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12th Sunday, 2009 B "Living in the Storm"
SCRIPTURE COMMENT.
Job 38:1-11; 2 Corinthians 5:14-17; Mark 4:35-41
We hear today from the Book of Job,
a famous passage where the voice of God finally answers Job
in all his losses, the illnesses and deaths.
It is a strange and ambiguous answer, offering no explanation for suffering,
but rather declaring that God’s power and creative will
is beyond human understanding.
The passage is included here because God’s unfathomable vastness
is compared to the sea.
Israel had an uneasy relationship with seas and even lakes,
where all of a sudden human striving is tested and seems small.
Today’s Gospel concerns a sea journey of Jesus and his disciples.
Jesus has finished a teaching by the lakeside,
and invites the disciples to come with him to the other side,
into a more distant territory.
And now for three Sundays we’ll hear from Paul’s 2nd Letter to Corinth,
passages about the powerful presence of Christ
in the lives of people who believe,
and how that presence makes a difference,
carries us through difficult times.
Today’s selection is a kind of summary
of Christian life, how it is energized by the Christ within.
So, in all, we are moving now toward summer scriptures
about discipleship, the adult life of the believer,
and Christian maturity.
HOMILY. 12th Sunday B. 2009
Here is a story I found some years back,
about the spiritual life in a Chicago school room.
The Gospel about the storm at sea reminds me of this story.
In a Chicago parochial school last summer,
I watched an African-American nun try to get the attention
of a dozen three-year-olds from the housing projects–
many of whom had been born crack babies–
during their first week of preschool.
The children were bouncing off the walls.
The nun said, "Children," and put her hands together in prayer:
"Children, sit down and find your power."
Two or three children understood immediately,
sat down, and put their hands together;
the others continued to race around the room.
The nun quietly repeated the request.
Several others sat down, and gradually
even the most unruly children began to sit
with their hands clasped in front of them.
Finally, the room was silent.
The stillness was soothing and profound,
something that most of them had probably never experienced before–
something that they had been able to achieve only by joining together.
Then the nun began to teach them the alphabet. *
You see the parallels, of course. The Gospel is not a story about sea travel,
but more about how to respond in the midst of the chaotic, the unruly,
how to engage the forces that would like to sink us.
Jesus suggests that something called ‘faith’ is at issue,
which is a power within the disciple,
underneath, deeper than programmatic strategies or problem solving.
Jesus, you may notice, does not wake up and grab the tiller.
He doesn’t tell Andrew to start bailing, or suggest a shift in ballast,
"let’s all lean to starboard," etc.
Instead, he deals directly with the unruly powers,
and calls upon a power within that can meet the situation.
In the same way, the Chicago children are not shouted down,
the nun does not line them up
and set some rules for how this class is going to be run.
She identifies, even presumes, a point of faith within the children,
a point of peace, union with one another and with her,
that they are ready to touch and claim, by imitation of her own gesture.
I don’t know how you feel, but I want to be able to do that!
You know, I recall a moment in my own teaching career.
I had been handed the shredded remains of a senior English class, 4G,
because their teacher had given up and frankly went into early retirement.
These guys were not a mean group, just a bit off the wall, and seniors in February.
I got them a good big novel to start out on the right side of them:
The Caine Mutiny.
And on my first day of opening the issues and the text
I read from the first chapter, a passage I thought was pretty good,
and from somewhere in the group came a sneer, a kind of snorted challenge.
I was very lucky that day. I not only knew where it came from,
I happened to have the guy’s name and could call it out: peaceably, quietly, "Farnsworth, do us the honor of reporting to detention
this evening. . . . ," smiling, confident I was.
And, you know, they took my side. I won the day and the semester.
But it was luck, it was strategy.
I think the children in Chicago got something more
than a good start to the alphabet,
they got a feel for something within them that is true, that is connected.
It was beyond good order, it was ‘self-emptying’ I think the term is,
a move toward what some call "transpersonal consciousness."
I want this too, in the face of the unruly, the scattered.
I wonder if it could happen at the family dinner table, maybe once a week
instead of the usual blessing, just a moment, even a minute and a half,
to fold your hands and enter into that place of power
that is your own core being. The family making this happen for one another.
Of course you’d have to practice yourself.
The nun must have known her own pwoer.
Think of it this way: you come to the end of the day,
and if you’re at all like me, you carry a lot from the encounters and the work,
arguments you’re still having with yourself of with the sound system:
regrets, self-criticism, and maybe a certain giddiness, happy moments too,
all a jumble. The mess of it.
St. Ignatius advises ending the day with what he calls
a review of your conscious life.
Not all the details you remember, but consciousness itself.
Where the waves lap into the boat and the wind howls.
Oh so often I prefer some late food and drink, surfing TV or the net.
But to turn rather to your conscious life. Such a chore, it seems.
All that sifting and evaluating.
And that’s beside the point: don’t sift, don’t evaluate.
That’s an exercise of false power and technique,
trying to catch the demonic mind and send it to detention.
Instead, let the stone of your consciousness fall deep into the water.
I think of the nun’s directive: "children, find your power."
It’s good to get friendly with your own power,
you own inner capacity and core being, underneath the ego,
what Paul calls the inner Christ, where you don’t live for control or gratification,
where you don’t live for momentary management of the storm,
but where you find that the waves and the sea are one thing,
and you are that one thing too.
Then you have a point of perspective for everything else.
I say this to myself, I pass it on:
faith, peace, stillness, assurance, love: these things are real
and we can actually get a feel for them, listen for them, touch them.
Just one moment of freedom from the cravings.
What an open place it is. The wind dies down.
Then we can do what’s next. We put into shore.
*[From the New Yorker, June 1997, republished in The Responsive Community, Volume 8, Issue 1, Winter 97-98, page 39.]