Job 38:1-11

Mark 4:35-41

We live in a creative tension between action and rest, between worry and hope, between fear and trust. Tension, of course, is what allows us to stand up and walk. It is not to be avoided. But we seek some kind of balance—never reaching some ideal state but always adjusting as we go along.

I think that here at the Congregational Church, we often favor action, worry, and, yes, fear. Again, none of these are bad or wrong. They are simply a part of the creative tension of our lives.

But when we habitually lean toward one pole rather than the other, we need to recognize that and make some adjustments.

We favor action. Wake us up in the middle of the night and we can recite scripture: “Faith without works is dead,” we will tell you. Get busy. Do something.

We worry. We worry about the future—about the more and more apparent effects of climate change. We worry about the present—about race relations and white privilege, about the situation of immigrants and refugees in our state, about growing income inequality and poverty in our city and in our nation.

And, yes, we can be fearful, afraid. Scripture tells us that “perfect love casts out all fear”—which is proof enough that our love has not yet been perfected. Since the election in 2016, members of all political stripe—and while it might not always seem this way, there are many different political views among our members and friends—have told me, and you’ve told each other, that you are fearful for our nation, our world. That fear has often driven my preaching over the last couple of years. That fear has informed our lives as individuals and our life as a congregation. There are times when that fear seems to be depleting us.

So I think we need to rebalance that creative tension in which we live, leaning more towards rest and hope and trust. It’s not easy. It won’t be—it can’t be and shouldn’t be—permanent.

We get some help in starting this process from an unlikely place—our paraments for these late spring and summer days.

Occasionally a visitor—or even a long-time member—will ask me, “What’s the reason for the anchor on the pulpit and the ship on the lectern?” It often happens when we change from the white of Easter and the red of Pentecost to the green of this long season after Pentecost. A couple of weeks ago the question arose as our Sunday morning adult education group was talking about the windows in our sanctuary. Someone brought up that window with the anchor. What the deal with that?

These are good questions. After all, in Iowa we’re more familiar with plows than anchors; we’re more familiar with tractors than ships. The sea we know best is the sea of grass. Why all the sailing imagery?

The sea and ship and anchor provided powerful symbols for the early Christians. The top part of an anchor shaped like a cross pointed to Jesus, the sure anchor in the midst of peril. The ship is shown on stormy waves, reminding the followers of Jesus that they were afloat together in difficult waters.

In our own time, the logo for the World Council of Churches continues to depict the church as a boat on a storm tossed sea with a cross for a mast. One example of its logo is on our bulletin this morning, along with the Greek word that is the source of our word “ecumenical.”

The symbols might seem a little out of place in Iowa, but they recall for us the experience of both early and contemporary followers of Jesus. All of us have experienced the waves beating up against the boat. We have felt the wind blowing cold on our faces.

Sometimes we are given warning that rough weather is approaching. At times we are caught unprepared.

To this day, I am told, even when the sky is perfectly clear, the usually calm waters of the Sea of Galilee can be suddenly and violently disrupted by the winds that are caught and compressed by the ravines on its shore.

And even today when the wind and rain become strong in Iowa, TV meteorologists and sirens both tell us to find shelter.

We aren’t surprised then, to hear the question asked by the disciples and still voiced by us today: “Do you not care?”

“Do you not care that we are perishing?”

A teenager in a confirmation class I once led in another church wrote: “They say God will always be with me, but is God really there? God was always supposed to help me in my life and be there for me when I fall. Along the way I have realized that God is not always there for you.”

Do you not care if we perish?

Some would say that these are words of doubt, indicating a suspicion that God either isn’t there or doesn’t care. Others would hear these words as a pathetic attempt to awaken God to our plight.

But even more, the cry, “Do you not care if we perish?” is a prayer from our hearts. It is said that we can only love something that can be threatened, endangered, or which could cease to exist altogether. This prayer, then, is a prayer of love, spoken in the face of life’s frightening fragility.

In the teenager who asks, “Does anyone care?” we can hear the message that life—their life, all life—should have meaning and the fear that it doesn’t.

We are frightened by the difficult and demanding situations that we face because we do care. We are restless and worried and fearful because we do love our neighbors as ourselves; because we do love our world and our nation and its people. When what we love is threatened, we cry out.

We know, too, from hard experience, that there are often no quick or easy ways through the storms. How we would like to get through all this rough weather as soon as possible! How we long to hear the “all clear” signal without much pain or difficulty!

The easy way through all of this for a preacher is to say that Jesus will handle it all, that he calmed the storms of Galilee and can calm the storms in our lives as well.

But for many—and maybe for you—the whole premise is rather shaky. It’s based on this story of a miracle—of Jesus rebuking the wind and saying to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And, we are told, the wind ceased and there was a great calm. Many would prefer simply to discount such an event altogether—dismissing reports of miracles as impossible fabrications.

You know that a contemporary scientific outlook can accept many strange, unexplained circumstances because such events, while extremely unlikely, are not impossible in principle. But it is not the unusual nature of the event that makes it a miracle. An event is a miracle only if it in some way points us toward God and what God is doing in the world. An event that was extremely unlikely—such as the calming of a storm, or the healing of someone for whom there was scarcely any hope—does not really provide any proof of God’s action.

It does, however, pose the question about God more urgently than other events.

This story of the calming of the storm is told to us who still live in or threatened by bad weather. We are not asked to believe something we might find difficult. Instead, we are invited to consider again just who is in charge, to consider again who is the final authority.

That last question asked by the disciples, that question asked among themselves—not posed to Jesus—is the important one. “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

Who then is this?

The Gospel of Mark does not present Jesus as one who must appeal to God to calm the storm. Rather, it is Jesus who speaks with the authority of the very Creator of the universe in saying “Peace! Be still!”

This, then, becomes a Christmas story in a sense—a story of incarnation. Jesus is God in the boat with us, riding the storm out. The storm is calmed as a reminder of who is in charge, not as a promise that things will always be dealt with in this way.

In this story we hear the good news we are never alone, never left to our own devices. We are never reliant on our actions, our hope, and our trust alone.

Christ is present and is at work in us and through us.

In faith we dare to state that, though the waters roar and foam, Christ is the One who calmed the sea, who showed God’s love for all humankind even to the cross. Christ is also the One who is with us in the face of regret over the past, in our present worries, and in our fears for tomorrow.

Again, I’m not simply saying let’s just leave it to Jesus to take care of all of this. As those who seek to follow in the way of Christ, we are called into the world.

But we can also rest.

We can also hope.

We can also trust.

We don’t live in isolation. We join together to speak to God’s love and to work toward the realm of God in the world. We join together to support each other, to offer encouragement. We find ourselves in the boat not only with one another but also with the One whom we follow, Christ who is in charge.

How else but together as Christ’s church can we expect to make any difference in the world?

What seemed impossible alone in the storm becomes, in our best moments, a way of life filled with the grace of God and love shared with other men, women, youth and children.

We sail together. At times the waves seem awfully high. At times the wind is very strong. But our mast is the cross. It points always to Christ who sails with us.

We brave the wind and waves, knowing that we are not alone as we ride out the storm.