Sermons from the Pulpit
Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the second Sunday after Pentecost, June 25, 2000, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.I Samuel 17:3-58, Mark 4:35-41Let us go across to the other side. -Mark 4:35
Go, and may the Lord be with you! -I Samuel 17:37
"Let us go across to the other side," said Jesus, and they all clambered in the boat with him, "just as he was," and sailed off into the night and into a storm. Seems clear enough, doesn't it? But in the Bible, everything means more than it seems to mean, and you can spend a lifetime discovering what is in there without finding it all, which is exactly what I intend to do. I don't plan to do it all this morning, however. So you needn't worry.
If you have ever taken a tour of a great cathedral, or looked at a book about church buildings and architecture, then you know the old word for the part of a church where the people gather to worship. It is not a sanctuary. We use the word sanctuary loosely for the whole room, but more precisely it refers only to the altar area at the front, beyond the communion rail from the congregation. The sanctuary is the private preserve where priests and preachers prowl.
Whereas the place where the people gather to worship is: the nave. From the Latin noun navis, meaning a ship, and the verb navigare, to sail! You gather in a nave because your church is a boat, and you are its crew, sailors on a sea which can and will get stormy. You have joined up with the Navy of the Lord!
Stand in the nave of a cathedral and look up, and what do you see? A high, vaulted ceiling which resembles nothing so much as an inverted ship's hull. This is no coincidence. In the days before the whole population could read and write, the church building was their Bible. Every detail of it spoke to them of God. It surrounded them with the Gospel. It put them in the boat with Jesus and the disciples.
Who, led by Jesus, sail across the sea to the other side. The so-called Sea of Galilee is no more of a sea than Winnipesaukee is, but it is a frontier. The western shore, where they started, was their homeland, Jewish territory. The eastern shore, toward which they were navigating, was alien territory. Gentile country. They didn't belong there.
Let us go across to the other side. To go to places where they don't belong, to be with people who are not their people - that is what Jesus asked of his friends, and still does. The nave is not a nave if you don't navigate with it.
There is an ancient Latin saying, I understand it's by the biographer Plutarch:
Navigare necesse est. Vivere non est necesse.
It is necessary to sail. It is not necessary to live.
This is not a slogan for gung-ho sailors. Well, it is. But that's not all it is. Think of it this way: If you don't sail, you haven't lived. To live is to sail. That should be the watchword of all Christians and of their church.
The gift of this life is an invitation to go out, to venture forth, to push the envelope, to make crossings and connections, with or without the assistance of an actual, literal boat. And not for the sheer daredevil adventure of it, not for the love of risk-taking, no. But rather in the confidence that no place anywhere is really godforsaken, and no people anywhere are godforsaken either, because this is a God who is not in the business of forsaking, and the God who loved all places and all people into existence intends for every creature to acknowledge, recognize, and relate to all other creatures for the precious beings that they are. Even the smug self-righteous twerps and the jerks on Jet-skis and the Massachusetts drivers.
So it is love that draws us into the boat, not the thrill of danger, although it is true that there are dangers when you get in that boat. There are even those interpreters of the Gospel who say that this storm on the Sea of Galilee is a warning to the church to beware of and be prepared for the turmoil within and among ourselves as we undertake to go where Jesus takes us. Not all storms are external.
Jesus falls asleep in the boat, which provokes his totally hysterical disciples to accuse him of not caring whether they all perish and drown. The nerve of the guy! It's like he's showing off how brave he is. Or so I always sort of thought, until I discovered, in my reading this week, that in the traditional theology of the ancient Near East, this effortless ability to sleep and rest is a characteristic and a sign of a supernatural being!
I ask you, isn't that wonderful? It's like the old trial by water: If the defendant floats, he's guilty. If he sinks, he's innocent. If he nods off anywhere and sleeps like a log, he's the Messiah.
But it actually makes sense. Who should be able to sleep soundly, if not the Christ of God? Who can rest more secure? Who has less need to be vigilant? Who is more likely to place complete trust in God? Trust is what makes it possible to rest.
There are two kinds of bravery: The kind I am occasionally capable of, and the kind I dream of. The first kind, the kind I actually experience for a moment now and then, is the hanging-on-by-your-toenails-and-chewing-on-the-furniture kind, where you hang in there even though you're beside yourself with terror and you're running on pure adrenaline and you could no more fall asleep than fly in the air, in fact you're so light-headed you could fly in the air. The second kind of bravery, which I only dream of, is the one that I have always thought of as too-dumb-to-be-afraid.
I am now reconsidering this. I am coming around to the view that actual, honest-to-God serenity in the face of threats and dangers is not necessarily a sign of cluelessness. It's the lovely image of Jesus, snoozing in that boat, that pulls me toward this attitude adjustment. But even more, it's young David going out to meet Goliath.
How about that boy! Isn't he just living proof of the power of positive thinking? Moxie makes might!
Well, I certainly hope not. Moxie has never been my strong suit. I have always identified strongly with a little girl I knew who thought the title of the famous children's book was not The Little Engine That Could but The Little Engine That Thought It Could. I say Norman Vincent Peale was seriously delusional.
But there is this phenomenon of phenomenal trust, not in oneself but in God. It's the thread that runs through both these Scriptures. Jesus does not need to calm the storm; he does that as an accommodation to his rapidly deconstructing companions. (And what's their response? More terror, only this time they're afraid of him!) And David does not need to run from Goliath, he doesn't even need to pump himself up so that he can run straight at Goliath; he is simply content to be in God's hands, and for him it is literally no strain to be valiant against evil.
To be content to be in God's hands: What a treasure that must be! When you hear the word cancer, when doing the right thing turns out to be costly, when the wind blows and the swells grow, when your daughter insists she can drive on Route 128 all by herself, the prayer that always springs to our lips is, "Lord, save me! Rescue me! Get me safely out of this situation!" But we all know that prayer might not be answered, so it is not a serenity prayer; it is an exceedingly nervous prayer.
When King Saul finally gave David his blessing to go out and meet Goliath, Saul did not say, "May you kill that big lug dead, may you be a winner, may you have the strength of ten!" No, he said, "May the Lord go with you!" And that was all David was asking. No scenarios, no conditions, no guarantees of victory over Philistines or tempests, no nothing but the company and the care of God, and no idea what might happen. It is necessary to sail. It is not necessary to live.
These are your stories. They are not archaeological curiosities or legends to be studied for their cultural interest. They tell us who we are and what we're about. They put us in our place in the universe. Allow them to speak to your soul, to encourage you, to change you, to take hold of you. Only when we belong to them will they truly belong to us.