God in the Godless

Preached at Christ Memorial Presbyterian Church on June 23, 2024.

Scripture

Mark 4:35-41

On that day, when evening had come, he 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?” And waking up, he rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Be silent! 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 fear and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

Romans 4:13, 18-25

For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.

Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So shall your descendants be.” He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), and the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.

Sermon

For the adults in the room, I want you to think back—going back through the filing cabinets of your life—and remember your teenage years. Once you’re back in the shoes of your teenage self, whether you’re wearing Chuck Taylors, a beat-up pair of Vans, or trusty Reeboks, I have a question for you. what did the ups and downs of life feel like? When your crush turned you down, what was it like? When you found $10 on the sidewalk or you got double desserts after dinner, what did it feel like?

I’ve remembered through some recent youth ministry that the teenage years have so many big feelings. Goodness gracious. Your world topples over so easily, just as it resurrects so quickly. Life feels especially fragile. Even though adults might perceive it as being dramatic, you really aren’t - your feelings really are that big in the moment. Because everything feels transient, and everything is transient. In those ups and downs, you really are experiencing emotional turmoil.

When I worked as a hospital chaplain, and now in congregational ministry, I’ve realized that some things change, and some things never do. All of that transition we experience in adolescence — it doesn’t get sequestered in our teenage years or our 20s. Though our brains develop and we get better at navigating these feelings, our entire lives are transient. We’re constantly living within a world that is always changing, where the gravitational pull of transience seems to drag us into some sort of crisis, some sort of adventure at every life stage. Your 60s, 70s, and 80s are just as transient—if not more so—than those teenage years we just remembered.

Life is fragile. Even when it feels so settled, so unshakeable, so predictable. We’re always in that boat on the Sea of Galilee, waves undulating beneath us, sails blowing about in some fashion.

But if we glean anything from today’s Gospel reading, we also know that Jesus is in the boat with us. Jesus is in every moment of transience.

Jesus says to his disciples, “Let us go across to the other side,” inviting them to go on an adventure. Like the great commission that he will give them later in his ministry, there is an assurance of God’s presence along the way. In this case, the incarnate, real presence of Jesus. Jesus isn’t on either other side of the journey, trying to coax his disciples closer, but he’s their very midst. “Let’s go together,” Jesus says.

“Life is fragile. Even when it feels so settled, so unshakeable, so predictable. We’re always in that boat on the Sea of Galilee, waves undulating beneath us, sails blowing about in some fashion.”

What is so beautiful, so loving, so intimate, is that God is in the very midst of this great storm. God gets in a boat with these disciples, risking physical safety and the comfortability of the shoreline, and goes with them to that place of fear. God travels with his disciples into the very anguish of their experience, becoming deeply, personally aware of their feelings and hearts and bodily turmoil. And because of that, surely God goes with us into every terror, every crisis, every place of uncertainty and transition and ungodly horror — because God would rather die with us than to let us suffer storms alone. 

God will never, ever, ever abandon ship on you, me, the church, or any troubled corner of humanity. God doesn’t abandon ship in any hospital room, any nursing home, any addiction, any loneliness, or any hopelessness for the world. In places that feel godless – paradoxically and unexpectedly, God is in the boat with us. 

We know, however, that there’s a weird footnote to Jesus’ presence in this story. He’s asleep in the stern of the boat while this chaos unfolds. So how did we get here?

If we look back in the Gospel, beginning in Mark 3, Jesus has had a long day. Not just any long day. One of those long days where your whole body aches, your eyes are tired, and your brain is mostly mush. One of those days where you want to do nothing more than plop down on the couch and eat a whole family-sized package of Oreos.

Jesus heads out to the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and the Gospel recounts that crowds come from great distances and surround him. They press against him so closely that Jesus asks his disciples to prepare a boat so they can make a quick escape. That is the boat of today’s reading. Mark 4 also records five parables—major ones—that Jesus expounds upon. Beside this marathon of teaching, Jesus performs healings and casts out spirits; he appoints twelve disciples to be his companions; he argues with religious authorities; and fights with his mother and siblings. That’s when we meet Jesus in the boat.

“God doesn’t abandon ship in any hospital room, any nursing home, any addiction, any loneliness, or any hopelessness for the world. In places that feel godless – paradoxically and unexpectedly, God is in the boat with us. ”

Jesus’ rest in the stern of the boat isn’t a comment about his lack of concern for the disciples. It’s not a complacency or disregard or flippancy. It’s that he’s exhausted. In the incarnation, God meets frailty. God meets weariness and fatigue and soreness and human needs. What this means for us is that the frailty of life doesn’t separate us from God; it’s precisely where God becomes alive, incarnate, and specially present. God lives in the fragility, frailty of our humanity. And so, the goal of our ministry to one another isn’t to escape the boat, or to escape the real needs of our humanity; or to run away from our limitations; it’s to stay in the boat with Jesus.

Staying in the boat with Jesus will be uncomfortable, it will make us squirm around. Staying in the boat with Jesus will challenge our assumptions about who can sail with us and who should stay on the shore. Staying in the boat with Jesus will mean we must acknowledge the frailty and the fragility of our lives, not ignore it. We will have to think of aging as a privilege; the church as a place where nothing ever goes to plan; and our ministry as a voyage, not a destination. In other words, it will really stink staying in the boat with Jesus. But it is where we meet a God who loves us in every moment, who will bring peace to the days we never thought would happen. It’s where we find God in the godless — God incarnate in the midst of everything that feels devoid of all hope.

In short, because God is found in the frailty of our humanity, and because God is found in the very heart of all that is hopeless, we have reason to be “hoping against hope.” The epistle to the Romans says that in Abraham and Sarah’s hopelessness, they grew in faith. Underneath that phrase, “grew in faith,” is a little nuance. That verb, the word we translate as “grew,” is passive. It is not Abraham and Sarah making a concerted effort to do more, be more, or be more faithful. Instead, the Greek suggests that Abraham and Sarah were strengthened in their faith; that is, their faith was made to grow. It is God’s own work and movement that strengthens them and nurtures them. They didn’t have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Instead, it was God who grew within them a hope that defied all odds; that was perhaps irrational. Even though there was no reason to be optimistic, they were hopeful.

Even though our boats may be sinking, even though the water is pouring in from all sides, there is still hope against all odds.

“But [staying in the boat] is where we meet a God who loves us in every moment, who will bring peace to the days we never thought would happen. It’s where we find God in the godless — God incarnate in the midst of everything that feels devoid of all hope.”

To illustrate this, we turn to the wisdom of The Golden Girls. For those who might not be familiar, The Golden Girls centers on three finely-aged women, one of whom is a woman by the name of Rose.

In one episode, Rose and her friends have been tasked with organizing a charity variety show. Unfortunately, trouble shows up. The local weatherman, who was scheduled to emcee the show, has to cancel at the last minute. As one of Rose’s friends puts their conundrum, “We don’t have an emcee and every act is awful.”

But Rose offers a surprising solution: “Would it help if I got Bob Hope to be our emcee?” Her friend logically responds with the question on everyone’s mind: “How will you ever get Bob Hope to be the emcee?”

Day after day, the odds look increasingly bleak. There’s no evidence in the slightest that Bob Hope will ever show up. When Rose and her friends go to one of Bob’s local speaking engagements, he leaves for the airport before they find him. But what does Rose say, in her eternal hopefulness? “Bob Hope won’t let us down.”

Unfortunately, she appears to be wrong. The variety show kicks off, with no emcee at all. The acts stink. Nothing goes as planned. Rose finally acknowledges the sorry state of their predicament. “Maybe I’m just a foolish old woman who’s lived a silly fantasy her whole life.”

Suddenly, a single word reverberates from a magician on stage: “PRESTO!” From the magician’s magic box, it’s none other than Bob Hope. It turns out, Bob Hope’s former stage partner was in the charity show and invited him to perform.

I think that’s what “hoping against hope,” looks like. The disciples, on their boat, have little options left. They have no reason to believe they’re going to survive. Their frailty and the fragility of life are too much, and the odds are stacked against their favor. And worse yet, Jesus is asleep in the stern. But God shows up in the middle of the hopeless. In that fear, in that uncertainty and frailty, the presence of God is enlivened, stirring all around, bringing hope to a situation that is anything but hopeful.

Just as God brought unimaginable, unforeseeable hope to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, to Elizabeth, Mary, and the disciples, God brings hope into every godless corner of our lives. It’s always unexpected. It’s always unforeseen. But God is always in that boat with us, ready to bring hope to the hopeless.

One of my professors in seminary, Dirk Smit, was a pastor and theologian in South Africa during apartheid. Though he was a white man, he used his voice and body to denounce the violent sin of apartheid. Eventually, he would draft the Confession of Belhar, one of our Presbyterian confessions, and a confession that united many South African churches in their dissent. One day in class, we discussed hope. Dr. Smit said something that was at first, kind of odd. This man, who lifted his voice to envision a future of equity, stated that he was not especially optimistic. Most found that strange. But after that admission, he said something else, far more meaningful. Though he was not an especially optimistic person, he confessed that he was deeply hopeful.

We don’t have to be optimistic in our humanity. We can acknowledge our frailty, the unpredictability and the precarity of our lives while remaining hopeful. When it feels like our society is hopelessly tearing itself apart, God is alive there, full of hope. When it feels like our loved ones are getting sucked deeper and deeper into addiction, God was made incarnate in that human frailty, too, and full of hope. When we question our own mortality–whether we will awake tomorrow–God is in that uncertainty. The ups, the downs, the transience of adolescence and the transience of old age, that’s where we meet God. Not in spite of it. Because of it.

This is where we leave the Gospel reading. We don’t reach the other shore. And that’s what matters. We’re left in the boat with Jesus, still sailing, still on this journey. But we are left radically changed by what is revealed: God is made incarnate in the fragility of our humanity. And we can always hope against hope, because we will surely find God, even in all that is hopeless, even in all that is godless. Amen.