Mark 4: 35-41

2 Corinthians 6: 1-13

Open Hearts

June 25, 2006

Rev. Elizabeth Macaulay

I want to start from this concept this morning.

I want to affirm the pregnant power of chaos.

I’m not saying it is comfortable or fun or easy to be in the midst of it.

But chaos is one of the most powerful experiences we can find ourselves in. Out of it, God created all that is. And still does.

I don’t know, Matt and Pam, but would you say that you have come to know chaos in a whole new way since Amanda Jean was born?

A life beyond your control, into which you have been thrown without a real sense of how the heck you will do this thing called raising a child?

That’s chaos.

And, as you are already finding, it is a time of immense power. You are swept into the wind of fierce love and fear and you will find your life stormy often because of this angel child you bring for baptism today.

Chaos.

We have been trained to fear and tame it. We have been equipped with social structures that seek to keep chaos at bay -

For example, gender roles that try to tell us in no uncertain terms what it means to be a man or a woman, a husband or a wife. Gender roles that have come to have great power because if we tinker with them, we might find ourselves in the midst of chaos and we want to avoid that at all costs.

We try to keep chaos at bay by structuring our lives and psyches so that we can avoid chaos, sometimes at all costs, sometimes including the rights of others.

Companies like Franklin Covey and the organizing stores bank on our need for order. The longing for order in the midst of chaos is a reason many of us seek out faith community and worship opportunities.

I want to be clear that it is not a bad thing to want order.

It’s just that in our insistence upon it, we sometimes we can become rigid and insistent that all people share our sense of order. And, sometimes in our quest for order, we miss the most pregnant and creatively rich times of our lives.

We find ourselves in today’s text in the boat with some disciples terrified by the power of chaos.

Why were the disciples in the boat on that night? Why were they crossing the sea, beyond the chicken crossing the road answer that they sought to get to the other side?

They were in the boat, on the surface of the sea - bodies of water in dreams and literature are often a symbol for the spiritual - to cross over into the land of the Gentiles. Those who they believed might be blessed by the teachings of Jesus. Those whom their culture had taught them - in it’s need to maintain order in the midst of chaos - they should not interact with or much care about.

The boat load of disciples was on its way into new ministry territory with a people they had been taught to fear.

And on its way into new mission territory, a storm came up. That boat load of disciples met with the reminder that chaos is real. Bending boundaries unleashes chaos. Life can feel frightening and unmanageable and threatened when we set out into new territory.

And in the midst of it all, when the terror is most intense, when it seemed that the only thing left to do was to give up, those disciples remembered a crucial thing. In the boat with them was the Christ. Present. With them. All they had to do was to remember to call upon his presence and reassurance.

We find ourselves in similar seas. We, being the church. We, as individuals. We are called to head into territory where the word of Jesus is not known. We are called to clamber into the boat and take off for ministry fields we can’t even imagine.

And it is frightening, this setting out.

As a church, we are making a commitment to do so. We voted at the Ad Board last Tuesday to add a second worship service. We’re doing that because we believe that there are people living not across a lake, but across the street, who would be blessed by hearing the teachings of Jesus.

We believe that diversifying our worship life will help us to reach out more effectively so much that we are willing to set out on the sea of chaos. We believe it so much that we will open our doors and adapt our treasured Sunday morning lives because we want to share what we have been given.

We are a group of disciples getting into the boat intentionally, knowing that storms are certain.

Why?

Listen. In an article in yesterday’s Star Tribune, it was reported that we are becoming an increasingly isolated society. Nearly one in every four Americans has no close confidents, and the circle of friends people can share their hearts with has shrunken considerably the past twenty years.

We have become a people who relate through electronics. Many of us long for a community of people with whom we can ask the essential question posed by John Wesley:

“How is it with your soul?” Not only ask the question, but answer it, in a community grounded in grace.

We are a lonely people, we are, and the church and the message of Jesus is EXACTLY the antidote to the pain of that loneliness.

But in order to share that good news, we have to set out across the sure chaos.

We have to be willing to enter the storm of change.

But we can do this hard work, because we believe that Jesus travels with us. The power of God’s holy presence, powerful enough to calm any storm.

If we have the presence of mind to remember his presence. If we have the presence of mind to remember why we got in the boat in the first place. If we have the presence of mind to call upon him when we are sure we are going to be swamped in the sea of fear.

Today’s second reading comes from a church seeking to do just that. It was the early church trying to sort out what it means to live in the way of Jesus in the midst of so much chaos.

Paul had this to say about when it is the right time to cross over the sea.

THIS is the acceptable time, people of Jesus. God’s grace IS. Ours is not to put obstacles in the way of ourselves or others, but to work together with open hearts to share the love of God we have come to know in Christ Jesus.

In a community where ¼ of us have no human person to share their hearts with, it is near criminal for any church - and certainly for this one - to sit on shore and hold tightly to what we have simply because we are too frightened to set out into what we know will be chaos.

We live in a world starved for love - for human and holy connection.

Jesus is in the boat with us, compelling us to decide that we must row toward the way of sharing love. That’s the call of our faith.

Poet Mary Oliver shares the power of that decision in her poem West Wind #2, found on the front cover of your bulletin:

You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worthy the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the church of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks - when you hear that unmistakable pounding - when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and streaming - then row, row for your life toward it.

God, grant us the courage to open our hearts and row out into that which awaits. Together in Christ.

Amen