http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp7_RCL.html
When I was a little kid,
about 4 or 5 my grandparents rented a house in southern Vermont during the
summers. There was a deck that overlooked an overgrown field. I remember
climbing up on the railing of the deck and watching the wind blow through the
weeds and hay. The field was sort of impassable for a kid. The weeds generally
grew taller than I was. My grandfather would create some trails during the
summer so that we could get through it to the woods for dog walks. From my
perch on the deck, I remember feeling like I could control the wind. Maybe, as
a New York City kid, I was sort of unaccustomed to having so much outdoors in
front of me. Maybe it was the perspective of the overgrown field, ending in
dark woods. I am not sure what it was, but I used to sit up on the railing and
yell, “Stop Wind!” and “Stay Still!” The brief moments when the wind seemed to die down after
one of my commands, the moments where it felt like I controlled the wind, just
gave me a big rush. The elation was real even if the control was not.
It’s always interesting to me to analyze why certain moments
of childhood get turned into important memories while so much else seems to
disappear. I suppose that the disciples could be right, it is just an
extraordinary thing to control the wind. Or perhaps it’s the many idioms about our inability to control the wind
or weather, reminding us of our limitations, that whenever I heard them
reminded me of my wind control antics. Part of memory making and memory keeping
is surly about how many other times you have the opportunity to re-remember it.
I also wonder if it might be that I remember it because it was a feeling so
very different from much of childhood. I felt like I was defying nature, and
had some semblance of control over my surroundings. It is not the sort of thing
one generally feels as a four year old, or on bad days of the week, it can be
something I don’t feel as an adult. I often
find that I remember things that I have told the story of many times. But then,
I am probably not remembering the original event, but rather the telling of it,
the turning it into a story. Why this one? I really don’t know. I don’t think I told many people
about this wind desire ever. In fact, even as I was thinking about this sermon
and telling my friend and husband about this over dinner, both of them seemed
to think I was a little strange. I wonder too if this memory
is etched in my mind because of this Gospel passage--every few years when I
encountered it during the church year it would remind me of my childhood wind
stopping desires. I suppose it is possible too that this story had been read to
me in church, Sunday School or even by my parents. I think it could be possible
that I only even imagined being able to stop the wind having heard that is was
something that Jesus had done.
Though I could get very stuck
in a reverie about childhood memories (which I suspect I am particularly
susceptible to right now as I have recently been sorting out which of my
childhood objects I want my parents to keep, which I want in my own home, and
which are destined for the trash), I think there is also some larger things
here. And the first larger thing is our collective memory. I often wonder about
how we as groups of people decide how and what to remember. In our small
collectives like families, what are the stories that are always told, what at
the pictures that are saved in the albums. As a society too, we tell family
stories. George Washington looms pretty large in our collective understanding
as Americans. Martin Luther King Jr. and his "I have a dream" speech
are definitely a part of the American story. In more recent times as a society
we decided that we would not forget 9/11 (even if it were possible)--and so
many reminders on uniforms or posters urge us to "never forget." The
9/11 moment was one that we as a community, as a society decided to consciously
make into a memory. We have plenty of milestones and occasions to think of
Washington, King of 9/11. Anniversaries and memorials remind us of our
closeness and our distance to these parts of our collective memory.
As a church then, there are
lots of ways in which we construct our memories. This church and this
congregation have particular histories and stories that help to explain who we
are today. Likewise of course, how we tell those stories, and which stories we
tell reflects who we think we are today. But bigger than St. Ann and the Holy
Trinity, our most communal memory as Christians are our sacred texts. These are
the stories we tell year after year, season after season. They take on new
layers of meaning as we get older, or as they strike us on some particular
Sunday in a way they never have before.
The Gospel stays the same as we get older and encounter it in a new way.
The Gospel is reliably available to revel God's love through the life of Jesus.
Of course, the nature of the the way we read the Bible together, in a 3 year
repeating circle, allows the stories to become memories by the time we
encounter them again, 3, 6, and 9 years later. We get a chance to re-remember
the stories and make them a part of our personal memory and our communal one.
Perhaps one of the best arguments for thinking about scripture as collective
memory is the fact that we have not one but four Gospels, all ostensibly,
telling the same story. It's not that any one of the Gospels is more true than
the other, rather they are four different communities understandings of the
memories of Jesus.
Today's Gospel story offers
us a good example of the Gospel's function as communal memory. When we compare
this passage in Mark to the same story in Matthew some interesting differences
arise. Biblical scholarship indicates that the Gospeler who wrote Matthew had
the Gospel of Mark as a resource. Mark is the basis for both Matthew and Luke.
So this person is stilling down and thinking, like a preacher does, about what
these sacred words in Mark will mean to his community–and how he can best show his community the revelation of
God in Christ Jesus. In our Gospel from Mark this morning we hear the disciples
calling out to Jesus in the storm, “Teacher don’t you care that we are perishing?!”The disciples are incredulous that Jesus could sleep
through this storm and are somewhere between wining or being angry at Jesus for
his apparent lack of concern. When we contrast this to Matthew’s version of events the disciples cry out to Jesus saying “Lord! Save us we are perishing!” It’s a slight difference, but in
Matthew’s Gospel the disciples are
asking Jesus to take action, and in ours this morning they are sort of just
asking Jesus to care. In some ways Matthew’s version of the disciples
seem to understand who Jesus is a little better. They know to ask him for
salvation. In our Gospel there is a real desire to be cared about–which is a feeling I suspect we are all familiar with. I
think the interesting thing about these two stories is that neither one of them
is more true than the other, but they do reflect some very real human feelings.
Sometimes in the midst of storms at sea we call out “save us” and other times we call out “don’t you know that I am here?!”For the community that Mark was a part of, perhaps there
was despair in the time following Jesus’ death and resurrection, and
the despair of the disciples was a way of echoing that fear that the community
had. Being with out Jesus on earth, the community might not have felt like
Jesus cared about them. Mark reminds his community, as he reminds all of us
today that even when we most feel like we are perishing–and even when we don’t realize God’s presence with us–God is with us.
I think it is pretty safe to
say that we are at sea as a society today, and that the storms seem rough. The
water is coming in over the sides of our boats. The underwater mortgages that so
many Americans are trapped in seems perhaps emblematic of this, but we have
other sorts of waves too. This image of being in a stormy sea also conjures up
the perilous state of our planet. This recent heat wave certainly reminds us of
our relationship to the natural world, and perhaps gets us thinking about the
role we all play in the health of our planet. Since this is Gay Pride weekend,
we might also be thinking about how gay teens feel like they might be alone on
a sinking boat, especially in a culture filled with bullying, inequality and
hate. And with our immigration forum this afternoon along with President Obama’s actions this week, I have also been thinking about the
way undocumented immigrants and their families live in fear of deportation,
separation, and detention. These individuals and communities likely feel out to
sea in the midst of a storm. I think given the state of the world, the state of
some of our families and friends, the state some of us find ourselves ing, this
boat in a storm--these waves pounding in over the sides--it starts to feel a
bit much. These are moments when we find ourselves calling out to God,
"Don't you care?" and "Save us!"
Both the response of Mark's disciple
"don't you care that we are perishing?!" And Matthew's "Save
us!" present a relationship between God and humanity that has elements of
parent and child dynamic. And this is certainly one of the ways in which we
understand our relationship to God. The "Our Father" prayer, and
calling God Father, Son and Holy Spirit show us ways of seeing God. But the
richness of God goes beyond God being the one to call upon when we are in
peril, or God acting like a parent. Calling out amidst the storm to God is
certainly appropriate. That is the time to reach for God. And the image of God
as a mother or father can help us to see the sort of love that God has for us:
unconditional. But as we are gathered here we are enacting another vision of
God too, we are gathered as the Body of Christ we are also echoing God's
abiding presence with the disciples in the boat. Not only did Jesus abide with
the disciples on the boat, he showed them he cared, and then he saved them in a
way they had no idea they could be saved. Gathered here, as we share in the Eucharistic meal, God is of course abiding with us--but we are also abiding in
God, acting as God, and abiding in one another. When we are here--we are God
abiding in this community. When we have our moments of
calling out "Don't you care?" and "Save us" we do so in the
context of the church community where we are forgiven, fed and blessed each
week. We do so knowing that even in our big city and in our modern world, we
are a part of a loving community that treats its members with the love that God
showed to all of us in the giving of his son, Jesus.
AMEN.
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