Third Sunday after Pentecost

Third Sunday after Pentecost – Year B, Proper 7 (RCL) 2009
Job 38: 1 – 11; Psalm 107: 1 – 3, 23 – 32; 2nd Corinthians 6: 1 – 13; Mark 4: 35 – 41
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Parish, Portland OR
Sunday, June 21, 2009

The Faith of the Mustard Seed vs. the Fear of the Unknown

In the name of the God who calls out from the whirlwind of our deepest ignorance’s and asks “where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth”? In the name of the God who calls the Apostle Paul with the assurance; “At an acceptable time I have listened to you and on a day of salvation I have helped you”. In the name of the God who calms the ferocious storm and asks; “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” In the name of the God who speaks through us, the truth. Amen.

(SUNG) FEAR NOT, FEAR NOT,
FEAR NOT, FEAR NOT.

Some of the earliest Christians adopted a simple drawing of a boat with a cross for a mast as the symbol of the Church. In an age of 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. Recalling the story of Jesus' calming of the sea, like those first disciples in the boat, the early Christians must have joined in their desperate prayer, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"

Little has changed in the intervening years. The winds of change and the waters of chaos continue to beat hard on the worldwide church and the people of faith. People of Faith are still being martyred in shocking numbers in tribal, ethnic, and religious wars around the world. At home, the church is fiercely divided around issues of authority, liturgy, sexuality, and cultural diversity, so that deputies to each successive General Convention arrive with feelings of foreboding as they look to the business before them with suspicious eyes, preparing to build alliances of power to bolster their respective sides. Today, the prayer of many in the church is: "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"

Our private lives are not spared stress and storm as our individual little boats are tossed about by the waves of global economic uncertainty and change, planetary devastation and destruction from the abuse of our natural resources; collapse of order and civility due to oppressive political regimes; or the ravages of war, divorce, sickness, and death. Hardly a week goes by that we do not face the fearsome realities of these events, either impacting us personally or our neighbors or our friends in the church, and nightly the troublesome images of television news intrude into our homes from the larger world. "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"

In today's Gospel according to the author of Mark’s account, Jesus calms the wind and the waves and says to the tense disciples, "Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?" I have no doubt that Jesus surely intended the link between faith and fear. The opposite of faith is not doubt or unbelief; those tend to be doctrinal differences. No, the opposite of faith more often as not is fear. We fear the unknown. We fear the undiagnosed lump in the breast, the elevated PSA or the persistent yet unexplained cough. We fear Swine Flu or, the next indictable virus that will morph into a global killer. We fear losing control of our bodies our minds and our health because of aging. We worry about how changes in politics, technology, or the economy will influence our jobs; and we worry about the income from our savings and retirement funds which seem to be disappearing before our eyes as we watch helpless to control the downward trend. Fear is like waves ever seeking to knock us off our footing -- our faith footing.

(SUNG) IF YOU ARE LONELY, FEAR NOT;
IF WINDS BLOW HARD IN THE COLD TIMES, FEAR NOT.
FOR I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS, FEAR NOT.
ALWAYS AND FOREVER, FEAR NOT.

Allow me to share a story with you; this story, one of faith in a seemingly fearful situation, was told by a Presbyterian minister. He told of his days as a Navy submariner in the Pacific during World War II. "We would often come under depth charge attack by Japanese destroyers," he said. "The other sailors would be trembling with fear, while I just leaned back and read a comic book. One of them asked how I could be so calm. I explained to him that in my childhood I had very little supervision from my parents, so I spent many hours each day at the New Jersey shore. Sometimes a huge breaker wave would catch me by surprise and toss me under the water, rolling me in the sand. But I learned when I would just relax thousands of air bubbles like the fingers of God would catch me up and lift me to the surface. Now, whenever I find myself in trouble, I just relax and wait for the fingers of God to reach under me and lift me up."

Faith is an ever persistent striving toward life. According to psychologist Erik Erikson, it is a confidence that is typically acquired very early in life when a child learns to expect her or his environment and the people in it to be reliable and trustworthy. During the Cold War, when we were all living with the possibility of nuclear annihilation, some researchers interviewed children to see how worried they were from the threat of nuclear war. What they discovered was that the children with the least amount of fear were those whose parents were active in nuclear disarmament efforts, or who regularly attended church, or who were deeply involved in the social justice issues of their communities. These parents did not feel hopeless in the face of tremendous challenges. They invested themselves in actions to change the world around them and remained optimistic that what they could contribute would make a difference. As a result, the attitudes of the parents infected the emotional and intellectual development of their children. These children did not feel helpless. Rather, they saw that their parents and their church and the other involved citizens of their community maintained faith and were doing something toward resolving the problems of the world. Their faith would help to overcome their fear.

I have a best friend who, several years ago, within a period of three weeks, lost both of his parents, within the period of another few years a favorite and beloved aunt died. It dawned on him at the time that all of the people in his life who loved him unconditionally were dead, and that he was out in the front of the line as it were all alone. About the same time, his business began to decline and his business partner of many years was no longer interested in continuing; his plans for succession were dashed when an employee who was being groomed for leadership in the corporation decided to change careers and offered his resignation. In those painful and challenging months, my friend painfully and slowly rediscovered his own definition of faith. I share it with you: Faith is the simple trust that life still can be good despite the fact that it is very painful and difficult. Out of the worst of experiences that my friend could have imagined, he found many little bubbles of love, joy, and hope in the form of friends, family, and church lifting him upward like the fingers of God. And the worst year of his life was followed by what he declares to have been one of the best years of his life wrapped in the arms of the God who brought him safely through the storm to the other side of the shore.

(SUNG) I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS, FEAR NOT.
ALWAYS AND FOREVER, FEAR NOT.

"Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?" In these rather impatient words directed to the disciples, Jesus brings into focus the polarities of faith and fear. A gifted and prophetic voice of our time who recently passed from us, William Sloan Coffin has this to say in his last book, The Courage to Love, “Fear distorts truth, not by exaggerating the ills of the world…but by underestimating our ability to deal with them…while love seeks truth, fear seeks safety.” Faith is a stance and how we stand up to those things that would threaten us and how we manage our fears makes all the difference. In the midst of troubles, try reaching up your hand to God and saying, "Help!" And when you reach your hand out to others around you and say, "Help!" the fingers of God will never fail to reach down and lift you into new and reassuring experiences of God's grace. AMEN.