Sermon for June 21, 2021 - The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost, Youth Sunday, Year B, The Rev. Isaac P. Martinez

“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” These are the words from the disciples’ lips that are still ringing in my ears from our gospel reading this morning. This brief story of Jesus calming the storm is found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke as well, but as he so often does, Mark gets right to the point. Rabbi, teacher, master, savior, don’t you see we are in trouble? Do you not care that we are perishing?

This is a question I have voiced many times in my life. I’ve preached with you before about my psychological and spiritual wounds as a gay kid growing up in a fundamentalist church. Yet I’ve been lucky that I haven’t suffered physically very much in my life. My body almost always does what I ask it to do. I don’t live with chronic illness or pain.

But on one fateful day in March 2014, I broke my elbow after falling on a slippery, snow-covered sidewalk on my way to catch my bus. It was one of those classic New England early spring days: a cold snap after a few days of sunshine. I was rushing to get to work, so I didn’t think to look outside and see the fresh snow. I might have put on my snow boots, but then I would have missed my bus, making me late for work, most likely angering my boss and putting my job in even more jeopardy. So, I chose to take the risk in my dress shoes. I didn’t get more than a block before I went down hard on my left elbow. I was able to stumble back to my apartment and call 911 before I passed out from the pain. When I came to, I saw the paramedics surrounding me and my roommate in her bathrobe trying to explain she didn’t know what had happened. They took me to the ambulance while I texted my boss that I was going to the ER and didn’t know when I’d be in the office that day and I got the curt reply I expected. “Ok”, she wrote. “Keep me in the loop.”

Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing? 

My broken elbow, the surgery that followed, and the physical therapy that came after that were the physical, concrete manifestations of a storm that was terrifying me. But I was also in the midst of big life questions as well. I had just started the discernment process for ordination. I was in a relationship that I knew wasn’t going anywhere. And I was stuck in a job that was draining my life. I was perishing on many levels, physically and spiritually.

And, as They so often do, God stilled the storm in my life and spoke calm into my anxious soul. My elbow healed. I used the time off from work to deepen my discernment of what God was calling me to. I found a new job in faith-based community organizing later that summer. The storm was calmed and my faith strengthened.

So it is a little jarring to me to hear Jesus rebuke his disciples so soon after he rebukes the wind. “Why are you afraid?” he asked them, “have you still no faith?” They have good reason to be afraid! Some of the disciples are fishermen. They have years of experience sailing on this Sea of Galilee. They would know a storm that posed a danger to their life from one that didn’t. This was a storm that could have killed them.

But his question isn’t about the basis for the disciples’ fear. He knows they rationally should have been afraid. Rather, his question is about himself. Perhaps Jesus implies another question: “Did you not remember that I am right here with you? Of course, I would have saved you.” Jesus is always right here in the boat with us, my friends, no matter the state of the sea we are on. If it is calm waters and bright cheery skies, he is rejoicing with us. And if we are in the eye of the storm, as I was 7 years ago, he is right there with us. Jesus saves us not by always calming the storm, but by never leaving us while we go through it, changing who we are in the process.

But how can we know that? How can we trust that? Jesus wants us to have faith, but how do we come to faith? How do we build and strengthen the faith we do have?

There was an important character in my story. I hope you noticed her—my roommate and dear friend Mary Beth. She ended up coming with me to the ER and then drove me the specialist who saw the small fracture that day in March. In the weeks that followed, she lent me her car to get to physical therapy. As she was going through discernment at the same time, we would have long talks about our vocations. When I went back to that job I hated and came home that first day distraught to find that my boss had already hired my replacement, she insisted I start looking for another one that night. She sent me listing at the Leadership Development Initiative that would change my life and my ministry. Like Jesus in the boat, she never left my side and I was changed in the process.

How do we build the faith we need to get through the storms of our life and trust Jesus is with us? We build it in community. We build it through relationships. We build it, as Paul writes to the Corinthians, by keeping our hearts open.

Unlike the disciples on the boat, the Corinthians do not have Jesus physically with them. They only have what Paul was able to teach them about Jesus when he first planted the church at Corinth, when he would visit them, and most of all in the letters he wrote them.

But the poor Corinthians keep getting the Gospel twisted. They are constantly fighting with each other, trying to cast out this faction or another from the church. Some try to take Paul’s teaching on righteousness to moralistic extremes, while others take his teachings on grace and let an anything-goes attitude prevail. They divide themselves and this division and misguided understanding of Paul’s message is damaging their faith in Jesus and in Paul as a messenger.

So what does Paul do? First, he insists that he loves the Corinthians. At the beginning and end of it all, he loves them. Then, he tries to build up their faith by reminding them of his own story and how, through great endurance, he has survived afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, and hunger. He relied on and developed his purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God. He came to understand that signs of his faith, the proof of Jesus’s presence with him, are paradoxical: We are treated as impostors, Paul writes, and yet are true; treated as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and behold-- we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

He closes by emphasizing that his heart is wide open to the Corinthians. He teaches them that his open heart builds up his faith. His love for them helps him get through his suffering. Their relationship as siblings in Christ is the presence of Jesus for him and it helps him trust that God is in control of the storms of his life. 

All that’s left for the Corinthians, and us, to do is the reciprocate. Open wide your hearts also. So, my friends, no matter the storm, the suffering, or any state of our souls, may we keep our hearts open to each other, so that our faith may be strengthened and so that we can trust that our Savior Jesus will never leave us. Amen.