Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, rcl yr b, 2021
National Indigenous Day of Prayer
1 Samuel 17:57-18:5, 10-16; Psalm 9:9-20; 2 Cor. 6:1-13; Mark 4:35-41
Then the wind ceased,
and there was a dead calm.
There must be more to the story we read in Mark’s Gospel today. There has to be more. And you don’t have to be a sailor to see it.
The story starts “when evening had come,” and continues with an invitation from Jesus, to the disciples, to cross the lake to the other side. Which is a lovely start, right? The water can be especially beautiful, and the weather particularly pleasant, on the lake in the early evening.
But not this evening. This particular evening, “A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already swamped.” And the disciples feared for their lives.
It’s a story that brings to mind Psalm 107, where we read that
Some went down to the sea in ships *
and plied their trade in deep waters;
They beheld the works of the Lord *
and his wonders in the deep.
Then he spoke, and a stormy wind arose, *
which tossed high the waves of the sea.
They mounted up to the heavens and fell back to the depths; *
their hearts melted because of their peril.
They reeled and staggered like drunkards *
and were at their wits’ end.
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, *
and he delivered them from their distress.”
Or perhaps the story of Jonah, where we read that “the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm came upon the sea that the ship threatened to break up. Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried to his god.” A story that reaches an initial resolution, at least for the sailors who “picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea,” when “the sea ceased from its raging.”
There’s much going on symbolically in the story of the storm in Mark. There’s the challenge of change, and the danger that can come with being on the move. In the religious context of early Christianity, it may also symbolizes the journey of the good news of Jesus. When the gospel crossed over from the Jewish religious world and into the Gentile religious world, representing the challenge posed by preaching the gospel to the whole of the world, and the challenge of bridging the differences that so often feel so difficult in overcoming. As Ched Myers puts it, “These harrowing sea stories intend to dramatize the difficulties facing the kingdom community as it tries to overcome the institutionalized social divisions between Jew and gentile.”
This politically inflected reading of the story is helpful, and it does two things. First, it sheds some light on the complex religious world of early Christians and the challenges they faced; and secondly, it helps us see the challenge of the sometimes violent religious complexity of our own world. Something most certainly in my mind as we take time today, and in the past weeks, to reflect on the violence that can come when the gospel moves from one culture to another, a violence that took root in residential schools.
So this might not just be about ancient religious antagonisms, but offers an opportunity for some reflection on the challenge of divisions within our won community of faith; just as Jews and Gentiles, even when they believed in Jesus, had a really hard time coming together and into one church, so have Anglo Christians had a hard time coming together with Indigenous Christians.
It’s a complex story, this meeting of culture and spirituality. It’s a history that has come into the open a bit after St. John’s Church on Six Nations was burnt down—a fire most likely set by people who were rightly angry about the news of the graves of children found in BC.
But the response to the fire brought out the complexity of religious life and religious encounter. On the one hand, the encounter of settler and indigenous cultures has bred violence and reprisal; but on the other, in the meeting that took place this week after the fire, it wasn’t only Christians who came out in support of St. John’s Church. There were traditional people there too, who had family buried in the churchyard; and St John’s Church was remembered as a place of resistance, even, to settler domination. Anglicanism, after all, first came to this part of the world through the Mohawk Thayendanegea—also known as Joseph Brant.
And Anglican Christianity was embraced by many Mohawk people well before the Mohawk Institute—our own Residential School—was established on Six Nations.
And so the passage of the good news of Jesus from one place to another, and when the story of Jesus crosses cultural boundaries, it can come with fear, and violence. Just as those disciples feared for their lives on that violent sea, as Jesus sailed with them from their own homeland and into the world beyond.
But Mark’s story of the passage of Jesus and the disciples from Jewish territory into Gentile territory does not end, though, in being crashed about in a storm and fearing for one’s life. In responding to the fear of the disciples, with Jesus “rebuking the wind” and saying “to the sea,” “‘Peace! Be still!’” And with the wind ceasing, and the sea calming down under the order of Jesus, what this story reveals is Jesus’s mastery over the elements of creation, Jesus’s lordship over fear and violence, and his ability to bring about its end. The point is that this Jesus is Lord of the wind and the sea, and has power over their violence.
And I wonder if this works against any simplistic reading of this story as simply political; if the wind and the waves are of the Lord, as Jonah and the Psalmist clearly say, then religious strife, and the violence that comes with religious encounter, would have to be seen as of God as well. But this simply cannot be so, in any simple or straightforward way. If we find violence in Jesus, then we are simply mistaken, and under the influence of much smaller and pettier gods.
I seem to have come very far from where I started. I started by saying that there must be more to this story in Mark, and that you don’t need to be sailor to see it. The “more” is in one phrase, almost a throwaway phrase, and it comes after Jesus says to the sea and the wind, “Be still!” After Jesus says “be still,” “the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.”
And there was a dead calm? I mean, have you ever been sailing? Even if you haven’t been sailing, I imagine you still get the basic concept. To sail is to use the force of the wind to move on the water.
And while it’s true that you really don’t want to be caught in a small sailboat in a big storm like the disciples were with Jesus, you also don’t want to find yourself in a “dead calm.” A “dead calm” means no wind whatsoever; and no wind whatsoever means being completely stuck, unable to go anywhere at all.
So there must be more to the story than Jesus stilling the waves and the sea. Because we know the disciples don’t spend the rest of the Gospel of Mark stranded in the middle of the lake. Nope, there’s much more yet to happen, and the wind picks up again, driving Jesus and the disciples to Jerusalem, and Jesus to Golgotha. They will be driven through the valley of death, the death that leads to life: Christ will be crucified.
And it serves as something of a reminder that the Christian life is rarely one of staying still. I mean, there are certainly moments of bliss, of God’s peace, of God’s joy, of settling into the calmness of God’s presence. And if we are to find that true peace, and reconciliation in Christ, it will not be in the storms of violence that destroy; but it will be, safe as we are in his care—the care of the one who commands the wind and the sea to cease its violence, in the care of the one who is crucified for us. The life of the one who shares with us his life, in the community of the crucified; the crucified one who promises peace.
The Revd Dr Preston DS Parsons