June 22, 2003

Mark 4:35-41

With many stories like these [imaging GOD's commonwealth], he presented his message to them, fitting the stories to their experience and maturity. He was never without a story when he spoke. When he was alone with his disciples, he went over everything, sorting out the tangles, untying the knots.

Late that day he said to them, "Let's go across to the other side." They took him in the boat as he was. Other boats came along. A huge storm came up. Waves poured into the boat, threatening to sink it. And Jesus was in the stern, head on a pillow, sleeping! They roused him, saying, "Teacher, is it nothing to you that we're going down?"

Awake now, he told the wind to pipe down and said to the sea, "Quiet! Settle down!" The wind ran out of breath; the sea became smooth as glass. Jesus reprimanded the disciples: "Why are you such cowards? Don't you have any faith at all?"

They were in absolute awe, staggered. "Who is this, anyway?" they asked. "Wind and sea at his beck and call!"

[The Message]

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1. We all have storms that need stilling. Some of them have risen up out of the contexts within which we find ourselves. Some of them have come about because we've been too cowardly to deal with them before this. They have grown out of our lows and inability to be truthful about ourselves and the world around us. And now threaten to undo us.

2. The stilling of our storms needs to be done on two fronts. One is the outside front of events and on one is the inside front of interpreting events.

As we become more familiar with these two fronts we will be able to follow Jesus all the way to the doing of even greater deeds.

3. Among the greater deeds is the stilling of economic storms, political storms, warring storms, inequality of opportunity storms, ideological storms, and more. To be about this grand work requires that we deal with our fears about dealing with such events and with such fear.

We not only need to ask who Jesus is, we need to ask who we are. Storms are not beyond the beck and call of any prophet. As fellow-prophets we are to continue the tradition of storm-stilling. Still out!