The Storms of Life

Let us pray...

Gracious, loving, and peace giving God, we come today with so much on our minds, worries, concerns and so much more. In this time, o God, we ask you to help us to still the storms in our hearts, minds, and spirits that we might be able to open our ears to your still speaking voice, Amen.

Encyclopedia of 7700 Illustrations 1671 Epigram on Fear

The man who knows no fear is not only a gross exaggeration; he is a biological impossibility.

I started us off this morning with this quote because this is an absolute truth. If you are breathing, there is something in your life that you currently fear or have feared about recently. It is a fact of life, we have all had a moment when we were scared. So, let’s take a moment to think about fear…what are some things that we are afraid of this morning?

What are some of our fears?

leave some time for answers...

What are some interesting things you heard about our fears? One of the things I learned in Al-Anon, many years ago, was this terminology about fear...

FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real

The reason that the program taught us this acronym is that, in most cases, our fears come from false evidence. I have often said that I am the King of Projection. I can project outcomes like no one else I know…I often use the excuse that I am trying to prepare myself for any possible outcome. However, what this projection has caused in my life is nothing but trouble. I won’t go into the details, just know that as I have grown older, and hopefully wiser, I have come to realize more and more that fear can dictate our lives or we can overcome the fear and live into our faith. And to be perfectly honest, isn’t faith about trusting in that which we cannot see, feel, taste, or touch. Faith is about trusting in the one that overcame everything to give us everything, right?

Now, I also do not want to down play fear. As humans, we all have fears. Whether that is of physical things, things that are not real, or things that just plain old drive us crazy thinking about them. One common denominator though is that overwhelming feeling of a lack of control, right? I mean our fear, whether real or perceived, stems from a lack of control over the situation or circumstances. When we fear, our hearts race, our blood pressure goes up, our eyes dilate…there are physical things that our bodies do in response. We either have a strong desire to stand and fight or we have the overwhelming desire to flee from the situation. We fear because it is our bodies natural response to a threat to us. Ok, so I think I went a little further than I had wanted to on this but I wanted us to consider this morning what it is that might be holding us back in our own lives from truly living into our faith.

The Disciples and Fear

The story we have before us this morning is a time when the disciples were having their own faith tested. I have to admit that this story is so rich in theological concepts that I had a hard time trying to figure out upon which one to focus this morning. But what kept coming back to me is how Jesus’ disciples responded in a time when they had just witnessed Jesus doing some pretty amazing things…so let’s take just a moment and consider the context of this story so that we have a frame to talk about what this story might inform us about our own time.

Context - Who, What, When, and Where...

Jesus and his disciples have been “touring” the Galilean countryside, teaching people about the Messiah and the coming Kingdom of God, at least that is according to Mark’s chronology of the events. Last week, we heard about Jesus teaching about the seeds of faith and how the seeds will grow the Kingdom of God. Prior to that, Jesus had healed a man with a shriveled hand, healed others of demons, been accused of being Satan, and I am sure many other things that are not recorded for us.

Can you imagine how drained and exhausted he must have felt after doing all these things? Not to mention the fact that he was constantly surrounded by people clamoring for help or accusing him of some wrongdoing or just merely asking for more teaching…I can imagine being busy that there is not enough time to eat or sleep. As Jesus has been known to do, he seeks time to recharge and reflect on all that is happening. So, he tells the disciples to prepare a boat so that he can escape the crowds for a while…and this might be the kind of boat into which he escaped:

This boat is fairly small. The one that they have found at the Sea of Galilee measures 27’ long, 7.5’ wide, and nearly 5’ deep. It could hold about 15 men for fishing. In thinking about how small these boats were, they were no taller than me. Now when you think about the Sea of Galilee, here is a view from shore of the Sea of Galilee...

View from the shore...

What you may not be able to see clearly is that the Sea is completely surrounded by mountains. So as the surrounding area may get a storm, the mountains funnel those storms into the Sea and they typically intensify. This makes storms on the Sea difficult to manage.

The other part of this to consider is that the boats are not very deep so that the fishermen who manned them could be able to pull the nets into the boat. If you are familiar with boats at all, when the boat is shallow, waves can easily swamp the boat, meaning that it could fill with water very quickly because they were very shallow. And we need to remember that at least 4 of the 12 disciples were fishermen and would have been very experienced at managing boats in this environment.

So, I think that covers our background, let’s spend a few moments considering what this story has for us today…and this is just a tiny part of what the story could hold for us. Let’s look at verse 40 for a moment...

Mark 4:40 NLT

Then he asked them, “Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?”

As I studied this passage this week, I kept coming back to these words of Jesus, “Why are you afraid?” If you think about it, it is easy to say, why wouldn’t they be afraid. I mean they had just witnessed people crowding around Christ. They had just seen the Scribes and Pharisees accuse Jesus of being Satan and casting out demons in Satan’s name. The disciples were then instructed to sail across the Sea of Galilee, in the dark of night, with what could have been hundreds of other boats trying to follow them. And then, like what is typical for the region, a storm comes up. Not just any storm, a storm that knocks them around and begins to fill the boat with water…who wouldn’t be afraid?

I mean seriously…who wouldn’t be afraid? It is a frightening experience to be on a boat of that size and be tossed about on the waves. And there in the back of the boat is their fearless leader, sleeping. And I mean sleeping like he had not slept in days, maybe he hadn’t. But he is so soundly sleeping that despite the wind and rain, he is not awoken. Can you feel the terror yourselves of that moment?

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered those words in his First Inaugural Address in 1933 while attempting to raise a nation from the depths of the Great Depression. What more profound words could be spoken about fear. I think Jesus would have said it first and maybe he did at some point. But I must admit, these are really hard words to digest. Fear, as I said before, is real. It causes real pain, discomfort, and even physical symptoms.

Here is the difference though, in mind, from what Jesus was saying vs. what FDR said…it has to do with faith. So, in thinking about the context I gave you before, at least 1/3 of the men in the boat that night were fishermen. They likely had encountered storms like the one they faced in the past. They, in my mind, should have known how to manage the boat. Yet, they still sound panicked when they ask...

Mark 4:38 (NLT)

“Teacher, don’t you care that we’re going to drown?”

Don’t you care that this storm is overtaking us, that we do not know what to do, that we do not understand why this is happening to us now, of all times, why now? You just called us to live a life of peace and become fishers of men…and now, after we heard others call you the devil himself, we are supposed to understand what is going on?

These are some of the words that I hear them speak between the lines. They are scared. And rightfully so. Given all they had witnessed, they have every right to be frightened.

Yet, Jesus expected more from them. He desired for them to take what they had seen and share it with others. He desired for them to be brave and go out and face even worse torment that he would withstand. He desired most of all that they would take the faith they already had and use it in this situation.

Jesus Proves Faith is Greater than Fear

Jesus teaches them and us through this circumstance that there is something greater than fear in this world and that is our faith. Over the last month or so, we have spent a lot of our time talking about our faith. There’s a really good reason for this…after what we have been through, as humanity as a whole, could have easily shaken the strongest of foundations. I mean, think about it, the world has been on lock down, shut down, closed up, and segregated for well over a year. We have been isolated from one another and now that we are coming back to some form of normalcy, that normal is not what normal was a year and a half ago. Things have changed and that creates fear. We have changed, I hope for the better, and that creates fear. The world has changed, some for the better but mostly for the worse, and that creates fear.

You see where I am going with this. Jesus in that boat that night challenged the disciples by basically saying, “This is not something to be afraid of, but since you are, here, let me take care of this to show you once more that I am who I say I am. You would think that after everything I have done, you would have a little more faith that I am with you always.” Faith is about trusting that which you cannot sense. Faith is about believing that no matter what, God is beside us, guiding us, leading us, and giving us everything we need in the exact moment we need it. To me, that is what this story is about…not about the fear as much as it is about the faith of those who were there and us.

Challenging Our Fears...

It stands as a challenge to have faith despite the fear we may feel. At the beginning of our time together, we talked about our fears and what makes our hearts skip a beat if you will. I wonder, if Jesus were here right now, what would he do to challenge our faith so that we can overcome our fears and move into the light and onto the path he has laid out before us…Amen.