Sermon for the 23rd of June - Fourth Sunday after Trinity

A couple of months ago, my brother went on a 10-day Vipassana Buddhist retreat in Herefordshire. It included a practice of meditating for 10 hours a day, starting at 4 o’clock in the morning. Along with a very strict diet, no talking, no books. It was the hardest thing which he has ever subjected himself to.

One of the many things he came away learning is what was described as equanimity. We receive a lot of stimuli, positive and negative, and equanimity is the ability to acknowledge those stimuli, and not to react. There are other ways of saying the same things.

Being aware. An awareness and realisation that there’s nowhere else you need to be, or have, to bring peace.

Perhaps you can remember a time when you’re on holiday and you realise how easy, when you are not striving towards any concrete goal. One of the fifth century Fathers put this in an unusual way, saying that we must establish ourselves firmly inside our skin with nothing protruding outside.

Another way of expressing this is as detachment. Being detached, not in the sense that we don’t care about anyone, or we aren’t compassionate towards yourself or others. But we are able to choose to respond from a place of equanimity or calm. We know that when someone is drowning, we must jump in to rescue him or her, but not let ourself be seized by them, because then we would both drown. It’s the ability to detach or disengage in order to engage ourselves in a new way.

So, what do you do when there is a storm raging, and you are on a boat and you think you’re going to drown? Perhaps we can view today’s Gospel as a metaphor for life. Life throws all manner of things at us…. Difficult relationships at work or with family or friends, the failure of a exams, loss of job, loss of confidence, sudden illness or grief. Storms of life.

How can we respond with equanimity, detachment, awareness, calm?

We might have a tendency to panic, like the disciples on the boat. And that’s understandable.

Or, our tendency might be to flee. You may know of the polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz [Shien – kia – vich] who gave us the picture of St Peter leaving Rome at the moment of persecution. And at the gates of the city he meets Christ who is on his way there. Peter asks him, in that famous phrase: Quo Vadis, ‘Where are you going Lord?’. Jesus replies, ‘I am going back to Rome, to suffer and die there because you are leaving it’.  Peter, fleeing, again in the face of danger. It’s a helpful reminder that there’s no such thing as a perfect saint.

And perhaps that’s our instinct: when life becomes dangerous and we enter stormy waters, we pray, Lord, deliver me. Take me away.

Or, our response might be to turn to drugs to anaesthetise our turmoil – drugs of over-working, over eating, over drinking, or whatever.

All of these responses are understandable. But Jesus wants us to learn a different path when we experience the storms of life. There is a way of calm equanimity in which navigate life’s storms: recognising that it isn't avoiding the storms, or by fleeing, but acknowledging the discomfort of uncertainty and stress, to accept not knowing the answers, or our confusion about how to respond to painful challenges.

There is no pill you can take to fast-track this way of being. I believe it comes from a practice of prayer – a regular practice of stillness, silence, contemplative prayer.

It’s from this place that we discover deep down the presence of God alongside us, through those storms. It’s knowing God’s gentle, caring presence, that will never leave us, nor forsake us. In Mark’s story of the storm, the obvious fact is that Jesus is just as present in the raging water as he is in the soothing calm that follows.

We may not wish for challenging stormy times for ourselves or others. But often, the harsh realities of this broken, disordered world are what draw people to faith.  We seek the good because we experience the bad.  We yearn for justice because injustice surrounds us.  We pray for calm because chaos brings us to our knees.

It’s after the vicious storm that the disciples recognise the holy in their midst.  It’s after the boat fills with water that they are “filled with a great awe.”  It’s after Jesus accompanies them in the chaos that they realize who he is.  May the same be true of us.     

 
Reference

Debie Thomas. Don't You Care? 13 June 2021.