This morning we were able to visit Pilgrim Lutheran Church in Granville, OH.

Pilgrim is a small congregation in a small building. We estimated between 15 and 20 in worship this morning. I thought it was cool how almost everyone communed in one table. We sat in the back, next to the organ in the back right corner. My daughters gave them a decent test, but I didn’t see any of “the looks.” In fact, the organist smiled over at us, and told us that she has had her children (when they were young) and her grandchildren sit with her at the organ. They do have a decent cry room, but thankfully we didn’t need that today.

The service was p. 15 TLH. Pastor Daniel Ruff chanted everything from the Preface on, something I usually don’t see in the older service. Afterwards, the pastor wanted to chat with us, but the girls were getting hungry.

Pastor Ruff’s sermon, “Faith and Fear,” was based on Mark 4:35-41. Transcription follows:

When you think about it, an awful lot has happened in all of our lives since this time five years ago. In addition to the many and varied personal transitions and crises and things that happen when we have other plans, together we’ve experienced September 11th, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the South Asian tsunami, the terrorist bombings in London and Egypt last year. I thought about that, because the radio was talking about remembrances in London, stirring up fears and sadness again over the event.

There’s the casualties that continue to mount of U.S. service personnel killed by roadside bombings in Iraq and other activities. At least one of those deaths we knew very well, once upon a time. We survived both the War on Terror and its new incarnation, the goal and struggle against violent extremism. We endured the Patriot Act and recent assaults on civil and human rights in the name of security. I can’t speak for you, but North Korea’s test launch of nuclear-capable missiles, the implications that are unfolding, and the potential U.S. responses have been deeply unsettling. Even though the test failed miserably, we all know it’s a matter of time until one of our greatest fears is realized: a small desperate country that is hostile to the U.S., with nothing to lose, has nuclear capabilities. The unfolding stories of the ruthless brutal atrocities committed by some Army service personnel during this war and some attempts to cover them up and brush them aside as if they were nothing are also unsettling. What are we becoming? The cumulative effect of all of these events is like that of water torture. Each incident might not be that big, but taken together they become mind-numbing and nerve-shattering.

What’s happened within me over the last five years I believe has happened to others as well: the sense that the calm, ordered, “givens” of our lives have opened up into an erupting chaos. It’s like the structures of our world have collapsed in on themselves. There were things that we thought we knew and were secure, and we’ve been greeted with a reality it seems has no object or order to it whatsoever. Who wants to live in a world like this, that kinks up like this? How can we have faith when reality is so scary?

In today’s gospel our Lord calms the wind and the waves and says to the tense disciples, “Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?” He surely intended that link between faith and fear. In this setting the opposite of faith is not so much unbelief as it is doubt, and in some ways doubt doesn’t quite cover it. No, I think the opposite of faith is, more often than not, fear. We fear the unknown. Fear is like a weight ever seeking to knock us over. Faith is trust and confidence, and its opposite would be fear. We fear because we don’t really deep down trust God or Jesus to do what the Bible says he can do.

The scene in our lesson would almost be humorous if it weren’t so dangerous. The disciples running in manic terror all around the boat, trying to keep things up, Jesus serenely sleeping on a cushion. What does Jesus sleeping in the back of the boat indicate? Mark seems to draw special attention to that little detail, because the disciples read his sleeping as if to say Jesus didn’t care, that they were all going to die. The disciples just seem to wake him up only to tell him, “We’re all going to die. Not to bother you, or anything, but don’t you care?”

But might Jesus sleeping be for Mark a sign of something else? A sign, a picture, of complete trust in God? The fact that at least four of Jesus’ disciples were professional fishermen heightens the severity of the storm. We might easily understand the fear of a tax collector at sea, because they didn’t know the sea, but these fishermen, they knew the sea. Undoubtedly they had exhausted every last effort before they finally broke down and went to the landlubber and screamed for help. The storm was that bad.

Jesus, I see him, getting up, blinking his eyes, getting a stretch, turning around and noticing what was going on, and he says, basically, “Be quiet!” And it was. Then he turns to the disciples and says, “Why are you so cowardly,” and I use that word deliberately because it’s more precise from what the Greek says. “Why are you so cowardly? Did you not yet have faith?”

The disciples’ response to all this was literally, they were terrified, they were afraid with a great fear as they started to question among themselves, “Who is this guy, that the wind and the sea obey him?” They still didn’t have a clue. Our New International Version’s translation, on the back of your bulletin, translates Jesus’ chiding words, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith,” which isn’t bad, as far as it goes, but the word fear that Jesus uses here talks about a person’s lack of something, not just responding to something going on, a scary thing around them. It’s talking about their own, some inner defect or lack. One is afraid because one lacks courage. One is cowardly or timid; they lack trust. Jesus indicates that there is something defective within the disciples: they’re fearful, cowardly, timid, lacking in faith.

The disciples’ eyes are centered on the externals, just like you and I would be out there. First the storm and the sea, and then what they’d seen Jesus do, both produce fear in them. How often do we, whether as individuals or as a congregation, look at what’s going on around us and become fearful or discouraged. For instance, our community is declining in population, or whatever it is that we look at and say that’s an example that everything is doomed. Should we not also look within to see whether or not our fear stems from our own cowardice or timidity, our inability to believe or trust God? That’s tough to do.

I find it interesting that up until this point in Mark the only characters who have shown faith are those who carried the paralytic. The disciples have not been described as people who have faith. Part of the said (indication?) of their lack of faith is the fact that just before the text we’re told that Jesus explained everything to them in trying (audio unintelligible) to them. He had special catechetical classes for them, and they still didn’t get it. In fact, the disciples are never described in Mark’s gospel as really having faith. In spite of the disciples’ lack in this area, the miracle still happens for them.

In contrast to this, Jesus tells in a lesson a couple of weeks from now, the woman with a flow of blood, “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace,” and he healed her disease. A couple of verses later, he says to Jairus, whose daughter he thought was dead, “Do not fear, only believe.” Faith or trusting is involved with the healing of the demon-possessed boy and the blind man who seems to follow Jesus along the way. You know, I can’t help but wonder, what if the disciples had had faith, this kind of trust that Jesus could do everything that they (a.i.) What would they have done differently? Would they have, perhaps, gone to sleep with Jesus, trusting that God will see them through the storm? Or trusting that if they die, God has a room prepared for them in heaven? Should they, rather than have him wake up, rebuked the wind and waves as Jesus did, believing that if they “do not doubt and believe in their hearts,” it will be done for them as they ask?

How should faithful people deal with inner fears and outer difficulties? The early Christian church adopted a very simple drawing of a boat with a cross for its mast to be a symbol of the church. An aid to persecutions from the outside and controversy and conflict on the inside, in their experience the emerging church must have seemed like a boat on a storm-tossed sea.

When I look at the indifference toward religion and the unborn controversy and conflict amongst Christians, I feel like joining those early Christians in a desperate prayer, “Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?” The winds of change and the waters of chaos continue to beat hard on the church and people of faith. Christians are still being martyred, and religious wars abound. Back home, the church is fiercely divided on the issues of authority, liturgy, sexuality, cultural diversity, and more. Again I’m forced to ask, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” It doesn’t stop there. Our private lives are not spared stress and storm as our individual little boats are tossed about by the waves of economic uncertainty, change, war, divorce, sickness, and death. There are troublesome events across the world that intrude into our homes. “Teacher, don’t you care that we’re perishing?”

I want you to take out that bulletin again, and look at it. If you have a pencil, look at that next to the last paragraph of the gospel we’re reading, that line: “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?” Circle it, highlight it, underline it, because it speaks by the way of chiding, by the way of redirecting our attention. Why are we human beings so constantly afraid when we’re in the storms of life? Why do we human beings have so little faith in the midst? Did I say little faith? Jesus said, “no faith.” Yes, I think there are times in the storms of life that we have no faith, only fear.

Someone pointed out to me, as a side point, that having the wind stopped is disastrous for sailboats. It means the sailors are going to have to do hard manual labor to move the boat to wherever it’s going. Even in the presence of Jesus with his great miracles, we still need a lot of work on our part to get us where Jesus wants us to go. If Jesus wanted his disciples to go to the other side of the lake, why can’t he just beam them across rather than have them go through a storm and then row the boat to shore? Maybe there was something to learn. While we may pray that Jesus would work miracles in our lives, in our world, and in our neighborhoods, the miracles would come probably wouldn’t let us off the hook from doing some kind of hard work required to do what Jesus told us to do.

Well, you know it, I probably left a number of dangling questions out there, and I’m going to let them dangle because I think those are questions that we need to wrestle with rather than have someone tell you what the answer is, because I’m not sure that I can do that. I can only point you to scripture, to Jesus, and to the lesson, to trust, that is present in there.

St. John wrote to his fearful brothers and sisters in the midst of their own (a.i.) cowardice and said, “Perfect love casts out fear,” (I John 4:18) even the fear brought on by a raging storm. As storms of our lives, our churches and our own individual lives, kick up, let us not give in to our fears. Rather, let’s engage the storms courageously and creatively, trusting in the power, the presence, and the love of the risen Christ, because in the end, maybe our worst fears really are true, and our own powers inadequate by themselves to quell the rising tide. (a.i.) We won’t be successful in confronting the storms and demons. Only through the presence and the power of Christ can we weather the storm, to get through it, and to emerge victorious. Only if we allow Christ-like love to cast out our ears can we engage life’s raging waters. There’s no simple answers; only trust.

Let this then be our journey, brothers and sisters, even as we long to hear our savior call, “Quiet. Be still,” and may we be found trusting him. Amen.


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