Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Mark 6:45-56

July 28, 2024

What if…that’s the question today…what if.

What if you lived 2,000 years ago and you were there and saw Jesus do the miracles and you heard Him preach and teach? What if you saw Him take a few loaves of bread and some fish and miraculously fed 5,000 people, not including women and children?

What if Jesus told you, along with the rest of His disciples, to go out on the boat and head to the other side of the sea, and then you saw Him head away to pray, and as you were rowing, the waves came, and the storm churned so that you and the disciples couldn’t make headway? What if, in this impossible situation, you saw someone walking out on the water toward you, appearing to levitate or walk atop? Would you do as the other disciples and let fear take you over and think it was a specter?

Now remember, you saw the loaves, you saw the other miracles, you heard Jesus’ preaching. What if you were there on that boat on that stormy night, fighting against the waves? Would you respond like the other disciples?

I think we all would. I think we would lose hope and get frustrated that the boat isn’t moving. I think we’d get scared silly when we see Jesus walking toward us on the sea, not knowing it’s Him. Our hearts are just as stubborn and hard as theirs were, and all too often what we see right in front of us blinds us from what our Lord calls us to see with the eyes of faith.

But let’s go back even further and ask, “What if.” What if you were alive during the time of Noah? And you’re walking around town, and you see this man and his family building something, a boat – a big boat, and you ask Noah what’s going on. Noah says, “The Lord is sending a flood to cover the earth.” What if Noah said this? Would you laugh at him? Would you say, “Ah, Noah, you don’t know what you’re talking about, everything’s fine”? Peter tells us that Noah tried to preach to the people of his day, but they wouldn’t listen, so only 8 people were saved on that massive ship we call the ark. What if you were there?

It’s so far removed from us, the days of Noah, and yet it really happened. It’s quite possible that the human bones that are mixed in with dinosaur and fish and other animal bones along the eastern ridge of the Rocky Mountains are pre-flood bones, if the evolutionists would only stop assuming that the earth is 3 billion years old and believe what the Scripture says and adjust their dating assumptions accordingly. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people all over the world, wiped out by flood. What if you were there; would you have been one of those millions?

This is serious business, isn’t it, this “What if” stuff?

A stormy sea, a global flood, a boat full of disciples with hard hearts who don’t understand about the loaves, and today, generations later, and we still don’t understand, do we? We don’t understand the things which God HAS done, and we certainly don’t understand the things He will do.

You know, we look at our church attendance and we worry. We worry because the boat’s a rockin, the waves are pounding against the side, budgets are tight, and we start to say, “We gotta fix this; we gotta change everything to make this boat stay afloat.” See, we’ve learned nothing. Those 12 disciples were trying every which way to keep that boat afloat and get it moving in the right direction. They were professional fishermen; they were expert sailors on that mighty sea, and yet even those experts could not get that boat to do what they wanted. The wind and waves were just too much, the threat of capsizing was a REAL threat.

I don’t know because the Scripture doesn’t give the details, but I suspect that Noah and his family were somewhat shaken up as they were tossed to and fro atop a miles-deep flood.

We are human beings, after all, and we humans have a knack for seeing only what is smack-dab in front of us and then, like blind men and women, we flail our arms about hoping to find something to grab on to for stability and comfort.

And we say, “If only…if only. If only we did things a different way, if only we had made that decision, if only that problem in my past didn’t happen, things would be different, if only people would just do things my way, everything would be better.” Yet, like the disciples, we don’t understand even the loaves, we don’t understand the miracles – they’re just stories to us on paper. What arrogance it is to think we can know or even change the future, right?

Like the disciples, we see the miracles, but we don’t understand. We hear His Word, but we don’t get it. And so, when the tumult comes and the storm rages and the waves crash against us, worry and fear take us over, so that even when we see Jesus working in the midst of our turmoil, we worry and cower.

And with such hard hearts, why doesn’t the Lord do to us – why didn’t He do to the 12 disciples as He did the entire human race, save 8, in the flood? Why doesn’t He just wipe us out and start over? What can be done with hard hearts and closed ears and eyes blind to the truth?

Well, He can teach us, and this is just what He does. In Genesis, the Lord didn’t just plop an ark down at Noah’s feet and say, “Get in.” No, but instead He instructed, He taught Noah regarding how to build the ark. And it took over 100 years for him to build it. Noah suffered. He suffered wood splinters, achy back, fatigue, and he suffered the insults and blank stares of all the people around him who didn’t care and didn’t think anything would come of God’s threat.

And with the disciples, Jesus certainly could have zapped them to the other side of the Sea of Galilee and He could have kept the storms and waves at bay as they crossed over in the boat. But Jesus had in mind to teach His disciples so that in their suffering and fear they might learn to lean on Him. And the thing is, they believed Him when He said He would meet them on the other side. They took it on faith. But no sooner did they get out on the sea and the waves rose, and the winds howled, that they lost their faith that He would keep His promise.

But the whole time, from the moment they stepped on that boat, Jesus was watching. His eyes never left that little boat on the Sea of Galilee, just as His eyes never left the big boat on the world sea – the flood, just as His eyes never leave this congregation or any one of you or me who dwell within. Never.

God watches over all His children, and He seeks us out and finds each of us in our time of need. You might be tired, weak, unable to paddle one more stroke, going nowhere fast. Your faith may be weak and even absent. But Jesus is here in the midst of it all.

In the Book of Job, this Sea of Galilee event is foretold. In Job chapter 9 where Job is debating with his so-called friends who accuse him of wrongdoing and tell him to essentially give up, Job says, “The Lord is wise in heart and mighty in strength, he who removes mountains, and they know it not,

when he overturns them in his anger, who shakes the earth out of its place, and its pillars tremble; who commands the sun, and it does not rise; who seals up the stars; who alone stretched out the heavens and trampled the waves of the sea. Behold, he passes by me, and I see him not; he moves on, but I do not perceive him.”

God is He who trampled the waves of the sea and who passes by unseen. And yet, God IS seen – not in mystical, magical experiences or musings of the mind, but in Jesus. God passes by unseen, but behold, He reveals Himself in flesh. And the disciples are all the more fearful because they still don’t get it. God is right there in front of them – the creator of the universe standing before them on the water, and they do not understand.

Now, what if you were God, standing there on the sea before the 12 disciples, what would you do? If you are anything like me, you might say something like, “What is wrong with you people? What else do I have to do to show you that I am your God, and I will not leave you, and to get you to trust me more? Come on, guys, time’s a wastin!”

Thank the Lord that we are not the Lord! Jesus doesn’t get upset or nasty with them, but instead he says, “Pax Domini, be of good cheer, it is I, I AM, do not be afraid.” Then He gets into the boat with them; He doesn’t just float on past them, but He gets in and suffers with them.

This is our Lord. He’s not a lord who grants wishes or typically fixes all our problems, though He may. He’s not a lord who tells us how to fix our own problems and then goes off to universes unknown, though sometimes we may feel like this is how He works. But He is the Lord who gets into our boats of suffering and turmoil and gets dirty.

After Jesus calms the storm and safely guides the boat to the other side, it’s still pretty clear that the 12 disciples didn’t understand. In fact, they didn’t really understand all that much while He was with them; it was only after several years that they finally looked back and understood and wrote the Gospels.

And how often it’s the same thing in our lives. We are in the midst of some tumultuous thing in our lives, or maybe as a church, and we don’t see a solution. Maybe we try and row differently or maybe we try and bucket out the water that’s pouring in to try and stay afloat, but nothing seems to help. And then…we’re fine. Everything works out, and things settle down, and it may take three, four, five years or more before we finally look back and see how the Lord was right there in the midst of it all, suffering with us, and calming the storms and protecting us.

Noah was on that ship with all those stinky animals for a year. Surely there were some days where he and his family had no grasp of anything, where they thought they were all alone on a flooded world. And then, suddenly, they’re back on dry land. And Noah sings a song and builds an altar to the Lord.

It so amuses me when people accuse us Lutherans of “always saying the same things and singing the same hymns and using the same liturgies.” Our skulls are very thick, and we forget things very, very quickly. We don’t understand the miracles. We see them all the time here, but we don’t see them as miracles – we don’t understand – we don’t get it.

And so, we hear it again, and again, and again, because it takes a lifetime to sink in, and even then, we don’t really get it, do we? Think of how many times Jesus said, “Do not be afraid, trust in me, I will not leave you, be at peace,” and yet they forgot, and they forgot, and they forgot?

In the Old Testament, under the old covenants, God did things and established things and designed things to be repeated over, and over, and over, for generations. God put a rainbow in the sky, and Scripture says He did this so that HE would remember His covenant. People really struggle with this because they insist that God can’t forget, and that the Bible must be mistranslated. But no, the Scripture literally says that the Lord put the bow in the sky so HE would remember His covenant.

But let’s not accuse God of having a bad memory, instead let’s understand this properly. Jewish covenants always had a sign attached to them so that the people would remember their promise in keeping the covenants. In the case of God and the flood, the sign of the covenant was placed so HE would remember and not flood the earth again.

The fact is that WE forget…all the time. We hear, again and again and again, but we forget. But God never forgets; He remembers His covenants, and that rainbow in the sky is the continued sign that He continues to remember, and it’s repeated throughout the earth over and over and over. In fact, I’ve heard that there is always a rainbow displayed somewhere in the world at any given time. God NEVER forgets His promises.

And think about it – It’s been a rainbow for 5,000 years! And He sets an example for us. Noah didn’t have ores on the ark. He had to fully trust in God even when he didn’t want to, to keep that ship afloat and to bring it at last to its anchorage. When we start paddling our boats every which way hoping to make headway in the storm, we must be reminded, over and over and over again, to be at peace and trust that our Lord is with us and will save us.

This is why God established all the religious and ceremonial things He did for the ancient people of Israel. They needed the constant, steady, same old same old. And what happened whenever they swayed from God’s system? They went astray, they brought in idols and false gods, they forgot the Word of the Lord, they even lost it for a time.

The dinghy of your life, the boat of this church, the ark of the whole universal Christian church, it doesn’t need our cleverness or new ideas or revolutionary ways of rowing. We need Jesus. We need the same old, same old, the same promises of peace, protection, forgiveness, mercy, and love. We need the miracles of Word and Sacrament, the living and active Word of God faithfully preached and brought out to the neighbor through our confession in our day to day lives. We need the mystery of God’s body and blood in bread and wine, the miracle of the feast of heaven touching our tongues and keeping us on the vine of life. We need the stream of living waters which flow from the throne of heaven pouring on our heads in our baptisms where we die daily to sin and rise again in the newness of life. We don’t need cleverness and new ideas and new models of steering the ship to safety OUR way. We need Jesus.

When troubles come, when our church struggles from low or slow attendance, when families struggle, when health gives way, when life surges 100 feet over heads and crashes down upon us, we need Jesus and His Word and Sacraments to speak peace, comfort, assurance, and hope. We need Jesus to come and walk on the tumultuous sea and make them calm. We need Jesus to step into the boat with us and bear our suffering and calm our fears.

Fact is that Jesus has never really left the boat; He’s been with us the whole time. We don’t always understand, and we sometimes get into our own heads and let jealousy or envy, or big dreams steal us away from His Word. But he’s always with us and He has promised to get us on to the other side. And it’s just as simple as that. HE promised, HE does not go back on His promises even when we don’t understand His Word and works. He delivered Noah and his family. He delivered the 12 disciples, and He is delivering us, and He will complete His work, of this you can most certainly be sure. Do not fret, do not flail. Steady on. Amen.