³⁵ That day when evening came, he said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side.” ³⁶ Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him. ³⁷ A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. ³⁸ Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”

³⁹ He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.

He said to his disciples, “why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”

They were terrified, and asked each other, “who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him?

I do struggle with Jesus’ miracle stories. Not that there is more and more that I don’t understand about the world, about atoms, about animals, about trees, about people. And not that I don’t profess to be a Christian which means being grounded in things some of my friends think are outlandish.  But I still am stunned by stories like this, of which the New Testament is full,  stories of turning water into wine at Cana, of healing a woman who touches the hem of his garment, or, here, of a man-God quelling the wind with his very voice.   

There are historical and theological reasons why miracle stories populate the New Testament, having to do with the establishment of Jesus as divine prophet. But this morning I want to go on a path to take this miracle story fully into us, because I think we so need it now.  We need at once to keep this story out there, strange, all-powerful, beyond our understanding, while at the same time letting it seep into us. I don’t want ever to give up on Jesus being even now out there calming the storm around us, even though he often seems asleep to us now. Maybe we are just blind, weak in hope, or not child-like enough. We need to believe he is out there now saving us in our storm-tossed world. But this morning I want also to bring Jesus inside of our storm-tossed hearts and minds.  Seeing Jesus inside us will help us, calm us, still our storms now. Don’t we all so need this?

Today is the tenth Sunday after Pentecost, the transformative happening for us.   

Pentecost: Jesus’ gift to us after he leaves his time on earth. Pentecost: the descent of the Holy Spirit on, into, all of us, the Spirit, the Christ, the God, into us.   Pentecost changes the space of things. Out there becomes in here. We often I think place Spirit, Christ, God,  out there, and they do live everywhere, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t also taken up residence deep within us. About twenty years ago my husband and I were in St. Lorenzo’s cathedral in Florence. I walked up to a pulpit carved by Donatello. One of the scenes was of Pentecost. The disciples had dropped their staves and were all leaning in, heads touching, to receive a crown of fire. For a moment, just remember that image, of the crown of fire, like a young Swedish girl’s crown of candles, in my family, settling on each disciple’s head. It has settled on each of ours, taken up residence. You are here; it has settled. It has settled, the descent of the vertical, the unexpected. God lives in us.

And so, today’s Gospel: Jesus calming the storm from without us, yes, but also from within us, all the time.  

Jesus abiding within us, resting at times, within the boat of our storm-tossed bodies and souls, these days. I have been drawn these days to this story because I love the sea, and its storms. I need the sea, I view it as some sort of vaster image of my own being. TS Eliot in one of the most powerful poems of all times, Four Quartets, says “the river is within us, the sea all around us.” We are one with all this water. We stand on a shore right up next to it, living our domestic lives here on this peninsula but all the same, we know how close we are to its wonder, its wonder,--- and its fearfulness. Another poet Seamus Heaney puts it this way, “the shore is where things overflow the brim of the usual.” We here love that, the overflowing of the brim of the usual, the unexpected, the uncontrolled.   Every time I walk by the graveyard on Barter’s Island and read the inscription on Amos Barter’s headstone, “lost at sea,” I feel a great hollowness within me. I am brought back to all those women who stood on promontories and in widows’ walks looking for their boat, bringing back their people. Rereading Moby Dick this winter I felt the fear of it all, the smallness of the boats, the mightiness of the whale and the ocean. And I remembered, as many of you remember, your own moments at sea when you were sore afraid that this was it. Living near the sea, we face what is fundamental. We know how small we are. We know how much we need help, the help of each other, the help of God.

Our storms are not all sea storms these days. Overridden with guns, with disease, with war, with a dying environment, even those of us who are older often feel the despair our children and teens do. Every day at least for some brief time I feel something overpowers me, some heaviness I can’t seem to lift. I know I am afraid. I feel sometimes we are all perishing, leaving behind nothing at all. We feel we are living not only in what the mystics call the dark night of the soul, but also in what Matthew Fox has called the dark night of our very species.

So, I need, we need, Jesus in our boat, even if seemingly asleep some of the time in these dark stormy days and nights. We need to see him there in the stern, preventing the following sea that threatens to swamp us, call out to him if he seems asleep, don’t you care that we are perishing? Don’t you care? And we need to hear that voice, calming the storm, and, yes, chastising us for having so little faith. I pray every day to hear that voice, that not always gentle voice that lives inside of me, of you, to calm us, calm these storms without and yes, within too and also to call me out.  I don’t really like to be called out, but I need to be.  

What we need is to Pray for the descent of grace, for it is a gift of grace to know Jesus inside us in the boat. We can’t make ourselves feel the utterly surprising and wondrous descent of the spirit upon us, within us. It just comes, a gift. 

And yet as I look back upon my days when Jesus’ calm has come again, I realize I have put myself in the way of it, a little, made a little room for it to come, by the things I think and the things I do. We sometimes nourish our bodies better than we nourish our souls. I recently read these words in a powerful new novel, Fellowship Point, about Maine!:

“grace and love are offered all the time, in every new moment, at every glimpse of the sky, or dawn of a day that has never before existed, or squirrel skittering along a branch, or conversation with a sister or a friend, or the sense of time suspended when reading a good book. We are free, always, to accept what is offered; it is we who don’t recognize this.”

So, what can we do, to recognize grace? 

Find good teachers. One holy feeder, among the so many in all the spiritual traditions, I want to share this morning with you. You may know her, have studied her. She is Julian of Norwich, one of the so-called mystics in the Christian tradition. Remember that Jane Austen remake in which a young confused girl crosses the street and flashing in the walk sign is, “What would Jane do?” Well, what would Julian do?

We don’t know a lot about Julian who lived in England in the 14^th century, a contemporary of Chaucer. When she was six years old that era’s version of Covid, the Black Plague, had just begun. We infer that she was educated, first woman to write in English. We know she lived as many contemplatives did and do: sequestered.  With a woman to help her, she lived in a small cell attached to a church. Like them, she did this so she could keep her focus on what was real, fundamental, and not illusory. The book she wrote to share her peace with us is called “Showings,” or revelations she experienced of her mother God.

Julian knew of darkness. She says, “sometimes we experience such darkness that we lose all our energy.” We know a deep sadness, that depletes our spiritual energy. “because of this darkness,” she says, “allowing and trusting God’s great love…is almost impossible.”

Julian’s way through her darkness was to strip away all that is inessential. Many of us have been cleaning out our stuff in these pandemic years. But she would go even further. How do you really want to spend your precious, and short time on this earth? If we get lost, in social media, in calendars that are too full of things that really mean very little to us or anyone in the long run, lost in worry, in judgement of others, in anger, if we get lost in this noise it only gets worse. For some of us who are older, who have known death near to us, or who knew it closely when we were young, we perhaps already clear out and number our days. It is a wise practice for we live each day differently then.

So. Find a great teacher.

But also, be attentive every day to signs of God’s wonder, don’t forget by getting buried in business or despair. 

As you walk outside in the evening without your phone listen for that Veery, a particular kind of thrush, that Rachel Carson, just up the Sheepscot river, heard so often (or maybe it was a real thrush, rarer now). Its sound, echoing like gentle chimes, is other-worldly. 

In the days, go to the tidal pools. There you can see as Adam Nicholson does in his new book,  The Sea is Not Made of Water (but of creatures), sandhoppers. He says “to sit and watch them about their business, multiple limbs flickering and pausing over their own bodies, keeping house, keeping themselves proper, ensuring their own continuity, …they must be making decisions. They must have minds at work.” Or, prawns, whom he begins to see look like him. “For all their strangeness I can see my body in their symmetry: a trunk with its appendages, its orifices, its means of movement,” balanced as we are.

Julian and Carson and Richardson don’t keep their visions to themselves. Nor should we. For in the boat within us, Jesus at the stern, is the beloved community, other disciples. This is not about a solitary pursuit. It is about our keeping calm together, Jesus calm. It is about sharing that calm with one another. We who aren’t on the front lines in the public still exert Jesus’ calm power, through daily love with our families, our prayers, our singing, our carpentry, our writing, or whatever you do. It is about saying and feeling more than on Sunday mornings but all the time,  “peace be with you, and peace be with me.”

So It's not that in seeking calm we are to ignore what is happening in the world. We seek to know the kind of calm Jesus knew while he was in the world so that we can have his mind in us and be him to others. However much he moved about, whatever he faced, and he faced everything, whether he was justly angry or weeping, he never let any of it stick. He always stayed rooted in God’s utter, bottomless calm. 

Focusing our minds on great teachers, attending to daily miracles of wonder, traveling with the beloved community in Jesus’ boat, outside us and inside us: calming us in these days.

Be with Julian as she says, “I saw that God is our true peace…our safe protector when we ourselves are in disquiet, constantly working to bring us into endless peace.”

Perhaps Julian’s most famous lines, quoted also in Four Quartets, are, “And all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Repeat.

 

Amen.