Sunday 21^st June, 2009 – The Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time – ‘Who Then Is This?’

Readings: 1 Samuel 17: 1a, 4-11, 19-23, 32-49, Psalm 9: 9-20, Mark 4: 35-41

“Who then is this”?

In CS Lewis ‘The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe’ there’s a scene where Lucy, the youngest of the children, has just learned from Mr Beaver that Aslan, is a lion. “‘Is he quite safe?’ Lucy asks, ‘I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.’ ‘That you will, dearie, and make no mistake’, said Mrs Beaver, ‘if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.’ ‘Then, isn’t he safe?’ said Lucy. ‘Safe?’ said Mrs Beaver… ‘who said anything about safe? Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.’” In Narnia Aslan is the un-safe God, as is the God we encounter in our readings today.

In many ways over the past 3 weeks the God we’ve heard about and focused on has been a God many of us are perhaps uncomfortable with. On Trinity Sunday we find the mysterious God, the hard to pin down God, the God who is both 3 and 1 and as such is, inherently, a God of contradiction. Last week, Te Pouhere Sunday, we meet the God who sides with the marginalized, the God who demands justice, the God who refuses to put nice clear lines between faith, culture and politics. Now today, in perhaps both the most and least obvious ways of all, we meet the God who is dangerous, the God who sets our knees knocking, today we meet the un-safe God.

That’s most clear, of course, in our first reading, although in some ways its not.

We all know the story of David and Goliath, I’m sure. It’s a Sunday School classic that’s guarantied to get the boys at least sitting up and taking notice. It’s the story of the young, slightly puny, shepherd boy who takes on the enormous Goliath and wins. It’s given birth to innumerable Disney movies, all based on the obvious moral of the story, summed up in Vege Tales as ‘little guys can do big things too’.

Except of course the Disney movies seldom end the same way that the Bible story does. We leave out the next bit in the reading, where David takes Goliath’s own sword, hacks off his head, then carries it around like a handbag before presenting it to King Saul as a trophy. That’s not something we particularly want the Kidstime children reenacting in the parish lounge this morning, and nor is it the family-friendly focus the Disney movies aim for, so we skip that part, even though it’s clear this is where the story’s heading when, facing Goliath, David spells out his intentions: “This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head; and I will give the dead bodies of the Philistine army this very day to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the earth, so that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel.”

“So that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel.” We think we know the moral of this story, but we don’t. David and Goliath isn’t a story about the little guy beating the big guy, it’s about the big guy being beaten by the even bigger guy. This is about God making it clear that Israel belongs to God and anybody who goes up against Israel goes up against a God who is so big and so powerful that all he needs is a young boy with a slingshot to bring them down. The moral of this story is don’t mess with God or God’s people.

And we might quite like that moral. We might quite like the idea that God is on our side, that God has our backs, that God will deal harshly with those who choose to mess with us, except that often doesn’t seem to be the case.

Some of us don’t like that vision of God so much at all. That isn’t the God we know – the loving God, the comforting God, the God who binds us with bonds of human kindness. It is the God others know of course. It’s certainly the God Osama bin Laden knows, and the God George W Bush knows. This is the God who is the enemy of my enemies, who hates those whom I hate and punishes those who hurt me. This is the God of the Crusades and Jonestown and Waco and the God of every person who has ever strapped on explosives in the belief that theirs is a holy war and they are doing God’s work – this is their God, but not perhaps our God.

Maybe though this is not our God simply because we’ve never found ourselves in those situations? Maybe if we had been with the ancient Israelites, surrounded by Philistines, threatened with the loss of our land and our lives, maybe then this would be our God too? Certainly that’s been the case for others.

Martin Niemoeller was a theologian and pastor in Germany who vehemently opposed the Nazis and as a result was arrested and sent to a concentration camp where he witnessed unspeakable horrors. Later in life he said, “It took me a long time to learn that God is not the enemy of my enemies. He is not even the enemy of his enemies.” To which I want to say a loud Amen. Yet it seems pretty clear that the God in our Old Testament reading is indeed the enemy of Israel’s enemies, as is the God we read about often in the Old Testament, including the God in today’s Psalm, “You have rebuked the nations, you have destroyed the wicked; you have blotted out their name forever and ever.” This God remains a vengeful God, a violent God, an un-safe God.

Of course, this is also an Old Testament God, and many would be quick to say that this isn’t the God of the New Testament, the God of Paul and Peter and Jesus, which leads us to our Gospel reading this morning.

Again, here we have a well known reading that’s become something of a Sunday School classic. Jesus and his disciples are crossing to the other side of the lake when a great storm blows up, tossing the boat from side to side, and the disciples are becoming increasingly terrified while Jesus is sitting at the back fast asleep.

I always smile when I hear this story because it reminds me of my younger days when my friends and I used to love catching the ferry from Wellington to Picton on really rough days. We’d wait until the boat was really rolling and people were turning quite green and then we’d head to the cafeteria – this was in the days before the ferry’s had such fancy things as cafes – and we’d order baked beans on toast and watch those around us run for the sides. I’m not sure I’ve still got the same constitution, but this story reminds me of when I did.

We know how the story goes I’m sure. Jesus wakes up and calms the storm, saves the disciples and everything is wonderful. The moral, once again, seems clear – no matter the storms and turmoil of life, Jesus is with us and will protect us as long as we have faith in him, which is a nice, comforting message for sure. Unfortunately, it’s not the message Mark really wants to give here.

Let’s look at what actually happens; Jesus is asleep, the storm comes up, the disciples are frightened, so they wake Jesus up with the words, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” Note that they don’t wake him up saying, ‘Lord, save us!’ Why would they? They’ve begun to know Jesus better, they’ve seen that he’s a nice guy and a great teacher and an inspirational speaker who can even manage some incredible healings, but none of that suggests he can do anything about a storm. All they’re really doing is saying, ‘how can you sleep at a time like this?’ But Jesus wakes up and says to the storm, ‘Peace! Be still!’ “and there was a dead calm”, and then he looks at the disciples and says, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”

Now I have the utmost sympathy for the disciples in this case. They’re in a small boat during a fierce storm and they’re scared. I can relate! I feel the same way every time I get on a plane. This isn’t about faith it’s about the sure and certain knowledge that getting shipwrecked during a violent storm or falling out of the sky from 20 thousand feet is not a good thing. But the rightness or wrongness of the disciple’s response isn’t the point of this story either, the point is this: “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?”

Who then is this? The point is this isn’t the Jesus they had come to know. This isn’t the Jesus they thought they knew. This is something else entirely, something beyond human, something awesome and in a way just as frightening as the storm had been. This Jesus is still good, of course, but as Mrs Beaver makes clear to little Lucy, being good and being safe are not necessarily the same things at all.

I’m not sure that I want a Jesus who can calm storms and still the seas. It sounds good on the surface, certainly, particularly when I’m flying, I’d like a Jesus who can smooth out the bumps and take care of any problems. But the fact is ships do sink and people do drown and planes do crash, and I’m not at all sure I want a Jesus who can stop all those things, but doesn’t.

Nor am I sure I want a God who’s going to deal to all my enemies for me. You see, the problem is I can be quite a petty person at times – we all can. If someone hurts me, I want to hurt them back. If someone takes something from me, I want to take something from them. And if I can do that, if I can have my revenge, knowing that God is on my side, that God has my back, then that makes it even better.

But what if the other person thinks God’s on their side too? What if they took my stuff in the first place because they knew God wanted them to? And what if they win? Does that make their God better than my God, or does it just mean I picked the wrong side? Or is it just wishful thinking hoping that God is on anyone’s side at all? As the political activist, Ann Lamott once wrote, “You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."

The truth is, I’m not altogether comfortable with the Jesus who calms the storm and I’m decidedly uncomfortable with the God who encourages and enables David to decapitate Goliath. Neither of these images matches my own experiences of God, my own understandings of God, or to use the language I used on Trinity Sunday, my own imaginings of God. Yet for all my discomfort, here they are, these images of God captured on the pages of scripture, part of the wisdom and history or God’s people for thousands of years, pictures of a God who is anything but comfortable, a long way from tame, a God who, no matter how good, is ultimately un-safe.

So how do I deal with that God? I don’t have any simple answers to that question – I suspect if I did I wouldn’t need to ask the question at all – but I do believe I have to live with it. There’s no doubt that for me at least I’d rather ignore the David and Goliath God and even the storm-calming Jesus, but in all honesty I can’t. I can’t because to do so would be to ignore the fact that God is bigger than my God and yours. There is and always will be more to God than you and I can grasp or understand and within the small parts that we can not all of it will be to our liking and that is just the way it is.

Of course, the God I know today is also very different to the God I knew when I was younger. Lucy’s questions about the good but not so safe Aslan continue in the next Narnia book, Prince Caspian. Meeting the great lion again, Lucy notes that he seems much bigger than the last time she saw him. “I have not grown,” Aslan responds. “But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”

May God help us all to continue to grow, no matter how uncomfortable that may be. Amen.