In Us, With Us, Among Us
12th Sunday in Ordinary Time
By: Rev. Dr. Beverly Bingle
June 20, 2021
Mark told his audience lots of stories
that show Jesus with healing powers.
Jesus exercised demons,
and he healed people, including Peter’s mother-in-law,
a leper, a paralytic, and a man with a crippled hand.
Today’s story raises Jesus up,
above all the other charismatic sages with healing powers,
giving those first-century folks a different sense
of who Jesus is.
For example, Mark’s listeners would have heard
about the miracles worked by Apollonios of Tyana,
who was thought to master storms, fire, and other perils.
They would have known about the Greek gods:
Zeus, god of sky and thunder, and Poseidon, god of the sea.
In their own Hebrew tradition,
they most certainly would have known
the story of Jonah,
when God sent the storm
that led to Jonah’s being tossed overboard
into the whale’s mouth.
And they would have heard about God drying up the Jordan
so Joshua could pass over.
And they would have known about God
sending the wind to dry a path through the Red Sea.
And they would have known today’s reading from the Book of Job
about God creating the sea and controlling its storms.
So the dialogue that Mark puts in this gospel
carries a message for his listeners.
The disciples ask, “Who then is this
whom even wind and sea obey?”
and the answer is clear to them.
God is the one with the power to create storms and quiet them,
and Mark shows Jesus with the same power...
the power of God.
That’s the kind of insight that eventually led to the dogma
of a Trinitarian God:
Jesus does what God does, SO Jesus is God.
_______________________________
But the dialogue in this story
does more than plant the seed for future doctrine.
It carries a message for US
as we struggle with the storms of our time,
all the turmoil and stress we’re in,
in our world, our country, our city, and our own lives.
We’re in the same boat.
We’re in a climate crisis:
floods and drought and forest fires and hurricanes
and crop failures and water shortages and polluted air
plague our world.
We’re in a humanitarian crisis:
homelessness and joblessness and starvation
and violence and the pandemic swamp us.
Like the disciples, we cry out to God,
“Don’t you care that we’re perishing?”
And the answer to us
comes in the same two questions that Jesus asked:
“Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?”
_______________________________
In the Middle Eastern world, the Hebrew and Greek words
that are translated by the English word “faith”
are better translated, according to Dr. John Pilch,
as “personal commitment.”
Don’t you yet have faith?
Are you not personally committed?
Don’t you give yourself in ways that calm the storm?
Don’t you spend some of your life-time
writing officeholders about laws to stop gun violence,
ways to shore up our democracy, the need for a living wage?
Don’t you babysit grandkids and visit neighbors and phone friends
when you think you can be of help?
Didn’t you donate money to Holy Spirit
and then vote to pay two months’ rent
for a family you don’t even know?
Don’t you give your time and energy and money
to groups that give food, shelter, clothes, legal services,
education, and healthcare to the needy?
I KNOW you do all that, and MORE.
You ARE personally committed—
you have FAITH in the midst of the storms of life.
And that calms the storm.
As Laudato Si’ puts it, there is “an inseparable bond
between concern for nature, justice for the poor,
commitment to society... and interior peace.”
You do God’s work,
and God is, as we often say, in us, and with us, and among us.
St. Teresa of Avila put it this way:
“Christ has no body now but yours.
“No hands, no feet on earth but yours.
“Yours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion
on this world.
“Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good.
“Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world.
“Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes,
you are his body.”
The God in YOU calms the storm.
Amen!