Water Over the Bow

Sermon for Sunday, July 12

Luke 8:22-25

Have you ever felt helpless? Hopeless? Out of sorts? If you’ve ever tried to learn a new skill or practice for a new sport, there’s usually a moment where you feel in over your head. You are five miles into your first ten mile run, and you forgot about that monstrous climb. You are making the dough for your first loaf of bread and you can’t get the consistency right. Your dream job feels more like a nightmare because you just can’t quite master this one basic skill.

Once a semester in college, I would call my mom to tell her I wanted to drop out. I felt like I couldn’t do it; there were too many papers, too many things to do. I had five documents open on my computer and I was bouncing between them, adding a sentence here and a transition there, and my friends wanted to hang out that night as well. And my mom would just patiently say, “one thing at a time Wyatt: what is due next?” And I would breathe, and I would get it done. In times of helplessness, it helps to have calm and reassuring words from someone who has been before you. We seek out experts and gurus, who have put in their 10,000 hours, and so often their advice is so simple, so obvious, but we just couldn’t come up with it on our own. 

The disciples face a similar challenge in today’s story from the gospel of Luke. And from their struggle we can learn a valuable lesson. No storm and no sinking boat can keep us from the destination Christ has for us. No matter what obstacles we encounter while we go about the work Jesus has for us, if Christ brought us to it, he will bring us through it.

Life’s struggles sometimes threaten to overwhelm us. “The boat was filling with water, and they were in danger.” There is no picture of hopelessness quite like a boat taking on water. It’s a brilliant metaphor for a problem that only intensifies over time. When I was in my teens, my dad and I made a pretty good canoeing team. There were a couple rapids in the river that dad and I liked to surf. Our favorite standing wave was over a hole at Melrose, up river from Brookneal. On a good attempt, you paddle upstream into the wave, and the front of the canoe drops into the hole in the water, and you can lift the paddles from the water and just sit in midstream. To onlookers, you are standing still in the water. In the boat, it feels like sailing fast on a swift current.

One day, we made our attempt in a bit higher water, and when the front of the canoe dropped into the hole, we started taking water over the bow. As more water rushed in, the boat got lower and lower in the water with the increased weight, and I began to panic. It was then that I heard my dad telling me, calmly, to paddle backwards out of the hole. Balance was key, as turning sideways would have resulted in capsizing the canoe. But in trusting each other, we managed to back out of the rapid, paddle to shore and pour the gallons of water out of our boat.

Life’s struggles are like a boat taking on water, because it’s so easy to go from bad to worse. Our expression is apt: “When it rains, it pours.” Mistakes and misfortunes seem sometimes to pile up, before you can even deal with one, another comes. What do we do when this happens?

When we feel we are sinking, we can cry out to Jesus in our distress. The disciples cry out, “Master, Master, we are perishing!” In Luke’s gospel, that word “Master” is a word the disciples use when they aren’t sure what Jesus has in store for them. It’s the word that Peter uses when Jesus tells him to put his net in the water after a night without a catch. But when Peter pulls up enough fish to almost sink the boat, he calls Jesus “Lord” instead of “Master.” Even when we don’t quite trust Jesus, we can still cry out to him. All the disciples seem to say is “We don’t want to die.” But in learning to cry out to Jesus, they will finally learn to trust him.

How many times do we think we can’t bring our honest concerns to God? We worry too much about what is pious. I remember hearing a story about a visiting pastor sharing with a Sunday School class a Psalm of Lament. Perhaps he shared Psalm 42:9-10:

 “I say to God, my rock, 

‘Why have you forgotten me?

Why must I walk about mournfully

because the enemy oppresses me?

As with a deadly wound in my body,

my adversaries taunt me,

while they say to me continually,

‘Where is your God?’”

And the men of that Sunday School class said, “If that wasn’t in the Bible, I’d say that guy was a whiner.” We find the sadness of some of the Psalms offensive and depressing. When we face our own hopelessness, we push it down. Sometimes recognizing that hopelessness—recognizing that we don’t know how we are going to get out of this one—leads us to later recognize God’s miraculous providence.

Jesus can keep us afloat and get us to our destination. “And he woke up and rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a calm.” Jesus breaks the problem (the windstorm) down into its component parts (the wind and the raging waves), and he calms them. How often in life’s struggles do we jump to conclusions about what the end is? We miss the forest for the trees. We think our problem is the sinking ship, when in reality it is the wind and the waves that are causing the ship to sink.

We think our problem is our bank account when it is the economy, or the car that keeps breaking down, or that we are compensating for a job that we hate by spending too much money—and it never makes us happy. We think our problem is that person who is just too difficult, when it takes two to tango, and we have hurt them more than we will let ourselves admit. We think our problem is that we are in danger, but Jesus knows he will bring us through. We think our problem is death, but we know that Jesus can even pull us through that.

The disciples’ fear makes sense because we know it, but it’s only appropriate for them because they stand on that side of the Resurrection. They didn’t know what Jesus could do. They lived in a world where death was it, the end of the story. Our prayers need to be shaped by the confidence and knowledge that we know that death is not the end. We do not need to seek death, but we can pray in confidence: “Lord I don’t want to die today, but I entrust myself to you.” We know who holds the future. We know who holds tomorrow. We know where our destination is. For those in Christ, it is heaven’s bright shore. There are no waves on that sea. Our boat will never be swamped.

We can trust Him in the midst of the storm. “Where is your faith?” Jesus sees the uncertainty and the turbulent doubt of his disciples, and he calms them. He calls them to a higher level of faith: “Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him?” When we see what Jesus has done, we understand that Jesus can do anything. This is because we begin to understand who Jesus is. The disciples’ question is pointing them to Jesus’s divinity. In the ancient world, it was believed that powerful religious figures had influence over the elements. But there are no stories of human beings directly controlling the weather. That was left up to God.

Millenia before, this God birthed the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt. God did it by calling them onto a dangerous path, and providing them a way through the sea. The disciples would know this story, as it forms the basis and background of their Ten Commandments: “I am the Lord you God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” It is a story that we remember, in the old Spiritual, “Jesus Christ is a way maker, amen amen.” There is a power in our testimonies and our memories, to remind us that when we think all is lost, Jesus is there moving and making a way for us.

A ship’s pilot is a dangerous and vital job. A pilot is a captain who is not part of the crew. Usually at the beginning and end of a voyage, a pilot who is familiar with the perils of the harbor will board the ship, often while it is still moving, to navigate the treacherous waters, narrow straits, and shallows near the shore. The ship’s captain has to yield authority to the pilot, so that the crew can follow the orders of one who knows how to get them to where they are going. The alternative is shipwreck and disaster, the loss of cargo and the loss of life. The pilot’s familiarity with the destination is the salvation of the crew and passengers. 

One night in Bethlehem, the world spun madly at the pace it always had spun. The gap between earth and heaven had grown treacherous. Millions were perishing without hope and without direction. Humanity’s best efforts at achieving our own salvation had resulted in washing up on the rocks and the reefs outside that heavenly harbor. Incompetence bred mutiny and rebellion, but salvation came into the world in the person of a little baby. Not frightened by the pace of the world, not intimidated by the mutineers, the Son of God left his heavenly home, to steer us safe to shore. Jesus is our pilot, he will sail us into the harbor, and we will be safe.