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“Peace! Be Still!”
In Sunday worship, I shared a poem by one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver. The poem, entitled “Maybe,” is written about Jesus calming the wind and the sea. As I mentioned in my sermon, Oliver begins her poem with “Sweet Jesus,” and by the time she is done, he is “as he always was—a thousand times more frightening than the killer sea.”
However appropriate it may be, I always hesitate to preach about fearing God. You always risk tapping into the trauma that so many carry as a result of bad theology which paints God as vindictive, judgmental, and mean. This is not who God is and we know this because it is through Jesus that we know God. But the awe-filled fear of God (and of Jesus) is most certainly a part of the human/divine relationship.
One part of Oliver’s poem that I did not comment on was her reference to what happens when the “holy” breaks into our world. When something wholly different from the norm, from our day to day, often repetitive lives disruptively enters in. For those on the boats around Jesus, this “holy, wholly different” was a sleepy-eyed Jesus calming the wind and the raging sea. And yet, Oliver writes with such honesty, “you know how it is when something different crosses the threshold—the uncles mutter together, the women walk away, the young brother begins to sharpen his knife.” In other words, everyone quickly moves on, ignoring the miracle that has just taken place. Oliver contends that these miracles speak to the soul, but that most of us humans do not receive such soul food, because “nobody knows what the soul is.”
The beauty of poetry (all art really) is that you can never truly know what the author is thinking or trying to convey. Oftentimes, even the author cannot fully articulate it. And so, the reader gets to absorb it and see where it leads them. In the end, it moves you in some way and this feeling is not the work of the mind, but is, rather, the soul processing whatever art it is consuming.
Our souls yearn for such beauty. In fact, I would go so far as to say, they depend upon it for nourishment. And in a world with so many meaningless distractions, with such shallowness, selfishness, and materialism, we often ignore the desperate cry of our souls for depth, meaning, and connection with each other and the divine. So distracted and self-absorbed, even if a raging sea were to turn suddenly “silky” right in front of our eyes, we may not even notice. Or if we do, if our souls are stirred, we quickly move on to the next task we must address. Even miracles become something we can quickly scroll by to get to the next meme or mildly entertaining video. As Oliver writes of the aftermath of divine action, “uncles mutter together, the women walk away, the young brother begins to sharpen his knife…forgetting how the wind tore at the sails before he rose and talked to it.”
We humans have always been prone to forgetting the miraculous. The Israelites relationship with God was a perpetual back and forth. God’s people would forget God’s miraculous liberation and steady provision and then God would, often impatiently, remind them. We continue to be in desperate need of these reminders from God, but the only way to receive them is to have souls that are open. The focus on efficiency and productivity and the materialism and shallowness that saturates our lives, makes it extremely difficult for our souls to find the sustenance they need. And this is why God commanded us to keep the Sabbath holy. Without holy rest, our souls cannot receive that which is holy. Even today, the winds and the seas continue to be stilled, but we must be prepared to see. It would seem that Jesus' command to the wind and sea was also meant for us - “Peace! Be still!”
Blessings,
Will
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