So I had some unanswered questions during the sermon on the end of Mark 3.  Namely, why were the disciples so shocked that he calmed the storm when they seemed to be asking him to do just that?  Which leads to: Why did they wake him up in the first place?

As we can see by their reaction, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” that they were more scared that he calmed the storm than they were by the storm.  So what does that mean about this statement, “Teacher, do you not care if we perish?” ? It seems like they wanted him to be awake and worrying with them instead of sleeping.  Or perhaps they just wanted to complain.  Then when he actually did something about the problem they were shocked.  We never do that do we, ask God for something, without believing it will actually happen?  Or just complaining about our situation without doing something or actually asking God for what we want.  We really are very fatalistic, like the Muhammedan, we think God does whatever he wants and we really can’t make a difference with our prayers or actions.  We talk about prayer as a means of aleviating our frustrations or as something we are supposed to do, but it couldn’t be that the God of the Universe would actually respond–to us.

Rembrandt, Christ in the Storm on the Lake of Galilee

But I think this is precisely what God is rebuking them for.  They lacked faith.  We think of faith as some sort of personal feeling, but faith must have an object.  Faith that, fill in the blank.  Faith that this or that will happen or not happen.  Faith in a particular thing at a particular time.  Regardless of who Jesus was, the disciples were not taking their faith in God very seriously.  If they feared for their lives they should have prayed.  Their worries were not doing any good.

Time and time again we see Jesus telling people that their faith has healed them.  “And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him, and when they had made an opening, they let down the bed on which the paralytic lay. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven”  They had real problems, and they had real faith that those problems were not the way it should be and that the God of the Universe and his representative Jesus could set those problems to right.  Faith believes that you do everything to make things the way they should be. No matter the difficulty of the circumstances or the roadblocks put up, even by Jesus himself (Mark 7:24-30 ).  Keep pushing, keep petitioning, nothing is written in stone, except the compassion of our God.  Faith knows that blessings are often disguised as hard work or tragedy.  And faith knows that even if you don’t get what you want, that it all must be done for your good.

But these are Jesus’ disciples and they were worried about their lives and a storm.  They knew he was the Messiah, they knew they were chosen to usher in his Kingdom.  Yet now they were sure that they were going to get wiped out by this storm and the whole movement would be over.  They had no personal, individual faith as proved by the fact that they acted incorrectly in this real, actual situation.  They didn’t say “Jesus stop the storm”.  They didn’t follow his example, they worried.

There is also an historical element to faith.  Faith isn’t just blind it appreciates the workings of God it has witnessed or heard about in the past.  I was struck recently by the profound way in which our entire country takes everything for granted. As with most things it is the fault of the Church, we have been unappreciative and so the world has followed suit.  Now they take this great edifice of civilization which has been built by Christianity and use it to ridicule Christians.  For example the whole notion of a hospital was a Christian invention.  Before Christendom, the sick and weak were left outside the city gates to die, unwanted children were left on the road side, this was normal.  But Christians came along and built hospitals and orphanages.  Yet today we think we have a right to hospitals, and Christians who want to mix sound economic wisdom with the blessings of modern medicine are abused for denying someone something.  Many ideas we take for granted like freedom of speech, high view of women, love for your fellow man, tolerance of those who differ from you, science, etc. all things which were very rare on this earth before Christianity are now used to bash Christians.

We live in a time of unparalleled wealth and prosperity.  And again instead of appreciating how rare this is in human history, it is used as a way to mock Christians, because some people are not as wealthy as others.  Never mind that even the poorest of the poor live much better than most of humanity has.

We live in a time of unparalleled peace.  War is about the most common thing to happen to large groups of humans on this planet.  But we enjoy the luxury of not having to participate in war and to hardly feel it’s effects.  Yet people think we can disband the military threat that makes this peace possible and they complain about every dollar spent on it.

College graduates enter a world with unprescedented opportunities.  Technology enables them to take any idea and almost instantly turn it into reality.  Financing is available, people are available, machines are available which our grandparents could only dream of, all at the touch of a few buttons.  Yet if they are not handed a job making what their parents made after a life of hard work, they go protest in a bunch of city parks like children.  They are children, but not in the good sense, the faith sense, in which case the faith of a child always trusts that things are ok that God is working things out and that they just need to learn to appreciate it.  We, the church, need to appreciate it if we ever want to see it done by the world.