6/25/06
Have You Still No Faith? (revised/longer version) - Mark 4:35-41
(view lectionary notes for this text)
Today, our gospel lesson takes us to the beginning of series of weeks focused on Jesus’ preaching and healing ministry. In our lesson from Mark, we find Jesus and the disciples retreating from the crowds, after a time of Jesus’ teaching, boarding a boat, and heading across the sea. Jesus, fatigued from the work he’d been doing, falls asleep in the back of the boat. Soon, however, a great windstorm rises, knocking the boat around, and the disciples are frightened, and wake Jesus. “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” they ask with accusations in their voices. He responds with equal accusation, after calming the storm with a word of ‘peace’, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” Our short scene closes with the disciples marveling, “who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
I couldn’t quite figure out who I ‘sided with’ in this story at first. Jesus’ words ring out loudly through the text, “Have you still no faith?” I questioned, “is Jesus fair in laying such a claim against them?” After all, this is just the beginning of Mark’s account of Jesus’ ministry. The disciples have not been with him long yet. They’ve not witnessed some of his most impressive miracles and healings, they’ve not heard the prophecies yet of what will happen to their teacher. They’ve only just abandoned their whole lives to follow this strange man. Why would they put their faith and trust in this man and his power? And yet here he is, accusing them of still having no faith, as if they’ve been with him for years already. Was Jesus being fair to them?
Yet, I had to reconsider, that maybe Jesus was more on target than I thought. Consider this. Before Jesus questions the faith of the disciples, they shout at him, “do you not care that we are perishing?” They want him to wake up and fix things, they want him to snap into action. So it does not seem to be that the disciples do not have faith in Jesus’ power that he’s questioning them on. They seem to have great confidence, actually, that Jesus will just wake up and stop the storm. What Jesus responds to is that the disciples accuse him of not caring for them. They do not have faith that Jesus cares for them: this is the true faith crisis. After all, why were the disciples so afraid of the storm anyway? Most of them were fishermen, who probably had much more experience than Jesus, a teacher and carpenter, anyway. They had undoubtedly weathered countless storms without needing someone to magically make the winds calm. Why did they suddenly act like that had no idea what to do? Why did they suddenly want Jesus to do everything for them? How could they believe that he had the power to calm the storm, and yet not still believe that Jesus would want to protect them and desire the best for them? Jesus’ accusation, it seems, is right on target after all. “Have you still no faith?”
Our own faith lives are not so different, I think. God continually has to question us, “have you still no faith?” We, like the disciples, seem all too willing to believe that God is all-powerful, able to do anything, to fix any problems we might encounter. We always seem to have faith that God can do the miraculous. But somehow, faith of this kind works against us and against God instead of for us and for God. First, we put so much trust in God’s supernatural powers, that we forget to use our own skills and gifts which God has given to us. We, like the fishermen who suddenly were floundering on the sea, act like we don’t know what to do or how to help our selves with what God has already given us. What we don’t realize it that God’s power and miraculous abilities are revealed as much in our gifts and talents as they are in multiplying fish and loaves, parting of seas, or bread from heaven. Some of us are gifted with music and drama. Some of us are gifted with a listening ear. Some of us are gifted with organization and management abilities. These gifts are miracles, God’s love and power manifest in us. When we face faith crises, these gifts are God’s way of already providing us with help in times of need. Instead of looking for a quick defying-the-laws-of-the-universe fix, God asks us to look inward to our own resources.
Second, we, like the disciples, see God as all powerful, but somehow, after all God has done for us, we don’t believe that God will act for good in our lives. We always suspect that God is out to get us. We want to blame God’s far-reaching power whenever something goes wrong in our lives. When things go bad, we fully believe that God is causing our pain. We, like the disciples, cry, “God, do you not care that we are perishing?” How, after all God has done for us, can we still believe that God does not care for us? How can we believe that God does not look out for us, or that God in fact wants to work against us, to cause us pain? Why is it easier to believe that God will act against us or not act at all that to believe that God loves us and cares for us completely?
This month our spiritual discipline as a congregation is all about the body, and so running has been on my mind, or, I should say, how out of my running routine I’ve gotten! I have a sort-of love hate relationship with running. Part of me hates it, and I’ve often had to drag myself out to run against my own will, and play mental games with myself to trick myself into a run. Other times I’ve just loved it. During seminary, right across the street from my apartment, was a big three mile loop that I would usually run around in the mornings. On the back side of this loop was a large hill that I always dreaded going up. Once I graduated, I tried to maintain my routine. I would run on the tracks in Rome during the summer before I started at St. Paul’s, and I’ve run around the track at Oneida High School too. There are no big hills there to drag me down – it’s all smooth sailing. But I found a different dilemma. Unlike the trail at seminary that was just one time around, to run three miles at the track, I have to go around the circle 12 times! Not only was it hard to keep track of the progress I’m making, since it seemed I was getting nowhere, but it was also difficult because there’s always the temptation to quit before I hit my goal: the exit from the track comes up each and every lap, offering me the chance to give up and walk home. At seminary, if I stopped part way around the loop, I still had to at least walk the rest of the way home. Here, I could short change myself as easy as could be. So my running routine hasn’t been so routine these days.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, I think we like to think of our lives and our faith journeys more like the great big loop I ran at seminary – one big loop, certainly has hills to climb, but new ground is always being covered, there is clear progress toward the goal, and once you see the finish line, that’s it, you’re finished! There’s no where to get on or off except the beginning and the end. But actually, I think our lives and our faith walks are much more like the track at the high school. We often have to cover the same ground more than once to really make any progress. And yes, like on a track, we are offered chance after chance to give up and get out. We have many chances to stumble, to get off course, to lose our way, every time we think we’re making some progress. The journey can be quite frustrating, and it’s easy to feel like God has trapped us on this path, and left us to struggle there. “God, do you not care that we are perishing?”
But God calls us, “Have you still no faith?” Instead of one long path, beginning to end, we have chances in life to try again, to go around one more time, to enjoy our gifts and graces in different contexts and settings. We have chance to measure our progress, even within the safety of the course, and we have the task of confronting our temptations too.
I’ve been going back and forth on my plans for today’s special focus – Celebration of Ministries Sunday. You can tell I’ve been going back and forth, because you’ll see no evidence that today is Celebration of Ministries Sunday in the bulletin – nowhere in the order of worship – because up until the last minute, I didn’t know what I was going to do today! In fact, actually, you can still see the heading left over from last week. Well, my first year here, I decided to have a Celebration Sunday so that we could hand out certificates and things to lectors and choir members – folks I understood had gotten certificates in the past, and I wanted to make sure to recognize these people. As I was planning, I expanded the Sunday – after all, we have people involved in so many ministries at St. Paul’s, it seems that everyone contributes in a way that is worth a certificate – so we handed out a hundred or so certificates. Last year, I had you all nominate people who you felt were gifted in particular areas – youth, adults, older adults, Sunday School teachers, unsung heroes – people who give to St. Paul’s in time and gifts and talents. In the process, I think everybody in the congregation was found to be an inspiration in someone else’s eyes. So here it is, another day I’d planned to designate as Celebration of Ministries, and I was at a loss. I didn’t want to give out more certificates. I didn’t want to have nominations. In fact, I’ll admit, I was feeling a little frustrated. I have a love hate relationship with summer as a pastor. I’m anxious, after being busy with ordination and interviews and committees and annual conference and all things end-of-the-school-year, for a slower pace. But I also dread the usual decline in attendance in worship, and the two or three months where it’s hard to do much of anything new in at St. Paul’s. Even our gospel lessons chance pace – focusing on Jesus’ teachings, but less on the ‘big events’ of the Lenten, Easter, and Pentecost celebrations. Everything is ‘on hold’ until September, and by the end of August, I’m twiddling my thumbs, ready for “back to church” time. I wasn’t much in the mood for celebrations.
But this week, I spent some time talking with Matt Jacobs, who chairs our staff-parish relations committee, and in midst of conversation he commented on something like how St. Paul’s can always meet the goals it sets as a congregation if it is really committed to the cause. Think about what we’ve done, even in the last year. We, for the third year in a row, have raised thousands of dollars for Relay for Life, and again we’ve won a Spirit Award. We’ve enhanced our sanctuary with this beautiful cross. We talked about it, we planned it, we made it a reality. We’ve celebrated baptisms and confirmation and weddings and remembered the commitment and faith of loved ones who’ve passed on. We’ve added a second worship service, and found, against the odds, the leadership needed to support that service, even as it still finds its footing. We started a new prayer shawl ministry, and have knit shawls for probably a dozen people already, myself included. We hosted a state dayhab program for three months on our site! We just got shiny new equipment on our doors, making them safer and stronger. We carpeted our Sunday School rooms, a longtime project moving along at last. We’ve expanded our mission program – after traveling every year to Red Bird, Kentucky, this year we responded to the crisis in the Gulf Coast, and sent a team to Mississippi. And we didn’t just send a team, we, as a community, put together an entire early response trailer. And we signed up for two more trips, and we decided that we could go to Africa too. And I have no doubt we can make it there, because we have the vision.
Sometimes, of course, things don’t go the way we plan in the life of the church, or in our own personal lives. We put in our best intentions and best efforts, and still, things flop, we fail, we must start over, start again, start something completely different than what we had planned. We feel like we’re starting back at square one, covering old ground. But imagine if the disciples’ time and journeys with Jesus had only been on one long path, beginning to end. There would have been no opportunities to learn from their mistakes, no chances to try again to share the good news with communities, no second chances when they let Jesus down. Fortunately, Christ seemed to know that he would have to cover the same ground with the disciples and the crowds over and over again. Parable after parable seem to cover the same material, they seem to convey the same messages to them and to us. Jesus told them again and again about God’s love and about what Jesus would have to do in order to show God’s love. Jesus would go around the lessons with them again and again, helping them to become faithful servants. So it is with us. Have we still no faith? Faith in ourselves, and faith in our congregation. Faith in the vision laid before us, the path God calls us to? Fear not, God is a patient teacher, who will stay the course with us. Let us put our trust in our parent, our creator, our teacher. God will not leave us alone on the stormy waters. Amen.