Why Are You Afraid?

“Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Why are you afraid?  Have you still no faith?’” 

Mark 4:40

The Reverend Luther Zeigler
June 24, 2012

Emmanuel Church

            My wife, Pat, and I have never lived near the sea before.  What an extraordinary difference the presence of the ocean can make to the daily rhythms of life.  We have been making a habit of sitting out by the shore early in the mornings, before the crowds arrive, sipping our coffee and sharing conversation about the day to come.  The ebb and flow of the tides, the salty smell of sea air, and the sheer vastness of the ocean deep has a way of connecting us to the natural order of things.  There is a reassuring serenity to the lapping of the waves upon the shore.

            There is the visual beauty too.  Two Friday evenings ago, we ventured north to Rockport and took in our first concert at the Shalin Liu Performance Center.  What an architectural and acoustical treasure it is.  And most stunning of all is the way in which the design of the concert hall makes the majesty of the sea a part of the performance, not merely as a visually compelling backdrop to the musicians, but almost as a musical descant to the melodies of their instruments.  We listened to hauntingly beautiful string quartets by Mozart and Schumann as we watched the sun set over the Cape as the boats came into Rockport harbor after a day’s work at sea.

            But the beauty and peacefulness of the sea is, of course, only one aspect of its complex reality.  The sea can also be a profoundly destructive force, benignly calm one moment and then raging with furious and uncontrollable power the next.  Fishermen understand and respect this dimension of the sea’s nature.  I was reminded of this fact during another recent trip up the Cape, this time to Gloucester to visit the Fisherman’s Memorial on Stacy Esplanade.  I’m sure you know it.  Commissioned in 1923 to celebrate Gloucester’s 300^th anniversary, the Fisherman’s Memorial is an eight-foot tall, bronze statue of a fisherman dressed in oilskins standing braced at the wheel on the sloping deck of his ship.  The statue is positioned so that the fisherman is looking out over Gloucester Harbor.  The memorial is dedicated to the thousands of fishermen lost to the raging and unpredictable fury of sea in the first three centuries of Gloucester's history.  The statue has become a symbol of the city, commemorating Gloucester's link to both the breathtaking beauty and the life-threatening power of the sea.

            Even if you know the statue, what you may not know is that there is a small plaque on the front, harbor-facing side of the base with an excerpt from today’s Psalm, Psalm 107.  Only verses 23 and 24 of the psalm appear on the plaque, presumably because of space considerations, but I wish there had been room for the whole of verses 23-30, for they are a poignant prayer for the fates of the fishermen:

Some went down to the sea in ships,
   doing business on the mighty waters; 


they saw the deeds of the Lord,
   his wondrous works in the deep. 


For he commanded and raised the stormy wind,
   which lifted up the waves of the sea. 


They mounted up to heaven, they went down to the depths;
   their courage melted away in their calamity; 


they reeled and staggered like drunkards,
   and were at their wits’ end. 


Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
   and he brought them out from their distress; 


he made the storm be still,
   and the waves of the sea were hushed. 


Then they were glad because they had quiet,
   and he brought them to their desired haven.

            The ancient near Eastern peoples, who were much more at the mercy of their natural surroundings than are we, understood just how apt a metaphor the sea is for life.  In its calmer moments, it enchants with a mysterious beauty and inviting and hypnotic rhythms; its energy can be exhilarating and awe-inspiring; but in the blink of an eye, the sea can turn on us, tossing us about like paper-mache dolls on its surface, battering us with the force of its waves, overwhelming us with one swell after another, drowning us in a seemingly inexhaustible supply of water, its sheer immensity reminding us of our place in the universe.  For these reasons, in biblical literature, the sea tends to be a symbol of chaos, something to be feared.  Think of Genesis and the primordial chaos of the deep over which God breathes his creative and ordering spirit.  Think of the plight of Pharaoh’s army in the Exodus narrative as the walls of the Red Sea collapse in on them.  Think of the story of Jonah, tossed into the depths of the sea for his refusal to heed God’s prophetic call.  And then, of course, there is today’s gospel text about the sudden storm that threatens to overcome the disciples in their small boat as they make their way across the Sea of Galilee with Jesus.

            The story is one of fear and faith.  It opens as the shadows of evening signal the end to another long day of teaching.  Jesus gathers his disciples and says to them:  “Let us go across to the other side.”  And leaving the crowd behind, they board their boat and drift out across the Galilean sea.  But just then a great windstorm suddenly kicks up, winds gusting, with huge waves rocking the small boat from side to side.  As the boat begins to take on water, the disciples fear for their lives.  They turn to Jesus, only to find him in the stern, asleep on the cushion.  They wake him up:  “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” Jesus wakes up, rebukes the wind, and says to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” The wind subsides, the waves stop, and there is a dead calm.  Jesus then asks, “Why are you afraid?”

            Why are we afraid?  The answer seems obvious enough.  We are afraid because we might die.  The storms of life threaten to do us in.  A debilitating disease; a business venture gone awry; a child lost to addiction; a broken marriage; the vicissitudes of mental illness and emotional problems; the grief that comes with the loss of a loved one, not to mention the ensuing loneliness.  These are the storms of life, and each of us, sooner or later, is battered by one or more of them.  To fear such storms, to fear the rage of life’s sea, seems entirely human.

            And yet, by posing the question – “why are you afraid?” – Jesus is inviting us to look our fears in the face, to recognize that they ultimately do not have to control us, and to consider embracing a deeper reality that promises to overcome not just our fears but even death itself.  Jesus lies asleep on a cushion in the stern of the boat not because he is unconcerned about the disciple’s plight.  His sleep reflects his relationship with a power that lies beneath the surface of life’s storms, and that gives him a peace that, in the words of one of our most ancient blessings, passes all understanding.  He is at one with the God who is the Creator of life itself and the tamer of its storms.  And by rebuking the wind, and calming the seas, Jesus is revealing his identity as the Son who shares the Father’s power over all of creation.  His invitation to the disciples is to place their faith in him, and to see past the turmoil of the moment.  Jesus is not denying the reality of life’s storms, and of the pain and fear they can cause; rather, he is calling us to trust in a more enduring reality that will redeem that suffering and assuage those fears.

            But there is yet another layer to the story if we look more closely at its context.  Remember how it begins.  Jesus says to those who would follow him:  “Let us go across to the other side.”  What does he mean by “the other side”?  He is referring, of course, to the other side of the Sea of Galilee.  Up to this point in Mark’s gospel, Jesus and his disciples have been teaching and healing on the west side of the Sea of Galilee, in the Judean countryside, in the land of their fellow Jews.  The “other side” of the Galilean Sea, to the east, is the TransJordan, Gentile country, a land of strangers.  So, if we want to follow Jesus, it seems as if we must be willing to board the boat that travels to “the other side.”  We have to be prepared to leave the comforts of home, and the safety of our own neighborhoods, to meet “the other” on his or her own terms, on his or her own land.  Jesus acknowledges that such a journey will be a rough one – as trips out of our comfort zones always are – but it is an essential element of discipleship.

            The story of the calming of the sea, it turns out, is not merely a Christological testament about Jesus’ identity as God’s Son and of his authority over the earth’s power; it is also a “border crossing” story.  It is a story of how authentic faithfulness requires an openness to the other, a hospitality to the stranger, and a willingness to risk relationship with those different than ourselves.  And in the chapters to come in Mark we will see how Jesus expands his ministry beyond his own people to include not only Gentiles, but especially those forgotten and neglected by their own people:  the lepers, the widows and orphans, the prostitutes, the tax collectors.

            Thus, when Jesus asks us why we are afraid, an honest response is that we are afraid not only because of the normal range of life’s storms and travails; we are also afraid because we realize that he is inviting us into a boat headed to “the other side.”  What we will discover soon enough is that Jesus is on a mission to break down all the social and political and cultural barriers that we erect to keep us safe and to close us off from difference.  And more than that, he is asking – indeed, he is demanding – that we make the journey with him to encounter and embrace all those who are not like us for the purpose of building up God’s Kingdom. 

            In the end, the really hard question is not so much “why are we afraid?”; but rather, “do we trust Jesus enough to get into the boat knowing where it is headed”?  It can be a frightening choice to make.  But Jesus’ promise – the promise of faith – is that if we are willing to take those risks, we will discover that our salvation lies precisely in that community of expansive welcome and care on the other side.  To be sure, at times the passage will be rough, but at journey’s end we are assured a joy and a peace that surpasses all understanding.   And if you still find yourself a bit scared as you take that first wobbly step into the boat, just remember this simple truth:  Jesus will be in the boat with us.  Amen.

Seeds, Weeds, and the Kingdom of God

“Jesus said, ‘With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it?  It is like a mustard seed, which when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.’”  Mark 4:30-32

The Reverend Luther Zeigler
June 17, 2012

Emmanuel Church

              Oftentimes when I am listening to Jesus teach in the gospels, I find myself secretly wishing that he would speak more directly, more transparently.  “Just tell me what I am supposed to do, what is expected of me,” I want to say.  When Moses taught, for example, his approach, typically, was to lay down the law simply and clearly.  Thou shall not murder.  Thou shall not steal.  Honor thy mother and thy father.  What such teaching lacks in lyricism, it more than makes up for in precision.  With the Ten Commandments, you know where you stand.  There is no ambiguity.

              This is not how Jesus taught, however.  Rarely does Jesus teach through laws, maxims, or directives.  Rather, as we hear in today’s gospel text, Jesus loves to teach in parables.  Parables are short stories that use pictures and images to suggest a truth or a reality without completely revealing that truth or reality.  Parables work indirectly and gradually.  Parables tease us with their meaningfulness.  Like an onion, we keep peeling back the layers, only to discover more.  Parables sometimes work by analogy, sometimes by metaphor, sometimes by allegory.  And parables are often subversive, inviting us to think about something in a whole new way by upending conventional ways of thinking. 

              That Jesus prefers to teach in parabolic form, rather than in a more “straightforward” way, is itself a fact deserving of our attention.  Why talk about God in parables?  One way to come at this question is through the lens of a favorite poem of mine by Emily Dickinson, entitled “Tell All The Truth.”  It reads:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant,


Success in circuit lies,


Too bright for our infirm delight


The truth's superb surprise; 



As lightning to the children eased


With explanation kind,


The truth must dazzle gradually


Or every man be blind.

Dickinson’s poem suggests that Truth often cannot be conveyed directly; rather, it has to be told at a “slant.”  It is like the bright noonday sun:  if we look at it straight on, we are likely to go blind.  We know of the sun’s presence because its radiance illuminates everything around us, because its fiery energy warms our skin, and because the power of its gravitational pull keeps everything on our planet in its place; but we dare not stare at the fullness of the noonday sun with the naked eye.  For it is “too bright for our infirm delight.”  Truth is thus like the sun in that it “must dazzle gradually” and not all at once.

                  Jesus talks about God in parables for just these reasons, I think.  God’s being is too vast, too mysterious, too sublime to be captured in neat and tidy linguistic categories.  God is not an object like other objects in the world; he is the source of being and beauty and truth and life itself, beyond conventional description.  We can approach God only indirectly, a glimpse here and a glimpse there, never full on.  And this is why the language of poetry and metaphor, and the telling of parables, is often more suited to talking about God.

                What, then, are we to make of today’s parable, comparing the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed?  It is, of course, a familiar parable.  And there is a relatively simple and conventional way of interpreting it, as you heard just a few moments ago in our children’s story:

                Big things often start out small.  Don’t be discouraged by modest beginnings because great and wondrous realities frequently grow out of the smallest things.  On this reading, the parable is fundamentally a message of hope.   It expresses the conviction that we should persevere in our faith, even when the world around us may not appear to reflect God’s Kingdom, because we trust in God’s promise to make something big of even our humble faithfulness.  And this interpretation of the parable is true enough so far as it goes.

                But this traditional reading doesn’t do full justice to the story; indeed, it tends to domesticate Jesus’ real message.  Because the really striking image in the parable is not so much the size of the seed, but that Jesus should compare God’s Kingdom to a mustard plant.  The little mustard seed might seem like a sweet little image, as if it's the little underdog, the good seed that survives against the odds and flourishes, triumphant over the “big seeds.”  But this choice of metaphor would in fact have been shocking to Jesus’ listeners at the time because the prevailing botanical image for God’s Kingdom in the prophetic literature was not some small, dusty, old shrub, but the tall and majestic cedar of which Ezekiel speaks in our first lesson and to which the Psalmist alludes in our psalm for the day. 

              The great Cedars of Lebanon were well known in the ancient middle East as a strong, tall, beautiful tree, a fitting symbol for the divine.  The trees were used by the Phoenicians for building great ships, as well as for houses, palaces, and temples.  The sawdust of cedars has been found in the tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs. The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh designates the cedar groves of Lebanon as the dwelling of the gods to which Gilgamesh, the hero, ventured.  And wood of the cedar tree was used in the construction of King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.  The great cedar tree is indeed mentioned 75 times in the Bible.

               By contrast, guess how many times the mustard plant is mentioned in the Old Testament?  Zero.  And no wonder.  There is nothing majestic about a mustard shrub.  Nor is it especially beautiful.  It is a mundane plant, without noble lineage in ancient literature, and of only modest use.  Indeed, the mustard plant is frankly more like a weed than anything else.  It is an invasive plant that grows easily, insinuates itself into gardens and plots of land, and is hard to get rid of.  It is wild and unpredictable.  Once mustard gets into your garden, you have a hard time controlling it.

               So, this is what the Kingdom of God is like?  What is Jesus getting at? 

               Most of us, I suspect, like our spiritual lives to be neat and tidy, well-kept and beautifully maintained, much like an English garden.  We’re good Anglicans after all.  God happens on Sunday mornings, in gorgeous little chapels like this one.  We hear our lessons, say our prayers, and check church off the list.  But what if life with God is not like that?  What if life with God is not tame, and domesticated and easy to control?  What if it is like a wild and relentless shrub that once you let it into your garden, it won’t go away, but will keep looking for new and unexpected places to pop up.

              Imagine, for a moment, what our lives might look like if we let that tiny seed of faith in our hearts begin to run wild.  What if we were to let love and hospitality and compassion invade every nook and cranny of our being?

              What would happen, say, if you interrupted your business day by taking ten minutes at lunch to leave your downtown corner office to buy a meal for the homeless guy you always see hanging out on the street?  What would happen if I took an hour on a Saturday morning to visit the nearby nursing home to brighten the day of someone who otherwise has no one in her life?  What would happen if each one of us volunteered just one hour a week to tutor a kid from an underprivileged background?  What would happen if we picked up the phone and called that long-lost friend or classmate that we have been meaning to re-connect with, but have never found the time?  What would happen if we let our faith grow like an unruly and persistent mustard shrub in the garden of our hearts?  I suspect that both the world and each one of us would find ourselves changed for the better.

              The parable of the mustard seed, it turns out, is a somewhat disturbing and challenging story.  Just as God defied all messianic expectations by coming into this world not as a great king or warrior, but as a poor and humble servant, a child of homeless teenagers, so too is God inviting us to defy all conventional notions of respectable piety by practicing our faith not just by attending church once a week, but by loving recklessly and spreading his Kingdom every day of our lives as if it were a wild weed.  Because if we truly let that mustard seed sprout, and grow, there is no telling what will happen.  I’ll warn you, however:  it does mean giving up control of your garden and letting God take over.  And that can be scary at times.  But the mystery of God’s grace is that He knows what He is doing.  And the wonder of God’s grace is that He loves inhabiting not only tall, beautiful and majestic cedars, but little old mustard shrubs like you and like me.  Let Jesus spice up your life with a little mustard seed.  Amen.

Where Are You?

“The Lord God called to the man, and said to him, ‘Where are you?’”  Genesis 3:9

The Reverend Luther Zeigler
              June 10, 2012
              Emmanuel Church

              When I was a senior in high school, at the urging of my best friend, I decided that I would do something completely different from anything that I had ever done before in my life, and so I tried out for the Spring play that year, the old screwball comedy, Arsenic and Old Lace.  Perhaps you remember the classic movie version, directed by Frank Capra, and starring Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, and Raymond Massey, involving the young reporter Mortimer Brewster, his fiancé Elaine, and Mortimer’s two crazy aunts, who had a bad habit of killing lonely old men by lacing their drinks with arsenic and hiding their bodies in the house?  Drama had never been an interest of mine, but our public high school had an excellent drama director and my friend convinced me that if I didn’t try acting in my last year of high school, I might never again find the time or courage to do so.  And so I tried out, and somehow was able to land the leading role of Mortimer Brewster.

              For those of you who have acted before, you know the effort involved:  memorizing lines, learning the blocking for each scene so that you are always in the right place at the right time, mastering gestures, vocal dynamics and inflection.  There is a lot to remember.  And then perhaps the biggest obstacle of all is overcoming – or, at least, managing – the anxiety of performing in public.  For weeks before opening night, I was haunted by a recurring nightmare:  standing out there on stage before all my friends and family not remembering a single word of what I was supposed to say. 

              The performance went just fine, I’m happy to say, with only a few small gaffes.  But still, I remember the struggles with stage fright and that nightmare.

              This little dream from my childhood embodies a common anxiety: the fear of being vulnerable, exposed, judged.  And you know, as well as I, that there are many variations on this theme in the universe of human dreams.  For example, I know many experienced preachers who, even after years of preaching, are still haunted by nightmares during the week of not being able to cobble a sermon together by Sunday, and then being caught in the pulpit with nothing to say to their congregation.  And then just last week, my dear wife told me about one of her own recent nightmares:  showing up in an exam room to take a history final, only she had no idea what was going to be on the test and was utterly unprepared.  You know the dream.  I suspect you have had one like it.  Indeed, psychologists tell us that this is one of the very most common dream patterns:  showing up for a test of some kind without having studied, or without knowing what is to be covered on the test, or discovering that the test is written in some foreign language that you do not know, or always having your pencil tip break every time you try to answer a question, or running out of time before you can get anything written. 

              You don’t have to be a psychologist to know that dreams of such universal experience reveal something important about the human condition.  Indeed, long before Freud and Jung, the Bible taught us that that we should pay attention to our dreams – think of the dreams of Jacob, or Joseph, or Abraham, or the three wise men.  The ancients understood that the unbidden communication in the night opens sleepers to a world different from the one they manage during the day. The ancients dared to imagine, moreover, that this unbidden communication is one venue in which the holy purposes of God, perplexing and unreasonable as they might often seem, come to us.

              Our dreams of vulnerability and exposure – of failing to perform on stage or on a test – point us to a primordial reality of our creatureliness that is nowhere more famously captured than in the story of the Garden, a small excerpt of which we heard in our first lesson.  God creates a world of mysterious and unimaginable beauty, he places man and woman in it, invites us to delight in the world, to care for it, and to enjoy each other’s company.  But, there is one catch:  He tells us just as clearly not to overstep the bounds of our humanity, that we are not to try to become like Him, godlike.  He admonishes us to stay clear of the forbidden fruit.   And yet, being human, we can’t help but wonder what it might be like to be God, to have the knowledge and power and control over the world that God does.  And so we eat.  And the great consequence for humanity of seeking to be God, as our first lesson teaches, is that we are exposed, made vulnerable, literally made aware of our nakedness before God.  And out of fear for what we have done, we hide.

              This is the great narrative of the Fall.  And there is, of course, a rich and vast theological commentary on the story – starting with Paul and running through Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Kierkegaard, Barth and Bonhoeffer, among others – an explication of what we call the doctrine of sin, of human brokenness.  A lot of ink has been spilled on the subject, and a great deal of controversy has swirled about it.  Especially for those of us who come out of the Reformed tradition (and, yes, my name is Luther and I come with plenty of that baggage), I fear that a little too much attention has been devoted to the darker side of this story, focusing on the actions of Adam, Eve and the serpent:  to the act of disobedience, to the serpent as a demonic figure, to the shame and guilt that follows as a consequence of sin.  But what I want to suggest today is that perhaps not enough attention has been paid to the good news in the story, the good news that we hear when we focus not on what Adam and Eve do in the story, but on what God does.

              Listen to the story again.  What does God do immediately after Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit?  He doesn’t abandon them out of disgust.  He doesn’t destroy them out of anger.  Instead, he seeks them.  He goes looking for them.  Indeed, he takes on a human form to chase after them.  In a scene of subtle beauty, verse 8 reads:  and then “[Adam and Eve] heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden. . . .”  Here, barely three chapters into Genesis, we get the first hint of the lengths to which God is prepared to go to draw us back into relationship with Him.  In this simple scene, we get a glimpse and we hear the barest whisper of the Incarnation to come:  God’s willingness to enter our world, to become like us, to take on a human identity, so that He might restore the relationship that we have broken.

              And, having chased after Adam and Eve, what does God then do?  He asks them a simple question.  Chapter 3, verse 9:  God asks, “Where are you?” 

              When I used to teach the Old Testament to middle schoolers, I often started the course by asking:  Does anybody know the first question God ever asks in the Bible?  It would usually stump them, especially these days when most teenagers have never even cracked a Bible.  And then I would make them search the opening chapters of Genesis to find it, all the while trying to persuade them that the very first question that God ever asked humanity is probably one worth knowing and thinking about.  And sooner or later, they would find the question.  And at first, they would think it is a somewhat comic question.  “Where are you?”  Why on earth would God – the all-knowing Creator of the universe – have to ask such a question.  Surely, he knows where Adam and Eve are.  And I would quickly agree with them.  Of course, God knows where Adam and Eve are.  So, why then, I would ask my students, do you suppose, God asks the question?

              At this point, one of the more astute students in the class, invariably a girl, would usually pipe up:  “because God wants them to answer the question for themselves.”  When my pedagogy was working, this line of questioning was one way to coax my students to move from a literal interpretation of the story to a theological one.  God asks the question not because he is looking for Adam and Eve’s geographical location in the Garden.  He knows exactly where they are.  He asks the question because God wants Adam and Eve to ask and answer the question, to reflect on what has just happened and what they have done.  The question God poses is:  So, where are you now in relationship to me?

              I suspect each of us came to church this morning at different places in our journey with God, perhaps very different places.  For some, God may seem quite present – close to our hearts in prayer, keenly felt in our relationships with those we love, manifest in the beauty and mystery that surrounds us.  For others, though, God may for whatever reason seem distant just now.  His presence may be obscured by the burden of worries or fears, or as the result of a broken relationship or a loss, or because of a debilitating condition of one sort or another.  Indeed, maybe some of us woke up this morning haunted by our own dreams of vulnerability or powerlessness, weighed down by the anxiety of being a fallible and limited human. 

              Yet, no matter where you are in your journey, the good news I hope you hear in our text from Genesis this morning is that God is seeking you.  He has not and will not abandon you, no matter what you have done or not done, no matter how hard you may be trying to hide, no matter how far you may stray.  If you listen closely enough, I promise you will hear His footsteps.

              So, as we leave this place this morning, I invite us to open our ears and our eyes in new ways to God’s presence in our midst.  Listen for Him in the music of the birds, in the crashing of the waves on our shore, in the laughter of our children, in the small talk of friends and family.  God is there, in all of it.  And He is relentless in chasing after us, in seeking our company, in drawing us closer to His heart.  And through it all, as He seeks us out in all of our various hiding places, He keeps asking each one of us that same, simple question:  Where are you?