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Grace, mercy, and peace to you this Father’s Day from God our heavenly Father, and from our Lord and Savior, His Son, Jesus Christ, Amen.
Storms are among the most powerful forces in God’s creation. We know from the very fact that storms can sometimes be destructive that they weren’t a part of God’s original plan of creation. They came to be as a result of humankind’s fall into sin. Just like all other destructive things in nature like earthquakes and fires, we brought them upon ourselves on account of our inability to perfectly keep God’s Law.
That’s not to say each specific storm is somehow God’s punishment being inflicted upon various segments of humanity for specific sins, as some famous American televangelists have sometimes falsely claimed. Hurricane Katrina certainly didn’t happen just because New Orleans is a sometimes wild, corrupt, and bawdy town. If that were the way God worked, I’m sure that Las Vegas, Bangkok, and Washington, D.C. would have long since been wiped from the face of the earth. But storms are certainly a characteristic of our fallen world. They’re part and parcel of the consequences of sin first experienced by our earthly ancestors after they’d rebelled against God and lost the perfection of His creation.
I don’t know about you, but I find storms fascinating, whether viewed from afar on the Weather Channel, or experienced first-hand. I certainly don’t like the damage they can cause or the injuries and sometimes deaths that they can inflict.
Still, to witness a storm and to realize that even the most powerful storm is still under the governance of God’s will, and that it holds but a mere fraction of His infinite power, ought to give us all something to pause and reflect upon.
Sometimes if the winds aren’t too strong and the lightning isn’t too close, I don’t mind sitting out on a covered porch or under a picnic shelter with a cold Lutheran beverage—seeing, feeling, hearing, and even smelling all the sensory input that a thunderstorm brings. Viewed from a safe place, they can be quite fun and stimulating to observe.
It’s rarely pleasurable to be engulfed within a violent storm, however. Driving through wind-swept sheets of rain, hail, sleet, or snow, trying to see a slippery road through streaking wipers, is no sane person’s idea of fun. If it’s bad to experience a storm like that in two dimensions while planted firmly on solid ground, it’s even more frightening to do so in three dimensions.
I remember an airplane flight many years ago, heading to Ohio from North Carolina. A colleague and I were traveling together in hopes of eventually making it home to Illinois for the weekend. Coming across the Appalachian Mountains, he leaned forward and tapped me on the shoulder, pointing outside toward the horizon. It was easy to see the well-defined edge of a storm front approaching from the west. As we got to the far side of the mountains, we could feel the increasing turbulence as the winds began to sweep up the western slopes. There weren’t any gaps in the oncoming wall of clouds, and we knew it was going to be a bumpy ride. There wasn’t anything to do but pull the seatbelts a little tighter, and hope for the best.
I knew my buddy Al wasn’t likely to have uttered a prayer himself, for he wasn’t exactly known for being the God-fearing type. In fact, the best way to describe Al was that he smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish, and cussed like a pirate.
So, if there was going to be any invoking of God’s mercy and care at that point, I was going to have double duty, and I did.
For what seemed like hours but was really only the next twenty minutes, we rode what seemed like a cross between a roller coaster and a rodeo bronco—except that our jumps and drops were not only measured in dozens of feet, but occasionally went sideways as well. More than once, I could feel the burning, acidic taste of bile in the back of my throat as my stomach mirrored the jumps and drops of the airplane. In addition to the protection God was providing, I was immensely thankful for my lunchtime choice of grilled cheese and potato salad instead of Al’s Buffalo wings, too.
The rain against the aluminum skin and glass sounded like gravel on a tin roof, and the changes in pitch as the engines spooled up and down in the surging winds seemed like what I imagined the painful shrieks of a dying cat would be. The sky outside alternated between utter darkness and the strobe-brightness of lightning strikes illuminating greenish clouds. It was the most frightening experience I’d ever had up to that point in my life.
Just as I thought it could get any worse, I felt a tingling in my arms and legs, and suddenly the world around us lit up in a white-hot flash, as if we were staring into God’s own face. At the same instant, the airplane was slapped sideways across the sky like a toy.
It was then that I felt what the disciples probably felt that day on the Sea of Galilee, trying to guide their founding boat through pitching waves while Jesus seemed unconcerned and inattentive.
Although I don’t remember asking God the same question—and I might have had a hard time admitting it even if I did ask it—I’m sure something very similar went through my mind at that moment: “Don’t you care that we’re perishing, Lord?”
Jesus obviously does care—then and now. After rebuking the wind and the waves, calming their wild tempest and rescuing the disciples from probable death, Jesus has a rebuke for them as well: “Why are you so afraid?” He asks. “Have you still no faith?”
That’s a tough question to answer, really. It seems our faith does leave us at times, especially in hard times. It’s easy to have faith when things are going well. To use a rather obvious pun in relation to this situation in which the disciples find themselves—we find faith easy when everything is “smooth sailing”.
But the fact is, life isn’t always smooth sailing, is it? It’s a lot more challenging to have faith—to have unquestioning love and complete trust in God—when everything around us seems to be crashing down. When we’re nagged by illness or injury, we doubt God’s healing power. When our retirement funds or our college savings shrink to a fraction of their prior value, we are suspect of His providence. When our job is eliminated, our grades drop, or our friends betray us or snicker, we wonder if God really cares. When we argue with our spouses, or they simply avoid or ignore us like the furniture, we question whether or not He really matched us up with the right individual. When people in our congregation or our synod bicker like children, we wonder if we’re really part of His Church at all.
Franklin Roosevelt, in one of his more famous speeches, once told Americans, “We have nothing to fear but—fear itself.” It’s a memorable line, sure, but it’s not strictly true. There are plenty of things to fear among the storms of life, especially if we think we’re facing them all alone—but God doesn’t want us to allow those fears to be greater than the fear, love, and trust we have in Him above all things.
The fact is: You should expect storms in your life. You should probably even welcome the storms, for without them you will have no appreciation of the rescue God provides you from them—whether physical or spiritual. If the world embraces you, soothes you, encourages you, and supports you, something is wrong. It means that you are standing on the shore while Jesus and the faithful sail off into the brewing squall.
You want to be in that boat with Jesus. For when we are living an active faith, we find ourselves continually in a storm of the devil’s and the world’s making—a storm no less threatening and even more dangerous than that which the disciples faced on the sea that day.
You know, it’s a funny thing about storms: They don’t respect boundaries, do they? Not levees and dikes. Not seawalls and coastlines. Not man-made territory borders drawn artificially on some map, either. Certainly not small boats, tossed about on the waters, no matter how well-constructed or well-piloted. The disciples learned this all too well when the waves began swamping their boat while Jesus rested near the tiller.
Spiritual storms don’t respect boundaries, either. As Jesus indicated after calming the wind and the waves, the disciples’ problem that day was as much spiritual as it was physical. They doubted. They feared that their end was at hand, that all was lost. From their words, they even worried that Jesus might not care that this was happening, though their words also were an appeal to Him that contained an element of hope.
We offer this same mix of despair and hope each week, when we come together to confess our sins: We express our fears that we are sinful by nature and unworthy of His blessings. We admit our inability to avoid offending God and our neighbor in thought, word, and deed. And we cower with fear, knowing that we do indeed deserve God’s temporal and eternal punishment and cannot escape it on our own.
But even in the midst of that despair, we have something the disciples lacked that day on the lake: We have faith. We trust that in emptying ourselves before Him, Jesus will intervene. He will come to our rescue, calming the wrath of almighty God that would consume us.
Note—if you will—the predicament Job faced in our Old Testament lesson today. Though a faithful man, Job had not emptied himself on this occasion and humbled himself. Rather, Job began to question God’s wisdom in the troubles he had faced. And how did God confront Job? In a storm—a whirlwind that made it clear who was truly in control of all things, who governed creation and all its wonders and powers, and who held it back from making humanity face complete and utter destruction.
When Job and the disciples lost faith, that’s when they faced destruction. They only saw and believed what was visible to them. They saw and felt the storms and concluded that this was all there was, and they realized they couldn’t stand up to it.
That’s what unbelief does: It only trusts what can be seen, felt, and proven. That’s because unbelief is an ordinary thing. It is common, unremarkable, drab, dull, and worldly. Unbelief scoffs at the extraordinary.
But faith is different. Faith sees what is not apparent. It grasps onto what is not easily accepted as real, and it overcomes what is visible and what is felt. Faith not only embraces the extraordinary, it IS extraordinary. It subdues the flesh, holds back the devil, and rejects what the world sees and thinks is important and true. Faith does battle with the turbulence in our lives caused by the devil, the world, and our own sinfulness.
Faith is not merely an oil poured out on troubled waters to smooth them, but it is the reaching down of the almighty hand of God to actually compress the tempest of sin and unbelief, and to hold it back against its will. Faith holds all these powers at bay—not merely withstanding them or struggling to a standstill or a standoff, but actually beating them back, subduing them, and defeating them. Faith is so extraordinary, in fact, that it conquers the world and even destroys death.
So do not fret with anxiety or cower in fear when you face the storms of life, either the little swells or the great tempests. It may appear to you that your Lord is sleeping, unconcerned with your welfare, or even whether or not you perish.
But you need not fear. Remember that He is with you in this vessel of the church. You are tossed about, but you have also been splashed with water there. You call out in fear, but He is here in flesh and blood, offering you protection and safety. And here His rebuke to the wind and the waves is also sweet Gospel that is applied to your fears: “Peace! Be still!”
Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey Him? He is Jesus, your Savior—and He cares so much that you were perishing that He threw Himself in the stormy path of God’s terrible wrath. Through faith in this, you will find peace and eternal rest from this world’s storms, and receive the crown of glory on the golden shore of that distant, glassy sea.
In the name of our perfect heavenly Father, the Son—our Prince of Peace—and the Holy Spirit who gives you faith. Amen.
