Sunday, June 21, 2009

Peace! Be Still!

Pastor Dave is about to confess an embarrassing childhood secret – one of my favorite TV shows growing up was Gilligan’s Island. You know the setup – a small group on a pleasure boat for a 3 hour tour encounter a storm – “the weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed, if not for the courage of the fearless crew the Minnow would be lost, the Minnow would be lost” – and get washed up on a remote island. It being a kid’s show, in watching it one often had to suspend disbelief – why exactly did the professor take his entire chemistry lab and Ginger and MaryAnn their entire wardrobes along for a 3-hour tour, and where did they put all that stuff – the pleasure boat would have had to have been the size of an aircraft carrier - but anyway the show was a relatively harmless way to pass the time between the end of school and my parents coming home from work.

I was reminded of this guilty pleasure from my childhood by today’s Gospel reading (Mark 4:35-41). Jesus had just concluded a long day’s teaching the crowds, speaking from inside a small boat on the sea of Galilee. He wanted to cross to the other side, and when indeed, when he got there, he was accosted by the demon possessed man from Gerasa, who lived among the tombs. But that’s not part of today’s Gospel – today’s Gospel is about how Jesus got from one side of the sea to the other. We’re told that while on the sea, a great windstorm arose. The tiny ship was tossed; if not for the courage of the fearless crew….sorry, wrong story. Actually, far from fearless, the crew was scared out of their wits, and the boat had taken on so much water that it was on the verge of going down. Jesus had missed all the drama to this point; tired out from teaching, he’d taken the opportunity to get some sleep. So in their panic the disciples woke Jesus up, saying, “Don’t you care that we’re about to die?” Jesus stilled the wind and waves, and chided the disciples for their lack of faith – “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”

It is notable that accounts of this miracle appear in all four gospels. The early church considered this miracle so important that none of the Gospel writers could omit it. And it has been noted that perhaps this story of Jesus ministering to his disciples with a miracle is also the story of Jesus and the church throughout its history, from its fragile beginnings under Roman persecution to the present day, as the church periodically finds itself caught up in storms, nearly swamped by the waves, and wondering whether God notices their struggles, or whether maybe God has abandoned them. And yet, despite all, somehow Christ always arrives at just the right time to say, “Peace! Be Still!”

In Mark’s Gospel, this miracle comes at the end of an account of Jesus’ teaching, which included a series of parables in which the Kingdom of God is compared to a seed – something that looks small and unimpressive, but which has great life and vitality far beyond its size. So Jesus’ parables told his listeners that the Kingdom of God, while outwardly small and unimpressive, had great hidden power. And then today’s Gospel begins a series of miracle stories that demonstrate this hidden power of God in Jesus to tame the powers of nature, cast out demons, and overcome the power of disease.

At Emanuel UCC, we recently concluded a study of Mark’s Gospel during the church school hour. We saw that often, after his miracles, Jesus would tell those around him, “Don’t tell anyone.” Theologians call the “messianic secret,” and it’s a strong theme in Mark’s Gospel. We wonder why Jesus would have wanted to keep his miracles a secret. Maybe he was using reverse psychology – the surest way to get a message out is to tell someone to keep it a secret. But I think another reason for Jesus’ desire for secrecy was that his miracles could easily be misunderstood. If all we know about Jesus is the miracles, we can easily think of Jesus as a cosmic Dustbuster, waiting to vacuum all our troubles go away. And, indeed, this is exactly how many TV and radio evangelists preach about Jesus, telling their followers to “name and claim” God’s miraculous power to shower prosperity upon them, and to make all their problems vanish - Poof! - just like that!

But that was not Jesus’ message. Remember that when Peter confessed that Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus’ very next words were about suffering and death, about the cross. The cross is an inescapable part of the Gospel – the path to the Kingdom of God goes through the cross. So it is not God’s plan to remove all suffering from our lives, but rather to give us hidden power to bear up and overcome – like seeds who have to push up through the rocks and soil to bear fruit, like a small boat making its way through troubled waters. God surely did not remove all suffering from the lives of the early disciples – nearly all of them ended up as martyrs to the faith – and he doesn’t promise us calm waters either. There will be times when our lives, like small boats, nearly capsize amid the wind and waves. But he does promise that he will not abandon us, that even during those times when it seems as though God has fallen asleep, that when we’re nearly overwhelmed by our circumstances, God is still powerful and stands ready to say “Peace! Be Still!”

In the words of an old hymn – “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 may it be well with our souls, in this congregation which for roughly 150 years has kept afloat in waters calm and stormy, and in our individual lives as believers. Amen.

A Disturbing Trend

Today's blog entry could be considered a serious downer, and will not win me any popularity points. On Wednesday, June 10, a gunman in his late 80’s entered the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC with a gun, killing a security guard. Three Sundays ago, on May 31, around 10 a.m., on Pentecost Sunday, just about the time I was standing up to go into the call to worship before our first hymn, at the Resurrection Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, Dr. George Tiller was gunned down while handing out bulletins and greeting churchgoers as an usher. Scott Roeder, the suspect in his murder, has said that he saw Dr. Tiller – an ObGyn who performed abortions - as a murderer and felt justified in gunning him down. In April, a gunman who posted on the white supremacist site Stormfront gunned down 3 Pittsburgh police officers. In July of last year, at the Knoxville Unitarian in Tennessee, another church shooting; the gunman, Jim Adkisson, said that he’d have liked to gun down Democratic members of Congress, but they were far away, so the folks at nearby Knoxville Unitarian would have to do.

What I’m concerned about is that Roeder and Adkisson and the shooter at the Holocaust Museum and the shooter in Pittsburgh didn’t come to these decisions in a vacuum. Nationally prominent TV pundits, talk radio hosts, internet websites, political leaders and, yes, religious leaders maintain a constant drumbeat of hate that goes beyond disagreeing with opposing viewpoints, to dehumanizing the people who hold them – seeing Jews, muslims, racial minorities, immigrants, gays and others with whom they disagree as “not quite human” or at least not human on quite the same level they are.

One of the strengths – though it comes with many frustrations – in the United Church of Christ is that we don’t have to agree with each other to be in community with each other. As a former Association moderator, I can tell you that leading an association of 2 dozen or so Philadelphia-area UCC churches is like herding cats – our churches and our members are all over the place, but the covenant that binds us is stronger than our varied responses to the hot-button issues of our day.

When we think of terrorists, I think there’s a tendency for us to automatically think of Muslim terrorists – and, indeed, less than three weeks ago, a convert to Islam shot two soldiers at an Arkansas recruiting center. However, we’ve seen a string of “lone wolf” acts of terror by folks who are not Muslims, people who - at least until they opened fire - would not stand out in a crowd here in Bridesburg. Some of them consider themselves good Christians doing God’s work by killing evildoers. One of the dangers of fighting against people we may consider monsters is that we can in the process become monsters ourselves – as it has been said, when we gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into us.

I would urge us, as strongly as I can, never to lose sight of our own humanity and the humanity of those who differ from us, even those with whom we vehemently disagree. Everytime we overhear a conversation in which someone goes on a rant, spewing hate and says they’d like to line all those ______ (fill in the blank) up against the wall and shoot them, everytime we get some rancid email dripping with hate toward this group or that group, imploring us to forward to as many friends and acquaintances as possible, I’d ask that we take a minute, catch our breath, and consider whether we really want to participate in this.

I’ll close with these words of Martin Neimoller, a Protestant pastor in Germany during Hitler’s Third Reich who ended up in the concentration camps….perhaps you’ve heard them before:

"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a communist;

Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a socialist;

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak out for me."