I recall a few years ago, in the middle of storms of bitter controversy threatening to overwhelm the Church and break it apart, how a Christian leader was asked what was the one essential message that everyone needed to hear. You might have expected 'Maintain the unity of the Spirit', 'Stick to the Bible', or 'Love one another', but his response was actually 'Don't panic!' His point was that when we panic our perspective narrows; our ability to see a way forward shrinks; we stop trusting that God is present among us. But God is present in every storm and calls us to resist the temptation to panic and instead to trust that with God there is always a way forward. This is what the panic-stricken disciples of Jesus learn when they are caught up in a storm on the Sea of Galilee.
I expect most of us at some time have had an experience of how wild and dangerous the sea, or lakes or rivers can be. One lovely early summer day, the birthday of one of our sons, we hired a boat and went out on Derwentwater in the Lake District in England. Rowing was easy to start with. We reached an island and had a picnic. But when we got in the boat to head back, suddenly the wind picked up and the water got quite rough. I was rowing into the wind and it seemed like I was making no progress. Small, charming Derwentwater suddenly looked huge; the sky darkened and the water, splashing up and into the little boat, felt very threatening. Our youngest son expressed what we all felt when he said 'I'm scared!' We've had other scrapes, including in the river Aare, all of them reminding us just how menacing rivers, lakes, the sea can be. So far, we've lived to tell the tale.
In the Bible, the sea is typically thought of not in terms of beauty and majesty, but as a place of chaos and disorder, threatening God's good purposes. The scriptures often speak of God stilling the raging of the waves, as in today's reading from Job (38:8-11), and saving those in danger on the sea, as in the Psalm set for today (107:23-32) – though we don't often include the Psalm in our service. In the perfected future creation described in Revelation, it's significant that we are told: 'And the sea was no more' (21:1). This is the biblical background to what is going on in today's reading from Mark's Gospel. A great storm blows up on the sea, waves are beating into the boat and it is filling with water. And the disciples see Jesus doing things associated only with God. Jesus addresses the terrifying natural power of wind and water, addresses the storm as if it is a wild animal, calming it, taming it, so that the wind ceases and the sea is calm. The disciples are safe. Life can go on again in peace.
In his wider ministry Jesus calms storms not only at sea but also in the lives of those he heals and delivers from evil. The very next story Mark tells (5:1-20) is of Jesus meeting a man possessed by a destructive inner, demonic storm that drives him apart from all human contact to be among the tombs where he howls and bruises himself with stones. Here again, Jesus drives out the chaos, the storm, and brings peace.
Such authority prompts the disciples to ask who this man is; gradually they will come to understand the fullness of God's presence and action in Jesus. There's also an important lesson here about how the authority exercised by Jesus flows from his perfect trust in God. The disciples rush around in panic achieving nothing – and don't we all know that experience? – but Jesus at first (bizarrely) sleeps peacefully through the storm and then, when the disciples rouse him, he acts decisively and powerfully. The childlike trust in God which Jesus teaches and lives out may appear impractical and foolish, but this trust enables him to be a channel of God's action in the world.
After calming the storm, Jesus rebukes the disciples: 'Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?' Those of you who heard the whole of Mark's Gospel read aloud recently over a couple of evenings may recall how often we hear about the slow, painful progress of the disciples. This is very realistic about the imperfect humanity of those who became the founders of the Church, and that's encouraging for us, too, when we may feel discouraged by how slow our progress can be in the life of faith. The disciples have left everything to follow Jesus; for some time they have listened to his teaching and witnessed his power to heal; they acknowledge him as their master. But the storm on the Sea of Galilee seems to blow away everything they have learnt. 'Where is your faith?' asks Jesus: panic has driven trust from their hearts. This isn't the only time the disciples fail in faith and understanding. Often Jesus rebukes them, but he perseveres with them and continues to call them to share in his mission.
The God we see in Jesus is a stiller of storms; God wills harmony for the world and peace for all our hearts. But storms rage on, around us and within us. So why isn't the God who through Jesus stilled the storm more obviously at work stilling storms in our lives and the lives of those we care for, stilling storms in the wider world?
Storms in our own lives can all too easily undermine our trust in God. We feel the waves around our little boat getting higher and we start to panic, just like the disciples. But the disciples are rebuked for their lack of faith, not for calling out in their genuine need. It's ok to call out to God, as they do to Jesus, 'Don't you care that we are perishing?' So when our lives are in danger of being swamped by chaos or suffering of various kinds it's far better to cry out in anguished, confused faith (even faith mingled with disappointment or anger) than to turn away from God in bitter silence. It is an authentic prayer of the Church to call out to God, just as the disciples do here, and as we also hear in many Psalms: 'Don't you care that we are perishing? Do something, Lord!' We may then know some lessening of the storm about us, or it may be that as the storm continues we are drawn deeper into the trusting relationship with the Father which we see in Jesus, who in this storm lies asleep like a child and will trust the Father through far worse storms yet to come upon him.
But this story prompts us to think not just about the storms in our own lives – however real and terrifying they are for us – but also to look beyond ourselves and our immediate communities, our families, the community of this church, to the storms in God's wider world. We know that actual storms are becoming more frequent round the world, bringing disaster to many lives. We may not typically think of the pandemic as a storm, as it is silent and invisible, but in parts of the world like India at present its effect is like that of a storm, causing panic, killing thousands, leaving devastation in its wake. And in countless ways the human family brings storms of inhumanity, injustice, violence upon itself. In our prayers of intercession for the world it is as if we are taking that complaint of the disciples up on our lips and calling out: 'Wake up, Lord, don't you care that your world is perishing?'
We pray that prayer because we believe in the God who came among us in Jesus, the God who stills storms. And we pray with both pain and hope within us: pain because of the storms that continue within us, around us in those we love, and throughout God's world; but hope because in Jesus God has stilled storms and the world is in the hands of this God, who has promised that in the end every storm will be stilled.
That's hard to imagine. I find very moving lines in the hymn 'I cannot tell' (sung to the tune Danny Boy):
'I cannot tell how all the lands shall worship,
When, at His bidding, every storm is stilled...'
Surrounded by many storms, it can be hard to believe God's promise that every storm will be stilled. But that is the promise, and we are called to reach out towards it, not just for own sake but for those around us and for the sake of our world. When St Francis prayed 'Make me a channel of your peace', he was asking that the power of God to still storms that we see in Jesus would also be at work in him and through him, to bless others, to bless the world. A question we need always to hold before us as a church is what that means for us, how we can be channels of God's peace to each other at times of overwhelming, and how we as a community can be channels of God's peace to those caught up in the many storms that cause havoc in God's world.
So we are reminded today: Don't panic. Even if it feels like we are alone in a sinking boat, we are not. God is present in every storm. We can call out: 'Don't you care that we are going under, that we are perishing? Wake up, Lord!' And the God who gives us his peace calls us to become channels of that peace to each other and to the world around us.
Revd David Marshall