First Presbyterian Church of Blackwood
21 E. Church Street Blackwood, NJ 08012 Sermon Notes (Sunday ~ June 23, 2024) Sermon Title – Who Is This, Anyway Text – Mark 4:35-41 Rev William Gaskill Who Is This Anyway? II Corinthians 6:1-13; Mark 4:35-41 Okay, I’m going to preach to myself and you are invited to eavesdrop. Did you ever find yourself in the midst of such a storm that you knew you were in over your head, a storm over which you had no control, a storm strong and unsettling, a storm that threatened to overturn life as you knew it? I’ve been there more than once in my life. Is there a way to find shelter in the time of storm as the old hymn has it? Is there any hope of finding peace in the midst of trials and the chaos they cause? It’s a long and complicated story of which I will spare you the details, but in one week, my daughter, a single mother of five, will be officially homeless. She and four of her children are moving in with us at the end of this week. Good-bye peace and quiet; good-bye leisurely mornings over coffee and scripture reading with my wife; good-bye spacious home with several rooms within which to find solitude; good-bye peaceful meals, prepared in an un-crowded kitchen where all the pots and pans have been well washed and ready for use. And a whole lot more, but need I go on? We saw this movie once already, seven years ago. As Yogi Berra said once, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” Lord have mercy! Through this and many other storms Jean and I have walked and I must say, this time around I feel a curious sense of peace. I’m willing to do whatever it takes to please the Lord. Oh, I’ve prayed my Gethsemane prayers: “Lord, if it be possible let this cup pass from me, nevertheless…”. I’ve done a little whining: “God, I’m no longer a young man; I don’t know if I’m up to it!” “Peace. Be still!” I’d read the story of Jesus and the disciples out in the boat on the Sea of Galilee many times before I actually went there and saw it for myself. When I saw it I thought, “Huh? How could anyone feel their life was in jeopardy on this quiet little lake?” The Sea of Galilee is only 7 miles across (on a clear day you can see the opposite shore) and 13 miles long. It could easily fit into the Delaware or Chesapeake Bay many times. It was after that trip to Israel that church members Tom and Shirley took us out on their boat in the Northeast River, which is a tributary of the Chesapeake. Suddenly, a violent thunderstorm arose and then I understood how someone out on the water could get really scared. And the water wasn’t even deep! And I’ve learned since that due to the topography around the Sea of Galilee there is a great wind funnel that can cause such violent waves that even today in parking lots on the west shore there are signs warning motorists that even their cars are liable to be swamped should a sudden storm arise. The Jewish people had an uneasy relationship with all sea waters. Scholars have noted the parallels between this story and the story of Jonah. You remember old fish food; Jonah was sent to warn the wicked city of Nineveh to repent or else. Jonah had two problems. One, he hated Nineveh and wanted bad things to happen to them. The last thing he wanted to do was warn them. So he went AWOL on God’s call, but God used a stormy sea and a great fish to halt him in mid-flight. Sometimes it takes dramatic measures to elicit our obedience to God. Jonah knew enough about God to know that God isn’t willing that even one should perish, as the Apostle Peter put it hundreds of years later, and that the odds were that the people of Nineveh would repent and God would show them mercy instead of judgment, which, of course, is exactly what happened. It sent Jonah off in an angry sulk. And of course there are other sea stories, like the one from the Exodus, the story of Israel being blocked by the Red Sea in their frantic escape from the pursuing Egyptians. There, God opened the way through by splitting the sea apart. The sea that confronted them caused them to fear that their hoped for salvation was about to evaporate under the wrath of the Egyptian warriors. Then God came to the rescue. God is Lord of all the mighty waters on earth, both physical and spiritual. Or you could go back all the way to Genesis and see God’s creative authority over the waters of chaos setting boundaries and limits over them. But unbelief can leave our confidence in tatters. Oceans are beyond our control but not beyond God’s. Sometimes though, we wonder if the boundaries will hold up. There is much more in the Old Testament that shows us that Israel did not view seas as happy little swimming holes painted by Bob Ross. We find malicious and threatening sea monsters from the Book of Daniel all the way through the Book of Revelation. Add to that the ancients’ belief that the whole creation, both sea and land, was infested with hostile demonic forces that were prowling around like roaring lions looking for someone to devour. So, the actual weather conditions and resulting rough seas were augmented by the disciples’ prevailing world view. Result? Terror! Wake up Jesus! Save us; we are perishing! How can you sleep at a time like this? Don’t you care? Ah, the storms of life and our questions. Storms seem to always generate questions. And like the disciples, when the storm breaks, often our first reaction is fear. We are in over our heads. We want to be in control but we are not. Forces much bigger and stronger than us are threatening our lives. As our fears intensify, we may come to think that we have a sleeping Savior. Oh, we believe he is always nearby, but we suspect that as conditions worsen he is possibly not paying attention. We’ve read Psalm 121 that assures us that our God never slumbers nor sleeps, but if he’s awake, why doesn’t God do something? Can’t God see we are in real trouble? The disciples shake Jesus and cry, “Wake up!” We’ve also read the end of Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus said, “I will never leave you or forsake you and lo, I am with you always to the close of the age.” In the next moment he ascended up and out of their sight. How can we know he is with us when we can’t see him? How can we put these things together in a coherent whole? Is our Savior really present in the storms of our lives or are we engaged in wishful thinking? Where are you when I need you Lord? Are people of faith what the world thinks we are, gullible fools? Jesus, wake up! Jesus’ eyes pop open but he seems almost serene, so the next question is, “Don’t you care that we are perishing?” Why aren’t you as afraid as we are? Don’t you see we are going to drown? They’d already seen Jesus perform remarkable and mighty signs, but that was then and this is now! Why don’t you do something? Sure you can heal people, you can exercise powerful authority over the demons that torment individuals, but how about the malevolence of this violent wind and this stormy sea? If you are not personally acquainted with this question, you simply have not been in a strong enough storm yet. Sooner or later most of us get our own stormy boat ride. When storms rage on and nothing seems to get better, the most natural question is, “Don’t you care?” That question’s first cousin is the oft heard question, “How could a good God allow this to happen?” Or, “If God is good, why doesn’t God come to help us?” These questions transport us to difficult theological problems. The first thing to say is that the presence and power of evil in the world is impossible to explain. We can experience its onslaught, we long to understand the how and why of it all, but it is beyond our powers of reason. That’s why Paul wrote, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12) We soon realize that the battle doesn’t belong to us but to the Lord. Without God’s help we are lost. There are not just atmospheric dangers, not just physical dangers we can understand by study and by applying our scientific methods to the trials of life. There is a spiritual dimension to our struggles that we can only meet and overcome by faith and trust in God. Come what may we must trust, because just as evil is inscrutable, so is the grace of God. Oh the riches, the depth, and the kindness of God’s grace! God’s goodness is far beyond our capacity to limit or define! Sometimes in the evil day, the goodness of God seems to be eclipsed by difficult circumstances, but we believe in spite of it all, or not. If we look at the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we see Jesus doing all sorts of remarkable signs and wonders. But each gospel has a turning point where Jesus sets his face to go up to Jerusalem, there to die on a Roman cross. The juxtaposition of his gracious and compassionate work, his signs and wonders which put the power of God on display for all to see with his gruesome end is not accidental. Each of the four gospels has been steering us to an encounter with crucified love, with the life of God’s Son laid down for us and our salvation. His love is on full display in his suffering, not just in his miraculous deeds of healing and deliverance. Jesus is hanging there by choice to fulfill his mission. There humanity hurls insults that are the fruit of their unanswerable questions. If you are the Son of God, come down from there. It is because he is the Son of God that he doesn’t come down. As the old choir song goes, “He could have called ten thousand angels, to destroy the world and set him free. He could have called ten thousand angels, but he died alone for you and me.” He is hanging there for love, even love for those who hate him. “He saved others, he cannot save himself,” they jeered. If he saved himself, none of us would be saved; we would be eternally lost. On Golgotha and in every generation since, human hubris has demanded answers that we could not handle if we wanted to. Read God’s answer to Job if you want an illustration. Our natural limitations preclude our ability to fathom the wonders of creation and redemption. It’s humbling to face up to that fact. And our natural man or woman likes the taste of humility about as much as a dose of castor oil. Once, an old farmer friend gave my wife a dose of castor oil for her stomach problems. If you are at all young, you have no idea what I’m talking about. Castor oil was an old-fashioned remedy even then and it tastes nasty. From the face she made I thought she might die on the spot! But the remedy worked. Sometimes God’s remedies are also hard to swallow. Confronted by the disciples’ somewhat accusatory questions, Jesus turned the tables with a question of his own: “Why are you afraid, you of little faith?” Then he rebuked the wind and the waves: “Peace! Be still!” And suddenly there was a dead calm. The disciples’ fear of the elements turned to reverent fear of the one in the boat with them: “Who is this that even wind and sea obey him?” Now that’s the right question: who is this? It’s the question that each of us must ask and answer; do we believe Jesus is the Son of God or not? And do we realize that Jesus is not only Lord of each person’s heart, but he is Lord of the whole created order? As John said at the beginning of his Gospel, “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.” The old time commentator William Barclay put forth a little outline of the places we can find peace, listing three areas where we all spend some time. He said first that we can find peace in sorrow. The resurrection of Jesus Christ and his promise that we will be raised with him to newness of life places a boundary around our grief. The comforting presence of the Holy Spirit enters our sorrows and begins to give us consolation and a peace that passes understanding. God’s comfort far exceeds our capacity to fathom it rationally. It makes no sense, but there it is. Second, we can find God’s peace when we are faced with life’s problems. We must learn in prayer to recognize the still small voice of our Good Shepherd and learn to trust the guidance we receive. Third, we must learn to find peace that replaces anxiety. Anxiety is the fear of an imagined but undefined situation which may not even come about. We create dreadful scenarios and then fret over how to avoid them. Paul wrote in Philippians that we are to have no anxiety about anything. You can have anxiety or you can choose not to have it. You can choose to trust in Jesus in all circumstances. So, in one week, my daughter and four grandchildren are moving in. So here are the choices I am making and the ones I will try to stick to, though I might stumble a time or ten. I am going to thank God every day that I am able to shelter the people I love so much. I am going to focus upon love that I can give and that I most assuredly will receive. I am going to praise God that while they are with me I have a golden opportunity to model what it is like to be a Christian. I am going to give my time and attention. I will seek new ways to nurture the intimate moments that my wife and I have enjoyed throughout our days. Some things are going to need re-configuration. And so on and so on. None of this is going to be easy, but all of it will be worth it! You get the point, I’m sure. Life is about choices, not just about what to do but how to feel and what to believe; but enough about me. How about you? What storm are you facing? Whatever it is, never forget who is in the boat with you and what he is able to do to guide you, protect you, and bless you. May you know the nearness of Jesus Christ no matter what.
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