Proper 7B. June 20, 2021
1 Samuel 17:57-18:5, 10-16. Jonathan loved him as his own soul.
2 Corinthians 6:1-13. See, now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation.
Mark 4:35-41. Let us go across to the other side.
O God of our faith, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
Jesus had been teaching about the Realm of God being like seed scattered on all kinds of ground, and about the Realm of God being like kudzu (well, he said mustard, but an uncontrollable weed with medicinal qualities is what he was talking about). At the end of the same day that Jesus had been teaching the crowds, when evening had come, he said, “Let’s go over to the opposite shore, to the far shore. Let’s go to the eastern side of the lake to the region of the Geresenes, to the territory of the Greco-Roman Decapolis.” He was not suggesting a vacation.
The Gospel writer we call Mark says that, leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. How was he? Exhausted? Crabby? Some translators render it, “They took him with them, as he was in the boat; other boats were with him” (but he didn’t go in those boats, he stayed in the disciples’ boat). They were headed to the other side, not that far away, but it was dark, and a great windstorm arose, a tempest whipped up waves that were coming into the boat, which was quickly being swamped. They were in grave danger, and Jesus was sound asleep on a cushion in the back of the boat.
The frantic disciples roused Jesus and said, “Teacher, do you not care that we are dying?” Jesus woke up, the story goes, and reprimanded the wind and told the sea to “shut up,” to literally “be muzzled.” Shut all the way up! The wind and the sea did as they were told, and then there was a dead calm. And do you know what? Jesus could see that the disciples were still afraid. The storm was over, but they were still terrified. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” I find that this question generally gets preached about in pulpits and heard by people in the pews (or people on their computer screens) in one of two ways: either a rebuke of the disciples, who weren’t as wise as we are now about the power of Jesus to save, or as a challenge to the size of our own faith in times of terror, when we’ve lost our moorings. We can’t see a way out, and we’re perishing. (Our Gospel hymn today is Exhibit A.) We tend to identify with big fear and little faith. But Jesus taught that with faith the size of a mustard seed we can accomplish monumental tasks, so I don’t think the size of our faith is our main problem.
I want to suggest another way of hearing this story. It occurs to me that the main difference between us and those in the boat with Jesus is post-resurrection; we are the Body of Christ in the world. We are called to stand in for Jesus. That is a part of our covenant commitment as people of God. As I said last week, the Church is not God. The Church is supposed to represent Jesus Christ, especially when agents of Satan seek to cause chaos and destruction to the children of God. And we are the Church. We are to proclaim and enact, indeed, be the Good News. If we identify as the Body of Christ, then it is we who are asleep on our cushions in the back of the boat while others are perishing. It is we who need to be awakened to use our power to still the buffeting winds and calm the rough sea t, which threatens to capsize boats and drown the people in them. It is we who need to be roused to hear the challenge, “Do you not care that we are perishing?”
On the day after Juneteenth has been recognized as a federal holiday, on the day that The Honorable Byron Rushing will give us a tour of John Eliot Square in Roxbury for Chapel Camp, I’m particularly thinking about the many ways that the largely-white Episcopal Church has stayed comfortable in back of the boat in the midst of the devastating effects of white supremacy. We are being roused, awakened by the voices of those who rightly wonder whether the Church cares about those who are perishing.
You probably know that our parish was planted at the beginning of the Civil War by abolitionists, whose wealth came from the slave trade. Our own first rector Dan Huntington’s grandparents owned enslaved people. Our founders were part of a costly movement to free enslaved people; and yet, when the former enslaved people were freed largely into poverty, and our federal and state governments did everything they could to keep them there, many white churches slept. Our parish awoke again in the civil rights movement of the late 1950’s and 1960’s. And still, the air that we breathe is polluted by white-supremacist urban and suburban planning, red-lining, bussing, mass incarceration, and “welfare reform.” Now the wake-up call is for reparations and transformation.
Some of you know of journalist Isabel Wilkerson, the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.[1] Writing about the call for reparations in her book, Caste, she uses the analogy of buying an old house. It’s the best analogy I think I’ve ever heard. She writes:
We in the developed world are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even. Many people may rightly say, ‘I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked indigenous people, never owned slaves.’ And, yes, not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joints, but they are ours to deal with now, and any further deterioration is in fact on our hands.[2]
Speaking to Oprah Winfrey, Wilkerson explained that her analogy was inspired by her love of old houses. “I love old houses,” she said, “but old houses always need work…. Just when you think you’ve fixed one thing, there’s something else that needs attention.” [That’s true for old churches, too, by the way.] “And when you own an old house, you know to expect those things,” she continues. “You know that the work is never done. And if we think of our country as being like an old house, then we recognize that it should always be open for re-inspection, for additional inquiry, for checking things out, if we want it to be healthy and to stand for a long time.”
It seems to me that fear is normal and the right response when people are perishing. I notice that Jesus doesn’t say, “Do not be afraid.” I wonder if we can hear Jesus’ question as sincerely curious. Why are they still afraid even after the wind and the waves have ceased? As the Body of Christ in the world, how do we quiet the wind and the waves and restore calm; and furthermore, how do we demonstrate that we are trustworthy when it comes to dismantling the white supremacy, from which white people benefit every minute of every day and night? It’s not as much about increasing our faith or trust as a parish (with an a), but about increasing the reasons for people who are perishing (with an e) to have faith in us. It’s about increasing our trustworthiness, our reliability, our dependability to provide tangible forms of justice and mercy, in right-relationship with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color who are Emmanuelites and neighbors, and to share all of our resources.
All week the words of poet Audre Lorde have been running through my head. She said, “We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”[3] Maybe you know her poem called “A Litany for Survival.”[4]
For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed futures
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours;
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid.
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.
Second Corinthians urges us “not to accept the grace of God in vain….See now is the acceptable time, see now is the day of salvation.” Let’s open wide our eyes and our hearts also.
1. Thanks to Junior Warden Bill Margraf for the assigned reading!
2. Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (NY: Random House, 2020), exerpt: https://www.marketplace.org/2020/08/05/america-is-an-old-house-isabel-wilkerson-on-race-and-caste-in-america/.
3. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), p. 44.
4. Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn (W. W. Norton, 1978) and https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147275/a-litany-for-survival.