Sermon Title: “Climate Control – Jesus Style”
Grace and peace to you from the God who is, who was and is to come, the one who is the same yesterday, today and forever, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
I don’t have too much experience with boat travel, but I was on a ferry between Calais France and Dover England once when a major winter storm passed through. The boat rocked and rolled and waves swept over the deck. We were safe in a warm, air and watertight compartment, but my stomach began to feel the effects of the motion. We had eaten a delicious dinner of sausage, sauerkraut and beer, which was probably not the best choice before going on a boat trip. One of the friends I was with had a cast iron stomach. She simply put her head down on a cushion and went to sleep.
Our lesson is of course about a boat trip too. Jesus has just finished a day of preaching and teaching and he and his disciples cast off to go to the other side of the sea of Galilee. These are not weekend boaters by the way; they were seasoned fisherman, many of them, who had spent a lifetime on the water. This fact makes for greater tension and drama. The storm they encounter must have been a really intense, life-threatening storm. The description gives you some idea of its intensity. Waves poured over the sides of the boat, and the disciples were bailing out the water with anything available. Presumably the boat was filling with water and they were in danger of sinking.
With such a ruckus going on, with thunder and lightning probably occurring, it seems hard to understand how Jesus could sleep through all that noise and confusion. When I baptize sleeping babies, the instant the cool water touches their head they are awake. How Jesus could sleep with three inches of water in the boat, the boat rocking and rolling to and fro seems like another small miracle embedded in the story.
We’re all been in the boat with the disciples, though haven’t we? Perhaps we have had what we thought was a good marriage only to discover that our partner’s love has grown cold, or that an ancient trauma from their childhood had decided to create a storm in their life, thereby in our own as well.
Maybe we’ve worked for a long time at a job in a company we thought was destined to be in Maryland forever, and we find that our company, our job and our security is going South and we have to decide quickly whether to go with it or take our chances here.
A growth appears on your neck or chest, the doctor takes a biopsy and then calls you up to schedule a cat scan and you get sea legs all of sudden.
You discover that your child, the quiet one who has never given you a moments trouble has a drug problem or has been hiding something shocking from you for some time.
We have all been buffeted by the storms life brings and wonder “How Lord, can you sleep when all this is going on? Your silent napping scares me.
To the disciples’ utter amazement, once they waken him, Jesus simply commands the storm to stop. The original Greek means “be muzzled” like you would bind shut the mouth of a barking dog that is barring its teeth, menacing passersby. In St. Mark’s trenchant prose it says “the wind ceased and there’re was a dead calm.” There was a dead calm and a dead silence on the part of the disciples. They were then filled with great awe. Here again, the English is timid where the Greek is more potent. The Greek says “Megaphobos” mega means “great” and phobos “fear”. In plain words the disciples were speechless, freaked out, stupefied. Wouldn’t you be? We hear this story so often, that it loses its power. Jesus is so human we forget that he is also God – with the same power, the same potential. When you are in the boat with Jesus, you will not sink.
William Willimon, Methodist Bishop of Alabama and forever Chaplain at Duke University is quite a comical preacher. He talks about how Jesus might still surprise us as pastors and preachers. Suppose he said, he preached a sermon about the need for missionaries in Honduras and two families asked him on the way out of church. “You know Pastor, I have been thinking about mission work all my life. God spoke to me through your sermon. I’m going to start studying Spanish. Please give me the address were I can apply”.
Routinely, we Pastors encourage people to bring visitors or friends to worship. Suppose just for fun, all of you decided to do that on the same Sunday, I’d be so freaked out by such a display of God’s power that I too would be dumbstruck.
Yet don’t we all have experiences of a dramatic display of God’s power? In my second congregation, we prayed for a man who had pancreatic cancer. It is almost always fatal. He was a Vet and went to the Martinsburg, VA hospital. He was resigned to his dying and I think all of us were too. We had a healing service at that church, so I took my oil stock and prayer book down. Some of his friends from the parish went with me. We prayed for him, anointed him as it says to do in the Book of James and these “elders” of the parish made a circle of prayer around him. They put their hands on his head. Six months later, the cancer had completely disappeared from his body. The doctors were utterly mystified. So were we. “Calley” and his family moved to a new house a few months later. They invited me to do house blessing and during one of the prayers, I mentioned how thankful we all were that we were celebrating. Few recover from pancreatic cancer. We are in awe of the miracle. Everyone was silent. Silence and wonder are the appropriate response to being in the presence of God.
Who is this that even the wind and the seas obey him?
How is this that even pancreatic cancer leaves a human body at his command?
Who is this one over whom even death has no control?
This is Jesus, true man and true God. Have faith in him. Amen.
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