Living Calm
A Sermon by Cristina Rathbone
All Saints Parish
Brookline, Massachusetts
June 25, 2006
Text: Mark 4: 35-41
It's evening, and it's been a long day, and there's still more to do (as there so often is in Mark's gospel) but in transit, and for once, Jesus gets to take a nap. And this is fine. The disciples are fishermen, many of them. If Jesus has to crash out, then now is as good a time as any. But then a storm brews and the wind and waves pick up and cold, salty water starts slapping up against the side of the boat. The disciples turn to wake up Jesus and most of us have what happens next pretty much fixed in our heads: Jesus wakes, stills the storm and gets mad at the disciples for being fearful and faithless enough to have felt the need to wake him in the first place.
But how would it be, I wonder, to read the story just a little bit differently today? I've been reading the text a lot this past week or so, and it has come to seem to me as though Jesus doesn't get angry at the disciples for waking him up at all! In fact there is no mention of them being afraid, or of Him showing any sign of irritation until after he stills the waves - listen: "He woke up and rebuked the wind (not the disciples, the wind), and said to the sea, 'Peace! Be still!' Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. (Then) He said to them 'Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?'"
Could it have been the calm that frightened the disciples, then, instead of the storm? Not that the storm wasn't frightening in its own way. The wind was clearly sharp and the waves huge. But the disciples were fishermen and they knew about storms - they'd grown up with them and by adulthood must have become inured to them to a certain degree - the way we all become inured to the storms we know best in our lives.
Because of course our lives are just as storm filled as the disciples' ever were. Not the wind-on-the-lake kind, perhaps. But in the car, and at work, and after work, rushing from thing to thing or place to place, it sometimes feels as if our lives are pure tumultuousness. We grumble about this a lot, of course. But if we're honest many of us would have to admit that to a certain degree we thrive on it all as well. The hectic, busy storminess of our lives sometimes makes us feel useful and needed; it comes to define us, in a way, perhaps even makes us feel worthy: of respect, and, most of all, of love. So, while sometimes challenging, and occasionally even downright scary, the daily storms of our lives hold nothing in the terror stakes when pitted against their absence.
We've all felt it. Even the most overscheduled of us occasionally look up to find ourselves deeply alone, and empty, and with really not much of anything to do at all. It really is as if we're becalmed at those moments, stranded in what even the text today refers to ominously, I think, as "dead calm."
Most of the time, of course, we respond quickly: taken aback, we fill what we fear is emptiness with renewed vigor: we shop, or play golf, or turn back to work; we attend conferences and restaurants and movie houses. We eat, or drink, or watch TV. We do whatever we can, in other words, to prevent the silence we occasionally sense lies just outside of all this storminess from engulfing us.
A dead calm.
Here's the real source of fear. Because who are we when we still all the storms of our lives and simply breathe? Not competent fishermen, certainly, or successful professionals or relied upon parents. Not pillars of the community, or writers, or proud outcasts. All that dies in stillness. That is the death that occurs in calm. So what, then, survives? Anything?
This question, I think, is the cause of the disciples' fear that day on the once stormy waters of Galilee - and who can blame them? They're not contemplative types after all, not cloistered monks, but fishermen - tough guys, competent enough and busy all the time. Or they were, back when they were fishers of fish. But as fishers of people, Jesus is teaching them a new way to be. And so now they are being confronted -- with this text we are all being confronted -- with this terrible and fearful question: Is there anything behind all the storminess and rush? Are we really anything more than what we achieve?
Good teacher that he is, Jesus also, thankfully, provides us with an answer. And it is clear: God. God is in the stillness.
That's why this reading is coupled with the verses from Job, I think - it is God after all who commands the waters: "thus far shall you come, and no further and here shall your proud waves be stopped."
But of course this is the most frightening revelation of them all. The idea that it is God right there with them in that tiny, run of the mill fishing boat is what prompts the disciples finally to respond with 'great awe." And this awe, or fear, is ultimately what drives Jesus to exasperation. Not because they were frightened by the waves, which only makes logical sense, but because they were frightened of God's presence in their absence. "Why are you so afraid? Have you still so little faith?" He asks. Can't you see that I am here with you -- in the storm, of course, but most vividly, most fully, most wakefully in the calm. In the stillness.
The phrase 'dead calm' thus becomes an oxymoron. A more usual translation in fact, is not 'dead' but 'great' as in: "great windstorm" and "great awe." "Great calm" then, or maybe, 'living calm,' because that which lies beyond the distractions of the storm is not dead. It is not emptiness, or absence, or isolation, but love so alive it sustains us even when we don't stop to take notice. But oh, when we do! When we finally dare open ourselves to the great arms of that love, we find the kind of satisfaction that all the tumultuousness we can muster will never bring - a love apart from all the achievements, however noble, and from all the mistakes, however grievous, that our battles with the storm might bring us.
"Peace. Be still." Jesus says. There is no longer any need to run. God who is love is what lies beyond the frenzy of the storm. There is really nothing to run from but the waves.
Amen.