The Heart of the Storm

Propers: The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 12), AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

The sea, in the Bible—and more broadly in the collective unconscious—represents chaos and variability, the cycle of life and of death. The world is born from water in Genesis, then deluged, drowned, and reborn anew. Each one of us enters this world through the waters of the womb. And each Christian enters the Church through water and the Word as well: baptized into Jesus’ death, already died for us, and into His eternal life, already begun.

The sea is home to treasures as well as monsters. Nothing is more creative than water, and nothing is more destructive. The very blood in our veins is modified seawater. In Revelation, the sea represents the Gentiles, the nations of the world who do not know God—or at least don’t know Him as Israel does—especially the Roman Empire, which at the time was all the Gentiles basically rolled into one.

The first Emperor of Rome had a quote that I’m fond of repeating: “Impious was he who first spread sail and braved the terrors of the frantic deep.” Ancient peoples feared and hated the sea even as it brought them life and food and trade. The Romans called the Mediterranean “Our Sea,” the center of their world. Yet even they clung close to shore and feared to row too far from land. For them the Atlantic was the end of the earth.

Now, I’ve been to the Sea of Galilee, which is of course not really a sea at all, not literally. It’s a lake, about eight miles by 13, nothing to sneeze at, but not exactly Superior or Michigan. It is subject to some rather weird weather. It can get choppy fast, and foggy. One can understand how modestly sized fishing boats sailing across could suddenly find themselves swamped by storm or by squall. I certainly wouldn’t want to go down out there.

In Jesus’ day it was a crossroads of cultures. Galilee had always been a borderland, from the recent Roman pleasure city of Tiberius, to the Hellenistic city-states of the Decapolis, to the old Phoenician marchlands, “Galilee of the Nations.” In crossing the waters, He’s crossing a boundary, from Jew to Gentile, godly to godless.

Anyway, a storm comes up. The little boat is buffeted by waves; it’s starting to founder, starting to flood. And Jesus, like Jonah, is asleep for it all. Isn’t that something? Can you imagine, storm, winds, high seas, a tiny, drowning boat, and Christ remains so unperturbed that it doesn’t even rouse Him from His sleep? The disciples, far from cowards here, are rightfully dismayed. They’re all about to die. So that of course they raise Jesus from His slumbers. Of course they look to their Lord for deliverance, or at least for commiseration, in the midst of their distress.

Thus does Christ rebuke the wind, and say to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceases, and there is a dead calm. And the disciples are terrified—filled with great fear! Don’t let this English translation deceive you: the awe here is their terror. Storms are scary. In pagan pantheons the storm god is invariably the biggest dude on the block. The sea is scary. She is Leviathan, Tiamat, Jormungand, Godzilla. Who then is this, who is not simply stronger than the storm, greater than the sea, but who subdues them with but a word, commands them and they obey?

Our texts today make the answer clear. “Were you there,” God asks of Job, “when I shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb? when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?”

Or how about the Psalm: “They cried to the Lord in their trouble, and He brought them out from their distress; He made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed.” There is no ambiguity for the evangelist here. Only one commands the sea. Only one can calm the storm. Only one; only God. And they were filled with great fear.

I have an icon of this story in my office, of the little fishing boat on seas so high that the keel is nearly vertical. Peter is standing and pleading with his hands out, while another disciple hunkers down in the hull. Jesus sleeps placidly, resolutely, wrapped in blue and red—colors signifying heaven and humanity—with His hands crossed over His chest like the Pharaohs of old. He is lying down but the boat has risen so high that He’s almost as upright as Peter.

And that icon is one of my favorites because it speaks to me. I empathize with Peter, and with the other disciple as well. Because life is a storm on the sea, is it not? The deck is ever shifting, the winds are ever blowing, and the waves buffet us from every side, so that we cry out in exasperation and in fear. How could we possibly sleep through such things? How could any of us be quiet or calm when everything around us is chaos and death, the terrors of the frantic deep?

I have always been a creature of the mind, more comfortable thinking than doing. When I set out on a task, I think about what I’m going to do, I think about what I’m doing, and then I think about what I’ve done. The mind is what makes us human. The mind is what separates us from beasts, in degree if not in kind. Yet the mind is often of little help these days. We’ve overstimulated it far past the point of crisis.

Not that I think that we’re thinking too much. No, the intellect is not the part of the mind that we use these days. Rather, it is the passions and the will: that is, our desires, our appetites, our egos. These are played upon 24/7 by advertisements and entertainments, by diversions and distractions, by purchases, preferences, politics, until the mind is overloaded, overrun, with factoids and fashions and outrages and news cycles and social media apps designed to be addictive, designed to be stimulative, to keep the mind exhausted, to keep the mind frenetic. So that we don’t think, and we don’t do.

We just feel, exposed, like a nerve. So that we buy things, and we eat things, and we watch things, as balm to get through the day, like band-aids on a broken bone. And of course the reason we’re subjected to all of this noise is that there’s profit to be made. There’s money to be had from a population that doesn’t think, doesn’t rest, only buys and eats and longs for the next distraction. And we wonder why religion is down while loneliness and stress are off the charts.

But there is something deeper than the mind, deeper than either your actions or your thoughts. There is within you a still, small space, a quiet calm unperturbed by the storms of change and chance. Some call it the spirit, or some the soul. It is the Imago Dei, the Image of God within. It is the part of you that observes, that is aware, that says of itself, “I am”—“I am,” which is the Name of God, Yahweh.

Beyond your body, beyond your thoughts, beyond the world is a Spirit, breathed into you by the Lord. She is not hard to find, if only we be silent. And I know that isn’t easy these days; I know that everything around us is designed to fill our every waking moment with nonsensical noise. But what was true in days of old will still prove true today: that God is found in the silence, in contemplative prayer, when we still our minds to listen. Whenever we enter true silence, we find God already waiting for us there, God and the soul.

And that’s why that icon speaks to me darn near every day. Because life is a boat in a sea of storms, and doesn’t He care that we’re perishing? But there is Jesus in the heart of it all, unperturbed by the wind and the waves, immune to change and chance, above the cycles of life and death, alone immortal, alone eternal, alone the peace of God. We find the Lord of Love at rest, at peace, within. Jesus Christ is the Image of God and the Image of God is inside us.

When we wake that peace within us—if our spirit rests in the Spirit who is God—then all the dualities of I and you, us and them, God and man, life and death, they all pass away into peace. They all pass away into love. Faith in God is trust in Him, trust that Christ is with us, no matter what may come. Because when we wake the Prince of Peace, when we find the Lord of Love alive within the heart, then He stands and calms the waves and everything around us.

This is the true work of God. This is the true life of prayer. Acquire the Spirit of peace within you, and thousands of souls shall be saved. Allow the Lord to calm your heart within the heart of the storm, and He shall bring peace to all this world through the peace He gives unto you.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.