Pentecost 5B
St Thomas Church, North Ipswich
23 June 2024
In today’s set of lectionary readings, we are served up two of the all-time best-known stories from the Bible:
- The epic scene where David defeats the Philistine champion with a single slingshot
- Jesus calming the storm on the Sea of Galilee
These stories are vivid.
They are much loved by people who design Sunday School curricula.
More than that, they are primal stories that evoke a response deep within us as we hear the stories. This is true even if we have heard the story many times in the past.
These tales strike a chord.
As with many of the best stories in the Bible, these tales were doubtless told and retold by word of mouth for many years before reaching their fixed written.
Along the way—like any good fishing story—they may have grown a little in the process of being recounted over and over.
Some of the details do indeed seem far-fetched, but they need not distract us from spiritual wisdom that these biblical texts offer us.
For instance, we know that some individuals can be rather taller than most people in a population group. Or indeed, shorter, for that matter.
Just as modern basketball teams prefer tall players, ancient armies engaged in hand to hand tended to value larger than usual warriors.
Likewise, with the Sea of Galilee. It is actually a medium-sized lake: just 21 km long from North to South, and 15 km wide (from East to West). However, it does sometimes generate wild tsunami like storms.
A recent tidal surge storm event generated waves up to 5m and caused immense damage to buildings and parklands around the lake. The story in the Gospel of Mark at least preserves an ancient memory that such wild storms can and do occur on this mostly placid lake.
But we are not here to discuss variations in human body heights or tidal surges on the Sea of Galilee.
We are seeking spiritual wisdom for everyday life.
In everyday life we do face giants, and we can certainly feel that we are being swamped by the storms of life.
The first grain of wisdom may be to shift our mindset from engaging with a story in the Bible to a mindset where we engage with God in our own everyday experience.
Being a disciple is not simply knowing stories from the Bible but being familiar with the whisper of God’s Spirit in our own everyday lives.
In the famous story of Elijah fleeing to Mt Sinai after his conflict with the 400 prophets of Baal on Mt Carmel, he discovers that the most powerful expression of God’s presence is not in the strong wind, or the earthquake, nor even the firestorm, but in the still small voice. In fact, the Hebrew of that sentence is very hard to translate. It is more like a sound of sheer silence (2 Kings 19:12).
Maybe—as we walk towards our confrontation with the giants in our own lives—we need to do more than collect a handful of pebbles from the creek. What we actually need is a profound sense of the powerful presence of God that is beyond any words; whether ours or God’s.
Maybe—as we fear that our fragile vessel is about to be swamped by the tidal surges of everyday life—we need more than a memory of a Gospel story from Sunday School. What we do need is a deep confidence that the God who is already aboard our fragile vessel is perfectly able to still the storm, to calm the sea, to bring peace to our soul.
We just need to ask.
And maybe our most important mission here in the local community is not to tell people about the Bible, but to teach people how to discern the silent presence of The One Who Is.
The unseen God at the heart of the burning bush.
The utter silence of divine love we retreat exhausted from the struggle of life.
The surprising God who chooses a young boy to defeat a warrior giant.
The sleeping Jesus already aboard our fragile vessel.
Peace. Be still.
A sound of sheer silence.
Such a gift.
Such good news.
The prayer of the day
O God our defender,
storms rage about us and cause us to be afraid:
rescue your people from despair,
deliver your sons and daughters from fear,
and preserve us all from unbelief;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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