Second Sunday before Lent

Rev Brett Gray

On my wall at home is an old print, given to me by a past parishioner. It’s a woodcut image of a small sailing boat, storm-tossed in a writhing sea. Underneath it is written in French, a language I cannot read, a prayer attributed to a Breton fisherman.

Translated, I am told, it reads.

‘Protect me my Lord, my boat is so small, and your sea so great.’

I’ve forgotten who gave me that print, although, strangely, I remember the warmth and the kindness of the giving. Memory can be funny like that. I’ve kept it with me all these years because of that warmth, and because that simple prayer, at a certain time, came to mean something to me.

There was a period in my life a number of years back, before I came to Cambridge, when I felt like I was at sea. But, it was more than that. I felt that, at any moment, my life would be inundated. The walls of my world, like the sides of a ship, with a crack would implode, and a cold watery chaos would flood in and drown me, and everything, and everyone, I loved. That chaos, that sea, was fear.

Prayer was hard at that time; almost impossible. Living was hard at that time.

The full story doesn’t need to be told here. It wouldn’t be appropriate. It’s enough to know that un-dealt with trauma can come back, and come back again, until it’s dealt with.

But in that time of fear, and fear’s return, that prayer came to mean something. As did the story read to us in the Gospel this morning.

‘Protect me my Lord, my boat is so small, and your sea so great.’

The sea does a lot of metaphorical work in the Hebrew Bible. To the Ancient Near Eastern imagination it was the largest, and the least controllable, thing you could imagine. It was the abode of monsters, the place of un-creation, chaos, and death. So it came to stand in their poetry, the poetry found in the Scriptures, for the forces of chaos and destruction, the fearful things, which could inundate and dissolve our lives at a moment’s notice.

The sea was the chaos, that God alone kept in check. The sea was the watery death of all, that God alone could prevent.

To me, although I love the sea, that imagery still carries some power. The sea can stand as a metaphor for all that we cannot control, all that we feel as a world-ending threat. It can stand as a metaphor for fear itself. And that imaginative hinterland of the sea in the Hebrew poetic mind is probably what you need to have in mind when you read today’s Gospel.

It is interesting to me that so many of Jesus’ first, and closest, followers were fishermen, men who worked on open water, men used to a life lived on an element that could so easily take that life. They probably did not scare easily, but, in this story, they are scared. And it is a fear born of full-knowledge, knowledge of what could happen to a small open boat in a bad gale. They are going to die, unless something happens.

Something does, unexpectedly, happen. Jesus calms the storm, tames the sea.

And, to get what this is, is to grasp that this is not just a neat trick, a bit of weather magic by the miracle guy. To get what this is, is to grasp that imaginative hinterland I just spoke of, to understand that the sea is, symbolically, more than the sea. It is chaos, fear, death, un-creation, everything that is out of control and a threat to our small lives.

It is, in their poetry, and their imaginations, that which God alone can keep in its bounds, which God, only, can tame. And, here, Jesus is doing God-work; God only work.

‘Protect me my Lord, my boat is so small, and your sea so great.’

There is a lot going on right now. There is too much. The news cycle alone is an attritional horror. Everything can feel a little out of control, the future a far less certain place. The very rules by which we thought we understood the world, the functions of law and power, and agreed morality, and truth, seem to be shifting and eroding. It feels like a time of chaos; a time of un-creation.

And sometimes I feel a sense of exhaustion, of anomie, of helplessness, of overwhelm, before all that’s going on. I do not think I am alone in that. It feels like a chaos upon which floats our small lives, and the lives of those we care for. Our boats feel small. And everything around them overwhelming.

Fear is a rational response to so much of what is happening.

But, in my own past time of great fear, and fear’s return, I found, I was gifted this prayer, and this story. And in them I found some comfort. And, in their brevity and simplicity, I offer them to you, with the hope they may be of use.

‘Protect me my Lord, my boat is so small, and your sea so great.’

And we do need to remember how this Gospel ends.

I am not Jesus, so I don’t have the temerity to ask you: ‘Where is your faith?’.

I am with the disciples on this, this stuff is frightening, and I am not afraid to admit that. But then there is the disciples final, astonished, question: ‘Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him?’

The Chaos, which really does threaten, is yet held back, and held answerable, to the one whom we worship. Who is also the one in the boat with us. This is not a promise that bad things won’t happen. You are not a congregation who would hear such a promise. This is not magic. Boats can still be overwhelmed. Boats will be overwhelmed.

But, even then, it is a promise that just as the chaos is held and contained by the one we worship, we are also held, but in a different way. Things may get lost, and those losses will be painful, yet, ultimately, in life or death, we won’t be lost.

And there is another Biblical water metaphor, deployed in our worship today, that is worth attending to at the end of this sermon. And it’s from our Psalm.

The God who stills the raging of the sea in Psalm 65 is also the God who has a river full of water, a soft but full flow that gives life to all things; a source of strength and sustenance, and of joy. There is, to quote another Psalm, a river that makes glad the city of God. God is in the midst of it, and it will not be overthrown.

The sea will be contained, and the river will flow, its waters sweet and strong.

May you know the comfort and presence of the One able to speak to the seas of all of our fears, the one who is in the boat with us, and the one who is the source of Living Water, the river of our life able to sustain all things.

Amen.