June 22, 2015 ♦ Yesterday’s gospel reading was Mark’s account of Jesus calming a great windstorm at sea. Perhaps you heard it yesterday, as I did, under a great vaulted Gothic nave.
That word “nave” comes from the same root as the word “navy.” As you read the passage from Mark, included below, imagine a great vaulted Gothic nave room upended, its gabled ceiling becoming the interior hull of a vast ship. Churches like this were designed to suggest such a shape, evoking a place of safety for all who attempt to sail the chaotic waters of this life, for all who seek safe harbor in Jesus.
Or to put it succinctly, when we gather in church, we are all in the same boat.
Mark 4: 35-41
On that day, when evening had come, Jesus said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be Still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
Now, imagine another ship, also created as a place of safety. I am thinking of Mother Emanuel, Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where this past Wednesday evening 12 ordinary people boarded ship as usual, gathering there for Bible study—as they might have put it, with Jesus resting comfortably in the stern. They welcomed a young stranger to share the peace of Jesus’ presence among them.
And then all hell broke loose.
How many people in Charleston today are asking the question that the disciples put to Jesus in the midst of that storm:
Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?
The question resonates throughout the country this morning, as it always does at moments of senseless violence and deep hatred. When that young stranger shot those nine innocent people in cold blood, mouthing hateful propaganda, when that sea of racist hatred engulfed that chapel, was Jesus still asleep, his head resting on a comfortable cushion in the stern of the boat, oblivious to the violence, oblivious to the chaos that will forever mark Emanuel AME Church of Charleston, the chaos that will forever mark and mar that place of peace?
Perhaps at least a partial answer to that question might lie in last Friday’s news report.
Nadine Collier is the daughter of 70-year-old Ethel Lance, one of the victims of Wednesday’s self-confessed shooter. At the bond hearing on Friday, Nadine Collier addressed the shooter face-to-face. Here’s what she said to him: “You took something very precious away from me. I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.”
Myra Thompson’s grandson Anthony, also in that courtroom, was even more direct: “I forgive you. My family forgives you. We would like you to take this opportunity to repent. Do that and you will be better off than you are now.”
How many of us could picture ourselves as Anthony Thompson, speaking on behalf of his sorrowing family? How many of us could picture ourselves as Nadine Collier, bravely facing down her mother’s murderer, and offering him not hatred but forgiveness? They are like Jesus rebuking the storm, cutting through the bloodshed and chaos with a clarity that stunned every person in that room into astonished silence:
He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.
I have a sense that it was that same dead calm that fell on that South Carolina courtroom on Friday, the dead calm of people’s stunned disbelief as they heard and witnessed the relatives of the Emmanuel victims, one after the other, speaking not of vengeance but of justice, not of retribution but of forgiveness, heard and witnessed those brave Christian people saying to that young man what God was saying in their own hearts:
Peace, be still, and know that I am God.
The great African American theologian and mystic, Howard Thurman, mentor of Martin Luther King as well as scores of Americans, black and white, who strove for justice and civil rights, had this to say about God’s healing stillness, a stillness that can calm even the most tumultuous storms experienced in what Thurman describes as every person’s “inward sea:”
There is in every person an inward sea, and in that sea there is an island and on that island there is an altar and standing guard before that altar is the “angel with the flaming sword.” Nothing can get by that angel to be placed upon that altar unless it has the mark of inner authority.
It was that mark of inner authority that allowed Reverend Pinckney to invite that strange young white man to sit beside him and to study with him and to pray with him on that extraordinary evening in Charleston this past week. It was that mark of inner authority that allowed Nadine Collier to confront her mother’s murderer and treat him like a human being rather than a senseless monster, to forgive him. Nadine Collier’s act of forgiveness confirmed the peace in her own Christian soul, calmed the stormy waves in her own inward sea.
Peace, be still. And the wind ceased.
Peace, be still. There’s a way of hearing those words—whether in English or the original Greek—as somehow enacting what they express. It’s as if the sea is calmed by the intake of breath that occurs between the utterance of the first word and the answer of the next two. Try it with me, say it aloud, but take a deep breath between the first word and the closing phrase:
Peace. [Breath] Be still.
Let us pray in solidarity with those who died and with those who mourn, responding to every petition with the phrase “Peace. Be still.”
Pray for those who have died in Charleston: Reverend Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Reverend DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Reverend Clementa Pinckney, Reverend Daniel Lee Simmons, Sr., Tywanza Sanders, Myra Thompson.
Peace. Be still.
Pray for those who survived.
Peace. Be still.
Pray for the families of the slain, and give thanks for their Christian witness.
Peace. Be still.
As Jesus taught us, pray for the Dylann Roof, whose racist ignorance and racist hatred continues to contort his soul.
Peace. Be still.
Pray that God may lift the burden of our history—the lasting legacy of racist hatred that continues to afflict us all.
Peace. Be still.
Amen.
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Adapted from a sermon preached Pentecost IV (June 21, 2015) at Christ Church Cranbrook, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan by the Rev. Roger Ferlo