After the Taki-Too accident in Tillamook this weekend, the timing of this text seems almost creepy. But today’s story of the sleepy Jesus and out-of-control waves isn’t just for ocean-goers. This may be more than you want to know about your pastor, but that is what last Monday was like for me. Rick would tell you that, to an outside observer, that if it’s Monday, I’m cranky. Mondays are when I plan the work for the week. There is always more to do than is humanly possible. The exegesis and thematic statemtn for the next Sunday’s sermon is always on Monday, which seems unfair to me. Didn’t I just finish a sermon the day before? It’s kind of like the mother’s realization—I cooked all afternoon and supper is over, but I’m just going to have to feed them tomorrow. Last Monday I knew that things were going to be tight.

Besides my ordinary pastor routines, I was preparing for Vacation Church School, had four bulletins for presbytery to proofread, I had a couple of weddings coming up, Playtime with the pastor was starting, I had four inches of material to read before a meeting the next day, my filing was 18” deep, and I couldn’t find a thing. What happened next was that I realized it was June 16, the day estimated tax payments are due. I couldn’t find the coupon for making the payment. Melt down. Speaking of, “Teacher, is it no concern to you that we are perishing?” Do you ever have days like that? Weeks? Months? Times when life looks like the video fast-forward through the movie previews, only it’s your life that is fast-forwarding, and there is no plot continuity and nothing is going slow enough for you to catch the dialogue, let alone time to figure out who the characters are? Mornings when your feet have gotta already be moving when they hit the floor, because you have so much to do? The weight of the whole world is on your shoulders, everyone is counting on you.

Does this sound like your life? Or maybe the doc says you’ve got bad test results. You can’t take care of the problem that keeps you awake at night, because you can’t afford the insurance deductibles but you couldn’t afford to pick up the last prescription you got, which is probably why you are awake at night, and that only makes your problem worse. Or maybe you’ve been volunteering, and it’s too late, but you have to admit that you could use some of the very services you’ve been volunteering. What’s going on with you is too embarrassing to actually say to another person, at least a person that you know, so you try to handle it alone. You can’t ask the church for help, because then people would know! You come to church and cry through the service because everything reminds you how out-of-control your life is, and people are so nice to you that it just makes you feel worse. So you just stop coming. Is there someone you need to call to help them back to church?

Maybe your life seems fine, but the rest of the world is out of control. Look at the taxation and business and employment and educational situations in Oregon. Speaking of out of control! No money for human services, which is to bad, because times are so tough that human services are desperately needed—basic living things like food stamps, disability and unemployment compensation, decent housing for fragile people, basic medical care, prisoners being released way too early. If that’s not out-of-control enough for you, try convincing businesses to locate in Oregon when the voters don’t support the schools enough to fund them so that the workforce can be educated enough to be employable. Or think about this: the Bill of Rights and basic constitutional justice eroding to try to address the people who have nothing left to lose by blowing up other humans. Which do you choose?

Let’s go back to our story. Bible stories are so much safer. The disciples are only trying to cross the sea when the storm comes up. Some help Jesus is! Dozing! Who could have that much trust in God that they sleep through a storm? That’s the explanation scholars give--trust. Jesus had so much trust in God that, storm or not, perishing or not, he knew God was in charge. I ask you—who could have that much trust in God?

Theologically speaking, what put the disciples and Jesus in the boat that night was “boundary crossing”—going outside the normal bounds of society. This is the section of the gospel of Mark in which Jesus and his friends go back and forth between Jewish and Gentile territory. At each crossing, Jesus goes a little further into the radical nature of his ministry. With each departure and arrival he gets further and further from being a nice, safe Jewish boy. There’s a little bit of escaping from the too-muchness of what is going on, as if Jesus and his friends are “forced” to move on. While there is some sanctuary when they arrive at the next place, there is also a new understanding of what it means to be living into the kingdom of God. On this dark and stormy night, Jesus’ friends are confronted with the incredible notion that someone could sleep through a storm like this. And if that’s not enough, that someone could calm that sea.

God saves, all right. Thank God that it doesn’t depend on our trusting that God will save! But this is not a God who protects us by encouraging us to stay put. This is a God who calls us to move out and take risks. To cross the boundary is scary! The boundary is treacherous, and you are taking your life in your hands! Think of Gandhi, Anwar Sadat, Martin Luther King Jr., the young Washington woman who laid down in front of the Israeli bulldozer. Boundary crossers. “Pastor? Uh, pastor. All those people are dead. Those people died for crossing boundaries.” OK. But what are your choices? Think of some of the churches who give mouth-service to needing to change—to boundary crossing, to evangelizing new members, to moving out of their comfort zones—who go right on “living into” their deaths rather than change. Think of people whose marriages are death-dealing, but who would rather die than change their pattern of relating. Think of the talented writer who couldn’t leave the comfort of home and died with the masterworks not written.

It is not always death to change, nor is it always life to stay where you are. You bear a responsibility. You—all of you together, all of you individually—need to receive your Savior’s invitation to cross the boundaries. The One Who Saves also invites us to risk. Safety is not the point of living. God does not call us to success or safety. God calls us to faithfulness, to showing up, to keeping on, to hearing our call. And none of those things are necessarily safe. But here’s a story that might help you. It’s a story about a superhero wrestling a ferocious opponent. The hero struggles mightily, throwing the opponent down over and over, but it seems as if every time he succeeds in getting the enemy to the ground, the enemy rises stronger than ever. It turns out that the source of that foe’s strength is the earth itself. When our hero struggles and lifts his opponent away from the ground, away from his source of strength, he is able to overcome him.

Think about it. When we are separated from our source of strength, when we forget that our God is a God who saves, we can only be defeated. It’s not that we need to sleep through the storm in the back of the boat. But when the storms turn us to God, even the out-of-control times are times of strengthening. The bad and tragic and crazy-making turn to good. When they turn us to our God, when they remind us that it doesn’t depend on us alone, the out-of-control times are truly times of redemption. All praise to God! The God who is even now redeeming you.