Pentecost 3 -- Gospel Text: Matthew 4:25-41 -- Jesus Calms the Storms of Fear and Doubt

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, who sustains us through love and peace – Amen.

In the gospel text today, the first thing we notice is that Jesus encourages the disciples into this trip to "the other side." Jesus calls them to leave the "crowd" and venture into the Sea of Galilee, a sea known by the fisherman with Jesus to be dangerous and prone to storms. In the ancient world, seas were known to be chaotic, scary places, which harbored monsters of the deep that could only be controlled by the power of the ethereal God. Jesus calls them out of the comfort they know and into this sublime sea. The disciples faithfully take Jesus’s invitation, which almost seems to be the anti-thesis of foreshadowing, as we will see later in the text when there is a lack of faith.

For those of you that don’t know, I am a social networking guru. Enveloped in Facebook and constantly checking Gmail, and adding on a new addiction – Twitter. Twitter is a website that allows users to send 140 character messages to anyone that chooses to see their updates. A while ago, I got a Tweet, that is – an update from a friend on Twitter, from my friend Reed that read: "I am learning how close absolute faith is to certain doubt. Both steal silently into the heart." I immediately became captivated by the idea and knew I wanted to preach on this gospel text, because there was a common thread: faith and doubt. Why do we have faith? Why do we doubt?

Recently I’ve been reading The Preaching Life by Barbara Brown Taylor, so I can’t resist the opportunity to quote her in this sermon. In this book she writes, “God has given us good news in human form and has even given us the grace to proclaim it, but part of our terrible freedom is the freedom to lose our voices, to forget where we are going and why.” I have the suspicion that in that boat, the disciples forgot in the midst of fear, where they were going and why. Doubt had stolen silently into their hearts. They were not without their voices entirely, because they called out to Jesus “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” but they had certainly lost whatever voice of faith they had to accept Jesus’s invitation to the sea to begin with. It’s possible they did not forget where they were going and why, but they certainly forgot who they were going with. Still, we as the Church do often forget where we are going, because we don’t have a man following us around, napping just a few feet away that we can wake with our voices when they tremble with fear. Or do we? In the moment the disciples cried out, Jesus awoke, and the storms ceased, because the wind and the waters obeyed him then, and whether we struggle with this truth, the storms of our lives obey him now, and when we awake in the night, fearful and doubting, Jesus proclaims the same truth – “Peace! Be still!”

I believe that while Jesus did rebuke the disciples, he didn't rebuke them because of their questions, but because of their lack of faith when he was obviously present with them. That's the crux of this text - this narrative shows how the disciples reacted when they were present with Jesus, how much more are we prone to fear when our Jesus, Our God, Our Redeemer, cannot sit with us as a tangible presence while we sail into stormy seas? You see, I don't think Jesus desires us to quit asking questions, but instead, to seek after God when we are in stormy seas, and remember that our questions will be answered, though frustratingly in “the fullness of time,” and that in whatever storm we pass through, we are never without a God of Peace.

When Jesus spoke, he spoke peace into existence over winds that threatened the disciples. As believers called to be Christ in the world today, when we speak violence, we do not create peace. When we speak hate, we do not cause others to feel loved. God has the ability to breathe creation into existence; God also has the ability to breathe peace into the hearts of the disciples in this text -- but not only in this text. God continually breathes peace and love into the heart of the Church, building community through God's own creation of loving, welcoming homes and parishes. The Church Universal is called to be Jesus in the world and so, we are called to speak peace into existence into the lives of our friends, family, and anyone we come into contact with when the lives around us are thrown into stormy seas of turmoil. When we find ourselves in storms of injustice, we are asked to speak love and never be silent - we are asked to speak on behalf of the wounded so that through our outward expression of the inward hope we have, others may have hope and be healed.

Hearkening back to Barbara Brown Taylor, again she writes, “What appear to be death throes may be the strenuous pangs of birth.” In this text, maybe it’s both. As a Sacramental body, we are wise to remember the setting of this text – the sea. A perfect place for a baptism. The disciples find themselves weak in fear and scared to death. Pun intended. And because of Jesus, and Jesus alone, they are redeemed in that boat on those waters and in the wake of seeing Jesus’s power, believe in the glory of God when they once doubted. We who are baptized have also entered into this same sublime sea.

Speaking of the setting, the sea is a very primal entity to be what surrounds the disciples and Jesus in this text. There's no stop along the way to the other side to ask for directions. There's no GPS to ensure they know the way. There's no life preserver on board just in case a storm comes. Instead, they are taken into this completely natural setting with only one Savior - Jesus. Again, we too, as baptized believers, are not always given assurance that we know the way, or assurance that we will face no storms, but are assured that there is a Savior.

When the storms come in this primal sea, I think of creation - the cosmos coming about because God made order out of chaos. Exegetical studies explain that the word for “storm” in the text is also the word for “whirlwind.” The disciples were led into a sea of disorientation that led them away from the faith they had when they left the shore so willingly. In addition, scholars note that this same word for “storm” carries overtones of demonic power. In addition, the words “Peace! Be Still!” are the same words used by Jesus to heal a man possessed by a demon in an earlier Marcan text. When in these waters, it is almost as if the disciples were possessed by fear and doubt, and their hearts of faith were disoriented by their human reaction to fear and doubt the power of the very “ruler of Nature” that slept peacefully beside them in that boat on the sea.

I wonder if when we, as humans, are made from primal elements, some of those natural elements include fear and doubt, because that is how we are so naturally inclined to respond to the storms of our lives. And, because God knows us so intimately as our Creator, God places Jesus in the boat, so that someone can say to us, "Peace! Be still!" when we forget what it's like to feel peace and forget what it's like to know stillness. To go back to what Reed said, maybe doubt and faith steal silently into our hearts because they are a part of our creation. We have faith that there must be someone to save us when we are dry, but in the stormy waters we fear.

As I studied this text, something from the Book of Common Prayer kept coming to my mind. As many of you may know, I am currently being led into a life of uncharted waters as an aspirant for Holy Orders. One of my earliest assignments from Father Jeff was to read a certain prayer every single day, which I have tried to do. Surprisingly, with a somewhat scary text to preach on, it’s a thanksgiving – A General Thanksgiving, found on page 836 of the Book of Common Prayer. I use this to close, because I think the heart of this text may be to trust in God, as hard as that is, and in all things, to try to say – thanks be to God.

Let Us Pray:

Accept, O Lord, our thanks and praise for all that you have done for us. We thank you for the splendor of the whole creation, for the beauty of this world, for the wonder of life, and for the mystery of love.

We thank you for the blessing of family and friends, and for the loving care, which surrounds us on every side.

We thank you for setting us at tasks, which demand our best efforts, and for leading us to accomplishments, which satisfy and delight us.

We thank you also for those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone.

Above all, we thank you for your Son Jesus Christ; for the truth of his Word and the example of his life; for his steadfast obedience, by which he overcame temptation; for his dying through which he overcame death; and for his rising to life again, in which we are raised to the life of your kingdom.

Grant us the gift of your Spirit, that we may know Christ and make him known; and through him, at all times and in all places, may give thanks to you in all things. Amen.