A Fourth Church Sermon by William A. C. Golderer

June 25, 2000 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

What Difference Would It Make?

William A. C. Golderer
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Joshua 1:1–9
Mark 4:35–41

I keep searching for shalom, drawing my water from one well after another—but still I thirst for the shower of blessing that is shalom. . . . I keep searching for shalom away from crowds and commotion, but peace and quiet don’t blot out the pain of broken hearts and broken bodies. I keep searching for shalom, standing in holy places, sitting among the saints. Surely in the sanctuary, I will find shalom. I keep searching for shalom but holy places are not magic. Good works and printed prayers do not guarantee shalom. Beyond cathedral walls and above ethereal music, the blaring din of death persists. Back in the streets the people still walk in darkness. I keep searching for shalom, but have I looked in all the wrong places?. . . Here in the streets I find shalom. Shalom lives, not in the sanctuary, but in the streets. . . in chaos. . . on a cross. In the face of Jesus is the peace that passes all understanding—shalom!

Ann Weems
Searching for Shalom

Gracious God. The seas of fear and anxiety churn night and day. The waves beat up against our fair boat and are scaring us to death. Arise within us Gracious God. Whisper in our hearts and tell us you are there. Unstop our ears, Open our hearts, and Rivet our minds to your word to us this hour. Amen.

One of the things I most love about the Presbyterian Church is its strong commitment to ecumenism—the nurturing of relationships with other denominations which together make up the Christian Church. Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Roman Catholics all have commitments to try and work for unity in our life and work as Christ’s Church in the world. One of the ways we signal that commitment to each other is to agree on a liturgical calendar or lectionary which contains the readings from Scripture that churches around the world draw from each Sunday. Fourth Church’s preachers have a tradition of following the lectionary readings as a sign of this commitment to Christian unity.

While this is almost always a good thing, following the lectionary can often be a scary thing—some of the readings can be pretty obscure. And can make the job of the preacher pretty tortuous—trying to find anything that applies to a twenty-first century community.

This Sunday, thankfully, is not one of those times. The story we just heard from Mark’s gospel is a foundational story for the earliest Christian Church and we can find it prominently featured in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The reasons for this are not necessarily apparent from a cursory reading.

Martin Buber once commented that stories like this one are more than a report of a “once upon a time event.” Stories like these are themselves an event, Buber insisted. Because they have the quality of sacred action. The sacred essence to which the story bears witness continues to live in them. Stories like these testify to our experience. . . .

On the surface, this is a story about an unexpected storm on the sea which threatened the disciples and Jesus. But at a second and third listen, we hear a story about what is expected from faithful people when catastrophe strikes, and even more than that we hear a story about what we can expect from God when chaos and suffering are rampant.

To its first readers, even the story’s setting was significant. Its earliest readers would know that the disciples and Jesus were in for a rough ride once they set off onto the sea, because the “sea” has represented the realm in which the force of chaos reigns for thousands of years within the Judeo-Christian tradition.

You may remember that the opening lines of Genesis announce God’s bringing form to the world out of the “waters” of chaos. The sea has been symbolic of places and spaces where all that are threatening and fearsome thrives. It is onto this vast sea that Jesus and the disciples have embarked. For those keeping score, the home field advantage goes to the forces of darkness and despair.

Even if you didn’t know about the ancient symbolism of the sea representing the force of unrest and chaos, much of our literary culture has depicted a deep distrust about what lies beneath the water’s surface. Authors too numerous to name have made the open sea a setting in which randomness and unpredictability thrives.

Fast forwarding into the present day, even the most sophisticated navigation systems and state of the art ship-building materials, have done little to quiet the fears of the hydrophobic. Just this week in fact, Time Magazine’s inside, back cover pays tribute to

A Nonswimmer’s 25 Scariest Movies—with Jaws taking top honors as the film celebrates its twenty-fifth year of psychological torment and a clear warning to STAY OUT OF THE WATER!! if you know what is good for you.

The experience of an outburst of an unforeseen storm on the sea—with all of its terrifying force was used by Mark to conjure up experiences of devastating adversity currently being faced within his community of readers.

This story of the disciples’ disorientation and eventual panic from the storm resonated deep within the fledgling Christian Church because they could easily relate to being tossed around violently by their own circumstance. Reading some of the more graphic accounts of the early church’s persecution by Roman officials often makes the movie Gladiator seem as harmless as a Barney cartoon.

One reason this story was important to the early church was that it testified to the destructiveness of encounters with the force of chaos faced by God’s people. The story attests to the fact that being a follower of Christ does not liberate you from the experience of fear and suffering. This enabled the early church to not fault itself for its plight.

The helpfulness of this understanding is not just confined to its early listeners.

So often, the rationale preached for belief in God and the following of Christ amounts to the taking out of a celestial life insurance policy. The idea that if you believe enough in Jesus Christ, you will be spared these dark encounters with disease and despair. If you attend church, say your prayers, lead a Christian life, and of course loosen your purse strings, your ship will be able circumvent the storms. That is a notion for which a Biblical basis is tough to find.

None of God’s faithful people, not one, escapes these kind of storms faced by the disciples. Not Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Ruth, Naomi—not Paul or John the Baptist. All of them traveled perilous seas.

If anything, their faithfulness, their striving to live in accordance with God’s purpose for their lives, brought them through more stormy weather—not less.

Another striking feature of the story is the way in which the reaction of the disciples--namely their fear of the storm—is acknowledged—even embraced by the story.

The fierceness of the storm’s description helps us share in their terror and perhaps acknowledge our own.

Just then, Mark writes, a great windstorm arose, and the waves that were kicked up beat up into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped.

You can almost see the disciples with their beards soaked by the sea-spray—all of them being tossed about by the force of the waves.

They are terrified and for these men, four of whom were fishermen by trade and had probably seen a storm or two before, this one must have packed a pretty good wallop.

What was helpful to the earliest Christians is helpful today—namely, the story acknowledges that some of the things they and we encounter during our lives together are terrifying.

I am comforted knowing that there were no superheroes among the first disciples—in fact, one scholar once said that the people God chose as disciples are not people you would want your children to grow up to resemble. If that is too much, it is fair to say, that being closer to Jesus in historical proximity doesn’t make you more courageous. What scares us? would scare the first disciples.

The acclaimed poet Donald Hall recently released a moving account of his battle with cancer. In the first chapter he recalls the morning when a young doctor with thick glasses cleared his throat before telling him that he had colon cancer, which had metastasized, to his liver. He was given a chance of less than one in three to live. He writes movingly of the time when he was left to feel the full impact of this storm of circumstance when he wrote,

“For weeks after my first operation—frail and without energy, sleeping 10 hours at a time, I looked in my house at all the books I had not read and wept for my inability to read them, and at all the great books I had read too quickly in my avidity—telling myself I would return to them later. There is never a later, but for most of my life I have believed in later! I admit it. . . . I am really afraid.”

Some scholars have suggested, wrongly I might add, that Jesus is angered by the disciples’ fear of the storm. No. Jesus is angered that this storm has led the disciples to question Jesus’ faithfulness to them. Jesus is angry because their fear has led them to doubt his power to bring deep peacefulness out of the chaos all around them. In this moment, their fear is their Lord not him!

Naturally, the jarring blows of storms will result in fear and doubt and questioning of God. But the trouble begins when panic takes hold—and we either presume God’s indifference or act as though our deliverance is up to us—that God is not and cannot be Lord of the danger and our fear.

When that panic takes hold, that’s when we go off course.

Nowhere is this panic more obvious than in the storms raging currently in the life of the Church. Today, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the highest governing body of the denomination, convenes to deliberate and act upon the most pressing issues confronting the church.

This presents an opportunity for the church to direct the energies of its people toward responding to the storms impacting God’s people everyday.

These storms are fierce and seem to be gaining strength—the AIDS epidemic in Africa, insufficient health care coverage for fully 25 percent of Americans, and these storms are not only affecting the body—there exists a rampant societal disregard for Sabbath observance—which threatens to consume all of our energy and time with work and more work.

These are storms which have power to strip God’s people of their hope and cause them to despair. They need our attention and resources.

What are we doing instead? After a depressing conversation with a delegate to the General Assembly this week, I learned that fully 40 percent of the business to come before the highest elective body of our church concern not any one of the aforementioned issues, but legislation which advocates for the exclusion of gay men and lesbians from full participation in the life and work of the Presbyterian Church.

Why? I can only guess this is fueled by widespread statistics of this church’s decline in membership and influence in society and that this possibility has sent many who love the church into a panic. The scurrying about for suitable scapegoats seems hardly the best way to navigate the storms of decline.

Should a ship throw some of the passengers overboard or at least escort them below deck, out of site and out of the way if it is going down? What good that does I am not sure. It is depressing when the church’s panic moves result in actions indistinguishable from the Darwinian premise of the show Survivor.

Perhaps if we don’t pay as much attention to the problems afflicting God’s people, and instead rid the church of people who differ from us—then we will survive and thrive again as a church. I can’t help thinking the effects of fear for our survival have caused us to go off course.

All of this has led me to wonder what effect a return to the promises proclaimed in this story would have on the church and on our lives.

What would happen if the promise of this story informed all that we do as Christ’s Church? I think that is exactly what Mark had hoped for when he told this story. That the fledgling church would take its promises to heart and take them to its people.

What difference would that make, do you think, if we oriented all we do around the promises of this story? If the Church was really confident that God was present in the storms of people’s lives, it couldn’t help but see them through that time. The church would honor each person’s fear, but urge all of us on to understand life as a gift to be received with gratitude and a task to be pursued with courage as our Presbyterian Confessions affirm.

I think the world would see a church that places its confidence not in its own ability to be relevant or spectacular or self-sufficient. It would instead see a church that places its confidence solely in the One whom the wind and sea obeys. It would be a church that fully trusts Christ’s power to navigate all of us through adversity and this church would be bold to venture out into the chaos—taking on the storms that cause people to lose hope. It would never content itself to be docked in safe waters.

The world would see a church that works to extend the well-being and peace that Jesus brought to the sea to everyone—it would be affirming of each and all—not just the ones that it finds pleasing to itself, but embracing of those whom God cherishes—namely all of us!

It would take up the work described by Barbara Brown Taylor, who urges the church to be a community in which God can work to save people from meaninglessness, by reminding them whom they are and what they are here for.

The church exists, she says, so that God has a place to point people toward purpose as big as their capabilities and to help them identify all the ways they flee from that high call.

The church that believes the promise of this story will be a place where people can repent of their fear, their hardness of heart, their isolation and loss of vision and where, having turned in repentance, they are restored to the fullness of life.

What a difference it would make for our church if we lived in these promises—that God is present in storms of circumstance and that Jesus is Lord over chaos!

How about for you? What difference would it make in your life if the truth of this story was able to dwell within you and take hold of your life? What difference would it make?

This is also something Mark is concerned about, I think. Whenever you encounter a miracle story like this about the suspension of the natural order by Jesus, it is tempting to tune it out or to ask certain questions which are ultimately unhelpful in understanding the purpose of the story.

To ask of this story: Did this happen exactly in this way? is to miss the point. The story does little to marshal evidence to convince you of its factuality. No corroborating witnesses are given except those on board the boat.

No, the aim of the story is far more ambitious than that. The story is trying to ground you, as it grounded its first readers, in an unwavering, unfaltering relationship of trust with a living God who reigns over all that causes you to be afraid in your life.

The story makes a plea that your living be infused with trust in God. That you persist in your faith and never lose heart.

It presents a portrait of the God who, out of passionate concern for all, was subjected to the worst of the chaos of this world and did not emerge from it unscathed. This God, this Jesus, emerged as risen with holes in his hands and side.

If you believed this were really true, what difference would it make?

It might mean that you would think that discipleship is about more than pious observances, consistently polite language, and even more than weekly attendance at church—it is about living life courageously in accordance with what God intends for you to be—no matter what the cost to you.

It would mean that you would have confidence in God above all—not in your own ability—not in your accumulated wealth.

Rather, your confidence would be in the one who is lying in the stern of the boat, who raises his head when you ask for help.

None who follow him onto the sea are promised safety or success or a smooth road—only that Christ is faithful and that God is Lord of all. There is no storm, no power, no principality, no thing in life or in death which can separate us from God’s steadfast love.

What difference would it make if you could take that to heart?

Would you brave the open sea? Remain joyful in circumstances you know to be desperate? Sacrifice some of your own happiness that another might live more fully? Love your friends unambivalently? Honor your parents? Welcome the stranger? Encourage the despairing? Savor the commonplace? Give thanks to God always and without ceasing?

For creating you—for loving you—for seeing you through every storm—every thing that causes you to fear or lose hope.

To live in this promise
transcends the logical
Eclipses the rational
Outpaces the sensible, safe way.

It is who we are called to be—what a difference we could make if we could just believe.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.