Text: Luke 8:22-39
I've taken two trips in the course of my life that have had profound life-changing effects on me. Experiences of other cultures will do that particularly if you're not just going for a vacation but actually going to learn something. Your travelling companions make a big difference too. In university I went to Mexico and in seminary I went to the Middle East. Both trips changed my views politically, my lifestyle. They made me question my wealthy, white, Western, American values. I saw first hand that how “good” I had it had profound negative consequences all over the world. Learning other peoples, who they are, their struggles, their joys brings us out of ourselves and gives a glimpse of how big and wonderfully different humans are. I am thoroughly convinced that a lot of the worlds problems could be solved if we took the politicians and the corporations out of the picture and got common people like you and me to sit down with common people from all over the world and share a meal. But, I guess that's what the Marriage Supper of the Lamb will be when Jesus returns and that's what we Christians are rehearsing for when we gather together for the Lord's Supper...but, I digress.
Here in Luke's Gospel we find Jesus and the disciples going on a day trip. The purpose of which was never stated. They just all got into a boat and Jesus said, “Let’s go to the other side of the lake.” To give you a little perspective, if their starting point was up in the northwest corner of the lake around Capernaum, then it was about a twenty kilometre trip to the southeast corner of the lake to the land of the Garasenes, a very Greco-Roman non-Jewish area where they ate pigs. It would definitely not have been an easy row and would still have taken several hours with a sail. And, if they were in the middle of the lake when the storm arose it would have been a five kilometre swim to get to shore if the boat capsized. Needless to say, getting into a boat with Jesus is risky.
Well, they are out there in the lake. The windstorm comes up and in this instance their lives really are in danger. The storm was getting the best of them. The waves were filling the boat. So, they went to Jesus who was very unconcernedly asleep and they shout at him, “Master. Master. We're going to die.” In Mark's Gospel the add “..and don't you care?”. Yet, they don’t ask him to do anything. They don't seem even to expect that he can do anything in the face of this terrible storm. Then, to their amazement he stands up and rebukes the storm. The wind stops and the lake immediately goes peacefully calm. Then he turns to them and asks, “Where is your faith?” That had to hurt.
The trip then grows even more complicating. On the other side of the lake there's a man possessed by a legion of demons. A legion was a Roman battle group of between four to six thousand soldiers. This man embodied evil like we cannot imagine. The thing that is amazing here is that the demons cower before Jesus because they unlike the disciples know exactly who he is and what he can do. You know, it is more than an interesting bit of trivia that in all of the Gospels it is only the demons who know exactly who Jesus is. Everybody else has trouble figuring him out. So, Jesus cast the demons into a herd of pigs that flocks like lemmings into the lake and drowns. The townspeople come and are astounded to find the man seated, clothed, and in his right mind. Yet, the extent of Jesus' authority scared them so much that they begged him to leave. So, he and the disciples get back into the boat and return from whence they came.
This not so little day trip across the Sea of Galilee must have been truly life changing for Jesus’ disciples. They had taken a huge step in leaving everything behind to follow Jesus, but on this trip he confronts their doubts about him and reveals himself to them to be more than just some prophet who was a likely candidate to be the Messiah. The Jesus the disciples meet out on this day trip is none other than the Son of God, the Lord of all creation whom nature and even the demons recognize and have to obey. This Jesus says things and does things that only God himself can say and do.
I think we often forget just how big Jesus really is as Son of God and Lord of all creation. We so often tend to consign Jesus to the private realm of personal religion, the realm of “me and my faith” when he is in fact the Lord of all creation and “everybody oughta know”. Did you know that thus far astronomers have counted over 500 billion galaxies? It takes light from the furthest of those galaxies 13.7+ billion years just to get here for us to see. I don`t know about you but I get truly awestruck whenever I see the pictures of space that the Hubble and Chandra telescopes are gifting us with. The whole creation is alive with and shining forth praise to its Maker. Jesus, our Jesus, is Lord of it all. He`s huge and...he cares about us each in our puny little lives that we tend to blow completely out of proportion. The Psalmist writes in Psalm 8 “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” One of my favourite paraphrases of that verse sings, “When I look up and see the skies which your own fingers made, and wonder at the moon and stars each perfectly displayed; then must I ask, 'Why do you care? Why love humanity? And why keep every mortal name fixed in your memory?”
Well, it's this really, really big Jesus the Lord of all creation who cares about us each in particular who stands before the disciples having calmed the storm that moments before had threatened their very lives and not only does he stand before the disciples but indeed us and confronts us with the life-giving question, “Where is your faith?” He's pointing out to his disciples that they really don't know him. They don't know who he is so as to truly trust their lives to him and that's even taking into consideration that they had left everything to follow him. Faith is incomplete, indeed it really is not faith, until we know Jesus personally as the Son of God who is Lord over all creation and are able to live accordingly.
The disciples' problem was similar to the problem that Christians have today. We have beliefs about Jesus that get in the way of our knowing Jesus. We turn being a disciple of Jesus into a day trip about “me and my faith” where we allow Jesus to be involved in our lives only on our terms and only in the ways we want him to be. “Jesus loves me still today, walks beside me on my way.” Yet, the way of “me and my faith” is littered with doubt and will fail us. Just as the disciples faith failed them in the midst of the storm. Salvation does not depend on our faith. It depends on grace. It depends on who Jesus is as Son of God and Lord of all creation and his faithfulness to us and it is comforting to know that when our faith fails us, he is still Son of God and Lord of all creation and he is faithful and he will act to save us in ways that we cannot imagine to be possible. It is to his faith and faithfulness and obedience as Son of God and Lord of creation that we must cling not to our own faith. Faith in our own faith leads only to disillusionment. Thus, the clichéd responses of “You’ve just got to have faith” and “You just got to believe more” are not valid. It is the simple fact that Jesus, the Son of God and Lord of all creation is with us in the boat that matters.
I can’t help but believe that Jesus took the disciples on this trip to point out that they truly did not know who he is. You see, being in the boat with Jesus, being his disciple involves one very important question that I think we in our anxieties just don't think to ask. The question – “Who are you, Lord?” Like the disciples in the boat we will be quick to point it out to our Lord when we sense ourselves in danger. Yet, we don't think to pull back and ask “Who are you Lord and why have you brought us here?” That's a very good question for us Canadian Presbyterians to be asking as the majority of our congregations are dwindling off into obscurity and it's not just us. The whole of Christianity in Canada is perishing. We run around like headless chickens looking for something that we can do to save our churches. Where is our faith is a relevant question as we seem to presume that the church belongs to us and it is up to us to save it because that's our duty as disciples of the Lord Jesus whom – let's be honest – we simply do not know. We forget that the church even this church belongs to Jesus Christ the Son of the Most High God and the Lord of all Creation. The really big Jesus. It belongs to him. If a church, a building, an institution, or a cultural manifestation of religion is standing in the way of his people actually, personally knowing him, have no doubt that he will take it away making us to realize that we can't have faith in someone we do not really know.
“Who are you Lord?” We must preoccupy ourselves with that question. Prayer and devotional exercises, Bible study and meditating on Scriptures are what we must do in this little boat on this perilous sea. When the disciples realized their predicament Luke says what? They started to bail? They jumped ship and swam? They raised the sail? They did a demographics study and a gifts inventory to determine how they might minister to the sea in which they are going to drown? No, Luke says the first thing they did was they went to him and they woke him up. They went to him. Jeremiah in the last verse of Lamentations looking out over Jerusalem as it lay in utter destruction by the hands of the Babylonians prays, “Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored.” Who are you, Lord?” Let me give you some homework this week. Try to pray this simple prayer as often as you can. Just keep saying over and over to yourself “Who are you, Lord Jesus?”. Do that and see what happens? I suspect that you will find yourself on a day trip that changes you profoundly. Amen.
