WHEN YOUR BOATS A ROCKIN

THE WIND AND WAVES OBEY JESUS

SCRIPTURE: Mark 4: 35-41

INTRODUCTION:

Jesus and the disciples got into a boat

 and began to cross the Sea of Galilee.

  A storm suddenly arose and the boat began filling with water.

 Jesus was so exhausted, however,

          that He slept soundly. 

When the terrified disciples awoke Him,

Jesus stood up and calmed the storm. 

The disciples were stunned.

“How is it that you have no faith?” Jesus asked.

 He was with them,

yet they did not trust Him. 

When our “boats” are rocked by the storms of life,

do we believe that Jesus can bring calm? 

Or would He question our faith in Him?

                   Ted Offterdinger and his wife Margo were members of a church in Lynchburg, VA.  They were a loving gracious people, and greatly involved in the vibrant life of their congregation.  They had only one child, Teddy who was about 30 and engaged to be married to Ginny Williamson, a girl from North Carolina.  Ted, Sr. and Margo loved Ginny and were supremely happy for their son.  One night shortly before the wedding Teddy and Ginny were driving up to Lynchburg from North Carolina.  A drunken driver careened across the road and struck them head-on, killing both of them.

          Teddy’s parent’s and Ginny’s parent’s worlds appeared shattered, especially Margo.  The entire community was in a state of shock over the double death. 

The Sunday after the incident, Ted and Margo’s Pastor, John Killinger, preached a very poignant message, which was meant for the whole congregation, not just for Ted and Margo.  Ted and Margo wanted something to commemorate their son and his fiancée, so their pastor suggested the establishment of an annual preaching mission in their names. 

That mission, with a generous endowment, is still blessing the community. This endowment that enriches the kingdom of Christ was bought with the lives of two beautiful people who were full of potential.

          The disciples cried, “Master, we are sinking! Do you not care?”

          There in a capsule is the apparent obliviousness of God to human suffering.  How many times have we uttered those words or words to the same effect?  We pastors hear them again and again---

·        from students failing in school

·        from lovers experiencing the pain of unrequited love

·        from businessmen and women losing their jobs or facing bankruptcy

·        from persons going through the agony of divorce

·        from parents locked in hopeless conflict with their children

·        from family members arrested in the shock of scandal or reeling under the impact of death.

 We pastors hear ourselves occasionally making similar expressions of anguish:

·        “I have tried to pray, but God doesn’t answer.

·        It is as if I were praying to a stone wall.

·        As if God weren’t there at all.

·        As if He didn’t care that I am going under.”

“Master, we are sinking! Do you not care?”

This picture of Jesus in the boat, blithely sleeping through the storm while the disciples rowed and bailed for their lives kept coming to the fore in  Pastor Killinger’s mind during the days following Ted Offterdinger’s and Ginny Williamson’s tragic deaths. If he heard Margo’s desperate words, once, he heard them a dozen times:

          “I’m so angry with God. I’ve tried to pray and ask him why, but he wouldn’t answer.”

 Inevitably, without even trying, he put himself in her place, and in Ted’s place.  He thought, “What if it had been one of my children? I too would have been angry with God. In the blindness of my grief, I would have lashed out at Him.

          “How could you be God and permit this!?” I would have demanded.

          “Don’t you care for your own? Doesn’t our relationship mean anything?

          “Must you always be asleep in the storm!?”

I.                  A THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM

I don’t need to tell you that we’re at the heart of a theological problem here that is as old as humanity itself.  Why do the innocent suffer? 

·        We can understand it when a dope pusher is given a concrete footbath and dropped in the river. “He had it coming,” we say.

“Look at all those little children whose lives he messed up.”

·        We can understand it when Saddam Hussein was hanged for wiping out Kurd villages with deadly sarin gas.

·        Or when we executed Nazi warlords for exterminating 6 million Jews.

·        We can also understand it when a Hollywood stuntman does himself in by botching a barrel leap. You can’t take chances every day and never pay the piper. 

·        But what about the innocent!?

·        Why do the young, the beautiful, the talented, ones with so much potential to give the world get maimed for life or killed?   Why the Teddys and the Ginnys?

There is no definitive answer to this question—only a partial one.  Romans 8:28 says, in the original language. “God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”(NASB).  God tells us that these “things” are common to humanity, But he gives those who love him a way to bear them (1 Cor. 1013). He does not bring the forces of evil against us, but rather allows them and then causes them to turn to our ultimate good.  What happens to us is merely the kind of a world we live in—a world as yet unredeemed, a world where good and evil are juxtaposed against each other, where tares grow up with the wheat.  This does not mean that we should regard the world as a dangerous minefield where we are bound to step on a pressure plate some time when we least expect it and be blown to bits.  This kind of an environment would make us all paranoid, and we would all suffer from traumatic stress.  We would all be reduced to moral cowards living in constant fear.  But reality does demand a certain maturity of us as we look at the world.  Bad things can happen in the world, and they can happen to good people.  Our understanding of life should include the very present dangers. To get a proper perspective on this one just has to read the first chapter of Job.

God is not responsible for the terrible things that happen, but God suffers from them too.  That is part of what we have to see.

God isn’t sleeping; God is suffering with us.  We may think when tragedy comes to the innocent or the beautiful or the good, that somehow God is absent.  That isn’t a biblical teaching at all.  The biblical teaching is that God is present with us in our pain.

Have you ever thought about God’s suffering and what it must be like?

 Think about the worst day you have ever had in your whole life, when your pain and depression was the greatest you ever felt.  Then multiply that by a thousand times— no, six billion times—and you have some idea of what God’s suffering must be like. 

God’s sensitivity is so much greater than ours.  He feels so much more. But the counter-point to His sensitivity is that He causes our calamities in the present to shape our character for the future.  Some time they are our own individual points of anguish and at other times they are points of anguish that include others who are close to us like children, or a spouse or a relative, or a close friend. Our suffering and how we bear it involves our children and our yet unborn generations. When I look at the sufferings of my ancestors and how they bore it, I am strengthened.

God never forgets, but carries our cares inside like a pregnant woman carries her baby in her womb.

     Moreover:

·        God is involved in the pain and suffering of all people.  

·        God is involved in the hunger of a seven-year old child in Africa who eats grass to put something in his distended belly.

·          God is involved in the fear and loneliness of a teenage girl who just discovered this morning that she is pregnant.

·          God is involved in the agony of a young couple who buried their infant child last week.

·         God is involved in the suicidal thoughts of an old man who desperately misses his wife of a half century.

·          God is involved in the hurt and pain and bewilderment of a three-year-old child who is tortured by the death of her parents.

The words of the disciples are ironic:

“Master, we are sinking Do you not care?”  Of course, God Cares. God is involved in all our problems. God is in the pain business. Why is God involved in the “Pain Business”? Because, (Are you listening?) our earthly life is His crucible in which He shapes and purifies the citizens of His kingdom. Look in your Bibles at Proverbs 17:3, and Romans 8: 28.

Sometimes in the blindness of our pain, we want to hurt God.  The French playwright Jean Genet, who spent most of his life in prison, said that he mentally cursed God as he chewed the bread of communion.  It was the only way he knew to get back at the Divine for all his suffering.  However, God doesn’t cause our suffering.  God is not responsible for the injustice in the world. Satan is. God is the only force against suffering and injustice in the world! 

And when we lash out at God, we are behaving like mistreated animals that try to bite the person releasing them from bondage.  God is more hurt by evil and suffering than we are. 

     But does God say “No” to the world because of this?  Does God curl up in His pain and say, “I’ll have no more to do with the world because it hurts me so”?  Surely, He must be tempted to.  But He doesn’t.  God holds on.  He keeps absorbing the suffering and turning it into good.  That is the promise of the rainbow, in the days of Noah.  It is a crown of beauty on the world. God loves His creation and continues to struggle with it, even at the price of being hurt by it. God has a goal for the human race and is not deterred by pain, because He loves us so intensely.

     God didn’t even say “No” to the world when Jesus was crucified.  If He was ever going to say No, that was the time to do it, when His only Son was being insulted, tortured, and hung on that viciously cruel cross.  If the suffering heart was ever going to burst, it was then.  But in all the darkness of Calvary, God said yes.  He raised up Jesus and made Him the first fruits of all those who suffer.  This time instead of a rainbow in the sky, it was the risen Lord who was God’s affirmation.  “The Son of God,” said Paul, “was always positive” (2 Cor. 1:19-20).

     This is the secret of the story of the storm at sea, when Jesus was asleep in the boat.  The sleep is the sleep of death, when Jesus was taken away from the disciples.  The sea rose up around them like some primeval enemy.

     “Master, they cried out in fear, “We are sinking! Do you not care?”  

And then Jesus of the Resurrection came to them and calmed the sea (Matt. 14:30).  In general, it is best not to put figurative or allegorical interpretations upon scriptural passages. But studying the Gospels convinces us that most if not all of the passages about Jesus and miracles at sea have to do with the Resurrection.  The sea in Jewish typology represents primeval chaos; and Jesus was triumphant over it!  Jesus was God’s affirmation in the midst of sin and death.  He was God’s affirming presence at the height of the storm, because even in the midst of the “raging sea” (i.e.) experiences of life we can discover God’s staying hand.  He is the power of the Resurrection that ultimately delivers us from authority of the evil one (Matt. 6:13 NIV) and it is the affirmation of God’s presence that enables us to stand firm). (Phil. 4:13).

It isn’t always easy.  Sometimes we must say “Yes” to God through clenched teeth.  Sometimes we must do it through tears of grief.  But because God has said yes, we too can say “Yes”.

·        We can say it when crisis sweeps around us and we are failing in

o       school or

o       business, or

o       marriage. 

We can be sure when we are engulfed by

·        loneliness and fear and

·        personal uncertainty. 

·        We can say it when the cold sea of death has reached up to claim a life that is dear to us

·        and the future has closed in like a heavy fog. Yes! Yes! Yes!

Because Jesus Christ lives, we too shall live.  Because He has overcome the world, we too shall overcome the world!

     Let me tell you a story of a woman whose boat was rocked by undeserved hardship.  She and her family—a husband who was ill and unable to work, a teenage son, and an adopted ten-year old daughter—lived on a farm in north Texas.  One day in late autumn, they were hit by a freak blizzard.  Temperatures plunged nearly to zero, and howling winds dumped snow so heavy that they could not even see the small trees a few feet from the house.  That night ass the storm continued to rage, the woman, disturbed from her sleep by the smell of smoke, awoke to find the house on fire.  She roused her family, and they choked and coughed their way to the door.  There was no time to find coats or take blankets.  They had to force their way into the snow in their nightclothes.  The son shouted that he was heading for the car.  The woman was guiding her husband and the little girl.  After what seemed like ages, they arrived at a small chicken house.  The woman made the girl lie on the floor and placed the chickens all over her.  Then she and her husband sat on each other’s feet and huddled together as well as they could.  They were freezing, and the woman knew that if they went to sleep they would die.  So she began singing hymns, and they recited Scriptures and prayed all night and into the morning.  They were found the next day by the postman, who had been following the snowplow and saw that the house had burned down.  The boy had frozen to death in the car.  The little girl was all right. Both the woman and her husband were frostbitten, but they recovered.  At the boy’s funeral, the woman said they sang some of the same old hymns that had sustained her and her husband during the ordeal of the freezing night. That was their way of affirming their faith in the Father who several years before had saved their souls and given them eternal life in Christ.

     It isn’t easy.  Sometimes we have to affirm our faith over the bodies of those we loved better than life itself.  But we “can do all things through Christ who gives us His strength.  There will be times when we think we can’t stand it, when we wonder if he cares.  But when the storms of life are over, we will see our life as He sees it, and understand why He planned our journey the way He did and refined us in life’s crucible until the image and character of Christ in us made us fit for His kingdom. Then we will rejoice and fall at his feet and worship Him forever.   

     Dearest Father, help us to affirm our faith even when life’s scaffolding collapses around us, for you continue to affirm your love for us in Jesus Christ when our sins were placed on His shoulders and He bore them to the cross.  AMEN!