Calming the storm

 

Sunday June 20^th – Trinity 3 – Proper 7

Job 38: 1-11. Is there no point to the human quest for knowledge? The point of chapters 38 to 41 is to state that humans are not able to see things from God’s standpoint. We couldn’t make any sense of reality even if we could. The quest for knowledge and for answers to the most perplexing questions of human existence must never be discouraged but our intellects are tiny when measured against an infinite universe and God deals compassionately with humanity despite our inhumanity to each other.

2 Corinthians 6:1-13. We are working together with Christ to bring the salvation of the world wrought by God in Christ, so we are ministers of that good news. Our work is part and parcel of the saving revelation in Christ – co-workers in fact. Paul describes the ups and downs of that ministry – the truth of it in God’s eyes and the slanders that come our way. The power of the gospel is from God but its credibility owes much to its ministers.

Mark 4: 35-41. Jesus shares our predicament amidst the storms of life, but this parable tells us that Jesus can do something about them as well. That Jesus was sleeping presents us with a picture of someone at total peace, even in the face of a storm. The parable offers us not simply a strategy for coping but the promise of salvation.

 

 

It is a truth that we no control over what happens to us – good or bad – but we do have a choice over how we react to things.

The most powerful book I have ever read that makes that so apparent is a book by the psychologist and Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl. I’ll read from the very end of the book about how the prisoners behaved towards each other.

“In the concentration camps, in this living laboratory we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine and others like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself. Which one is actualised depends on decisions not on conditions.

Our generation is realistic for we have come to know man as he really is. Man is that being that invented the gas chambers at Auschwitz, but he is also that being that entered the gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s prayer or the Shema Israel on his lips."

That, for me is a 20^th century re-telling of the stilling of the storm. The storm of the gas chambers couldn’t ever have been envisioned by Jesus, but he fully understood mankind so he understood the potential for those and a million other storms in our lives.

He knew our need to see and know a greater reality, a greater love and acceptance, that could absorb and transcend such horror.

That is the message of the cross and resurrection. That horror was absorbed and turned to joy.

We can choose what to do in the face of the storms of life.

We can let them overwhelm us and we end up fearful and drowning, alone in a cold uncaring universe, victims of chance and circumstance or we can choose to have faith that there is someone there, who understands, a friend who loves us, who has felt what we are feeling, and can lift us out of the storm.

Someone who is at one with God and can ultimately lead us to safety. This is the power of the gospel.

Those of us who share this faith can choose to share that with others and by doing so we can be Christ to others.

It is within our gift to be that helping hand, the steadying support, the bringer of the comforting word, a protector.

We are in that case working in co-operation with Christ as his co-worker. Christian means I suppose a little Christ.

You do hear people saying, usually clerics like me, talking about doing God’s work but every Christian that is kind and shows concern, either material or spiritual for their fellow man and woman is doing God’s work.

Bringing in the kingdom in our own small, humble but very important way. Paul calls it being Christ’s body here on earth.

Amen.