Jesus sleeping through the storm

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Catherine's Wickford this morning:

With Jesus in the boat,
we can smile at the storm,
smile at the storm,
smile at the storm.
With Jesus in the boat,
we can smile at the storm
as we go sailing home.

Who remembers that old children’s chorus? It’s based on the idea that Jesus stills our storms enabling us to sail serenely through life until we weigh anchor in heaven. But to read this story in that way you have to ignore everything else that happens in the story in order to focus only on Jesus’ stilling of the storm which the song then makes normative for our Christian lives (Mark 4.35-41).

In other words, it ignores Jesus sleeping through the storm, the disciples panic in the storm, and Jesus’ rebuke of them for their lack of faith. It would be a very different song if it took on board the rest of the story, maybe something along these lines:

With Jesus asleep in the boat,
we can panic in the storm,
panic in the storm,
panic in the storm.
With Jesus asleep in the boat,
we can panic in the storm
as we go swiftly under.

We don’t like the idea that God might be sleeping on the job while we are going through crises, so we naturally concentrate on the moment when Jesus saves the day and make that part of the story the part that we teach and remember. But to be true to scripture, we can’t simply pick and choose the bits that we like and ignore the rest. Instead, we need to deal with all that is involved in a story like this and, when we do, then a very different point emerges.

Why is Jesus asleep during the storm? Presumably, he is able to sleep because he trusts his disciples to get him safely to the other side of Lake Galilee, even in the midst of a storm. After all, many of them are fishermen, experienced sailors, while he is, as a carpenter, a landlubber. The disciples know boats and they know the lake, it makes sense that he would trust them to sail safely from one side of the lake to the other. He trusts them enough that he can catch up on some sleep while they get on with doing what they are actually very good at doing. The disciples have skills and knowledge of sailing and Jesus expects them to use these and trusts that they will use them well.

The problem comes, of course, when they don’t use their skills and knowledge well. The strength of the storm is such that they panic and don’t take actions (like taking down the sail, bailing out the water, and steering against the storm rather than with it) which would have enabled them to ride out the storm and get to the other side of the lake. They made the situation worse by panicking and it was their panic which could have got them killed.

This, I think, is why they are rebuked by Jesus for lack of faith. Essentially, he was saying, “If you had trusted in God to see you through the storm, you would have done the sensible things that would have enabled you to survive. But, because you didn’t trust in God to see you through, you panicked, didn’t take sensible actions, nearly got us all drowned, and needed me to intervene to save you.”

God does not, and cannot, simply intervene to save us from crises and storms. If he did, he would take away our free will and we would be automatons rather than humans. John Shepherd writing in The Times put it like this:

“Why doesn’t God miraculously intervene, and take things over? Dictate how everything should go, and what we do, and how we live our lives?

But then, of course, we would have a world of fixed laws. Our lives would be totally regulated and controlled. We couldn’t decide anything for ourselves. We would not be allowed any choices, or any freedom of action.

So our lives would become non-lives ...

Knowing everything will be all right because God will make it so is no longer to have life.”

But, if God isn’t there to save us in any and every circumstance, what is the value and point of faith? Again, John Shepherd is very helpful in a way that links up with what we are discovering about this story:

“We all need someone to believe in. And we all need someone who’ll believe in us. Think of the number of times we’ve told someone we have faith in them — that we know they can do it, that they’ll achieve their goal, pass that exam, get that job, survive that relationship, recover from that bereavement. We tell people we have faith in them all the time. “You can do it,” we say.

“I believe in you.”

And it happens to us as well. Think of the people who have told us they believe in us. They gave us confidence. They told us they had faith in us, and they believed we could do it.

We know how important faith is, because we’ve known what it’s like for people to have faith in us. And we all have this faith, consciously or unconsciously. We’ve all given it, and we’ve all received it. We know what it is and how it works. Having faith in others, and others having faith in us, isn’t a sign of weakness or mental deficiency. It’s reasonable and logical.”

What we find through this story is that God has faith in us. Jesus trusts himself to his disciples by sleeping while they sail and expects them to act responsibly during the storm in order to keep them all safe and to survive. What annoys him is when they don’t do this, when they don’t trust in the skills and knowledge with which God has gifted them. He wants them to see that the skills and knowledge with which God has gifted them are enough for them to come through the storms of life. He has faith in them but at this point they don’t have faith in all that God has given to them. Later, after the Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension and Day of Pentecost, they do develop such faith and go on to do great things for God.

“This is faith,” John Shepherd writes, “trusting in God without specifying what will happen. God has let the darkness be, so we may have life. But as well, God has given us Jesus, so we may have faith that the darkness will not destroy us.” God will not, and cannot, continually intervene because then life would be fixed instead of being free. So we are not to depend on God to save every time we encounter difficulty but instead to trust that he is with us in the storms of life and that he has given us what we need to come through.

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Iona - Brendan's Voyage.

Cynicism and grace

For various reasons I've been reflecting recently on aspects of ministry that can be perceived as or predicted to be failures in that there are no tangible positive results from our input (such as, for example, pastoral visits to those with dementia).

It seems to me that investing time, effort and energy in people and situations which do not yield tangible positive results or even where it can be anticipated that such results are unlikely to be achieved is an inevitable element of ministry. This is because ministry is essentially creating or offering an opportunity for grace to be received and, because we have free will, such opportunities are often rejected.

While there is a real sense that discouragement is likely to follow if all we experience is the rejection of those grace opportunities we are involved in creating, nevertheless it seems to me that we cannot pick and choose those to whom grace is to be offered and therefore need to be willing and able to offer opportunities for grace to be received to those whom come our way.

As a result, while seeking to be wise about the motivations of those with whom we come into contact, it seems wrong to me to be cynical about the motivations of others and to withhold ministry and the opportunity for grace to be received for that reason.

I've finally got around to reading Rob Bell's excellent Love Wins, long after the controversy it caused has blown over, and, with the above thoughts in mind, was particularly struck by the following:

"Cynicism we know, and skepticism we're familiar with. We know how to analyze and pick apart and point out inconsistencies. We're good at it. We've all been burned, promised any number of things only to be let down. And so over time we get our guard up, we don't easily believe anything and trust can become like a foreign tongue, a language we used to speak but now we find ourselves out of practice.

Jesus invites us to trust that the love we fear is too good to be true is actually good enough to be true."

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Gungor - Dry Bones.

God's Hazard

God’s Hazard, Nicholas Mosley, Dalkey Archive Press, 2009 (ISBN 978-1-56478-540-4)

A writer named Adam is writing a reinterpretation of the Genesis creation stories but his tale becomes intertwined with the story of his daughter and her friends leaving school and travelling to the conflict zones of the contemporary world. Myth becomes combined with history in the making and the reader is challenged to resolve questions of creation, responsibility and parenting.

Adam writes of God’s hazard being in setting his children free but then faces a hazard of his own as his daughter makes her way in the world. But who is actually hazarding what and who is telling whose story? Adam seems to write God’s story and that of his daughter Sophie but his own story is also being told and who is doing the telling? What choices, freedom and responsibility do each actually have?

Mosley’s novel places us, as readers, in the centre of these questions and gives us the responsibility for mediating between “God’s efforts to care for humans while leaving them free” and “humans’ rediscovery of their true need for God through darkness and disaster.” It may seem as though Mosley is seeking to tie us up in knots but it may also be that what he has written is a love-knot that “both binds and leaves you free.”

Accordingly and rightly, earlier reviewers have noted that everything in Mosley’s realm is double-edged and multidimensional and that his novels are both abstract and realistic. In a similar vein Mark C. Taylor has written of the way in which “some of the most creative contemporary painters and architects are seeking a third way that falls between abstraction and figuration.” In their work, “torn figures mark the trace of something else, something other that almost emerges in the crack of faulty images.” This other, he writes, “is neither being nor nonbeing, fullness nor void, immanent nor transcendent.” Taylor calls this “genealogy of otherness and difference based on the principle of creative juxtaposition”, altarity.

Nicholas Mosley is therefore the novelist, par excellence, of altarity and God’s Hazard, his latest effort at the truth of a Christian faith in free will.

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Switchfoot - Dare You To Move.

The suffering God (3)

To conclude I shall explore some of the implications for understanding the place of suffering and evil in God’s world that derive from understanding the relationship with God as one within which suffering can be protested and where our relationship is with a God who himself suffers.

First, protest within relationship implies freedom (2 Cor. 3: 6 & 17). Relationship with God cannot therefore simply involve unquestioning obedience and, were this to be the case, then God could be served just as well be automatons. Relationship with God must then be something freely entered into and freely maintained. This has important consequences for our understanding of evil in God’s world. For human beings to have this freedom requires an ‘epistemic distance’ from God which appears to have been achieved through biological evolution.

Biological evolution, however, brings the twin issues of becoming - an evolving world contains imperfections, which are, or result in, natural evils - and selfishness - development through the ‘survival of the fittest’. Left to their own devices these two would seem to hopelessly bias humanity against relationship with God but they are counter-balanced by the order within the universe and by cultural evolution which is predicated on co-operation not opposition, leaving human beings living with free will within a deterministic framework. This freedom does not just apply to our ability to choose or reject relationship with God but also to what happens within relationship as well. After all, as Christians we believe that the truth/Christ sets us free for freedom.

This leads on to the second implication, that protest within relationship implies intimacy (2 Cor. 3: 7 – 18). Such freedom to argue, berate, converse, debate, discuss, and protest within relationship can only occur where there is trust and long-term commitment. Between human beings this occurs most clearly within marriage relationships where we can choose to become naked in both our bodies and our thoughts. This is one reason why marriage imagery is often used of the relationship between God and his people.

The most significant learning that occurs within human lives occurs by observation, action and discussion within relationships, firstly within our birth families and then within relationships of choice. It is no different in relationship with God, within this intimacy we can observe, discuss and imitate in naked honesty. It is this pattern that we see in the lives of those who come closest to God - Abraham, Moses, David, Jeremiah, Job and, supremely, Jesus. Within this intimate relationship it is possible to become like God, learning a way of life that is counter to the selfish determination of biological evolution.

The third implication then, is of maturity (2 Cor. 3: 18). Growth occurs within relationships that contain the freedom and intimacy that we have examined. This growth, which is growth in partnership with God, is what God has offered humanity from day one of consciousness. It is pictured in the creation stories in the imagery of ruling in God’s image, tending the Garden at God’s request and naming the animals that God brings. It is the privilege of developing further the world that God has made, through the selfless imagination of the possibilities inherent in each aspect of creation, until it reaches its full perfection. It is growth that is individual, cultural and cosmic. It is this, towards which the choosing of Israel and the giving of the Law lead.

It is appropriate then that it is the one to whom the Law leads who, through his life as a divine-human Jew, his suffering and his rising again, opens up the possibility of entering into this partnership relationship with God for all once again. A possibility that is only achieved through the self-emptying and suffering of God leading to the awareness that those entering in to this free, intimate, maturing partnership to perfect creation will follow where God has led and themselves accept and embrace suffering (2 Cor. 4: 7 – 12).

Finally, there is the implication of an eschatological resolution to the problem of suffering and evil in God’s world (2 Cor. 4: 16 – 18):

“... God has ordained a world that contains evil - real evil - as a means to the creation of the infinite good of a Kingdom of Heaven within which His creatures will have come as perfected persons to love and serve Him, through a process in which their own free insight and response have been an essential element.” (John Hick)

Again, this is a perception that is common to both Christians and Jews and one that is seen by Jews such Cohn-Sherbok as providing “an answer to the religious perplexities of the Holocaust”. “The promise of immortality offers,” he suggests, “a way of reconciling the belief in a loving and just God with the nightmare of the death camps”.

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Johnny Cash - Redemption.