Stilling Life’s Storms: The Rev. Canon Jan Naylor Cope
Having grown up in south Texas on the Gulf Coast, I am no stranger to storms, particularly of the wind and water variety. June marked a very intense month in our household. While most people were looking forward to the summer and summer vacations and kicking back, not so in my house. My father managed the local grain elevator, which meant that the grain harvest started in June, and we were intense weather watchers because it also marked the start of the hurricane season. We were such weather watchers that we even had one of those magnetic hurricane tracking maps in our dining room. You know the kind—they had the little red swirls that you would—back in the day— plot the longitude and latitude to check the path of any upcoming storm. If the storms looked like they were headed our way—talk about intense, because it was always a race: would you get the crops in before something came and destroyed them? Our livelihood depended on bumper crops along with the farmers and everyone else who were dependent upon that agrarian economy. Suffice it to say, that if it looked like it was really going to come close and hit us, my mother was on high alert. My father would, just before the storm hit, carefully batten down the hatches at the grain elevator, doing everything he could to secure it; come home, do the same, and then promptly go to the bedroom and take a nap—much to my mother’s chagrin! How in the world could he go to sleep when a storm was about to overtake us?
It wasn’t until years later, when my father was ninety-one, that I finally said, “Daddy, how could you do that? What was that about?” And he very calmly looked at me and said, “Well, I knew what I could control and what I couldn’t. I knew what I could change and what I couldn’t, and I just prayed. And I was exhausted, so I went to sleep.” Seemed reasonable to me. It’s important in life to know the things that you can and cannot change, the things that you can and cannot control.
My father, I would say at the end of the day, was a person of deep faith. He feared little and trusted greatly. He knew that he had done what he could, and he leaned into the Lord that no matter what happened, God was with us, and that somehow it would all be okay. Every time this gospel lesson comes up—it’s in all three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke—I always think about that childhood experience and the lessons learned from my father.
To understand the context for today’s gospel lesson, Jesus has been teaching. He started the day teaching parables about the Kingdom of God and their meaning. We already know that since he began his ministry, he has been doing all kinds of healing. He’s attracting big crowds, and on this day, such a big crowd that he has to push out in a boat because he needed the water to carry his voice so everyone could hear.
We pick up the story when it’s evening, Jesus is exhausted. He’s been teaching all day. He goes to the stern of the boat, lies down and goes to sleep. Now, the thing about evening on the Sea of Galilee: it was much more dangerous. That’s when it was much more likely for storms to come up out of nowhere. That’s precisely what happens in this gospel lesson. So, the disciples, being incredibly human, go to Jesus to wake him up. They don’t say do something, but that’s essentially what they’re saying. Do something because the water is about to take over the boat and they fear that they will perish. Jesus simply rebukes the wind and says three words to the water, “Peace! Be still!” Dead calm. Now, in our translation of this gospel lesson, it says that the disciples were filled with great awe. A closer reading of the Greek reveals that the disciples were filled with great fear because, you see, in that day it was believed that water was incredibly dangerous. It’s where evil and chaos lurked. All they knew was that there was only one who had the power and the authority to still the storms, and that was God. So, who is surprised when they are filled with great fear and ask, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” Even though they had been traveling with Jesus—he’s been healing and teaching— they hadn’t yet leaned into the recognition that Jesus was in fact the Messiah.
Who then is this? Could it be? That’s the question that they asked. That’s the question so often that we ask. You’ll see throughout the rest of Mark that Jesus goes about teaching, healing, and proclaiming the Good News so that the disciples and all the followers would recognize who had that kind of power and authority. In his book, Jesus: A Pilgrimage, Jesuit James Martin dedicates an entire chapter to this gospel story.1 He notes that as a spiritual director, it’s been his experience that this story is the most helpful to people who are going through storms in their lives. We all have those stormy times in our lives, do we not? Our storms may be physical or financial or relational or vocational, and certainly political in this country. The question is: where do we turn? What do we do in those times when storms are about to overtake us?
Martin lifts up three counselings of Jesus that he offers to you and to me: “Jesus’s counsel against fear reveals several truths, a few things he wanted us to know about the world, and about God.”
1. I have not come to harm you. God’s presence should not prompt fear, for God always comes in love.
2. Don’t fear the new. God’s entrance into your life may mean something will change, but unanticipated doesn’t necessarily mean frightening.
3. There is no need to fear things you don’t understand. If it comes from God, even the mysteries should hold no terror. You may not understand fully what God is asking, but this is no cause to be frightened.2
If you are experiencing a stormy time in your life, I invite you to remember that no matter what, Jesus is in the boat with you and with me, always. That’s the promise. That’s the promise we stand on. Even though sometimes when we’re in so much pain or chaos, it may be hard to feel God’s presence, and that’s natural because we’re in such a tough place. But remember, God promised to never leave us or forsake us—to be with us always. Always. We may not know how things are going to turn out, but one thing we do know is that God’s right there with us to support us, to comfort, to strengthen, to guide us—always.
Martin offers this invitation and I offer it to you. “Can you hear Jesus inviting you to more calm in your stormy life? Even Jesus needed to take time alone to pray…Jesus gently guides us away from fear, and he calls to us, as he did to the disciples, inviting us onto the calm waters of life. Listen to him. He says to you, ‘Come’.”3
I want to leave you with the words of our Communion anthem that you’re going to hear a little bit later in the service. “Stand by Me” was written in 1905 by Charles Albert Tinley, a man who had more than his fair share of storms in his life. The first stanza is based on this gospel story.
When the storms of life are raging,
Stand by me;
When the storms of life are raging,
Stand by me;
When the world is tossing me
Like a ship upon the sea
Thou who rulest wind and water,
Stand by me.4
Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him? The One who stands by and with you and me. Amen.
1 James Martin, Jesus: A Pilgrimage (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), pages 224-239.
2 Ibid., 233.
3 Ibid., 238-239.
4 “Stand by Me,” Charles A. Tindley, Lift Every Voice and Sing II, (New York: The Church Pension Fund, 1993), 200.