Mark 4:35-41
It was hard to know what to preach this week. On Mother’s Day I spoke about the difficulty of such holidays. People came to worship today with different needs, with both positive and negative experiences of their own father, and with both positive and negative experiences as a parent (or lack thereof). Everything I said on Mother’s Day is true on Father’s Day as well.
But this week brought another challenge: the terrorist attack in Charleston, South Carolina, the assassination of nine people as they gathered for prayer and Bible study. How do I preach a sermon that feels appropriate to the celebration of fathers and children, when our God, our Father and Mother, is weeping over lost children? The timing is difficult. But then, the timing is always difficult.
I remember a few years ago a friend of mine got in trouble with her congregation for preaching against torture after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke—which happened the week leading up to Mother’s Day. Nobody wanted to hear about torture on Mother’s Day. The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School happened mid December. Nobody wanted to come to church during Advent and hear about the blood of first graders. I felt led to preach about the racism and the riots in Ferguson Missouri when that exploded, but that Sunday we had guests here for a baptism. These things always seem to happen at inconvenient times in the life of the church.
But there is no convenient time to talk about violence. There is no easy time to talk about racism. None of us want to come to church and be confronted with such atrocities. We want to come to church and be comforted. We want church to be our refuge from all that.
And so did the nine people who were murdered in their church this week. The people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, SC do not have the luxury of ignoring this atrocity. Nor does any predominantly black church in our country. Ignorance is white privilege. Looking away is white privilege.
So what is a preacher to do? It has often been said that a pastor’s job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But I don’t want to afflict us. I don’t want to berate us. I want to challenge us, empower us. I want us to be so sick and tired of the racism and the violence that we leave here absolutely determined to confront it, to fight tirelessly against racism in all its forms.
But I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to inspire us that much. All I know how to do today is grieve. To grieve for the families who lost loved ones. To grieve for the church who lost their pastors. To grieve for the children who won’t feel safe in Sunday School. To grieve for the community that is torn apart. To grieve for every person of color who knows how it feels to live with the fear of being killed simply because of the color of their skin. All I know how to do is grieve.
In the wake of the tragedy, I saw several people online quoting the same scripture, just two words: Jesus wept. Sometimes that is the only response—to know that Jesus cried, to believe that God weeps.
Some days, frankly, it doesn’t feel like enough. There are other clues, of course, of how we should respond, including one in our lectionary text for today. So let’s go ahead and take a look at our scripture from the Gospel According to Mark.
The disciples are traveling across the sea when a huge storm blows up unexpectedly. Some of them are fishermen. They have certainly lived through storms at sea. The geography of the area contributes to sudden, severe storms. But this storm is particularly vicious. Even the fishermen are terrified. And what is Jesus doing? Jesus is asleep on a cushion in the back of the boat. The disciples wake him, crying, “Do you not care that we are perishing?”
The disciples have forgotten who Jesus is. Now, to be fair to them, this is pretty early in their relationship. This is, after all, only the fourth chapter of the Gospel. But since becoming Jesus’ disciples they have seen him cast out demons, heal Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, cleanse a leper, heal a paralyzed man, and restore a withered hand . . . certainly more miracles than most of us have witnessed.
And yet they doubt. In Mark’s telling of this story, unlike other gospel accounts, the disciples don’t even ask Jesus to calm the storm. They simply ask him, “Do you not care?”
It’s a silly question, I suppose. Of course Jesus cares. Jesus is a caring person. And then there’s the fact that he’s on the boat, too, so of course he cares if it sinks. But still, he sleeps.
This poem says it eloquently:
Mystery of divine neglect:
the Light of the World lies in a dark stern
about to be drenched.
He who watches over Israel
slumbers and sleeps.
He who upholds them
lets them retch over the boat’s edge,
risk a watery death while they grasp
at swinging ropes, feet slipping
on wet boards.
One cowers, reciting a Psalm with chattering teeth.
One pulls, desperate, on a useless oar.
One reaches out to awaken him.
“Carest thou not that we perish?”
A reasonable question at a time like this.
If this is safety, it looks
a lot like danger. His care
looks a lot like carelessness.
And yet, the winds and the sea obey him
in his good time. Even now
breaking light shines
on the breaking waves.[1]
In this story we find divine deliverance for those who call on God in distress: when we or our loved ones are ill; when unemployment threatens our security; when we can’t see a way out of the mess we have made. The story is meant to assure us that not only does God care, but God can act on our behalf.
The only problem is: our stormy seas are not always calmed. We toss and turn on a windswept sea, and God is asleep on a cushion. Or, worse yet, the cushion in the back of the boat appears to be empty. It can’t even be used as a flotation device in case of a water landing. Our sails are ripped, our oars are useless, our boat has a hole in it, and we can’t find the Dramamine.
And we cry out, “Don’t you care?” Don’t you care that we can’t pay the bills? Don’t you care that my spouse was too young to die? Don’t you care that this divorce is tearing me apart? Don’t you care?
We feel that way at times. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” These words were, of course, uttered by Jesus—which, to my way of thinking, gives us permission to say them, too. And saying them helps. But is it enough?
One of my favorite novels is a book called The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. The main character, Emilio Sandoz, is a Jesuit priest. All of his adult life he did what the church leadership asked of him, even when he didn’t understand why. All the while he was looking for God, looking for an experience of God. And he never got it.
Until the assignment of a lifetime. This assignment makes his entire circuitous journey make sense. Emilio finally understands his path, his life’s work. And, more importantly, he finally experiences God. All his life he has known God intellectually. Suddenly he is in love with God. And then tragedy strikes. Horrible things happen to him, and he accidentally does something horrible in return. When he is called to account for his actions, he begins to unravel the whole dreadful tale.
He feels angry and betrayed by God. He feels that he finally opened up his heart to God, and instead of being loved back, he was assaulted. He firmly believes that God simply does not care. One of the other priests, attempting to comfort him, says, “God knows when even a sparrow falls.” Emilio answers: “Yes, but the sparrow still falls.”
Yes, the sparrow still falls. The storms still come, and they rage, and they toss us about until we are cowering in fear or retching over the side of the boat. We cannot stop the storms from coming.
The Bible gives us many similar stories, stories of tragedy when God didn’t come through in a pinch: the Hebrew children being taken into slavery; the forty years of wandering in the desert; the destruction of the temple and the Babylonian captivity. Our Bible contains story after story of bad things happening, and God not rescuing in the nick of time. But what it also contains is the resolution, the eventual salvation. Yes, the Hebrew children were taken into slavery; but God brought them out. Yes, they wandered through the desert for forty years; but God led them to the promised land.
When we’re caught in slavery, we can’t see the deliverance ahead. When we’re wandering in the desert, we can’t sense the promised land. When we’re caught in the storm, we can’t believe that God, who seems to be asleep, will rise and calm the storm—or at least see us safely to the other shore.
The question isn’t whether God cares enough to intervene in the problems of this world. The question is whether we do.
The question coming to us from our black brothers and sisters is the same as the question to Jesus: “Do you not care that we are perishing?” Do you not care that we are dying in the streets? Do you not care that we are massacred in our churches? Do you not care that our nations prisons are profit-centers, filled with the future of our people? Do you not care that we live in fear? Do you not care?
And if we claim to care, then what, in the name of God, are we going to do about it?
[1] Marilyn McEntyre, as quoted in Lectionary Homiletics, June 2003.