Rev. Tara Barber
The Community Church of Sebastopol
June 22, 2003
Mark 4: 35-41
It began on that day of parables. Jesus taught and taught, and as Mark’s gospel often tells us, the disciples just didn’t get it. It was that day that Jesus asked them to get into a small boat and sail away – sail across to the other side. And they invited Jesus to come just as was that day. Can you imagine? WWJL? What was Jesus like? Tired, grumpy maybe. A bit overwhelmed by the attention. Those disciples must have been a bit overwhelmed, too, by all the stories, a bit frustrated at trying to get the messages Jesus was attempting to convey – only to fail time and time again.
So they left the crowds, and climbed into a small boat. Jesus wastes no time in finding a comfortable spot down below to take a nap. And then a windstorm arose. Now they had an outer storm to go along with the inner storms they were feeling. But this was for real. The boat was being swamped by the water. Still frustrated, now even more overwhelmed, the disciples angrily awoke Jesus. “Don’t you care?” they demanded. “We are perishing here, and you sleep like a baby!” They did get Jesus’ attention all right. He woke up and yelled at the wind, and then told the sea to be still. And it was calm. Quiet, even. Jesus turned to the disciples, and asked them why they were so afraid. And Jesus didn’t stop there. He asked them an even more difficult question, “Have you still no faith? After everything we’ve been through. After this long day of teaching. After the wind and sea had been calmed. Have you still no faith?”
We were at the beach last Sunday. We went with mixed emotions. All of us were missing our fathers. Each of us were longing for a father that we couldn’t have. It was a mixed up afternoon. So we went to throw rocks at the sea. Rocks of grief; rocks of anger; rocks of longing. I even yelled at the sea. It didn’t calm, though. We collected a rock of hope, and then went to find a place out of the wind to eat our sandwiches. After we plopped down and had opened up the bag of food, the wind changed, and our sandwiches were quickly becoming sandy-wiches. I thought of this passage. I wouldn’t even consider asking God to re-direct the wind. How crazy, to pray to God to calm the wind or the sea. How crazy to ask Jesus to calm that wind, and settle that sea.
How crazy to have that kind of faith.
How crazy to think that a bear could feed and sustain a small child. NO, I’m not talking about a Disney movie. I’m talking about a news story retold by Barbara Kingsolver in an essay entitled, “Small Wonder”. She writes, “On a cool October day in the oak-forested hills of the Lorestan province in Iran, a lost child was saved in an inconceivable way. This child, younger than two, had disappeared. His parents searched everywhere. And then they searched some more. Night turned into day, and still they searched. “First their own village, turning every box upside down, turning the neighbors out in a party of panic and reassurances, but as they begin to scatter over the rocky outskirts it grows dark, then cold, then hopeless. He is nowhere. He is somewhere unsurvivable. A bear, someone says, and everyone else says NO, not a bear, don’t even say that, are you mad? They venture closer to the caves and oak woods of the mountainside.
Another nightfall, another day, and some begin to give up. But not the mother and father, because there is nowhere to go but this, we all have done this, we bang and bang on the door of hope, and don’t anyone dare suggest there’s nobody home…
Into the caves. Five kilometers away. At the mouth of the next cave they enter – the fourth or the hundredth, nobody will know this detail because forever after it will be the first and last – they hear a voice. Definitely it’s a cry, a child. Cautiously they look into the darkness, and ominously, they smell bear. But the boy is in there, crying, alive. They move into the half-light of the cave, stand still and wait while the smell gets danker and the texture of the stone walls weaves its details more clearly into their vision. Then they see the animal, not a dark hollow in the cave wall as they first thought but the dark, round shape of a thick-furred, quiescent she-bear lying against the wall. And then they see the child. The bear is curled around him, protecting him from these fierce-smelling intruders in her cave…
This is not a mistake or a hoax; this happened. The baby was found with the bear in her den. He was alive, unscarred, and perfectly well after three days – and well fed, smelling of milk. The bear was nursing the child…
In a world whose wells of kindness seem everywhere to be running dry, a bear nursed a lost child. The miracle of Lorestan is genuine…Another small footnote in the human archive. God is frightful. God is great – you pick. I choose this: God is in the details, the completely unnecessary miracles sometimes tossed up as stars to guide us. They are the promise of good fortune in a cloudless day, and the animals in clouds; look hard enough and you’ll see them. Don’t ask if they’re real…
The miracle of the Lorestan Province haunts me…I catch glimpses of that bear pacing restlessly on the periphery of everything I thought I could be sure of. We are alive in a fearsome time, and we have been given new things to fear…Like the bear, (these fears) could eat us up or save us. We will see.”
Have you still no faith?
In When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Kushner works thorough his own grief over watching his son die, and has in turn helped millions deal with loss and grief. Author Madeleine L’Engle challenges some of Rabbi Kushner’s ideas. “He also writes that there are prayers that one is not allowed to pray, such as my, ‘Please God, don’t let it be cancer.’ Rabbi Kushner says I can’t pray that way, because either it is cancer or it is not. But I can’t live with that. I think we can pray. I think the heart overrides the intellect and insists on praying.” Madeleine continues, “Does enjoying my faith imply protection from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? No. It did not stop my husband from dying prematurely. My faith is not a magic charm, like garlic to chase away vampires. It is, instead, what sustains me in the midst of all the normal joys and tragedies of ordinary human life. It is faith that helps my grief to be creative, not destructive. It is faith that kept me going through the pain at the very portals of death, and pulled me, whether I would or no, back into life and whatever work still lies ahead.”
Where is your faith?