Third Sunday after Trinity

Service

20 Jun

Overview

Storms are brewing this week: Job’s life has crashed around him in Job 38:1-11, and in our gospel Mark 4:35-41 the disciples’ boat is swamped by waves.

God answers Job’s questions (why me? What have I done to deserve this?) with a beautiful meditation on the deep, in which he describes the birth of the oceans as an infant God swaddles in clouds and darkness, and sets it limits like a parent reining in a toddler. Here the forces of creation are presented as an integral part of life: order is disrupted by disorder and chaos which brings forth new order.

I have often thought of God’s work in our lives and in our world as plate tectonics: the earth shakes, the mountains fall in order that new mountains may rise. It is painful but it is nevertheless a gracious act of creation and re-creation.

In the gospel God’s creative power is both experienced by and channeled through Jesus: a vulnerable human asleep on a cushion and described as “just as he is”. The best way, perhaps, to not just survive life’s storms but to experience their creative possibilities is in being ourselves, just as we are, before God.

Reading

Job 38:1-11

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:

“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a man,
I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?

“Or who shut in the sea with doors
when it burst out from the womb?—
when I made the clouds its garment,
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
and prescribed bounds for it,
and set bars and doors,
and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped’

Gospel

Mark 4:35-41

On that day, when evening had come, he said to them,
“Let us go across to the other side.”
And leaving the crowd behind,
they took him with them in the boat,
just as he was.

Other boats were with him.
A great windstorm arose,
and the waves beat into the boat,
so that the boat was already being swamped.
But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion;
and they woke him up and said to him,
“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

He woke up and rebuked the wind,
and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!”
Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.
He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”
And they were filled with great awe and said to one another,
“Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”