Lent 2
16 March 2025
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
STORMS
Mark 4.35-41
Following Jesus Through The Gospel of Mark
I would have given almost anything to have been there that day. How about you?
Jesus had just finished teaching on parables. He and his disciples hop in a small fishing boat and take off across the lake of Galilee. It’s not long before Jesus is fast asleep. His head resting on a pillow. He must have been exhausted.
Why is it so wonderful to watch people we love while they sleep? Sometimes that’s the best time to love your child – right? A time for simple uncluttered adoration. We can just sit there silently and take them in with our eyes and love them for who they are.
As Jesus sleeps the wind begins to blow and stir up waves. It becomes a howling storm.
Storms hit, do they not? And not only the meteorological kind, but those stormy events that blow through our lives and rearrange everything. And when those storms come, sometimes we’re not sure we’ll survive them. They can blast in unexpectedly from nowhere. A financial crisis. A job lost. A marriage ended. A friendship severed. Your first young love devastated by a breakup. Perhaps your physical body, or someone you love, has been stricken with disease. We could call these our outer storms.
Sometimes change itself is the storm. And you come into this place each week, needing a glimpse of a God Who is unchanging, Who is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Sometimes it’s the inner weather. Perhaps the outer storms have created inner storms, and you feel like they’re about to take you under. Emotional or psychological distress. Maybe depression. One writer who has crashed amidst that dark torment says “depression” is not a strong enough word for it. He calls it “a hurricane inside your mind.” The mind-storm of depression. Or it might be the flood-tides of grief or the searing desert windstorms of guilt or the ache of loneliness or the panic of anxiety. Inner storms or outer storms – they come nevertheless and rearrange our lives.
And if we’re honest, sometimes we feel like Jesus is asleep in the midst of our storms. As Jesus sleeps that day in the boat on the lake the wind becomes a bonafide storm. The waves grow so large they begin to lap over the sides of the boat. And Jesus . . . keeps on sleeping.
The disciples grow scared and they cry out to Jesus, “Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?” Perhaps we’ve said those same words, or similar ones. When the stormy winds blow through our lives and the billowing waves surround us it sometimes seems that Jesus is asleep, that God is absent. And our questions often become theological: “God, are you there?” “Jesus, don’t you care that my life is collapsing around me?” “Lord, do you not know that I’m about to go under?” These are life and death questions. Because to believe that God doesn’t care what happens to us can very well send us into depths of despair out of which we may never come.
So what do we do in those moments of overwhelming crisis, when we’re concerned not only because our ship is sinking, but because it seems as though God doesn’t care? It’s the question raised by the disciples, by the parents of a teenager who is out of control, by the teenager who feels lost and confused, by the patient who hears the tumor is malignant, by the family finding it almost impossible to make ends meet: “Jesus, do you not care?”
This sudden storm on the Lake of Galilee has frightened the disciples. Water begins to fill the boat, and they don’t know what’s going to happen to them. The unknown can be the most frightening part of the storm. When we just don’t know what’s going to happen.
I heard a man tell the story of when his father fell ill. His father was a big man – six foot two, over 200 pounds. He said he always looked up to his dad, amazed at what a pillar of strength he seemed. Six months before he died they were doing some tests. He said he walked into his dad’s hospital room and took his hand because he had never seen his dad so frightened before. He said, “Dad, what’s the matter?” His father said, “I’m scared.” “What are you scared of?” “I’m scared because I don’t know.”1
The unknown can be so terribly frightening. And it doesn’t have to be a really big unknown like tests for cancer or Alzheimer’s. It can be something like starting a new job or beginning a new relationship or the ending of a relationship. Just not knowing what it’s going to be like. And we sometimes expect the worst.
The disciples’ fear had turned to despair – the kind of despair that comes when we lose hope because Jesus is asleep and God doesn’t seem to care. “Why don’t you just curse God and die?” Job’s wife said to him. “You’ve lost everything. God doesn’t care about you. Can’t you see that?” That’s how the disciples were feeling. The ship was sinking around them and the sleeping Jesus didn’t seem to care.
But there’s one thing we often miss in this storm-story, as well as in our own storm-stories, and it is this: Jesus is in the boat with us. He’s not on the shore keeping an eye on the boat from a distance, inflicting the storms upon our lives. Jesus is right in the middle of the storm with us!
So the disciples wake him up. And once awake Jesus does two things: First, he rebukes the wind. Can you picture him? Standing in the prow of that boat, raising his arms to the fierce winds, shouting even fiercer still: “I rebuke you, O wind! Cool it! Chill out! Scram! Be gone!” And then he says to the waves a second thing, a more peaceable benediction: “Peace. Be still.” And the wind begins to cease and the sea is as calm as could be.
The disciples – are still shaking. Their knees – can’t stop knocking. Their hearts – pounding so loud, so fast, so hard, they wonder whether their hearts will just leap out of their chests. And Jesus says, “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?”
I don’t know about you, but I can think of all kinds of clever responses to Jesus: “That’s easy for you to say, Lord. You can walk on water. We float like a rock.” “You speak a word and the winds stop. We could holler all day till we’re blue in the face and the wind would just laugh at us.”
The poet e. e. cummings has given voice to the despairing thoughts of many when he prays: “King Christ, this world is all aleak, and life preservers there are none.”3
Jesus, however, won’t let us off the hook. “Why do you fear?” he says. “Where is your faith?” After we’ve given Jesus a dose of our sarcasm, maybe we need to let this confronting question sink in for a while. Is Jesus saying that the opposite of faith is not doubt but fear?
Fear is a terrible prison, isn’t it? I’m not talking about the healthy kind of fear God gives as a natural alarm system in the face of danger to keep us safe. I’m talking about an alarm system gone haywire. Where we live in constant fear. The kind of fear that wakes you up at night, that causes cold sweat to pop up all over your skin. It’s that dreadful panic that often paralyzes us. What if we could live without being gripped and controlled by anxious fear?
Jesus knew there would be storms that come and cause us to fear. He also knew that there are storms which are themselves fear. Fear-storms. And he wants us to know that there is help in the midst of our fear-storms. In the boat with the fear-sick disciples Jesus turns from the waters of Galilee which he has just calmed and rebukes the stormy seas of our fearful hearts being whipped by the wind. He says to our seasick hearts: “Peace, be still.”
Perhaps you’ve known those inexplicable times when the hurricane winds cease and a dead calm comes over you and the words of Jesus enter your heart: My peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives, but as I give. Let not your hearts be troubled. Neither let them be . . . afraid.
How would you like to live without fear? “Why do you fear?” he says, “Where is your faith?” Faith as the deepest kind of believing, the kind of trusting that goes all the way down. It hangs on even in the darkest moments when God seems nowhere to be found.
Adoniram Judson, America’s first foreign missionary, lost his wife and then his baby girl Maria a few months later. Out of the depths he lamented: “God is to me the Great Unknown. I believe in him but I find him not.”
Faith is something deep enough to hang on to even in the deepest darkest absence. Faith is also the kind of reality that can change the way we look at life and walk through life and face life. Faith can alter our vantage point.
One writer talks about living by faith in the midst of storms. He says: “These storms come – grief, pain, loneliness, fear. And they rage like Hurricane Hugo tossing about all the mobile homes in your mind. If you feel like you’re a mobile home, then it’s hell. But if you understand that you are actually the sky . . . The sky can be rough and stormy. But the skies were there before the storm and will be there after the storm.”3
That’s what faith can do. It changes your perspective. You are not a mobile home. You are the sky. You were here before the storms came and you’ll be here after the storms leave. For you are more than flesh and bone. You are a living soul held forever in the loving arms of God.
So we say with faith, “It may kill my body, but it will not kill my soul.” We strive to say with the apostle Paul: We are afflicted in every way – but not crushed, perplexed – but not driven to despair, persecuted – but not forsaken, struck down – but not destroyed. Like one of William Faulkner’s characters who says in southern redneck dialect, “They kilt us, but they ain’t whupped us yet.”4
When fear-storms surround us strangling our peace Jesus has promised to stay in the boat with us through all those dark and terrible nights. He has promised to be wherever fear may strike. And sometimes in the fiercest of storms God’s Spirit astoundingly wells up inside of you and you find yourself . . . singing, singing in ways your mind cannot comprehend: When peace like a river attendeth my way. When sorrows like sea billows roll. Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, It is well. It is well with my soul.
So when you find Jesus asleep in the midst of your storm, don’t be afraid, do not despair. Hold on to faith with whatever you can muster and know that the Risen Christ who conquered death is in the boat with you. Having faith while in a sinking boat with a sleeping Jesus is not easy, but it is possible. Because when the storms come, Jesus stands at the prow of the boat, the wind whipping his face, and he rebukes the storm, and he says to your fearful heart, “Peace, be still. I am here. And I always will be.”
When the storm ceased, Mark says the disciples looked at one another in amazement and said, “Who is this that even the wind and sea obey him?” He is Jesus, the human face of God. He is the one found in the midst of raging storms bringing peace. He is the Love that will not let us go.
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