“Knowing God, Learning from Christ”
A Sermon
Preached by the
Rev. Jean
Niven Lenk
Sunday,
June 24, 2012
First
Congregational Church of Stoughton, United Church of Christ
Text: Mark 4:35-41
This past week, students celebrated
the last day of school and we all celebrated the astronomical first day of
summer – and a scorcher it was at that.
The sacred and secular days of Memorial Day, Pentecost, Children’s
Sunday and Father’s Day, are now behind us.
Even the choir is now on hiatus.
There can be no doubt that the church program year is over, and we are
officially into summer.
It would be easy and natural to
think that this would be a good time to take a break from church; in fact,
judging from the empty pews, it looks like that’s what a lot of people are
doing, so I am really preaching to the choir, as it were.
But the universal Church takes a
different stance. You will notice that
our paraments and my stole are the color green.
This is not just because we think green is pretty or that we thought it
would make good fashion sense to be color coordinated. Green is the liturgical color for this period
in the church year, representing growth, and during these months ahead, while
flowers are blooming and trees are bearing fruit and vegetables are ripening on
the vine, we too are to be growing – growing in our faith.
This period on church calendar has
been given the unfortunate name of “ordinary time.” When I hear the word “ordinary,” I
immediately think of “not special.” And
put into the context of the church, we might infer that “ordinary time” becomes
the season when God’s presence is not center stage; when we are so used to
God’s creation that we fail to notice a beautiful sunset; when we’re so
accustomed to our loved ones we take them for granted; when we’re so used to
the blessings of our life that we don’t think much at all about them or their
source. Not special. And during this “ordinary time,” we might let
our faith life go into maintenance mode or forget it altogether. Is this what happens to us during these
summer months? Church and faith and God
become ordinary to us?
Make
no mistake -- that is not what the church fathers and mothers intended! “Ordinary Time” takes its name from the Latin
word “ordinal,” which means numbered.
During half the church year, we observe seasons such as Advent, Lent,
and Eastertide and celebrate specific acts within the story of salvation. But the weeks between Pentecost, which we
celebrated a few weeks ago, and Advent, which begins next December, are
numbered. Today is the fourth week after
Pentecost, otherwise known as the 12th week in ordinary time. And far from being a time for our faith to
become ordinary, or our focus to be turned away from God, or for our blessings
to become taken for granted, these summers months are to be a time when we
focus on growing our faith.
How
do we do that? By coming to know God,
and by learning from Christ. We come to
know God by lifting up our deepest yearnings and needs in prayer, by giving God
our praise in worship, by reading the story of God and God’s people in
scripture. We come to know God by
serving God’s family within and beyond these walls, by developing
meaningful, authentic relationships with each other, and by giving generously
in response to all the God has generously given to us. We call these “spiritual practices” because
we are not automatically good at them – we have to do them over and over – practice them – to imbed them in our
souls so they will become as natural and as necessary to us as breathing.
Another word for these spiritual practices
is “disciplines.” But we don’t like that
word, do we? Discipline -- we
automatically equate it with punishment.
But the word comes from the Latin root “to learn,” and wise parents know
that the point of discipline is to teach or train.
And that’s what spiritual
disciplines do. Prayer, worship reading
the bible, serving, nurturing spiritual relationships, and giving are just a
few of an array of habits of the soul that open us to the wonder and mystery of
God’s active presence which transform our relationships and our lives. They enable us to place ourselves before God
so that God can transform us. These
practices are not a mechanistic approach to faith, nor are they an end in
themselves. Rather, they are the path
which places us where transformation can take place. They are a means of receiving God’s grace. The task for us then during this “ordinary
time,” this time of growing our faith, is to cultivate our daily lives into
fertile ground in which God can bring growth and change.
And in the process of engaging in
these spiritual disciplines, or practices, or marks of discipleship, we become
disciples. Notice that word is also from
the Latin for teach – discipline, disciple.
And a disciple is someone who is being taught and trained, one who
follows and learns. That’s what the
disciples did, they followed Jesus as preached and taught and healed, and they
learned from Jesus, whom they called rabbi, meaning teacher.
But when we hear the word, our
immediate reaction might be, “Oh, I could never be a disciple! Disciples were perfect and faithful and
true.” But that is not what we read in
the Gospels. Far from being paragons of
virtue and shining examples of faith, the disciples were more often slow
learners, failing to understand Jesus’ parables and his veiled sayings, failing
to recognize who Jesus was or why he must die.
We see this happening in the story of
Jesus’ stilling of the storm. After a
long day of teaching, Jesus gets into a boat with his disciples to cross the
Sea of Galilee. But as familiar land
recedes into the horizon, the skies darken and the winds begin to howl and the
waters start to churn.
And while the disciples are
frantically trying to prevent their boat from sinking, Jesus is fast asleep in
the stern. In their despair, they cry
out to him, “Do you not care that we are perishing?” He gets up, commands the
wind to stop and the sea to be still, and then turns, and asks his followers
"Why are you afraid? Have you still
no faith?"
The disciples have been following
Jesus for years, but while they admire and respect him, the disciples’ do not
yet understand that Jesus is God in earthly form. They have listened to Jesus, but they have not
recognized his voice as God's. They have
watched him, but they have not grasped that his actions are divine. And the minute they hit a crisis, the
disciples experience panic and frenzy rather than the centered and secure peace
of God. In the moment of their greatest
need, the disciples throw overboard everything they have learned from Jesus,
everything Jesus has tried to teach them, through his words and actions, about
God.
This story says a lot about his
disciples – then and now – and how we fail to truly know and understand and
trust in God. Like the disciples, we get
angry at God for not helping, we accuse God of not caring. That’s what happens when we substitute
knowledge about God for knowing God, for a relationship with God, substituting an intellectual
understanding of our mind for a connection with God that is deeply rooted in
our souls.
When Jesus stills the storm, it
catches the disciples’ attention, it wakes them up to who Jesus is -- and in
listening to and learning from Jesus, they come to know God more fully,
experiencing the wholeness and fulfillment and joy and transformation that
comes from a relationship with God.
If you don’t yet have a relationship
with God, “ordinary time” -- this season for spiritual growth -- is an
invitation to do something about it.
Rather than keeping God on the sidelines or taking God’s blessings for
granted or letting our faith life go into maintenance mode, this is the time to
become a disciple of Christ, to learn from Jesus, to become an apprentice of
the Master, to watch his methods and put them into practice, to listen to his
teachings and apply them in our everyday lives.
This is the time to throw out life-as-usual, and develop a life-giving,
life transforming relationship with God, who will change our lives from the
inside out.
And if you ask me, that sounds anything
but ordinary! Amen.
