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let us again pray, Oh Lord! Uphold me , that I'm a uplift the amen. It seems that in these days of global weirding, we can hardly turn around without encountering a new story about a

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storm hurricane sandy up in the northeast, back in the fall, that monster storm that dumped feet of snow on much of the same region this past weekend and then that tornado that tore through Hattiesburg Mississippi on

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sunday night, I was watching the news coverage of it. They were playing the Youtube video of a storm chaser who captured the huge funnel crowd blocks wide , throwing up debris on both sides of it as

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it plowed through downtown Hattiesburg, blowing down houses and buildings and tossing trucks around like toys. The storm Chasers own voice could be heard as he kept his camera on the site. This is insane. This

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is insane! And somebody on CNN said there's only so much that we can predict about these storms. After all these storms have a life of their own . It is as if each one is alive,

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this is insane. It is as if each one is a lot in this text from Mark's Gospel today . It is also like that. Mark's language makes it clear that nature has come alive and has a

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demonic force all its own. Jesus and his disciples have gotten into a boat and they've sent out upon the sea of galilee and jesus says to them, let us go across to the other side. Literally

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the verb here means crossover, let us cross over to the other side and in the greek, according to my friend, dr brian blunt. That particular verb suggests difficulty. If it were a cakewalk instead

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of a dangerous crossing, Mark could have used another verb, but Mark only uses this particular verb in this place and one other place in his Gospel. Another difficult moment when jesus says, it is easier

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for a camel to cross over the eye of a needle than for a wealthy person to get into the kingdom of God. This is not by any means a normal day by day, dainty neutral little verb

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, not a dainty neutral little occasion, because crossing over takes some effort. The physics of nature are not agreeable. Here says blunt the whole universe, it seems, is opposed to this boat trip.

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Here's a jewish teacher who intends to cross over to the gentiles side of the sea of galilee, where there's a demo Niac waiting for him in a herd of swine who will receive his demons and people who

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are living lives that are ritually unclean. There is danger and multiple examples of otherness in this text and because of the boundary breaking, outrageousness of that idea , the idea that jesus and his disciples could blithely

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cross over to all of that, the universe itself will just naturally resistant and it will be as hard for jesus to cross over for the other side as it is for a wealthy person to climb through the

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night deposit box at Wells Fargo Bank. So sure enough, as Jesus and his disciples are pointing their boat resolutely toward the gentiles, nature itself has to react without any warning. And angry, insane storm

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blows up and just like that storm and Hattiesburg, it too, has a life of its own. It is as if it is alive, waves that seem to be possessed by demons throw themselves at the

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boat, they jump up like creatures in the night to confront and hopefully to drown jesus and the disciples as they're crossing over to the other side, because let's face it, we can never be sure that

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things were altogether safe on the other side, that's why we have our side and they have their side , our side of town and their side of town sides our boundaries, don't you see they are useful

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because they separate jews from gentiles, liberals from conservatives , republicans, from democrats, gaze from straits, presbyterians, from everybody else. Tea partiers from moderates , our side of the sea of galilee, from

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their side of the sea of galilee, what would we do without sides, jesus says to his disciples , let's cross over to the other side. The other side is the land of the jerry, seems

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they are unclean people, Is it a good idea to cross over to the other side? Well, nature doesn't seem to think so because doing such a thing as well, so unnatural. But Jesus has

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a view of the realm of God That does not privilege one side over another, jesus is forever crossing the boundary that separates the clean from the unclean. And in this boat trip from one side to the

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other, not even nature will have its way because jesus finally rebukes the wind and says to the sea , well it's translated peace be still, but perhaps a more accurate translation would be shut up and the

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wind and the sea shut up. Now note that is just here when things are called, that the disciples become afraid, really afraid, were attempted to read this story. And assume that here in this

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moment of calm, jesus begins to debrief with his disciples as a teaching moment. We assume kind of like after the first sermon you do and maybe preaching and the professor and your fellow students sit here in

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this chapel for a few minutes for the debriefing kind of like what some of you probably did in Turkey last month after a particular day of seeing a particular site. And you all got pulled together to process

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in some way what it was that you had seen . So maybe this is a teaching moment right? Where jesus is gonna debrief with these disciples and ask them to process their feelings about how rough the water

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was back there and maybe to say why were you afraid? But notice that that question, why were you afraid doesn't come up in the past tense? So I'm thinking that here in this moment of calm

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is when these disciples finally come to grips with the fact that they are afraid not were afraid are afraid of the power of jesus which they are just realizing is greater than the demonic power of the storm.

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Who then is this that even the wind and the sea obey him, they are saying to one another as they are quivering in fear and what jesus actually says to them is why are you afraid? Have

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you still no faith? They are afraid because this one to whom they have attached themselves is not as taymor as reasonable as they thought he might be. And there they are in the middle of the sea

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of galilee. He is instead one who is more unpredictable than the weather, the one who is there in that boat with them to whom they are now by necessity attached for better or for worse, is

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not afraid of God and certainly not afraid of storms . Therefore, he is also unafraid of crossing the boundaries in the world. He's not afraid of that kind of very frightening work. He's not afraid of

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any of the boundaries that section off humanity into little zip codes and ghettos of familiarity in which if left to our own devices, we would live forever. No, he's willing to mix it up. He's

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willing to cross those boundaries. He is one who on behalf of the realm of God, is willing to extend his hospitality and his mercy and his justice and love to all of those on the other side

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of any boundary you can name, which means that he is not safe. He is willing to go and to take with him through the stormy and demonic fewer caused by all of his boundary crossing all of

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these disciples. And that means they are not safe either. Who says faithfulness is safe. They know that now he is not safe as they float there on that suddenly be calmed sea and they ponder all

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of this, don't let that calm sea fool you . They aren't there in that boat Wiping their brows and high fiving each other and saying, Wow, that was a close one. No, they are

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now officially afraid of this man's power. It's not an accident. Therefore, that Mark's Gospel describes the calm of that C as well. It could be translated great calm. But the people wise, I

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think in the translation of the new, revised standard version of the bible, said Dead Call, because Mark is writing his Gospel with a church in mind in which jews and gentiles or forever negotiating their way

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across the cultural and theological boundaries that still stand between them. And until Mark can help this church get over all these boundaries, any kind of calm in their life is premature. It too is a dead

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call. So mark is communicating with them on two levels. He's describing the world beyond us as it always is. But he's also describing the world that they're experiencing right there inside their little sanctuary. Maybe

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in this moment, it too is a dead see bereft of any moral energy at all. The moral energy maybe was back there in that storm, whatever that was for them. Where there were some important

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values at stake where there was something worth fighting for , worth giving your life for and even the universe itself wanted in on the action. But now, for whatever reason, they're floating around too, that

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church and a dead call. That happens, you know, every once in a while at church rejects a pastor, not because he or she was incompetent or ham fisted or lazy or unloving, but rather

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because he or she was too good. He or she was faithfully committed to leading that flock across boundaries that they had no interest in crossing. And later , sometimes I find myself in conversation with some parishioner

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in that place, which goes something like this. Yeah, we just couldn't keep so and so we had to let him go. They were just too far ahead of us. Always stirring us up,

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always making us think, always leading us into the fray. We've got a fella now who just lets us be like, we want to be just stands up in that pulpit and tells the best jokes just

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makes us laugh. Doesn't insist that we poke our heads up above the bunker we live in. We just we just love him. That's the dead call . Except in a case like this. They don't

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even have the good sense to be afraid of it . It's often the case in our national imagination. We look wistfully Back to the 1950s when everything seems so called. Our churches were at their peak in

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size. Everybody was so well mannered. There was no unrest that we can remember if we can remember that far back. No, in politeness, everybody was just marching in the same direction. Right,

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go rent the series Mad Men and watch it across some long weekend. And you will understand what I'm talking about. Everything was so stable and calm in the series. Mad Men. When a woman gets

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excited about something, maybe even quote unquote hysterical. There is a man who will say now, calm down. Everything was so called. Never mind that nobody much dared step out of whatever boundary universe they

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lived in. Never mind that nobody much crossed over to the other side because such a journey could have killed them. Never mind at that time was hardly a paradise for women or people of color or anybody

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who was different in some way. Everything was just so called. When you listen to certain voices describe what happened next, civil rights, the women's movement , various other liberation movements, the moral reaction to

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an immoral war. It sounds like all hell broke loose storms everywhere, the whole universe churning up wage like creatures in the night. Hell bent on destroying these various boundary breaking efforts. And it depends on

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your point of view as to whether it was all hell breaking loose or all heaven breaking loose sometimes in the middle of such a storm. It's frankly kind of hard to tell as for those disciples who have

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gotten a taste of these storms, it is there in that dead calm that they may be assessing how much more frightening now the calm is. But then the storm now that they know what's at stake,

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it may be that that dead calm is creating for them a new fear in this semester ahead. I invite you to monitor yourselves as you experience this community , especially those of you who are brand new here

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. If something a professor says in class, makes you mad. If something you read in Cairo's makes you want to eat nails. If something gets said from this pulpit that you think may be a Harris

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if in some way, your experience here starts to feel more like a stormy sea than a placid, gone, then consider the possibility the possibility that jesus christ himself has drawn near to stir up something important

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within you to wake you up. Maybe as you might otherwise wish to sleep through a very important store . We can become accustomed to whatever dead calm we manage, even in these stormy times, to create

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for ourselves, we can become content with our particular ghetto ized zip codes and the sameness and the safety that they offer. People who look talk, think just like us, they can lull us into a

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kind of moral slumber in which we make our peace prematurely with such calm because once jesus has stirred something up, such calm is hardly a gift, but is a danger greater than any storm. It is

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precisely when we're living in such call that we need more than anything else. A savior who comes alongside to wake us up, two rows us back into the boundary crossing work. No matter how uncomfortable are

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frightening that feels until those boundaries that separate us from one another are broken down and God's future, rain comes to rule in the present and our best, After all, we know, don't we? That

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we would rather stay in the boat with him than play it safe in any other setting that may be