This sermon was preached at St Matthew's Lutheran Church, Maryborough, 8.15am, and Grace Lutheran Church, Childers, 10.30am.
Grace, mercy and peace be to
you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
And Jesus awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the
sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.
Prayer: May the words of my
mouth, and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord,
our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
In Genesis chapter 1 and 2,
we read about the creation of the world. And at the end of Genesis 1, we read
where it says: And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was
very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Later
on in Genesis 2, we read: The LORD God has not caused it to rain on the
land, and there was no man to work the ground, and mist was going up from the
land and was watering the whole face of the ground.
One of the things about which
we get a very strong sense from reading about the beginning of the world is
that there was a tremendous calm in the world. There were no wars, no fights,
no misunderstandings, no knee-jerk reactions, no scowls, no frowns, no anxiety,
no panicking – there was just a tremendous calm upon the earth.
In the last chapter book of
the bible, we read where it says: [God] will wipe away every tear from their
eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying,
nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
Someone once said to me that
they are looking forward to heaven as the place where there will be no more
money! Isn’t that an interesting thought? For me, I look forward to
heaven as the place where there will no more worries, or anxiety, or panicking.
There was nothing to be anxious about at the beginning of the world before the
fall, and as Christians, there will be nothing to be anxious about when Jesus
receives us into his own presence in the next life. What a joy it will be to be
still and know that [he] is God!
Our Gospel reading is a very
special text, which particularly deals with this topic. We see the disciples in
a boat, a great storm arises, Jesus is asleep in the stern, and when they wake
Jesus up, he rebukes the wind and commands the sea, and we read: And the
wind ceased, and there was a great calm.
This word “calm” does not
appear too many times in the bible. It does turn up in Psalm 131, one of the
smallest psalms, which reads: O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are
not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too
marvellous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child
with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, hope in
the Lord from this time forth and forevermore. That’s the whole psalm. And
it gives this picture of being calm, like a weaned child. A child which is not
weaned, which still drinks milk from its mother, is always anxious when its mum
is not around. A baby’s always looking for the milk lady! But when the baby is
weaned, and doesn’t need milk anymore, then the child can just come and sit
with mum on her lap, completely relaxed and go to sleep without any worries or
anxieties. It’s a wonderful picture in this psalm.
In our reading, we see the
apostles tremendously anxious and panicky. In fact, they fear for their lives. And
when Jesus brings about this great calm, he doesn’t just bring about the calm
between a weaned child and its mother, but a calm which extends over the whole
of nature. It extends over the wind, the sea, but also over the apostles’ minds
and hearts. They are set at peace, and through this action of Jesus, he shows
to them the beautiful, serene calm that they will enjoy in his presence, and in
the presence of God the Father, with all the company of heaven.
Some of our greatest sins in
this life, and some of our most painful regrets, have to do with those times
when we have lost our calm, when we have lost our tempers, when we have lost
our self-control for even a few minutes, but the damage then lasts for a long
time. We see in our world today a great desire for calmness – people take up
meditation techniques, yoga, and all kinds of things, so that they can be calm.
But these things are just the cheap imitations of something that this world
can’t give them. And that thing is Jesus himself—I would rather have all the
anxieties of the world, all the worries and the headaches, all the panic
attacks and the night-frights, than not have Jesus. St Paul writes in
Philippians: Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer
and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And
the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and
your minds in Christ Jesus.
I have a good friend who was
very strongly convicted by this text, where it says: Do not be anxious about
anything. He said: I’m always anxious, and I’m anxious about lots of
things. I don’t know how not to be anxious! But then I realised that he hadn’t
read the rest of the text, where it says: Do not be anxious about anything,
but by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made
known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will
guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. If only he had read the
rest of the verse! There’s no need to be anxious when we have a God who
peacefully listens to our prayers.
I remember in my first
parish, a lady rang me and said that their father was very unwell, and they
were worried that he was about to die. So I got in the car and went straight
away. When I got there, the man was being put into an ambulance: he was
scared and worried, and I was flustered. And of the strange things that happen
in life, the ambulance driver took one look at us both and said: Do not be
anxious about anything, but by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let
your requests be made known to God.
There is a wonderful little
book by an old Lutheran theologian, Johann Gerhard, published in English under
the title “Meditations on Divine Mercy”. In it there is a wonderful little
prayer for the gift and increase of gentleness. In it he speaks about the ways
in which we can so easily get angry about this, or that person, or lose our
temper here or over there, but that God is so patient and gentle towards us.
Jesus has won the forgiveness of sins for us through his death on the cross,
and he is so gentle in waiting for us, so patient in dealing with us, who are
so hateful and erratic and moody and impatient. Jesus says: Learn from me,
for I am gentle and lowly of heart and you will find rest for your souls. Listen
to those words, if you have a mouth that froths over sometimes and says a few
things you wish you’d never said, or if you worry and fret about things. Jesus
says: You will find rest for your souls. In this life, we still drag our
old sinful condition, our old self, our old Adam, our sinful flesh around with
us, and so we only experience this rest every now and then. And when it comes
for a while, it seems as though more and more worries and anxieties are piled
and piled on top of us. So we only have little tastes of that rest in this
life, but the full abundance of God’s holy rest in the next life, where we will
sing with all the company of heaven: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not
want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters;
he restores my soul. See how this psalm describes the wonderful blessing of
being in the presence of our Good Shepherd, Jesus.
There is a favourite quote of
mine, from Pope Shenouda III, the previous pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church,
which is a very large Christian Church in Egypt, and is the largest group of
Christians in the middle-east who speak Arabic. You can imagine what terrible
persecutions the Christians in Egypt have gone through. Pope Shenouda III wrote
a book called “Calmness”, where he says that if a rock hits a pane of glass it
shatters, but if it hits a mountain it doesn’t even affect it. And he says: I
want you to be like the mountain, not like the glass.
Now, for those of us who are
very sensitive, this quote can prick people’s conscience very deeply. Some
people love this quote, and some people hate it. But it also points us back to
a very well known quote of St Paul where he writes: We do not wrestle
against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities,
against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual
forces of evil in the heavenly places. Sometimes when we talk to people, we
find that they get upset or lose their temper for no reason, and we can’t
understand it. We think: “What did I say?” It’s almost like each of us in a
rider on a horse, and even though the riders are friendly with each other, our
horses react, and they get scared, and throw their hooves in the air, and bolt
into the forest. When this is what the horses do, the riders can’t talk. And
so, sometimes, when we’re dealing with other people, people lose their calm,
and they don’t trust each other, because there is another dimension to what is
going on. For example, sometimes if people have the Jehovah’s Witnesses come to
the door, they get the shakes. It’s not simply a person’s reason or intellect
or logic that we meet when we talk to another person, but also their souls,
their spirits, their emotions, their affections. Sometimes people have a long
history of issues and struggles and some innocent little remark can set off a
time bomb. And so, in this life, we are not wrestling against flesh and
blood, but we are dealing with spiritual realities.
At the heart of all this is
the forgiveness of sins. If we look honestly into the 10 Commandment and God’s
law, and use them like a mirror and look at our own life according to them,
what do we see? We will experience a terrified conscience. We should panic, we
should despair, we should be completely broken in half at the frightful,
terrible reality that God is a righteous, just judge who punishes sin. But
Jesus, who is gentle and lowly of heart gives rest for our souls,
because he gives us the forgiveness of sins. He has taken and suffered for all
the sin in the whole world, and the righteous anger of God against sin has come
down on him in his death on the cross. And his resurrection from the dead means
that he has won a wonderful victory over sin, death and the devil, and the
forgiveness of sins is ours. And we receive this forgiveness and the promise of
eternal life without anything that we do, simply through faith. And so, St Paul
says in Romans: Therefore since we have been justified by faith, we have peace
with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
So, let’s have a look at our
text, where we read: A great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking
into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. But [Jesus] was in the
stern, asleep on the cushion. And they woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do
you not care that we are perishing?”
In the middle of this storm,
we see the disciples on the boat, desperately trying to get the water off their
deck with buckets, and they realise that Jesus is asleep.
We have here an example of
Jesus’ true humanity, where we see that just like everyone else, Jesus got
tired and needed rest and sleep. He’s tired, but he’s also not worried. He’s at
peace.
Sometimes our prayers to
Jesus can often turn angry like the disciples, and we say to him: Teacher,
do you not care that we are perishing? Why don’t you get off your backside,
and do something? Many people often think that Jesus doesn’t care. Sometimes
when someone is worried about something, and are upset about something, they
might say to someone: The problem is, you just don’t care. It’s not true—it’s
just that the person is not worried. At the birth of a child, many husbands can
start to freak out a bit. But often the nurses and midwives are not worried.
It’s not that they don’t care, it’s just that they’ve seen it all before, and
they’re not worried.
Jesus knows what it’s like to
worry and be anxious, to the point of sweating blood. When he knew that he was
going to be tortured and die the very next day, he sweated blood on the ground,
and was troubled, and worried, and was jittery, and paced back and forth, and
laid down flat on the ground, and cried out in anguish: My Father, if
it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as
you will. Even on the cross, he felt the most terrible feelings of
abandonment by God, and said: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Jesus
felt the very depths of human emotion, human pain, and all anxiety and terror.
To think that his Father, whom he had so often talked to on the mountains in
prayer, and who had so often answered Jesus and spoken to him, now watched on
and was happy to do nothing about it. Isaiah says: It was the will of God to
crush him.
So let’s be straight on this
one: Jesus knows our anxieties, he cares, he knows our worries, and he has
truly suffered the great pain of anxiety and worry and inward terror.
Sometimes people look at this
passage about Jesus asleep on the boat, and they think that the whole purpose
of prayer is to wake Jesus up from sleep. But this is a pagan understanding of
prayer. In the Old Testament, we read about the prophet Elijah having a
competition with the prophets of Baal, and they set up two altars to see which
god answers from heaven by setting the sacrifice alight. When Elijah calls upon
God, he completely drenches the altar with water, and the fire comes down and
consumes the sacrifice and licks up all the water. But when the worshippers of
Baal call to their god, they whip themselves into a frenzy and start cutting
themselves with knives. Elijah begins to tease them and says: Cry aloud, for
he is a god. Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a
journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.
Jesus is not teaching us here
that he is a God who does not care, and that when we pray to him we have to
wake him up like Elijah says here. No—Jesus can sleep, because he is not
worried. He knows he won’t die by drowning—he knows he has a sacrifice to make
for the sins of the world.
And so, he just gets up, and
we read: He rebuked the wind and said to sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the
wind ceased, and there was a great calm. He said to them, “Why are you so
afraid? Have you still no faith?”
Often when we don’t know how
things are going to work out in the future, we can start to worry, and panic,
and fret, and get anxious. But then when everything has happened, the time has
passed – then we realise that Jesus was in the boat with us all along. The holy
Christian Church has floated through the centuries tossed around by winds and
storm, and yet Jesus has always been in the boat, and brought it through the
storm, and has calmed the wind and the waters. Even when we think about our own
death, Simeon said: Now, Lord, let your servant depart in peace. And
Paul says: My desire is to depart and be with Christ. This word
“depart” is a shipping word. It describes us leaving this world like a little
boat going out from the harbour, sailing out on the peaceful gentle waters, and
putting our anchor down in the arms of our Saviour Jesus, who says: Today,
you will be with me in Paradise.
And so we read: They were
filled with great fear and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even
the wind and sea obey him?”
Amen.
Dear Jesus, if even the wind
and sea obey you, what do we have to be worried about? Why do we find ourselves
so anxious, when you are sailing in the boat with us? Strengthen and calm us
through this troubled life, and send us the peace which passes all
understanding, until that time when we see you face to face. Amen.
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