, every sailor who
goes down to the dock passes by those names—a somber warning of the perils that
may lay ahead. The fisherman must learn to
respect the sea, to know his place before it.
It’s no wonder that all the ancient pagans had a god of the sea—and a
fierce one at that.
When Jesus boarded the boat that
night with His disciples, he was travelling with men like those Lunenburg
fishermen, men who had learned through hard experience to respect the power of
the sea. As far as we know, all of
Jesus’ original disciples were Galileans, and the abundant Sea of Galilee
dominated the geography and economy of the region. We know that at least four of the disciples
were professional fishermen, and many of the others would surely have grown up
around the water, working in the various trades that supported the fishermen’s
work.
Dramatic and unpredictable storms
remain common on the Sea of Galilee, and these men would have known family
members and friends who had perished in them.
They knew how to read the movement of the winds and how to balance and
steer the boat through uneven waters.
But this was no ordinary storm.
St. Mark called it a “great windstorm,” and the water was threatening to
swamp the boat, far from shore. The
disciples cried out to Jesus for help, in panic, sure they were soon to
perish.
This wasn’t the fretting of a group of
inexperienced weekend boatsmen. These
Galileans understood just how dangerous the situation really was. St. Mark doesn’t say, but I would guess they
had tried all their normal techniques, ran through all the old sailor’s adages,
before they turned to the son of an inland carpenter for help. Jesus was awakened at the moment of greatest
confusion, when all the familiar plans and tested solutions were proving
useless.
Jesus calms the sea immediately, speaking just a
few words: “Peace, be still.” And just like that, there is a great calm. The disciples, Saint Mark tells us, were
deeply frightened, full of awe. “Who is
this,” they say, “who commands even the winds and the sea?”
Who indeed, but God Himself, the Master of the
unruly seas. The miracle on the water
recalls creation itself, when the Spirit hovered over the watery abyss. There’s a memory too of the miracle at the
Red Sea, when God parted the waters and drew his people to freedom on dry
ground. In the Psalms, Israel’s God is
often acclaimed as the one “enthroned upon the waterfloods,” He whose force
cannot be broken by nature’s fiercest power.
Kneeling in the waterlogged boat, the disciples don’t confess all
this—not yet—but this miracle calls from them a fuller confession of faith than
anything else they have seen before. They
had heard some of Jesus’ teaching, and they had seen him heal and speak boldly
to the authorities. But to still the
sea, that speaks to men like this at an even deeper level. He stepped in when it had all really fallen
to pieces. Only God could work a miracle
like that.
We might assume that if we have Jesus with us in
the boat, it will keep the waves at bay.
But Jesus in the stern is not really like the rosary hanging from the
rear-view mirror, a good luck charm to ward away life’s perils. In fact, Jesus usually shows Himself to us
most clearly when things are going quite badly for us, when we can’t tell which
way we are headed, and all our own methods have proved useless.
If you’ve tried to live in this life with Him
for very long, you will remember moments when He seemed very much to be
sleeping through the storm, when you seemed to be staring death in the
face. Maybe it was physical death, or
instead something very much like it: the loss of your job, a painful division
in your family, betrayal by someone you deeply trusted. You were at the end of the rope, all that was
left to do was to turn to Him for help.
And then He showed Himself, stood up tall in the midst of the storm, and
an unexpected peace descended over the situation. You knew His presence, and you were assured
of His protection and guidance. Maybe
the physical situation didn’t even change, but you could see you would make it
through.
Today, we bring two young people through the
waters of Baptism into that new life in which Christ commits Himself to them
completely. The Baptismal liturgy
frankly acknowledges the presence of sin and death worked so deeply into the
fabric of this life. It recognizes that
faithfulness to these promises will be difficult, sustained only by the grace
of this Savior, who is alone is more powerful than the forces that would drag
us down. Baptism is no assurance of an
easy life, but the beginning of the great struggle. “Go forward Christian soldier, beneath His
banner true,” we will sing at the close of our service today, a fitting way to
send off these newly baptized boys into the way of discipleship.
This life in Christ will have times of confusion
and danger, when our desires are tested, and all our strategies prove
useless. That’s because these are the
times when we learn we cannot save ourselves, that all depends on the peace
that He alone can give. We are in the
boat together, but there only one Master of the unruly sea.
In the
Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
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