Our Genesis reading and our gospel alike have the flavour of once upon a time. Of halcyon days when the earth was untouched by human hand, and God was at work planting a garden…or when the weather was so beautiful, the sea so calm that a boat trip with friends was the perfect opportunity for an exhausted Jesus to rest, lulled by the gentle waves.
As I say, it STARTED beautifully. Harmony of humanity and creation. Peaceful sleep. Nothing to trouble anyone – unless it might be that seed of a trial that God sows when he tells the man “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die”. But that’s for later. For now, as the man sleeps, God creates the companion that he needed and the happy couple are left to explore the beauty of God’s garden, naked and unashamed.
Wouldn’t it be lovely to stay there?
Or, indeed, to find ourselves sharing a fishing trip with the disciples, quietly going about their business.
Nothing to trouble us. Nothing to trouble them. Everything just as it should be.
Maybe in the beginning life, and faith felt that way for you.
All about calm seas and prosperous voyages. God in his heaven, all right with the world. Ahh. Happy sigh.
But for most of us, it doesn’t stay that way.
Whether it's a fresh breeze or a veritable Eunice, something is bound to come along to disrupt things
It might be the moment when you find your faith shaken by something that feels like a positively unreasonable demand – from God or perhaps from God’s Church.
It might be the moment when a storm gets up, as you realise that simply being part of a Cathedral family won't be enough to keep your ship of faith afloat, when ill-health, money worries, rampant injustice in places of which you’d expected better, maybe even a global pandemic, literally rock your world, and suddenly you’re being buffeted from every side.
I can pretty well guarantee, though, that if you’ve not been shaken a bit by now, it’s going to happen soon. And at that point, you will surely wonder why on earth you ever stepped aboard that small boat in such a vast sea.
You may try giving yourself a pep talk.
You chose to be there because – well, because you wanted to be close to Jesus.
You were utterly certain that was the best, the only, place to be
Except right now, just when you need him, he’s asleep.
ASLEEP
How DARE he?
When terrible things are happening all around, we don’t need a sleeping Saviour do we. We need him awake, alert, making a difference. Unusually, Mark’s account of this event has more detail than Luke. It is he who adds a cushion for Jesus’ weary head, and who articulates the question that we’ve surely all lobbed heavenwards in times of crisis
“Do you not CARE that we are perishing?”
Luke just gives us the bald facts. We ARE perishing. That’s it. There seems to be absolutely no escape.
For many, this kind of experience is the last straw for faltering faith. You’ll almost certainly hear some say “I used to go to church but after I watched mum struggle with her cancer…after I saw the devastation caused by that earthquake…after that little one was killed…I just couldn’t carry on believing. What use is a God who allows that kind of thing?”
If you're honest, you might even think that yourself
For truly it’s quite hard not to sympathise. It can seem outrageous that the God for whom nothing is impossible apparently chooses not to step in when we need help so badly.
Master, Master, we are perishing. DO SOMETHING!
But the thing is, Jesus is there all along.
There is not a single moment when he leaves us alone, whether we feel his presence or not.
But perhaps both these stories have something to do with coming of age. With stepping out of “once upon a time” into a world of harsh reality.
A world where God is always with us but God’s presence does not guarantee a charmed life. A world where we have to take responsibility for many things we’d prefer to avoid.
A world where experience bears out the truth that psychiatrist and theologian James Finley once expressed:
God’s love protects us from nothing! Yet… sustains us in everything!
Did you catch that?
God’s love protects us from nothing.
We HAVE to engage with the same struggles, face the same challenges and disasters as everyone else. Knowing the truth of God’s love for you is never a talisman to protect you from pain or fear.
And yet…and yet…
Jesus, waking, asks “Where is your faith?”
And surely that is the central question for each of us – for it must be faith hand in hand with love,, that sustains us in the tough times.
Where is your faith?
It’s easy to hear the question as a criticism…as a “Could do better” in the same vein as the exclamation “Oh you of little faith”
According to that reading, Jesus might place the emphasis thus
Where IS your faith? Honestly, did you think the storm would overpower this, of all boats…
And if you heard it thus, you’re probably looking at your shoes, shuffling uncomfortably, whole you try to frame an apology.
“Lord, I’m sorry. I’m just weak and useless. And seasick actually. I’m no good in a crisis. You know me…”
You know me.
Ah yes, indeed he does.
He knows when we are panicking and why. He knows when our resilience is exhausted, when we just need to fling ourselves into his arms and cry.
And I’m confident that Jesus never asks that, or any other question to make us squirm. So, let’s hear it another way, as an invitation to pause and consider seriously on what our hopes are founded.
Where is your faith?
If faith depends on neat theological packages, with a tidy answer to every question, ideally rooted in Scripture, and tied up with gold ribbon – I suggest you may yet come unstuck.
If it’s based on a belief that the institutions of Church and state will always operate for the good of all…If it’s rooted in your own hard-won independence– well, you have probably found a few leaks in your boat already.
Where IS your faith?
Take the question seriously and don’t simply slip into glib answers. While we all know the story of the child who was so thoroughly indoctrinated that when asked to name an animal with long ears, twitchy nose and a pompom tail his response was
“I know it sounds like a rabbit, but really it must be Jesus”…we will know too that sometimes Jesus doesn't seem to be the immediate answer.
That's OK. Spend time with the question.
Spend time in the depths of your being and see what you find there.
Talk to your spiritual director, your clergy or a trusted friend.
Sit in the dark with God and see what happens.
Does that sound alarming?
Please don’t panic.
Lent is coming, and with it a genuine opportunity to plumb the depths…because you know, however deep you go, whatever the darkness you encounter, GOD WILL BE THERE.
Storms will still rage. You will not be able to stay, naked and unashamed, in your Eden, wherever it may be…BUT IT WILL BE ALRIGHT.
I promise you that.
You don’t need me to tell you that faith is never the same as certainty, and I have to say that I’m increasingly drawn to the apophatic, to a recognition that God is often located, immortal, invisible, within my own cloud of unknowing – which may at times look very much like a storm cloud of my own grief and fear.
But the anonymous medieval mystic who wrote of that Cloud of Unknowing wisely suggested a solution, to “beat on that cloud with a dart of longing love” – and it’s with that love that I want to leave you…conscious that it’s only love that will sustain our faith, only love that enables our life in Christ, together or apart. When the chips are down, it’s all we have.
So for me, faith resides always in that experience of loving and being loved. Here’s James Finley again
“ If we are absolutely grounded in the absolute love of God that protects us from nothing even as it sustains us in all things, then we can face all things with courage and tenderness and touch the hurting places in others and in ourselves with love."
That’s somewhere that I can put my faith, confident of its truth in calm and storm alike.
God bless us now, to live it for others in the name of the Father….
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