"The storm within"

Over the Christmas period the story of Dad's Army was told under the title "We're Doomed" ...some of you undoubted watched it. "We're doomed" ... the catchphrase of Private James Frazer, a member of the Home Guard platoon and local undertaker. Rendered by John Laurie, with his dour Scottish accent and expressive Shakespearian face, hopelessness and despair are conveyed easily by this man with a tape measure in his pocket and whose day job is death. I thought of this catchphrase when I was reflecting upon the New Testament passage that forms our second reading. A storm is raging, a boat is at the mercy of the wind and the rain, and those within it are frightened. More than that, they feel alone in their fear which makes it all the worse. In their anxiety they cry out to the one sleeping at the rear of the boat, "Master don't you care that we are perishing". There then follows the miracle of the calming of the storm and that penetrating question, "Why are you afraid, have you no faith?

We live in a frightening world. Never before has the entire human race been poised so precariously on the edge. Predictive analysts of the future base their doom-laden warnings on what they extrapolate from trends they discern in present time: relentless pressure of escalating population; shortages of food and energy; the frightening stock-pile of war and human conflict seen so clearly on the border of Ukraine; the uncontrolled momentum of science and technology; political inertia, individual blindness. Great powers feed each other's fears. No national government is wholly in control of its affairs. Economically, politically, and strategically, intelligent and dedicated men and women work at the problems, but no way forward claims conviction. And all of this against the backcloth of a pandemic which has claimed the lives of millions and hasn't finished with us yet. We're doomed, doomed.

I have always struggled a little with Mark's account of the stilling of the storm - if you probe it too deeply, the story falls apart. Notwithstanding the description of the miracle and the calming of the sea, it is the tense of Jesus' question, "Why are (present tense) you afraid?" and not "why were (past tense) you afraid?" that perplexes me. Surely, since the storm had abated, the past tense is the natural one? ... unless of course the real storm calmed by the words of Jesus wasn't the outer storm of wind and rain but the storm within the disciples.

Against the background of all that I have described, the turbulence and tragedy of our world, Jesus asks, "Have you no faith"? Faith, the ability to place the world and everything within it into the context of God, and so to live with hope... easier said than done, but not impossible. In the dark days of Stalin's Russia there were candles to freedom kept alight by men such as Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn and millions of unknown others, prisoners of conscience against all reason. In the dark days of Hitler's Germany there were men like Pastor Niemoeller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and millions of unknown others who died in Hitler's prisons and gas chambers. We have all read deeply moving accounts of ordinary men and women who did the best things in the worst times and hoped them in the most calamitous.

Hope has, from the beginning, been the currency of the Christian Church. But hope is an elusive lady. Hope isn't like a tablet that can be administered to the broken and the fractured and the weary of our time. Try to capture her, to define her, and she plays hard to get. The cynic may even say, she doesn't exist - she is but the child of that self-deception that we humans are so good at - we whistle in the dark to keep our courage, ourselves creating the sound which gives us a sense of companionship, a feeling of not being alone in the dark. But whatever the cynic might say, hope is a lady who cannot be so easily dismissed.

What the disciples on the lake longed for, wanted to know despite the onslaught of the storm, was that they were going to be okay. They wanted to believe that they would come through. That is what hope provides; the courage to believe in tomorrow. However, over a lifetime of ministry I have come to understand that hope isn't something you can gift directly to people. Nor can you automatically summon her by quelling people's negative emotions with a strident positivity that eliminates fear and anxiety. Mere positivity is not hope ... a lesson some politicians need to learn as they wave the magic wand of their words to inspire an empty optimism ... it just makes them appear out of touch, insincere, and aloof.

On that Galilean Lake we witness something very different. By stilling the storm, Jesus does not directly gift the disciples hope, but rather, he brings them to a place where they can discover it for themselves. Critically, they had to learn to recognise that God had not abandoned them to the storm but was in it with them. And learning that changed everything ..they were not alone - and in that discovery they found calm waters.

I don't think it is inappropriate to draw an analogy between those frightened disciples and our present situation. Life is a pretty rough sea for many at the moment, and Frazer's catchphrase "We're doomed", can be a harbinger of many dark thoughts within those who seek to navigate it. But we are not alone... God is in the boat with us. Those who have faith do not need to go looking for hope, because in believing, she comes to them... so not doomed at all, but held by gracious powers.