12^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

June 21, 2009

Omaha, NE

Rev. Steven W. Plank

“Divine Empathy”

Text:    Mark 4:38b – “… and they woke him up and said to him, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’”

Scripture Lessons:       Psalm 9:9-20

Mark 4:35-41

Proposition:  When things go well in our lives, it’s easy to believe that God is with us, loves us, and longs to bless us.  However, there are those other times when we wonder what ever happened to “Divine Empathy.”  Do we really think that God doesn’t care?

Prayer for Illumination:  Keeper of our lives, you know the hardness and gentleness of human hearts.  You call your people to faithful living.  Through the storms of life that bring suffering and fear, joy and laughter, teach us to turn to you for all we need, so that we may come to know your presence even in the midst of the trials that surround us.  Amen.

I’ve always been fascinated to hear people talking about “going into the ministry.”  I understand it, to be sure, but when I think about it, that is a phrase that should be absolutely foreign to us who are in the Reformed and Presbyterian branch of God’s Church.  After all, we believe that we all are called by God to ministries of some sort or another.  And that call is symbolized in our baptisms.  As a sacrament, baptism is, as St. Augustine in the 4^th century put it, “an outward, visible sign of an inward, invisible grace.”  That which is outward and visible is the water – just as in Communion that which is outward and visible is the juice and bread.  That which is inward and invisible in baptism is God’s sovereign, creative call upon our lives and God’s absolute, unwavering love for us.  Not a bad deal, is it?  We get a little bit of water; we are reminded of an abundance of love and grace!

This is the starting point for our ministry… for our ministry.  To what ministry has God called you?  It might be something to do with your occupation, how you understand God’s will and love working their way through the work that you do.  It might be the particular attitude you bring to the work that you do.  It might be being a friend to someone in school that no one else wants to be with.  Your ministry might be something totally unrelated to what you do each day, but might be evidenced through the spiritual gifts that God has entrusted to your careful stewardship… faith, which can help people during times when they can’t seem to find faith of their own… generosity, which can be seen through the ways in which you give your time unselfishly, or the ways in which you give your money cheerfully… prayer, which all of us can do, but which some of us are gifted with… humor, which, when used appropriately, can ease tensions, calm troubles, and bring joy.  To what ministry has God called you, do you think?

Even within what most people think of when they hear the term “ministry,” there are wide varieties of occupations.  There is “the usual” form of ministry – serving as a pastor in a congregation.  There are church planters – people who specialize in starting new congregations.  There are hospital chaplains – such as our Parish Associate, Deborah.  There are seminary professors – who bring to academics a sense of pastoral perspectives.  There are counselors – who are graced with insights to help people find their way through emotions or relationships or situations in which they feel lost.  There are governing body staff members in the Church – such Stated Clerks and Executives, who bring their gifts to help larger communities of congregations, presbyteries, and synods exercise their own gifts and graces.  There are interim pastors – who specialize in helping congregations make transitions, either from one pastor to another, or from one conflicted situation to a time of health and vitality.

A new interim pastor had come to First Presbyterian Church in Rockford, Illinois when I served as a pastor of a congregation just outside of town.  I wanted to welcome Bill to his new ministry, and so called him up one day.  We decided to meet at a little restaurant downtown where they served the best Swedish pancakes in the city – Rockford is a heavily Scandinavian area!  As we were talking, I asked him how things were going at the church.  He chuckled and told me a story.  He said, “Two of the elders were in my study the other evening, and we were talking about different things.  One of them suddenly looked at me and asked, ‘What is the difference between you as our interim pastor and whoever will be our next installed pastor?’  I thought for a moment, and then looked at them.  ‘You know those two places in the sanctuary ceiling that are cracked and need paint,’ I asked.  They both knew exactly what I meant.  ‘I don’t care.  Your installed pastor’s going to have to care about that.’”  I was initially shocked by anybody who told someone else that they don’t care.  But, of course, what he was explaining to them was that his particularly ministry was focused on different areas than the physical needs of the property, a luxury of focus that his successor would not be able to afford.

“I don’t care.”  Don’t those words just grate at you, like fingernails on a chalkboard?  I mean, I can understand people feeling a lot of things, but not to care just seems almost inhuman to me.  At election times, pundits talk about American apathy that they feel is evidenced by low voter turnouts.  But I don’t believe that’s as much about apathy as it is about either a sense of frustration over the rancorous bickering between two political parties that don’t often seem all that different from each other, or about a sense of hopelessness that anything positive is going to be able to change as a result of our political processes.  People talk about the apparent lack of concern about things in our environment.  But I don’t believe that’s as much about not caring as it is about feeling paralyzed about not knowing what to do, or feeling overwhelmed by the immensity of the challenges that loom before us as a global community.  Not caring is not usually the issue in our life, but the fear of someone not caring is the issue.  After all, how can someone not care about the poor, about children in need, about women who are abused, about gun violence in our community, about peace, about our planet’s well being?

In our New Testament lesson, the disciples were afraid… and I think they were afraid about two different things.    We read in the text that “a great windstorm arose” while they were in the boat.  A part of us might logically think:  “‘A great windstorm.’  Ha!  We live in Nebraska!  They haven’t even seen ‘a great windstorm’!”  But remember two days last June?  I was only here for one of those times, but that was a windstorm that sure got my attention!  Remember the disciples?  What was the occupation of most of those men?  They were fishermen!  They knew about stormy weather.  The lived day and night by the sea and in their boats, and wind and waves were part of what they dealt with every day.  So what kind of storm must this have been to have made them afraid?  It must have been quite a storm… and they were afraid.  But they were also afraid of something else, I believe.  They were out on the Sea of Galilee.  It had been a long day.  It was night.  They were tired.  A huge storm blew in, and St. Mark tells us that “the boat was already being swamped.”

And where was Jesus during this storm?  Do you remember?  Mark writes:  “But (Jesus) was in the stern, asleep on the cushion!!!”  Wouldn’t that make you mad?  Wouldn’t that frustratingly astound you?  And so Mark tells us that the disciples shook Jesus awake.  And here’s where we see their other fear, I believe.  They woke Jesus up and asked him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”  They thought they knew Jesus.  They had left their occupations – their ministries where they were – in order to follow Jesus.  They had already witnessed him doing great deeds of power and wonder.  They had seen the astounding depth of his compassion for others.  And now here they were.  They were the ones now in need.  And Jesus was asleep???  And so their fear?  Jesus cared for others, but apparently didn’t give them a second thought.

In times when the proverbial “storms” of life hit us, isn’t that our fear as well, if we are really honest?  Isn’t part of our fear in those times that God is somehow asleep on the job?  And the real fear that that calls forth from our deepest being is that, if God is somehow busy tending to other things, other situations, other people, then we are left utterly alone to deal with the situations that seem to “swamp” us!  The issue is the ultimate question that writers and theologians and poets have raised forever:  Where is God when it hurts?  Does God really care?

In his seminal work about the Old Testament prophets, Rabbi Abraham Heschel talked about the prophetic experiences of God, and concludes that all of the prophets experience, not just God’s presence, but God’s pathos.  He wrote this:

“… in the biblical view, human deeds may move God, affect God, grieve God, or, on the other hand, gladden and please God.  This notion that God can be intimately affected, that God possesses not merely intelligence and will, but also pathos, basically defines the prophetic consciousness of God.  Pathos denotes, not an idea of goodness, but a living care; not an immutable example, but an outgoing challenge, a dynamic relation between God and humanity; not mere feeling or passive affection, but an act or attitude composed of various spiritual elements; no mere contemplative survey of the world, but a passionate summons.”[1]

Author and pastor, Michael Lindvall, writes:  “Time and time again in Scripture the word is, ‘Do not be afraid.’  It is, you might say, the first and the last word of the gospel.  It is the word the angels speak to the terrified shepherds and the word spoken at the tomb when the women discover it empty:  ‘Do not be afraid.’  Not because there are not fearsome things on the sea of our days, not because there are no storms, fierce winds, or waves, but rather, because God is with us… even though there are real and fearsome things in this life, they need not paralyze us; they need not have dominion over us; they need not own us, because we are not alone in the boat.”

There are things in this life worth being afraid about!  There are storms that feel overwhelming to us – not just storms of nature, but storms in relationships, and storms that rage in our hearts.  “Divine Empathy” does not mean that those storms will suddenly disappear, as Jesus made the wind and waves still that dark and stormy night millennia ago.  But Jesus can calm the storms that rage within us.  And everything around us – our gifts for ministry, the signs symbolized in the sacraments, the prayers of people we know, and love that we share with those most special to us… all of those things remind us that we are not alone when the storms come.

Thanks be to God!  AMEN!

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[1] Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets, Volume II.  New York:  Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962; p. 3f.