24th June 2006Second Sunday after Trinity

Fr Andrew Norwood, Chaplain to the University of the Arts, London

Mark 4:35-41, Job 38:1-11, 2Cor 6:1-13

The early Christians adopted a simple drawing of a boat with a cross for a mast as the symbol of the church. In an age of persecutions from the outside and controversy and conflict on the inside, in their experience, the emerging church must have seemed like a boat on a storm-tossed sea. Recalling the story of Jesus' calming of the sea, like those first disciples in the boat, the early Christians must have joined in their desperate prayer, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"

This God isn’t content with short-term remedies.

Little has changed in the intervening years. The winds of change and the waters of chaos continue to beat hard on the worldwide church and the people of faith. Christians are still being martyred in tribal, ethnic, and religious wars around the world. The worldwide church is divided around issues of authority, liturgy, sexuality, and cultural diversity. Today, the prayer of many in the church is: "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"

Our private lives are not spared stress and storm as our individual little boats are tossed about by the waves of economic uncertainty and change, war, divorce, sickness, and death. Hardly a week goes by that we do not face the fearsome realities of these events, either impacting us personally or our neighbours or our friends in the church, and nightly the troublesome images of television news intrude into our homes from the larger world. "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"

In today's Gospel, our Lord calms the wind and the waves and says to the tense disciples, "Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?" He surely intended the link between faith and fear. The opposite of faith is not doubt or unbelief; those tend to be doctrinal differences. No, the opposite of faith more often as not is fear. We fear the unknown. We fear the undiagnosed lump in the breast, or the persistent cough. We fear HIV or Bird ‘flu. We fear losing control of our bodies and our health because of aging. We worry about how changes in politics, technology, or the economy will influence our jobs and the income from our savings and retirement funds. Fear is like waves ever seeking to knock us off our footing -- our faith footing.

There is a story (slightly cheesy) told of a naval submariner in the Pacific during the Second World War: He said "We would often come under depth charge attack by Japanese destroyers. The other sailors would be trembling with fear, while I just leaned back and read a comic book. One of them asked how I could be so calm. I explained to him that in my childhood I had very little supervision from my parents, so I spent many hours each day at the beach and playing in the surf. Sometimes a huge breaking wave would catch me by surprise and thrust me under the water, rolling me in the sand. But I learned when I could just relax; thousands of air bubbles, like the fingers of God, would catch me up and lift me to the surface. Now, whenever I find myself in trouble, I just relax and wait for the fingers of God to reach under me and lift me up."

Faith is a stance toward life. According to psychologist Erik Erikson, it is a confidence that is typically acquired very early in life when a child learns to expect his or her environment and the people in it, to be reliable and trustworthy.

During the Cold War, when the world was living with the possibility of nuclear annihilation, some researchers interviewed children to see how worried they were about nuclear war. What they discovered was that the children with the least amount of fear were those whose parents were active in nuclear disarmament efforts, or who regularly attended church, or who were deeply involved in the social issues of their communities.

These parents did not feel hopeless in the face of tremendous challenges. They invested themselves in actions to change the world around them and remained optimistic that what they could contribute would make a difference. As a result, the attitudes of the parents infected the emotional and intellectual stance of their children. These children did not feel helpless. Rather, they saw that their parents and their church and the other involved citizens of their community maintained faith and were doing something toward resolving problems.

Faith is the simple trust that life still can be good despite the fact that it is very painful and difficult.

"Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?" In these rather impatient words directed to his disciples, our Lord brings into focus to the polarities of faith and fear. Faith is a stance and how we stand up to those things that would threaten us and how we manage our fears makes all the difference.

We may find ourselves, like the disciples, faced with a response that takes our breath away and presents us with another problem to cope with: who is this God of ours – who is this that even the wind and the sea obey him?

This God isn’t content with short-term remedies. This is a God who goes right to the heart of the problem and deals with the root causes of our difficulties and failings. This is a God who gives us eternal life when all we asked for was a little help to get us through the next day or week. He may not still our storm in an instant. It may take him weeks, months, years, but then he’s working on a different time scale and his purpose is perfection. May he give us faith to reach out and stand firm. Amen