Sermons

Welcome to another Hallmark holiday. Yes, it’s Father’s Day today — the second-string parenting holiday that rightly falls during the summer outdoor grilling season, perhaps as a reminder of the kinds of masculine, flame-throwing cooking most fathers are known for.

We fathers often get the short end of the stick when it comes to family remembrances and celebrations — and that’s just fine with me. In a world with too much history of male dominance, it’s fine for us to be sandwiched between the greater holidays of Mothers Day and the Fourth of July.

Entire academic studies have been done on the portrayal of fathers in popular culture. (Here’s where I’m going to sound like a raging fundamentalist for just a moment.) And they have a point about the way sitcoms and movies generally don’t show us in the best light. I mean, try to think of a few examples of popular TV shows where there’s a positive, compassionate, competent father figure. Not many. The more common themes are the missing father, the absentminded father, the abusive father, the buffoon father.

We know that Mother’s Day is fraught with emotions because there are many dynamics at play — women who want to be mothers but aren’t; women who are mothers but wish they weren’t; children who experienced either excellent mothers or horrible mothers. You get the idea: Mother’s Day can die the death of a thousand qualifications.

We seem to have trouble being that coherent in our response to Father’s Day. There’s just more detachment regarding fathers and Father’s Day.

We do like to tell funny stories about our fathers and our role as fathers. Stories about ballgames and road trips and campfires and home improvement projects gone wrong. Sometimes those family stories include tales about how the children pulled a fast one of their dad or coerced him to do something he didn’t really want to do. Or they include stories about children being afraid to go to sleep or afraid to go somewhere — and how their father comforted them or protected them or encouraged them.

That’s where our Scripture story connects with us today. Jesus has become a kind of father figure to his disciples. They trust him, they follow him, they believe he will provide for them.

A sidenote: I find myself shying away from the “Heavenly Father” language to describe God. In my experience this phrase has been so overused and abused as to be problematic — besides being gender exclusive. And in run-of-the-mill church conversations, the label “Heavenly Father” sometimes gets applied to Jesus, which is all sorts of wrong if you understand the nature of the Trinity.

But that aside, the disciples do interact with Jesus as a kind of father figure, which is evident in our text from the Gospel of Mark today. Or in another way of looking at it, they see Jesus as the proxy for the Heavenly Father who should be taking care of them.

So it is that while they are out on the sea, a great storm arises and they are being battered by the waves. And in a fashion we would anticipate from nearly any American TV show, Jesus as the father figure is unfazed, unaware. He’s sleeping through the storm.

The disciples are panic-stricken. But rather than waking Jesus with an urgent cry for help, they awaken him with a critique: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

There is an assumption here that if they are being threatened by the storm, Jesus, their parent figure, their protector, their guide, their teacher, should have pre-empted their problem. Another way to hear the question is, “How could this happen to us while you’re in the boat with us?”

On the positive side, they at least believe Jesus is capable of helping them in a time of need. That’s good. They’ve been journeying with him as he has performed miracles and saved other people from the raging storms of their lives. So they recognize that Jesus has divine power to make things right. That’s good.

But in the preceding verses, we’ve learned that Jesus keeps speaking to them and to the crowds in parables, and even the disciples aren’t comprehending everything he’s saying. Back in verse 34, Mark tells us that Jesus privately explained to the disciples the meanings of his parables.

Yet they clearly have not understood how things work. They expect divine protection because they are, after all, in the presence of Jesus. Like children who trust that their fathers also will protect them from harm — even to the point of keeping harm from coming their way — they expect Jesus to anticipate their every need.

Sound familiar? It should, because we are all guilty of this. It is part and parcel of the human condition. Throughout time, regardless of what deity is worshiped, humans have turned to the gods for pre-emptory protection as well as for rescue.

The problem is, the world doesn’t work like that, and neither does God work like that.

We see in this story a reminder that bad things sometimes happen to good people — even to people who are following Jesus so closely that they are in the boat with him.

Perhaps you know this truth through firsthand experience as well. I sure do. Three and a half years ago, I underwent a routine surgery to address compressed nerves in my cervical spine, never anticipating that there could be complications. My doctor had performed this same surgery hundreds of times without incident. And yet, when I awoke from the anesthesia, I learned that during surgery I had suffered a spinal cord bruise that rendered my right arm and hand numb and nearly useless.

And that was only the beginning of an unexpected journey that included an unstoppable headache that lasted for two years and all sorts of other downline complications while my body built new neural pathways to receive communications from my brain. I was broken —physically, emotionally, spiritually.

It was Ash Wednesday, 2018, when I finally came undone. As the Wednesday night service at our church ended, I sat frozen in my pew. I could not move. I shook with emotion. I sobbed so hard, so uncontrollably, that the pew shook and those who were supposed to be tidying up after the service scurried away.

Perhaps you’ve been in this place, filled with fear, filled with anger, wondering why in God’s name this has happened to you and why God appears to be sleeping while you’ve been praying. “Jesus, do you not care that we are perishing?” Do. You. Not. Care?

That’s where the disciples are in Mark’s story here. They are afraid, and they see no way out. They feel trapped, and they don’t understand why Jesus is letting this happen.

So they do what we often do — what children also do when they feel trapped — they force God’s hand. They demand that Jesus rescue them.

What we don’t know — and even Mark couldn’t know this when writing the story — is what would have happened if Jesus stayed asleep and they rode out the storm. Would they have had the capacity within them as veteran fishermen to navigate the storm? Would God have rescued them some other way? And the question no one seemed to think about: If this Jesus who they followed was indeed the Son of God, would God allow him and them to perish before his mission was complete?

Of course, no one thinks clearly in a sudden crisis. I realize I’m asking a lot of the disciples. And yet, the human instinct remains: when God does not keep difficulty from coming our way, and when God does not act in the timeframe we think God should act within, we are prone to take matters into our own hands and attempt to force God to act.

This is true on a personal level — as with me and perhaps with you when healing doesn’t come — and it’s also true on a corporate level when things don’t go our way in church or community or culture.

I spent a good chunk of this last week watching, listening to and processing what transpired within the Southern Baptist Convention. Maybe you’ve seen or read some of the news about this from the week. It’s a story that matters even to those of us who are not Southern Baptist because the SBC is the nation’s largest non-Catholic denomination and a bellwether of evangelical thought.

What we saw happen in this Nashville meeting — and this really is a continuation of a long-term trend — is multiple attempts to force God’s hand on cultural and social issues Southern Baptists think aren’t getting resolved fast enough. Chief among those are abortion and a fear of losing white Christian privilege. The idea seems to be that by passing ever-stronger resolutions and demanding more exacting compliance from their own leaders, Southern Baptists can force God to reach down from heaven and intervene in the issues they believe culture is drowning in.

The natural outcome of this way of thinking, of course, is turning Christian citizens into cultural warriors through political action. I don’t have to explain to you what that looks like because we’ve been living with vivid illustrations of it for several years now, leading to the insurrection on our nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6 — a perfect illustration of crusading Christians attempting to force God’s hand by taking up arms and storming the seat of government.

What lies at the root of such actions? It is the fear that God is not moving fast enough or clearly enough to do the things we believe God ought to be doing. And — spoiler alert here — the results of such action are almost always disastrous.

Mark’s account of the disciples in the boat with Jesus on the stormy sea parallels another key biblical story — that of Jonah running away from God’s call to preach to the people of Ninevah. Recall that the way Jonah ends up being swallowed by a giant sea creature is that he is thrown overboard from a boat in stormy seas.

Jonah, too, attempted to force God’s hand not by his action but by his stubborn inaction. Which is a reminder that we, too, can attempt to force God’s hand by our resistance as well as by our unnecessary action.

What about you? Where do you find yourself in this story? What is the storm raging around you that causes you to think God is not acting sufficiently to rescue you or answer your prayers? What is it that you are resisting doing for the cause of Christ? Or what is it that you are attempting to force through with the belief that you are doing God a big favor?

We all have our blind spots and our human agendas. And it is human nature to be able to see these more clearly in others than in ourselves.

There’s a well-worn phrase we use in coaching writers. It’s not original with me, but I do quote it all the time. That advice, although a bit graphic in its expression, is this: “Murder your darlings.” What that means for writers like me is to remember that the lines and phrases we are most attached to often are the ones that are unnecessary and ought to be cut. We communicate best when we are not held captive by our pet words and phrases that we alone think are so beautiful.

That’s the kind of insight that’s needed when we ask how we’re attempting to force God’s hand too. We’ve got to be brutally honest with ourselves about why we’re doing — or not doing — what we are. It’s always easier to see the faults of others than to admit our own.

One last word, looking at the end of our story from Mark’s Gospel. After Jesus has calmed the storm, he asks the disciples: “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”

Those are instructive questions for us today, as well. We must ask ourselves why we are afraid. And we must ask ourselves whether we have faith enough to believe that God is at work in the world even when we can’t see evidence of it.

Why are you afraid? What do you fear that God is not doing right for you?

The answers to these questions seldom come amid the turbulence of life’s storms but more often have been stored up on the journey leading to the storm. This is how it was with the disciples, who had been following and learning from Jesus and likely had more faith to draw upon than they realized.

This was my experience, too. What sustained me through three years of recovery and adjustment to my new normal was not just what I learned in the midst of the storm but the ability to draw upon all that I had stored away in the years prior.

We are most prone to attempt to force God to work on our behalf when we have run out of spiritual resources to draw upon, when the well is dry and we are in a panic.

The lesson is much like the reality of Father’s Day — or Mothers Day or any single day that carries such weight of recognition. We do not honor fathers for what they do on this day alone; instead, we honor fathers for what they have done and who they have been every day leading up to this day.

The disciples were still learning this lesson as they journeyed with Jesus. And so are we. The more we learn, the more we grow, the more we come to understand that the words of Jesus to the raging sea are spoken to us as well: “Peace, be still.” Be. Still. … Find Peace.