2021-06-21
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text
Scripture: MARK 4:35-41
When I was a teenager, my family and I spent a year in England while my father, who was a professor, was on sabbatical there. At some point we took a ferry across the Irish Sea. It was the worst weather I’d ever encountered on the water, the ship being buffeted on huge waves. My mother was off on her own somewhere, but my father, brother, and I all lurched to the rail of the ship—to avoid the sights of seasickness, if you get my drift—and stared out at the sea. And to keep us occupied, the three of us sang our national anthem as loudly as we could, braying into the howling wind and holding on tight as we prayed for it to end.
It was an awful trip. And I was likely unnerved by the whole thing, so I could have used a Jesus miracle that day. Like the disciples sailing with Jesus on their terrifying journey across the Sea of Galilee, I would have welcomed the stilling of that storm and the calming of that raging sea.
In numerous ancient cultures, the sea represented chaos and disorder. The oceans were unruly, uncontrollable, dangerous—and petrifying. So while Mark’s story is, on its surface, a story about wind and waves being told to settle down, it is, on another level, a story about something else entirely. Ocean storms, after all, are not usually what occupy our hearts and minds, are they. The storm that roils us is the failure at work. The storm that undoes us is the shattering diagnosis, the tyrannical boss, the lost job. The tempest that stirs up our revulsion and fury and fear is the mother who disdains us, the father who manipulates and berates us, the sibling who cheats us, the spouse who betrays us. Oh, there are plenty of storms in our lives. And those storms rage, and they seethe, and they smolder. And how we wish they would die down.
And all too often, of course, those storms don’t die down, do they. The first followers of Jesus have to confront this truth. They face winds and rains that stagger them. “Waves [pour] into the boat,” as the story says, “threatening to sink it” (4:37, The Message). And here’s the disturbing and annoying and unnerving thing: Jesus is absurdly sleeping through it. Why no action? Why no relief? What good is a Messiah who doesn’t undo the damage, who doesn’t alleviate the fear? So the disciples go to the slumbering Jesus and confront him with the urgency of their crisis.
And it’s striking what they say to this apparently callous Messiah. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell this story, and in each, the words the frantic disciples speak to Jesus differ. In Luke, the disciples say simply and matter-of-factly, “Master, we are perishing” (8:24). In Matthew, those same disciples are much more direct and directive: “Lord, save us! We are perishing!” (8:25). And in Mark, whose version we hear today, they frame their alarm in the form of a question: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” (4:38). And that may not sound particularly significant. Except for this: in Mark, the disciples don’t demand anything or state a fairly self-evident fact. Instead, they ask a plaintive question. And the question is all about what’s most crucial for them: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” They don’t state the obvious, that a storm is undoing them; and they don’t tell Jesus what to do—either of which, in many contexts, would be fine. No, as Mark tells the story, theirs is a kind of bleak begging: Don’t you care, Jesus?
I imagine that for most of us, this is precisely the issue. Yes, we want the storm to stop. And Jesus, of course, does eventually stop this storm. We all know, though, that those same disciples are going to go out on the water again, and there are going to be countless other storms. And nobody’s going to intervene to stop those. No, what we want even more viscerally than some magical intervention is to know that someone cares. And especially that God cares, that Jesus cares. When we’re little, our prayers are for Jesus to stop all those storms. As we mature, though, we come to realize that those storms are going to continue to sweep across the plains of our lives. And that what we need is company on the journey, companionship on the open seas of life, camaraderie in the tumultuous tempests that rage within and without. We want to know that friends and family care. We want to know that God cares. It’s the compassion of God and others that makes those storms bearable.
This sort of presence and care is frequently a challenge for all of us. We can all be distracted and self-centered and resentful. This challenge to care, though, may be more difficult for men in general and fathers in particular. Certainly not in every case, God knows. We men, though, are undeniably enculturated to be producers and breadwinners first, and caregivers second. Men are expected to work first and care somewhere down the line. To be clear: this is not universally and always the case. It’s a tendency, a leaning.
Matt Fitzgerald, a UCC clergy colleague, says, “When my children were little, not a month went by when my wife and I didn’t get the letter from the kids’ school: ‘Your child has been exposed to head lice.’ [Nearby was a salon that picked lice from children’s hair. Into the salon I would march my children.] Flustered, I made a sad joke. Gesturing to my bald head, I told the receptionist, ‘I hope I don’t have them too.’
“He replied, ‘Don’t worry. Dads never get lice. Moms do.’ . . .
“I didn’t understand. ‘Why not dads?’
“He said, ‘Moms get down on the floor to play, or the kids get in their laps to cuddle. Their heads touch. The lice climb in’” (https://www.christiancentury.org/article/reflection/karl-barth-s-wisdom-fathers-and-mothers-and-all-children-god?utm_source=Christian+Century+Newsletter&utm_campaign=65272761c8-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_EdPicks_2021_6_8_syncretism_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b00cd618da-65272761c8-85603527).
Matt goes on to describe the playground across from his house, where the fathers have their faces buried in their phones. And these images of fathers not playing on the floor with their children, and of being distracted when those children are in their care, are enough to give us pause. Where did many of us men get so skewed? How did we miss the whispered alarm of our children: “Do you not care that we are perishing?” We’ll say it again: this may not be you, and it may not be your father. This is not a blanket indictment of every father. It is, though, a propensity. And we are nudged to confront it. Because care—God’s care for us and our care for each other—care is at the root of a rich and full life.
Our care for each other can manifest itself in any number of contexts. And key to it all, I suspect, is presence. When our children are discouraged or defeated, when they’re inexplicably mean or disruptive, when they’re felled by a depression or an eating disorder, we can make it our mission to simply be with them—to sit with them and hold them and above all listen to them.
Just this week, a church member told me she had learned that we need to “listen to understand, and not to respond.” So often we listen with an ear to what we will say to the other person when they’ve finished. Or we’re trying to figure out how to advise them, or instruct them or, worse yet, correct them. What if we were to just listen for what it’s like to live their lives? What if we were to invite the fullness of their inner lives to flow from them, without any judgment? ‘You failed? Tell me about it.’ ‘You feel incredible pressure to be thin, and to throw up to make that happen? What’s that like?’ ‘You’re gay, or you feel like the gender you were assigned doesn’t match who you really are? I’d really love to know how that feels from the inside.’ Listen to understand the storms, not to respond, not to advise, not to suggest, but only to understand—and not just in our children, but in everyone: that can be a cardinal guideline for all of us.
These storms manifest themselves in other contexts, as well. A young inter-racial couple I know says they are so often each treated differently in a restaurant, or a bank, or on the sidewalk. The Black wife feels it; the white husband observes it. One place they see it is in stores, where he can wander to his heart’s content, and she’s eyed suspiciously. It’s a storm for them. I thought of them the other day when I bought a jacket at a local store. The salesclerk forgot to remove the security tag from the jacket. When I left the store, the tag set off a buzzer. It never occurred to me that I was the one who had set it off. So I didn’t stop walking. No one flagged me. No one thought anything about it. It wasn’t till I got home and realized I had to take the jacket back to remove the tag that I realized what had happened. And when I walked back into the store, the store buzzer went off yet again, and no one paid any attention to me at all. I’m guessing a Black person would not have received the same ho-hum treatment.
Some of the care that’s invited from us is to be allies with those who are automatically confronted at the exit when the buzzer goes off, to be present with those who are stopped just for “driving while Black,” to be advocates for an equitable world in which such dismissal and suspicion and injustice are overturned. On this day after Juneteenth, the day we commemorate the end of slavery in this country, we recognize that to really care is to care not just for people who look like us. It’s to care for everyone.
Fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, friends, partner citizens of the world—or “earthlings,” as we said last Sunday—our work is to live into the care that God gives to us, to break down the walls that divide us, to make common ground, and to shape a world in which, in the midst of the storms of life, everyone experiences a deep sense of care.
So, to finish, two stories, one longer, one briefer. Laurie Hartzell tells the first story: “When I was 13, I could throw a football better than any boy in the neighborhood, thanks to my dad, who was always doing some physical activity with his three daughters. Running, downhill skiing, throwing grounders to each other in preparation for softball season, tackling waves in Lake Michigan—my relationship with my dad was intimately connected with the movement of our bodies.
“As I, the eldest daughter, grew older and my theology and politics [veered from that of my father], it was a comfort to be able to relate to my dad by playing tennis or riding bikes. During an election year, we could laugh while rolling down a sand dune together with my children rather than trying to talk about the candidates we supported. We found an intimacy that worked for us, hitting a Ping-Pong ball back and forth or playing ‘volley dog,’ a game of hitting a small stuffed animal back and forth over the clothesline in the backyard.
“This was better than discussing our differing views on climate change or racism or who is allowed inside God’s circle of love. We loved each other, and doing activities requiring movement kept us connected when we couldn’t talk about things.
“Then Parkinson’s disease struck. My dad’s strong and physically fit body began to betray him. Though he continued to move his body as much as could, the disease eventually left him wheelchair-bound in an assisted living facility. Parkinson’s had robbed him of many things, including his ability to relate to the world and to me through physical movement. I felt lost for a while. Even as my dad—with determination and integrity—learned so many new ways of relating to his body, his friends, and the world, we would have to learn new ways to be in relationship with each other. I grieved not being able to move and play with my dad in ways we had always shared.
“But amid the pain and loss, a new kind of movement began in my dad and in our relationship. It started with, ‘Come sit with me and watch the football game.’ I did, and he reached over to hold my hand. We’d get agitated if Michigan was losing. We’d shout out if Justin Verlander, then with the Detroit Tigers, threw a shutout.
“One day, the movement took a different form. Dad told me that the hardest thing about having Parkinson’s was not being able to do everything for himself and needing the help of others, even to clean his most private areas. ‘It’s got me thinking that I live my spiritual life that way, too,’ he said. ‘I think I have to do everything. But I don’t. God’s grace means that is OK—I don’t have to do it. God does it.’ I’d never experienced my dad sharing on that level before. That was a new kind of movement in my dad’s life—a movement of grace. And it created a new landscape in our relationship so we could move together. We could talk about faith and God’s presence and what it means to be healed.
“We didn’t always agree, and we still didn’t venture into politics much. We surely couldn’t move together in that realm. But our relationship, by God’s grace, went from a familiar physical movement into a deeper, more internal movement that swirled with pain and, in the end, deep joy” (https://www.christiancentury.org/article/readers-write/movement-essays-readers). Jesus would know this: mutual care stills the storms of life.
And the last vignette: a woman I know sits at her father’s bedside as he’s dying. He’s mostly not aware anymore. One day, though, he rallies. The woman says to her father, “Dad, will you miss me when you’re gone?” And he says with conviction, “You’re damn right I will.” Jesus would know this: a care that stills the storm.
On this Father’s Day, maybe storms assault and buffet you. So here’s the prayer: may we all be embraced by a care that knows no limits. May we be ambassadors of that care in this world of need, that all may feel that embrace. And in all the storms of our lives, may we know the deep peace that surpasses all understanding (Philippians 4:7). For God holds us, and it is good.