9th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST | 27.07.2021 | A Sermon Based on Gospel: Mark 6:45-56 | by Paula Murray |
45Immediately Jesus made His disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side, to Bethsaida, while He dismissed the crowd. 46And after He had taken leave of them, He went up on the mountain to pray. 47And when evening came, the boat was out on the sea, and He was alone on the land. 48And He saw that they were making headway painfully, for the wind was against them. And about the fourth watch of the night He came to them, walking on the sea. He meant to pass by them, 49but when they saw Him walking on the sea they thought it was a ghost, and cried out, 50for they all saw Him and were terrified. But immediately He spoke to them and said, “Take heart; it is I. Do not be afraid.” 51And He got into the boat with them, and the wind ceased. And they were utterly astounded, 52for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened. 53When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored to the shore. 54And when they got out of the boat, the people immediately recognized Him 55and ran about the whole region and began to bring the sick people on their beds to wherever they heard He was. 56And wherever He came, in villages, cities, or countryside, they laid the sick in the marketplaces and implored Him that they might touch even the fringe of His garment. And as many as touched it were made well.
English Standard Version (ESV), Crossway, 2001
I want to begin this morning not with the obvious, the imminent departure of our deacon, L.B. and his wife Sharon for parts out west, but with a single line in this morning’s Prayer of the Day. The prayer asks our Father in heaven to, “Multiply Your grace that we may run to Your promises and be made to share in Your heavenly joy.” Throughout the summer, we have reflected on what it means to practice more or less everyday what we preach as Christians. Another way to think of this is that we preach not only by what we say but also by what we do. So, the books written by both James and Paul teach us that we must not only be hearers of the Word of God but also doers of the Word of God. By happy circumstance, the sentence in the Prayer of the Day that I have lifted up leads us to our biblical mandate to do more than simply receive the Gospel Truth but also to enact it. That sentence has three clear parts: first, a request that God make something happen, specifically, that He multiply His grace; second, that we run to His promises; and, third, that we share in His heavenly joy.
The first part, the request, is familiar ground. We are accustomed to asking God to make something happen. The Prayers of the Church, coming up after this sermon, the sermon hymn, and Apostle’s Creed, are simply a list of requests of God supported by the biblical warrant for our expectations. So, we pray God heal our brother Paul and our sister Kay because the Bible tells us that Jesus Christ heals. Or, we ask God to give faith to the citizens of our country because the Bible tells us that lands filled with people who trust in You are lands more likely to be filled with peace. We pray often for ourselves, our loved ones, and even the total stranger for whom the local ambulance runs down the road, sirens wailing and lights flashing. Every single prayer we or anyone else utters or prays in the deep, quiet reaches of our souls is our petition to our all-powerful King and God to effect a positive change for someone in need of that change.
The positive change that this morning’s prayer asks for is that God multiply His grace. We know that if you want the numbers of anything to increase quickly we multiply them, not simply add to them one by one. So, we mean to ask God that He not just create more grace on earth but that He flood the earth with His grace. We heard that word, “flood,” just moments ago as the Old Testament reading from Genesis was read. The text from Genesis describes God’s own response to the great flood He unleashed upon the earth. Disgusted with humanity’s disloyalty and the resultant perversion and corruption of their behavior during Noah’s time, God resolved to wipe all animal life from the face of the earth with the exception of Noah, his family, and the animals he gathered, two by two and loaded onto the enormous arc built by Noah at God’s request. He therefore sent flooding rains on the earth not merely by a day but for forty days. The rains began, the waters rose, the ark floated off its moorings, and people and animals outside the sanctuary of the ark drowned. God’s response to His own action was not an enthusiastic, “Gee whiz, look what I’ve done to those faithless, wicked jerks!” It was, rather, sorrow, not only of humanity’s faithlessness and evil acts, but also at His use of His own destructive powers. So then, and there, He placed the rainbow in the sky, a sign of a new promise He made to all things living on earth that He would never again unleash watery death on such a scale. Rather, from this point onwards, He would multiply His grace, choosing mercy over punishment, to lead us to His truth. That approach, mercy over retribution, led in God’s own time to His only begotten Son’s willing death on the cross and our salvation.
Knowing that God has chosen grace over the kind of retribution that leads only to death, we can run to Him and the promises He has made us of the forgiveness of our sins and eternal life just like a small child runs to his mother who is the source of all his comforts. We need not cower from His power as His Son our Lord Jesus Christ comes to us over the rough seas of life as the disciples did in this morning’s Gospel reading, but rather lean into Him, knowing that He is our salvation. We need only to let the Holy Spirit open our eyes to the wondrous abundance of His grace to see His works among us and between us.
And to share in His heavenly joy. The disciples, we are told, feared Jesus as He walked upon the waves. Jesus intended to pass by them and arrive before them, at their destination across the Sea of Galilee. But He changed course, stepping into the boat to still the roiling waves and to calm the disciples’ fears. But rather than being at peace once the storm had been routed, their fears increased, for now they feared not the storm but the man with the power to still the storm sitting across from them in the boat. The twelve in the boat with Jesus did not understand what that single act meant because, as Mark tells us, they had first failed to understand the miraculous feeding of the five thousand with five loaves of bread and two dried fishes. “Their hearts were hardened,” says the text, like the heart of the Pharaoh was hardened in Moses’ day. Over the course of the ten plagues, God hardened Pharaoh’s heart so all might see and understand the power and glory of Israel’s God. Consequently, it was not until the last and most dreadful plague, the taking of Egypt’s firstborn by the Angel of Death that Pharaoh understood that he had pridefully contended with the Almighty, and lost. The disciples will also be slow to comprehend just Who they follow. It is not until the Jesus is raised from the dead that they begin to understand that Jesus is the Savior, the Messiah, God’s own means of fulfilling the promises long ago made to Adam and to Noah and others. Then they can share in His heavenly joy.
Unlike those first disciples of Jesus Christ, our eyes have been opened to the wonders of those promises and of the God who long ago made them and is, even now, fulfilling them. We may share in that joy, knowing that any leave taking between us is not permanent but is rather temporary. It is not so much as we say farewell as we say au revoir, until we meet again. So we say with sorrowful hearts a sad farewell to our Deacon L.B. and his much loved wife as they begin a new phase in their lives and move to Arizona. Which is, by the way guys, Yuma, Arizona predicted to have temperatures of about 104 and 105 degrees all of next week.
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