storms – By Another Road

Here, Here: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 9 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 14:22-33.

About halfway across the lake, I knew we should never have gotten into the boat.

It was late December, and my mom and I were traveling through the mountain highlands of Guatemala, where she was living at the time, teaching in an international school in the capital city. Just after Christmas, we’d made the popular trip up to Lake Atitlán, one of the most beautiful lakes in the world. Its deep waters are flanked by precipitously high volcanic mountainsides, and there are small villages sprinkled along the shore, and one afternoon we found ourselves needing to cross over to the other side.

And so we got into the boat.

It was a lancha, a small motorboat used regularly as a water taxi across the lake since the mountain roads are narrow and dangerous in that area. And at first, the trip was lovely—the broad blue water, the high clouds and the breeze and the green slopes arcing upward into the vault of the sky.

But somewhere about halfway across, far too late to turn back, the choppy waves started to turn into swells, and the boat was tossed around and water started coming over the low sides, and I realized three things at once.

First, we were the only two passengers on this boat, when usually they should be packed with people. Second, I saw no lifejackets. And third, as I looked around us across the wide, turbulent waters, there were no other boats making the crossing. We were alone. And the landscape that had looked beautiful and exciting just a few minutes prior was suddenly wild and terrible and we were very, very small upon it.

If you’ve ever had a moment where you had to stare your own mortality in the face, perhaps you can imagine the hollow-in-your-belly, eyes-wide-open feeling that hits you when there is no illusion of safety left to hide behind, and there is only you and this moment and the terrible, fearsome power of being alive and wanting to stay that way.

And if you can imagine this, then you can also imagine what the disciples are going through this morning in our Gospel reading.

Because they are in their own little lancha, crossing to the other side of a stormy lake. We focus a lot on Peter’s part, but we shouldn’t skip past that initial, understandable feeling of terror as the waves tossed them around in the boat. We might even wonder whether they felt a little betrayed—didn’t Jesus tell them to make this crossing? Why would he send them out and leave them alone in this dangerous place?

It is the perplexity that comes when we realize a godly life is no guarantee of a comfortable life.

Because ultimately, friends—and you probably don’t need me to tell you this—we can all be very good little boys and girls, we can follow all the Lord’s commandments, and yet we will all end up in the lancha at some point in our lives—we all find ourselves in a moment when the waves are high and the sides of the boat are low and we forgot our lifejacket somewhere and it is far too late to turn back.

It may come in the form of a death or a divorce or a diagnosis or simply a sense of lostness, loneliness or regret. But we all end up there eventually. As do communities and countries, in their own cycles of flourishing and floundering. We cannot evade the storm forever. We pray to God, lead us not into temptation, but oh, the tempests still come of their own accord.

And when they do come…this is where a lot of popular takes on Christian theology sort of fall apart for me.

Have you ever been in the middle of a really hard moment or season of your life and heard it said: don’t worry! Just have more faith! Just pray a little harder! God won’t give you more than you can take! And they might even cite Gospel stories like today’s. You of little faith, why did you doubt?

It’s the spiritual equivalent of someone giving you a pat on the head and saying “there, there.” There, there, you’re overreacting. There, there, everything works out for the best. There, there, don’t rock the boat. Don’t disturb the peace for the rest of us, those of us who are trying really hard to pretend the storms only come for somebody else. There, there.

I don’t have much use for that type of Christian comfort.

Because our story today indicates something far more profound than a pat on the head. In stories like this, God does not say, there, there. No, to the disciples, Jesus says, here, here. He says I am here, here with you, in the midst of the worst. I am here, here, precisely where you didn’t want to end up. I am here, when the waves are too high and your heart is breaking and you have nothing left to hide behind. I am here, here, right here, and I am asking you to be here with me, too.

As we mature, we come to see that entering the storm is not an impediment to following Jesus. It is a requirement of following Jesus.

Because faith is about looking hard at life and choosing to revere its often frightening beauty. It’s about holding onto each other through the rise and fall of the times. Faith is about facing the darkness and speaking peace into it. It is about standing in the storms we prayed would never come and still whispering words of trust on our trembling lips.

And when we do…here, here, God says. Life and death and heaven and earth are here, here, now. Come out and stand here with me.

Why? What does it do for us?

Well, for one, it makes us vividly grateful. Some of the times I have felt closest to God and neighbor were not the good times, but the tough ones. Facing the storm also makes us, hopefully, less petty and critical of one another, a bit gentler with them and with ourselves, too, because we realize that we are all just in this little lancha together, making our way through the waves.

And hopefully that helps us get clear on the things that matter most and choosing them, day by day. The things that Jesus constantly shows us: Mercy. Compassion. Ethical clarity. Charity of heart and generosity of spirit. Careful discernment and bold conviction that love is the only truly saving power there is. These are virtues born of the storms of life, not the avoidance of them. Here, here, where it is indeed possible to sink beneath the waves, is the only place you can learn them.

You might wonder why I haven’t dwelt much on the fact that Jesus walks on water. That’s usually the headline of this story. But it can be a stumbling block, too, because I think we tend to equate walking on water with somehow transcending the problems and the limitations of this life and thinking that’s what Christian life is about—that having “enough” faith will allow us to escape the waves, to never sink.

But if you hear nothing else today, I need you to hear this. I need you to remember something important about Jesus. Something radical and transformational in my understanding of him. Something that is the opposite of a pat on the head and a “there, there” and a blithe dismissal of the storm.

It is this: Jesus does sink beneath the waves. Not here, but soon, he sinks. On the Cross, amid the tempest of our brokenness and rage, he willingly sinks.

He surrenders to the storm. He gives himself over to the chaos and descends down, down, into the deepest places of fear and sorrow. He goes down, down, down…all so that he can say to you, here, here.

Oh yes, even here, I am here. There is nowhere I will not go for you, to be with you, to find you, to bring you back, even from the very bottom.

Walking on water is a wonder. But you of little faith, why did you doubt that even if you do sink, I will be there. Wherever you go, I am already with you.

As for my Guatemala story, you can guess the ending—we made it to the other side. The lancha managed to ride the swells and we got off, seasick and teary-eyed, weak-kneed and deliriously grateful. The meal we ate that night was, perhaps, the most joyful meal I ever experienced, because it tasted like life.

And that, when you think on it, is the journey for us on this Jesus-shaped path.

We face death, and we taste life.

We huddle together among the waves and we stumble, wide-eyed, onto the shore.

We are passengers on the ship of grace, you and I, and some days we have enough faith and many days we have not nearly enough, but somehow, somehow, God keeps showing up anyway.

And he says, always, the same thing. The one true thing that can always be said of God and by God, no matter how high the waves get:

Here, here. I am here.

Photographs

A sermon preached on the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, June 23, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 4:35-41.

My fiancé, Matt, and I have been in the process of moving into our new apartment over the past few weeks, and combining all of our belongings and finding space for all of our stuff is an adventure. As with any time you move, we are realizing how much stuff we all carry around with us as we go through life. And some of that stuff can be pared down or donated or sold, but there are always those things that you hold onto, no matter what. And among these, probably for almost all of us, are boxes of old photos.

I have a big plastic tub of family photos that I keep swearing I’m going to sort through and organize…and I’ve been saying this for the past 15 years. Every so often, usually when I move, I will drag out that tub and open the lid and gasp in horror at the mixed up stacks and envelopes. Then I close it up and slowly back away.

But I could never give them up, of course, because our photos are valuable in a different sort of way than other belongings. They are like a pathway through the forest of memory that thickens as we grow older… a pathway that guides us back to other homes, other times, other faces, other versions of ourselves that would otherwise be lost from view in the shadow of the passing years. We pull them out to show others—and ourselves—all that we have known, all that we have been.

In my own collection, I see many things. Here is my mother, sitting on the back of a pony when she was two years old..land here is my father as a young man, laughing in his college dorm room…and here is my great-grandmother, her smiling face obscured by a wide brimmed hat in the summer heat, and here—oh goodness—here is a child that was once me, dancing on the sand on some forgotten beach, yelling something into the wind.

Memories and mysteries, all of these photos. Perhaps we carry them with us, wherever we go, both to remind ourselves of where we’ve come from and to reassure ourselves that whatever we have become, we were also, this. And this, and this. And that life is, somehow, holding together all these layers, finding the truth not in any one picture, but somewhere in the sum of them, in the shape of what they reveal.

It might sound odd, but I think it’s helpful to think of Scripture the same way, almost like a box of jumbled snapshots. Because our sacred texts, too, are repositories of memory and mystery, and just like a single photograph, no single Scripture passage can ever reveal the whole truth about the life of God. Remember that when someone tries to cherry-pick a verse to use against…whomever. No, we must gather all of these verses together, all these little glimpses of God’s face, and ponder the bigger story they tell.

With this in mind, then, I think the most striking image of God’s face we are handed this week is Jesus asleep in the storm-tossed boat, his disciples as panicked and furious as the sea itself. You can practically close your eyes and see it. So let’s pull that one out of the box and ponder it together, shall we?

It is dark. Bands of rain and wind are lashing against a small boat on a stormy sea. The disciples are looking at their teacher, sleeping in the tumult, and they are bewildered—they can’t begin to imagine why Jesus isn’t awake, why he isn’t helping them fix the situation, giving them direction, something, anything. And so they wake him up and, at a word, he uses his mighty power to still the storm.

Is it easy to see what’s going on here? Just a scary storm and a God who will make it stop? Look a bit closer.

As is often the case, there is much more to this image than what immediately meets the eye. Because it’s interesting—Jesus, after calming the wind and the waves, doesn’t look at them and offer soothing reassurance. He doesn’t say what we might expect God would say, “there, there, I fixed it for you, don’t worry, you’re fine.”

No. Instead, a better Greek translation of his words to them might be, “why are you so timid? Do you not trust?” And the Gospel says then, and only then, after the storm, that the disciples “ephobethesan phobon megan” — they feared with a great fear — not because of the storm, but because of the One who stilled it.

You see, in that moment, the disciples have a brief encounter with enlightenment—they realize, right then, that Jesus is more than just a sleeping teacher who can fix their problems—more, even, than the prophetic miracle worker they’d been following around.

You might say that it was as though a collection of old photos suddenly appeared before them, and for the first time they could really see Jesus—all of him—and there he was, sitting on the back of a donkey, escaping to Egypt with his mother. And there he was, laughing as a young man in the Temple, astounding the scribes in his Father’s house. And there he was, dancing on the sand of some forgotten wilderness, rebuking the temptations of Satan, yelling something into the wind. And there he was, too, even farther back, before time and image and memory itself, the Eternal Son, like light looking up from the brim of deep darkness–the original Creator of the water and the wind now riding with them on the waves.

And for them, in this moment, to see Jesus—to see all the images that make up who he is and what he is—is to realize that loving him and following him is not about fixing their problems..it is about re-creating the entire world in the image of Love.

We are the inheritors of that same encounter, you and I, that same collection of images. We, too, are reminded that Jesus will not remain the flat, convenient, utilitarian image that might suit us best.

If we want him to appear as a mere teacher, we must also discover that he is Lord. And if we want him to appear as the victorious one, we must also see that he is the crucified one. And if we want him to bless our health and our wealth, we will also find that he makes his home among the poor and the sick and the forgotten.

And he is all of these things–this whole jumbled stack of images, this whole collection of memories and mysteries–not to make our faith an impossible task, but to make impossible our tendency to render God in our own image–our propensity to make God as small as our own fears and misgivings. He asks, ‘why are you so timid?’ because he wants the disciples, and us, to see that God’s love is so much bigger than we can envision, so much bigger than our fear.

And so, even now, this Jesus asks us— today, here, in The Episcopal Church; here, in the United States; here, on a planet on fire; here among all of us who have tried to be diligent, polite, welcoming people of faith—he asks us, as we fear that the church is shrinking and the world is raging and the ship is sinking, he asks again, Why are you so timid?

Do we not trust that love is the strongest force on earth? Because it is.

Do we not believe that the world needs this good news more than anything else? Because it does.

Do we not feel that love raging in us like a storm of life giving water? Because it’s there, waiting to be set free.

And all of this—the storm of love and the memory and the mystery, and the countless revelations of eternity—if it is part of Jesus, we must let it become part of who we are, too. We must let this undaunted, unfaltering, fearless type of love become the shape of us, the sum of all the images we are, the precious treasure that we can never give away, no matter how many years go by.

And maybe, if we were to look for this in ourselves, and in others, we would brush up against enlightenment, too. Maybe we would see that every person we meet also carries with them a box of old photos. That they were once two years old on the back of a pony, or laughing with their friends or dancing on the sand or shouting into the wind or smiling in the light of the sun.

Maybe if we saw all of one another, we would be less timid, less overwhelmed by the storms we are navigating, because we would realize that Jesus isn’t asleep while the world falls apart. He is dreaming a new world into being and inviting us to dream with him. A world in which, instead of fearing with a great fear, we will love with a great love

It’s a beautiful image, isn’t it? I think I’ll hold onto it.