A Homily for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

This sermon was preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on June 23, 2024, the 5th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 7B.

My friend Dan, who died recently, had a beautiful black German Shepherd called Hector. Powerfully gentle with a shiny midnight coat, Hector was well-trained and would follow Dan everywhere one yard off his right heel when they walked. Hector does, however, have a peculiar quirk. Like a lot of dogs, he just loves playing fetch. One problem. Hector doesn’t like dropping the ball on the grass so that you can throw it for him. Rubber tennis ball clenched between his jaws, Hector was perpetually caught between the security of gnawing and hope of chasing. And it was only after you stopped trying to get the ball from Hector that he would release it (almost in spite of himself).

Both Job and Mark present us with similar kinds of encounters in our readings from today. What the egg-heads call “limit-situations”: moments, periods, years where we find ourselves at effort’s end, and all the ways we know how to fix and attempt to control things and make it just so fail. Our horizons for making sense of things collapse. We’re at “wits’ end.” We’re drawn up short, forced to confront, acknowledge, welcome, befriend, and offer to God that which we have been keeping at bay our entire lives. 

Job has lost everything and his interlocutors (convinced that Job must have done something to deserve his trials) just make things worse, heaping bad storylines on top of a bad situation. The disciples find themselves in the in-between as well. Away from shore, headed to the “other side” they encounter rough seas. It’s choppy. A little dangerous. Risky. The basic uncontrollability of life, its groundlessness, erupts in the middle of what was supposed to be a scenic Sunday punt across the lake.  And what do the disciple’s hearts and minds do? They freak out, fret, worry, catastrophize: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” 

Read the news… it’s wavy! There is perishing. Calamity. Afflictions. Hardships. Does this mean that God doesn’t love me? That God is not present? Does hardship mean God is absent? Or is God a present help in time of need? Are the “obstacles,” in our life what prevent us from encountering God, or are they in fact opportunities to open more deeply, in greater and greater trust and childlikeness to find him unfoldingly everywhere? Are the obstacles in our lives actually our very path to union and communion with God as counterintuitive as that sounds?

There is the obvious hardship that visits each and every precious, fragile human life–illness, war, famine, climate change, loss of a loved one, the end of a cherished relationship—and there’s what we make of it. It's a whirlwind of chance, change, and contingency out of which God draws forth new possibilities for communities of love. God creates free creatures who can choose to co-operate with grace, or double-down on the self-centered dream of I, me, mine, of seeking lasting peace in the only places we know how: in self-powered and self-directed attempts at power/control, affection/esteem, safety/security. And God, in God’s uncontrolling love that honors human freedom that it might be freely directed towards its ultimate fulfillment/end (telos) in union with Godself necessarily creates a world where cell mutation, tornadoes, free will exercised under the thrall of greed, anger, ignorance, and egotism resulting in war and violence , errrupt alongside Mozart sonatas, mountain cirques, and mango lassis. 

You might say that God has created the best of all possible worlds for the expression of free human communal flourishing. The question becomes not how faith can eliminate all difficulty, contingency, chance, and change–as if faithfulness meant skating on thin ice our whole life and never falling through–but how we navigate and relate to the inevitable ups and downs of this strange situation we call being human together amidst the chances and changes of this world under the pressure and lure of God’s love.

So difficulty and hardship are not problems to be eradicated or excised. Instead, with Jesus we set our face towards Jerusalem; we choose to go towards that which we habitually avoid through our distractions, our strategies of avoidance that keep us in a kind of waking sleep blown this way and that by our dramas, our stale storylines, our believed thoughts. We open to our grace saturated life just as it is (even the hard parts) and notice how we want it to be otherwise. We notice the tension between what is actually happening and the believed story we tell about what’s happening. “I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened,” as Mark Twain is purported to have said.

The truth is, we tend to trust our thoughts and stories more than God in the midst of our daily life. And we trust our thoughts about God more than we trust the living, dancing, singing, uncontainable effervescence of God’s love for us in Jesus. Mark tells us that the disciples welcome Jesus into the boat “just as he is.” Is that really true? They seem to have more than a few ideas about what a Savior is supposed to be don’t they? What about us? They berate him as if he’s a teenager sleeping past noon and the trash hasn’t been taken out; literally arguing with reality. Don’t we, too?

To accept Jesus just as he is, means to accept our life as it is. Grace’s work of transformation begins with honesty and acceptance. This is where he meets us. Now is the day/ hour/moment of salvation: in our leaky boats and bad weather, in our fear and trembling. So we faithfully drop the mind’s paltry, grindingly shared, storylines and open to our experience, to the sustaining love of God caring for us through thick and thin. In our daily prayer we learn to slowly stop trying to fix ourselves (and others) and let everything be held, boated,  in Him. There are times of distraction, times of resistance, times where a grief or sadness blow in for a while and churn like a Nor’easter. 

No matter. We simply let it all be as it is in the simple child-like trust that whatever the seas of our life look like, whatever thunderheads are forming on the horizon, Jesus is in the boat with us drawing new possibility forth from apparent dead ends. Maybe the seas will calm, or maybe not. Jesus is not a guarantee of smooth sailing. And rough seas aren’t a sign that you’re not faithful enough. And faith doesn’t even mean your knees aren’t going to shake. People who think faith and fear are mutually exclusive usually just develop a well-practiced habit of pretending they are not afraid and performing some kind of preternatural calm that vanishes when you need them to bail out the boat. 

That seems effortful, contrived, complicated, and doesn’t work. Storms are scary. Cancer is scary. Getting old ain’t for sissies. No use pretending they are not in the name of being a “good Christian.” But faith as simple trust and relationship allows us to see and drop the doomsday storylines that fear generates. We can be afraid, but not run, or possessed, by our fear. We can gently turn towards our fear, welcome it, wonder our way into it, tend it, care for it, and offer it to God who takes it into Godself transforms it, giving it back to us as honeyed bread for the journey into Love. In the very offering a little receptive space is made for something other than narratives of fear, scarcity, and lack that keep us hollering, “Do you not care that we are perishing?” “Of course I care, Dear One. I Am Care. Thank you for the gift of your fear. Behold! I’ve turned it into the meat of Love. Come, let’s eat!”

I think back to our friend Hector and how similar we are: not wanting to drop the ball, but yearning to bound across the field and chase it at the same time. Immersed in the love and mercy of God, but like “old men yelling at clouds” as the saying goes. Will we choose the pursuit of frantic and feeble faith that walls itself against choppy seas of life, admonishing God for the whirlwinds of chance and change? Or a generous, flexible faith that finds in those selfsame choppy seas the Easy One revealed Awake/Asleep in the gunwhales of the boat? 

“Teach us to care and not to care,” as St. Ignatius puts it. Teach us to embrace and live fully from all that is beautiful, good and true in this world of ups and downs, happinesses and heartbreaks. Teach us to be easy, to settle back a little with You in the boat of our ordinary life–like an old dog in the sun. Teach us to drop the ball of our stale old storylines that we might run, and leap, and pant, and chase and find You, receive You, in strange, new places: with grace-opened  eyes, grace-opened ears, grace-softened hearts, grace’s serving hands: busy, active, tending, and utterly still. Working desperately hard for what You accomplished. The peace of God, which passes all understanding right here in these very choppy seas. Right here as this very perishing. Now pass the bailing bucket. Amen