Good morning, and happy Father’s Day to all our fathers and father figures in the congregation this morning. Thank you for all you do to shape our lives, and for the example you provide us in managing the ups and downs in life. I hope that you feel honored and loved today for all your hard work.
Comedian Jim Gaffigan posted on Twitter, “My 4-yr.-old gave me a handmade card for Father’s Day. Maybe for Christmas I’ll draw him a picture of some toys.” A man named Mike Primavera tweeted, “Get your dad what he really wants this Father’s Day by turning off the lights when you leave a room.” And a tweet from username Dad and Buried reads, “Called my dad to wish him a happy Father’s Day and we spent the whole time discussing back pain and ibuprofen. The circle is now complete.” (1)
There are few things in life more rewarding than having a great relationship with your parents. Pro golfer Bubba Watson listed his priorities in his Twitter description as “Christian. Husband. Daddy. Pro Golfer.” He and his wife Angie have two adopted children, and Watson says that joy of being a father far outweighs any professional success he has achieved. He took some time off from golf after the first adoption so he could bond with his son. As he said, “I had to be there for my son, so golf was the farthest thing from my mind . . . Trying to be a good husband, a good dad, was the most important thing.” (2)
Good fathers and mothers have a natural impulse to protect their children and to serve as an example to them in tough times. I think it’s appropriate that our Bible text for today falls on Father’s Day. This is a story about the disciples caught in a terrible storm. They need courage. They need leadership. And they need an example of how to face a challenge that is beyond their strength. If you’ve ever been through a storm like that in your life, then I believe you’ll get something out of today’s Bible passage.
Our story begins at the end of a typical day for Jesus and his disciples. Jesus has been teaching huge crowds of people by the Sea of Galilee. But the crowds have finally gone home, and it’s time to pack up and head to their next ministry spot in the region of Gerasenes, in modern-day Jordan. It must have been a tiring day. Jesus went to the back of the boat to catch a nap. And suddenly a storm swept in. Verses 37-38 read, “A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”
There is a corporate training company called Survival Systems that has a Leadership & Team Development program that simulates surviving a plane crash or a ship sinking at sea. So they take a group of corporate employees out into the ocean and put them in a situation that simulates having to escape a sinking ship. The training program involves teaching teams skills such as “raft evacuations, underwater escape, surface-water survival, jumping from a height—and even how to be rescued.” One purpose of the training program is to “improve stress control” and build leadership skills. (3)
How would you react in a situation like that? What would a life-threatening storm reveal about your leadership skills and ability to control stress? Perhaps if we can imagine ourselves in a tiny plane being buffeted by a storm that is threatening to tear our small craft to pieces, we can appreciate the terror that seized the disciples when a terrible storm came up on the Sea of Galilee. The wind and the waves threatened to swamp their little boat. Some of these disciples were seasoned fishermen. They had been sailing on this sea since they were little boys. They had encountered storms all their lives. So, imagine how ferocious this storm must have been if these expert fishermen thought they were going to die. They were so frightened they woke Jesus, who was sleeping in the stern of the boat and asked him, “Teacher, do you not care if we perish?”
Many of us have asked the same question at some time in our lives. We’ve hit a storm in our lives. Not just a stressful event. But an event or a season of life that is so devastating that we don’t have the strength to face it on our own. And where is Jesus? Jesus seems asleep in the stern of our boats and we want to ask, “Do you not care that we perish?”
You see, everybody goes through storms at some time or another. Our storm may be a problem marriage. The American Institute of Stress has a tool called the Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory that ranks certain life events in terms of their negative impact on a person’s life. “Death of a spouse” ranks as the most stressful life event in the inventory, with “Divorce” and “Marital separation from mate” as the second and third most stressful life events anyone can face. (4)
A healthy marriage is vitally important to most people’s sense of identity, security and well-being. When a marriage falls apart, the partners can go through the same stages of grief as someone whose spouse has died.
Author and speaker Laura Petherbridge refers to divorce as the “soul deep accuser.” After her husband had an affair and ended their marriage, Laura contemplated suicide. She says she knew she could not survive such pain without Jesus, yet she felt such shame that she wanted to hide from him too. She felt unworthy to come to God for help when she most desperately needed to be assured of His love. As she writes, “. . . rejection hauntingly whispers, ‘You are a loser. You are unlovable. You are a failure. You deserve to be alone. Life is over. You will never be loved again.’” (5)
Some of you understand the pain she is talking about. Most marriages face a storm of some kind over the years. Some marriages don’t make it through the storm, and the wreckage can be devastating. Especially for women. A recent study showed that women and children experience a 73% decline in their standard of living the year of their divorce. Ironically, men’s standard of living increases 42%.
Just as important is the fact that more and more couples find that divorce is no real solution to their problems. Marriage counselors who a decade ago were advising couples to go ahead and part are now recommending couples hang in there and try to make it through the storm. Of course, that has been God’s plan all along. Marriage problems are a storm many people are going through.
The loss of a loved one is also a terrible storm with devastating effects. William Sloane Coffin was a very popular and influential pastor who lost his son Alex in a car accident. He says that he received lots of cards and phone calls and visits from friends and church members and fellow pastors. And most of them had no idea how to comfort him. He said the least helpful people were his fellow pastors. They quoted the Bible at him a lot. But they didn’t understand his grief. As he said, “. . . the depth of my grief made those words unreal.” (6)
The worst part is that Jesus seems to be asleep. “Why doesn’t he intervene?” we cry out in our distress. Where is God in my distress? Do you not care that we perish?
Reynolds Price, in his book Letter to a Man on Fire tells of getting a letter from a young man named Jim who had just been diagnosed with cancer. Price had survived his own bout with cancer a few years earlier, and Jim was writing to him because he knew Price would understand his fear and his questions. Jim wrote, “I want to believe in a God who cares . . . because I may meet him sooner than I had expected. I think I am at the point where I can accept the existence of God . . . but I can't yet believe God cares about me.” (7)
“I want to believe in a God who cares. . .” That’s the question we will all wrestle with sometime in our lives. And if God does care about us, why does He let the storms happen? I believe we can see the answer in today’s lesson.
The story in Mark’s Gospel is an affirmation. Yes, Jesus does care. When the storms of life are raging, he does care. When it seems you cannot hold on a moment longer, he does care. When the waters threaten to engulf, he does care.
Remember this: Jesus had all power in heaven and earth available to him. He chose to empty himself of his power and take on the life of an average man. He chose to endure hardship. He chose to endure oppression from the Roman government and rejection from the religious establishment and his own family. He chose to be hungry, to be lonely, to be abandoned and betrayed by his closest friends. He chose to suffer wrongful arrest and torture and humiliation and death. Jesus chose to place himself into every imaginable storm because he had faith that God was using these storms for a greater purpose, for the salvation of the world. Jesus chose to place himself into every imaginable storm because he knew God Almighty was with him every step of the way. That’s how he could face down every storm without fear.
Glenn Scrivener says that a few years ago he prayed to God that he would get to know God better. Within a week of that prayer, Glenn’s employers deported him from England back to Australia, his long-time girlfriend broke up with him, and his parents announced they were divorcing.
In the midst of all these painful events, Glenn had a revelation: God was using these storms to answer Glenn’s prayer. He realized that following Jesus often leads us into challenging pathways. Jesus may very well lead us directly into a storm. But it’s not because he doesn’t love us. It’s not because he wasn’t prepared for it. It’s because we can’t understand the power and the peace of God unless we encounter it in the middle of a storm. The best way to get to know God is to be caught in a storm with Him. (8)
And that’s a lesson the disciples needed to learn, and they couldn’t learn it any other way. So the disciples rouse Jesus from his sleep, and he speaks to the wind and the waves, “Peace! be still!” And the wind ceases and there is a great calm. Then he turns to the disciples and asks, “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?”
The central question in life is not how many storms we must pass through. The question is whether we have faith for the storms. All of us will encounter storms. Sometimes it will seem as if God Himself has forsaken us. It is at such times that our faith will be critical.
A few years ago, a woman named Chastity Patterson lost her father. After his death, Chastity continued to send daily text messages to his old phone number. She just wanted to feel like he was still there, still sharing the ups and downs of her daily life. It was her way of dealing with a storm of grief. For four years, she sent daily text updates to her father’s old phone number. And then one day, she got a reply.
Just before the fourth anniversary of Chastity’s father’s death, she received this text from his old number: “My name is Brad and I lost my daughter in a car wreck August 2014 and your messages have kept me alive. When you text me, I know it’s a message from God.” Brad texted that he was proud of how Chastity had managed the challenges in her life over the past four years. Chastity posted their text exchange to social media to show her friends and family “that there is a God and it might take 4 years, but he shows up right on time!” (9)
That’s what the disciples learned from their struggles in the storm: there is a God and he shows up right on time. Do you believe in a God who loves you and has promised never to forsake you? Do you believe that however dark the clouds may be, behind those clouds, the sun still shines? Do you believe that beyond every cross, there is an empty tomb? If you do, you can weather the storm, however severe. If you do not, today is the day to appropriate that faith for yourself.
1. (@JimGaffigan, June 20, 2010); (@primawesome, June 17, 2015); (@DadandBuried, June 18, 2017); “Tweet Roundup: The 15 Funniest Tweets About Father’s Day” by The Dad https://www.thedad.com/tweet-roundup-the-15-funniest-tweets-about-fathers-day/.
2. Andrew Branch, “A Masterful win for family man Bubba Watson,” http:// www.worldmag.com/ 2014/ 04/ a_masterful_win_for_family_man_bubba_watson. Cited in Jim L. Wilson, 300 Illustrations for Preachers (Bellingham, WA, Lexham Press, 2015).
3. “The wildest, weirdest corporate team-building trip ideas” by Kenneth Kiesnoski CNBC July 26, 2017 https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/26/the-wildest-weirdest-corporate-team-building-trip-ideas.html.
4. https://www.stress.org/holmes-rahe-stress-inventory-pdf.
5. “5 Things People Don’t Know About the Pain of Divorce” by Laura Petherbridge Crosswalk.com August 9, 2019. https://www.crosswalk.com/family/marriage/divorce-and-remarriage/5-things-people-don-t-know-about-the-pain-of-divorce.html.
6. Dr. Thomas Long (http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/long_4603.htm).
7. [Reynolds Price, Letter to a Man On Fire (New York: Scribner, 1999), 25.] Cited by The Rev. Dr. Lewis Galloway, https://day1.org/weekly-broadcast/5d9b820ef71918cdf20031a6/does_jesus_care.
8. Glenn Scrivener in sallysjourney.
9. “Arkansas woman texted father's number every day after he died, she got a response four years later” by Morgan Phillips, Fox News, https://www.foxnews.com/us/arkansas-woman-texting-father-every-day-response.