Chaos

In the beginning, there was Tiamat.

Scripture: Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 19), A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

“In the beginning, before the sky was named, before there were fields or men or even gods, there was Tiamat.”

So begins the Enuma Elish, one of the oldest of all the stories of humankind. It was written on tiles of clay in Sumeria some three to four thousand years ago. Perhaps you’ve never heard of Tiamat or the Enuma Elish, but trust me, they’re more familiar to you than you think.

Tiamat is the oldest name for humanity’s oldest foe. She is spoken of as a dragon, or a sea serpent, or the wild thrashings of the ocean, but at heart she is nothing other than the embodiment of chaos itself. And we’re all familiar with chaos, aren’t we? Unexplained illness strikes the one we love—chaos. Markets collapse and governments default—chaos. Small feuds catch like wildfire and consume untold myriads of innocent souls in the scourge of war—chaos. Earthquakes, landslides, floods, tornadoes, cancer, Ebola—all chaos! Chaos is the unexpected, the irrational, the unbidden, the disruptive. Chaos is the enemy of our plans, the destroyer of civilizations, the thief that robs us of our control.

Chaos is the dragon, the raging sea, which must be fought and slain and cut apart by brave, strong, and stalwart warriors—heroes and gods—who can kill the dragon and build from her corpse the foundations of an orderly world. That’s the story of the Enuma Elish. In the beginning was Tiamat, the chaos-dragon, who had to be destroyed and dismembered so that we could build a controlled and civilized reality fit for civilized men and civilized women. But should we ever let down our guard—should the strength of men fail and savages storm our gates—Tiamat shall rise again, and we will all return to the original, predatory, merciless state of the world: the primordial world of chaos.

The Vikings told versions of this story. So did the Hindus, the Babylonians, the Greeks. And we tell versions of it today, don’t we? We have to be strong. We have to be heroes. We have to stand above the chaos of the sea and fight to keep the monsters at bay. Such is how pagans have understood the nature of our world.

The Bible, however, tells a very different story. There is still a Creation. There are still the primordial waters of chaos. There’s even a sea monster, the ancient Leviathan. But that’s where the similarities end. In the beginning, the world was formless and void, and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. But the waters of chaos, in this story, are not some terrible monster that must be slain and dismembered. No, the waters of chaos obey the voice of God. God is the Creator of the waters; He gives to them their boundaries and their borders. He says to them, “This far, and no further.” It is God Himself who creates Leviathan, the biblical equivalent of Tiamat, to play in the waters “for the sport of it.”

Chaos, in the Bible, is not some force opposed to God. It is a wildness that has a place within His good Creation. Modern science has come to view the world neither as random nor deterministic, but as probabilistic—and what is probability but chaos with limits? It is the nature of our world. And God made the world good.

The Old Testament hammers this home time and again. The pagans were afraid of the sea. As the Emperor Augustus put it, “Impious was the man who first spread sail and braved the terrors of the frantic deep!” But the Hebrews had none of that. Theirs was the God who created the world—who created everything—and who had led His people to freedom through the waters of the sea. Look to Scripture: “God alone stretched out the heavens and walked upon the sea,” insists the Book of Job. Also Solomon, in Ecclesiasticus, writes that God “orbited the heavenly sphere alone and walked on the waves of the sea.” And David, in the 76th Psalm, sings “God, Your way was through the sea, Your path through the great waters.”

Time and again in the Old Testament, the Hebrews describe God as the one who walks on the sea, for He is the Master and Father and God of the sea, the one whom chaos cannot harm, whom dragons must obey. Please note, this doesn’t mean that when we encounter chaos in our lives God wants bad things to happen to us. I do hope that should be obvious. We live now in a broken world, in which chaos has overflowed her banks. But the point is that God’s steadfastness cannot be threatened, let alone broken, by the chaos we encounter. This is the God who draws life out from death. This is the God who walks on the waves.

Life, I confess, has been pretty chaotic lately. This weekend my wife led a funeral for a four-year-old boy. He was the third child that she’s buried in three years. Here in Mills we’ve had kids diagnosed with epilepsy and chromosomal disorders. We’ve had cancer scares and surgeries and flooding and unexpected deaths. The news is even worse, isn’t it? War, all over the Middle East. Planes shot down. Christians exterminated in some of the oldest cities in the world, cities talked about in the Bible. Rotten economy. Gridlocked government. Chaos, all chaos. And we want to shout, like Elijah in the reading this morning, “Hey God! Everything’s a mess! All the good people are dead and I’m pretty much the only sane person left in the world! And I can’t fight this fight anymore; I can’t keep the dragon at bay.”

But what does God tell Elijah? “Silly man. This was never your fight to begin with. I will rescue My people, not you, and I will preserve my faithful who have called to Me, thousands of them whom you have not even noticed. You were never alone.” God is at work in quiet and humble and unexpected ways. God has not abandoned us, nor anyone in this world who suffers. Elijah was the greatest prophet of the Old Testament, a wonderworker who wrought terrible miracles, yet God admonishes him not to be ridiculous: Elijah’s job is not to save the world! Elijah’s job is to have faith in the One who is already saving it—the one who walks upon the sea.

All of which brings us to our morning Gospel reading. You could see that coming, right?

Immediately following last week’s story of Jesus miraculously feeding the 5,000, the Apostles pile into a boat in order to cross the Galilee. Jesus retreats to pray—which, you may recall, is what He was trying to do in the first place after the death of John and before the crowds interrupted Him. The Galilee, while not terribly large by American standards, is nonetheless a very volatile body of water, over which violent storms boil up suddenly. One such storm hits, and the Apostles find their boat battered by some rather frightening waves.

Shortly before dawn, they see Jesus coming towards them—walking through the darkness on the water. Keep in mind that the waves are still crashing and winds still whipping through the night. They rather reasonably assume that they’re seeing a ghost, but in the midst of the storm He cries out, “Take heart! It is I!” And Peter, brave but ever impulsive, yells back, “Lord, if it is You, tell me to come walk on the water with You!” Peter, mind you, isn’t stupid. He knows the Scriptures. He knows that God alone walks atop the waters of chaos.

At first things look pretty good, and Peter starts to join in this wondrous miracle, drawing closer to Christ by walking upon the waves. But the winds lash and the waves rage, and in his fear, Peter “the Rock” starts to sink like a stone. He calls out to Jesus and immediately—immediately, understand—Jesus catches him by the arm. “Oh ye of little faith,” Jesus says. “Why did you doubt?” And He guides Peter back to the boat, at which point the storms abruptly cease. And the Apostles fall down and worship Jesus as the God who walks upon the waves.

The point of this story seems clear. Jesus is God, the same found in the Old Testament. Jesus stands above the waters of chaos, the storms of life. And when He calls to us, we stand above them too. Notice that He does not immediately calm the storm but simply promises to be with us in it, to see us through the wind and the waves. Only when we gather around Him does the chaos truly calm.

I wonder, though—what was Peter’s lack of faith? We tend to assume, don’t we, that if Peter had just trusted Jesus a little more, he would have been able to walk to Him without incident? He would be the great hero, the dragon slayer, defeating the waters of chaos just like the heroes of the Enuma Elish. But maybe that’s not it. Maybe we’re being a little too pagan in our understanding. What if Peter’s lack of faith wasn’t the sinking, but that he thought he had to cry out in order for Jesus to rescue him? Christ was there immediately, pulled Peter up immediately. There was no lag time, no waiting for the cry for help. Jesus was already there. Why did Peter think that he would have to ask for his salvation?

Life can often be chaotic, stormy, truly tragic. But God endures. More than that, God is with us in the chaos; God comes to us amidst life’s waves, walking upon the waters, calling us from our refuge, pulling us up from death to new life. He’s always with us. He’s always there. And He commands us, “Take courage. Be not afraid. It is I. Why did you doubt?”

Thanks be to God, who is there in the storm. In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.