KNOWING WHOM TO TRUST

June 30, 1991
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago
Scripture
Job 38:1~11

Mark 4:35-d1

-Why are you afraid? Wave you stilj no faith?”
—Mark 4:40 (NRSV)

Are you in that boat? Is your life our of control?
around in waves and words generated somewhere else?
to forces aver which you have no influence?

Are you bouncing
Is your life subject

n the emotional and spiritual needs of urban adults. The study documented
he notion, which people whe analyze urban life have always observed,
namely that for city people there seem to be huge, anonymous and
threatening forces which have a major impact on the way we Jive, the way
we feel about the way we live, and over which we have very little control.
The report provided several familiar examples:

"% [os I recently read a professionally prepared market study which focused
; fe)

- a new job or an evolving career which seems often to be in the hands of
someone else, a supervisor, a committee, the market, or blind fate;.

~ starting up new relationships, social and romantic;
being alone and responsible for one's own care and welfare;

raising a family in an urban environment.

and then the simple reality of city life, noise, crowds,

pollution
and crime.

Dave Barry wrote a very funny piece for the Chicago Tribune a while
ago about the differences between suburbanites and urbanites.
walk everywhere...

Urbanites

If you walk in suburbia, peaple look at you cautiously
and assume there is either something wrong with you or with your car.
Suburbanites go to the movies for excitement. Urban life is like living in
the middle of a movie. Suburbanites, he said, worry about things like the
price of cauliflower. Urbanites wonder if they are going to be assaulted

by the person sitting beside them on the subway, . or if they will actually
survive the taxi ride.

For all of us - urban, suburban, rural - life often feels out of
control, or that we are wp against huge forces that we are powerless to
influence. The verbatim part of the market study was poignant.

"IT have a lot of job stress. I work in a big,

corporate law firm. Lots of lawyers, caught up in the
sane problems. ;

"I've got new responsibilities. My job forces me
to deal with a lot of stress and hard decisions."

"The world becames more complicated and more
confusing. There's more to deal with. {1 need) an
anchor ora resource ta help navigate."

"Et's hard facing life alone.'

"The future's uncertain. I live alone - no

roommate. I don't want to stay in Chicago more than a
few years.”

I suppose there are not many of us who have not felt on occasion that
our lives are out of control. And my guess is that there are some of us
who feel that way all the time. To live and move and have being in Chicago
this summer is to be acutely aware of personal impotence in trying to get
from one place to another. Driving across town, or to the airport, or down
Michigan Avenue this summer is no small project - requiring planning, a
creative strategy, nerves of steel and, of course, patience.

Dr. Herbert Benson who teaches at Harvard Medical School and who
wrote a classic and helpful manual on stress management says:

“Most of us find that we are helpless in solving
the big problems. We have some vague hope that the
leaders we elect {and the experts they rely on) can find
the solutions. But our concern usually involves
everyday difficulties. Our frustrations come about
because we generally can't even solve the less earth-
shaking problems, such as being on time to work ina
large congested city. Indeed, the every day demands
of living make it more and more difficult to escape the
increasingly adverse psychological effects that seem

built into our existence." [The Relaxation Response,
p. 17) TO .
if So, may I propose that the question before many of us, maybe even the

oon

question that motivated us to be here in this building at this hour, is

this: Where can we find something to hold on to? Where can we find an

anchor, or.a navigator, at a time in life when we.fee] out of control,
Tike our’

when it feels jives are buffeted, pushed and pulled by huge and
not riecessarily benevolent forces, who can we trust with our future?

It was a question foremost on the minds of a small group of people
who pushed off from shore one evening long ago in a fishing boat. Students

of literature tel] us that this story, which occurs in the Books of
Matthew, Mark and Luke, has the feel of an eye witness account. Someone
told this story who was there. In any event, the small group of men and
women had been intrigued and then captivated by Jesus of Nazareth. They
had accompanied him as he walked from village to village in Galilee and had
watched and listened as the people came to him, as the crowds grew in size.
Why, that very day so many had come that Jesus had stood in a boat, a few
yards out in the water and standing there in the stern, he had taught

them. As the sun settled in the west, the crowds had shown no signs of
dissipating. It was Jesus who said, “Let's go to the other side," The
significance of that suggestion is that the other side was not part af the
bargain. The other side was new and unknown territory. Galilee was home;
the people in the crowds were neighbors and friends. The people on the
other side were strangers. Many of them were gentiles. Besides, it was
one thing to walk around Galilee with him. It's another thing altogether
to hop in a hoat and head out for a new shore trusting him with their
future. This thing is getting out of control.

And so, with understandable misgiving, with doubt and some fear, they
set the sail and pushed off into the light. breeze of early evening. Jesus
was soon asleep. That body of water is G00 feet below sea level and the
surrounding hills function like a funnel for the prevailing breezes from
the Mediterranean. Sudden and fairly violent squalls are common and that's -
exactly what happened in the dark of night. A small boat in a squall, with
the sail up and the waves crashing over the prow is a very busy place.
People are bailing frantically, hauling in the sail, securing oars and
water and food, struggling with the tiller, and holding on for dear life.
So it is not idle curiosity which prompts one of them to shake him and ask,
"Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?" That's far too soft - it

was a panicked scream: "For Ged's sake Jesus, we're going down, at least
get awake and lend a hand!”

~

And then, the strangest thing happened. He got awake, looked around,
said: "Peace! Be still...!" And there has always been a suspicion that he
was talking to them - those terrified people. In any event, the squall
subsided and so did they apparently. ;

~ Now, the interesting thing about that story is that the eariy

[thr istians told it first to non-believers, pagans, as a kind of attention-
getting, sensationalist documentary about Jesus' power. It's almost
impossible for Twentieth Century people to understand how First Century
people regarded nature and natural’ processes. Quickly - nature, they
believed, was inhabited by spirits - good and evil. Ancient people

- believed that nature was ‘the battle.ground for a primal conflict between
the forces of order and stability - God and the forces of chaos -
destruction, evil. The occult, still the theological system of choice for
millions of people, still very big business, still influential in critical
decisions in high places, is based on that ancient superstition. Bodies of__
water, in the ancient world, were frightening, places where terrifying
creatures lived. Recall those ancient maps with pictures of dragons on the
perimeters and the warning “monsters here"? The oceafis are a threat to
the land: floods are always attempting to overcome and destroy human life
and civilization. So when the Bible says God separated the water and
created dry land in Genesis 1, and that God speaks out of the whirlwind as

Job proclaims, and that the earth is the Lord's, as the Psalmist declared,
and that Jesus calms the storm, it is making a very important theological
assertion in the ancient world... Nature is God's creation. It is not the

enemy. Nature is God's gift. Ged's authority and power are sovereim
even over nature,

That's a troublesome idea for us in a way it was not for pre-
scientific people. That God controls and uses storms and floods and
volcanos is difficult for many of us to argue, or believe. Its
implications are appalling. Whatever God's relationship to nature is, it
does not, in my estimation, include the use of nature in ways that are
harmful and destructive to life. When those things happen, when a tornado
rips through a subdivision, or a volcano erupts, or floods devastate a
nation, or cells begin to destroy other cells in a human body, it is not
because of divine will or intent, but natural processes and cosmological
accidents. God's sovereignty over nature is a critical notion as we
explore our relationship to the natural world - which we have turned into a
kind of ecological warfare. But it is not to suggest, nor is it the point

of this story that if you ask Jesus he will intervene in nature on your
behalf.

The second use to which the early Christians put this story, and the
more important one by far, was to encourage and comfort one another in
times of threat and distress and danger. They told the story to one
another whenever things seemed out of control.

"Lord, don't you care that we are perishing?" they must have said and
listened to the disciples say to Jesus.

"In times of tumult and grave danger," one Biblical scholar observes,
"a natural human reaction is to wonder whether or not there is a God, and
if so, whether God is-even aware of my problem. We cry out to God in the
midst of the storm, ‘Don't you care?'" [Interpretation, Mark, p. 102]

I suppose each of us could recall a time when we asked that. Robert
Coles, the Harvard psychiatrist who wrote the best seller, The Spiritual
Lives of Children, interviewed ten-year-old Margarita, who with six
brothers and sisters lived in a Brazilian slum and whose mother was dying
of tuberculosis at the time Coles asked what she thought about when she
looked up and saw that statue of Christ in the Andes with the outstretched
arms. Her face lit up. She said, “I want to scream. I get angry.at him.
I go and tel] him off. 'Why are you going to take her, what has she done
to deserve death? Don't tell me, as the priest does, that she'll go to
heaven.' All of us-here can't eat off our mother's life in heaven.'

“What does Jesus say back to you?" Coles asked, and was surprised at

the answer he received. "He'll say, ‘Margarita, you are looking too far
ahead. First try to get to the evening, the sunset; then try to get to the
morning, the sunrise!' When I hear him, I feel calmer... hearing him gives

me something to hold on to.” ([p. 91-93]

Madeleine L'Engle has written a moving account of her husband's
critical illness, their long and productive relationship, and his death.
About a particularly difficult time when things were going very badly, when

the best medical] procedures were no longer helping and when Hugh's body, as
she put it, was betraying him in every possible way, she wrote:

"T will have nothing to do with a God whe cares

only occasionally. JI need a God who is with us always, 4
everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest

heights. It is when things go wrong, when the good ly
things do not happen, when our prayers seem to be lost,

that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering
wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in
the darkness, stumbling along blindly." [Two-Part
Invention, p. 124}

What those people learned that night in the middle of the storm is
that Jesus is in the boat with them, experiencing their terror and doubt
and fear, and that somehow his commitment to them gives them the strength
and courage and confidence they need to make it through the night.

Fear, anxiety, uncertainty, the sense of life being out of control,
contribute to some very bad decisions sometimes.

Sometimes we feel so out of control that we sell out to someone oar
something wha promises structure, certainty, predictability. The classic
studies of tatalitarianism and fascism all conclude that when freedom leads
to unrelenting fear and anxiety, it loses its value and people will
happily trade it for an authority that promises security and a stable.
currency and trains that run on time.

Norman Cousins worried that the threat of nuclear war tapped into the
primal fear of non-being in all of us and would ultimately drive us to seek

relief, if not in authoritarian political structures, then in the anesthesia
of drugs and alcohol.

On a personal level, people who believe their lives are aut of
control often make unhealthy choices about relationships, or jobs, or life-
styles, or drugs, often turn personal autonomy into unhealthy dependency.

The G. Heileman Brewing Co. knows that a malt liquor called "Power-
Master" wili have enormous appeal in a sub-culture with the highest
unemployment, where men feel absolutely powerless, and totally at the

disposal of economic, social and political forces over which they have no
control.

-Fear of the future makes for bad decisions. It also paralyzes. It
always suggests that the past was a better place than the future can be,.
that new, unexplored places are to be avoided at all costs, that new
ventures are frightening and threatening.

In the middle of a storm the friends of Jesus learned that they could
trust him, trust him to be with them in the present: trust him with the
crossing over to a new and uncharted future.

They learned, that is to say, who he is.

6-30-41

They did not, by the way, receive a promise that if they trusted him
there would be no more storms. The best part of the story is that after
the storm, after they have been quicted, they are filled with great awe.
They're still afraid, maybe more so now. But it's a fear grounded in hape.
It's a high and holy exhilaration, I think, knowing that he will lead them

into new places, new ventures, new life and that he will always be with
them. ;

There is something out there ahead for each of us: a professional
challenge, a job that needs doing, a task calling for more than you have
ever produced: a personal challenge, a relationship which is risky, and
demands more of yourself than you have ever given. There are people to
love, forgive, care for; there are fences to mend, or exams to take, or
addictions and dependencies to battle... for all of us regardless of who we

are or how young or old - a future ahead that can and often does look
frightening indeed.

And the invitation which came that night long ago, in a little boat
in the middle of a storm, comes to you, here and now. It is very simple
and very profound. It is the essence of our faith. ;

Count on hin.

~
a

Put your future in his hands.

Trust hin.
_*& kk

God eternal, there are many times when our lives seem out of control.
Come to us; bring your calm and give us your peace and grant us that
confidence in the Lord of the future... who, in love and mercy, rules over
all; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

6-30-97 | 6