still small voice of calm

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St AIDAN’S, ALEXANDRA

and ST JAMES’, ROXBURGH

NINETEENTH ORDINARY SUNDAY

(August 9^th) 2026

 

READINGS 

 

1 Kings 19:9-18 

Psalm 85:8-13

Romans 10:5-15

Matthew 14:22-33

 

                                   

If you were one of the remarkable people who has read or is reading the bible cover to cover, or even if you were doing that simply with Matthew’s gospel account, you will read or better still hear this story knowing that just a few minutes ago Matthew used this same motif.

In Matthew 8 he records Jesus telling a teacher of the law that foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nest, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. Then he tells a would be follower that he  cannot  bury his father, but must follow in the Way of the Cross immediately. And Jesus then stepping into a boat with his disciples and heading off on the lake, where a storm arises and Jesus calms it.

That though is not the story I have just read. This is another lake, another storm, another story. Jesus is not in the boat with the disciples in this vivid scene. He arrives somewhat unorthodoxly, and for people like me who really took very little notice of bible stories in my youth, it would be one of few that are memorable. And it all seems a bit unusual, really.

In fact what do we do with the nature miracles? For me there is a delicate middle path between cynical dismissal of these miracles as silly stories in an old book and uncritical acceptance of them as verbatim records of a spectacular event on a lake late one evening long ago, on the Sea of Galilee.

Matthew, who borrows this scene from Mark, makes significant theological alterations. In the first place he uses the unusual word “compels” – Jesus compels the disciples to enter the boat and undergo this harrowing experience.  Matthew vividly describes the boat as being “tortured” by the waves, and the first hearers of Matthew’s story would not have need to be rocket scientists to see the association between the portrayal of would-be followers of Jesus in a tortured boat and themselves, as would-be followers of Jesus in a church community “tortured” by misunderstanding and hatred in the Roman community around them.

The Christians were in fact rocking the boat of the Roman Empire. But that’s not the boat on display here. The boat here is their faith community, tortured by fear, buffeted by the winds of change, endangered because Roman authorities are becoming angry. They are because these upstart followers of a new religion, an illegal religion founded by a crucified criminal, are upsetting the gods.

And Jewish neighbours weren’t terribly happy, because their uneasy relationship with Rome was threatened, because Rome didn’t care about differences between upstart Christian believers and the more orthodox Jewish community. They were, to the Romans, basically atheists. They were angering the gods with their talk of one Creator God. They. the Romans, could almost stomach the traditional religion of the Jews, but these upstairs? A pox on both their houses. So the Jews and Romans alike were unimpressed.

The Jews had reached an uneasy truce with Rome, largely by compromising their standards. The new mob were hot-blooded, dismissive of the Roman gods, dismissive even of the Caesar if and when he dared to usurp the place of the Creator.

Was there a storm on the Sea of Galilee? There were probably many, and probably many occasions on which the mana of Jesus was such that the disciples trusted his judgement. Perhaps there were miraculous interventions, too – certainly this scene had to be consistent with the belief that Christians had that in Jesus they had discovered one who command the storms of life, including the storms of nature, commands storms to abate. One who could bring calm into the deepest chaos of his followers’ existence.   

It is no accident that in those thoughts Matthew was echoing the Genesis story of Creation. The Spirit breathes order into the chaos of an untamed cosmos. Indeed, one of the advantages the ancients had over we post-enlightenment travellers is that they knew the immediacy of chaos, just beneath the surface of human experience.

For decades we have tried to silence that awareness, but in the horrors of two world wars, of genocide, and of a cold war last century it was never really far away. And in the resurgent fears of nuclear chaos, the unparalleled awareness of ecological collapse, and the dramatic collapse of the American experiment, the American empire before, our very eyes we are vividly reminded that chaos’s grip is not too far away.

And that is the point Matthew – and Jesus before him, is making. The storms are not the final word. The voice of God is not in the dramatic and destructive and demonic, but in the silence, the still point, the calm. Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire” as we shall sing shortly, “o still voice of calm.”

Our duty is to be still enough, to practice the stillness of God enough, to hear the voice that is greater than the chaos, to know the peace that is always there around us. In liturgy especially we have that opportunity … A practice that is useless for any purpose except to focus on the unseen God. That and to turn our hearts for a few momenta to that God.

To know peace, and strengthened by that knowledge, to continue the journey across the lakes of life.