Simon’s Sermon - 9/3/2025

“Jesus…rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a calm.”

One or two of you have told me that they have been reading Catherine Nixey’s book Heresy: Jesus Christ and other sons of God so I thought I would read it myself. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Heresy takes a historian’s view of the many and competing claims of divinity and wonder-working around at the time of Jesus and the early Church. It gives an account of the many ways early followers of Jesus understood this extraordinary person. When it comes to the question of miracles, one of which is our Gospel story today, Nixey tells us that claims of such things are far more common in the ancient world than we might have assumed. Wonder-workers were, if not ten-a-penny, then at least a familiar sight. That Jesus calmed a storm would have been met with a shrug and a ‘so what?’ As today, many would have scoffed cynically. Nixey’s thesis, one long understood and accepted by both biblical scholars and historians, is that there were many other claimants to the things we associate with Jesus around in his day, and that over time these faded away or sometimes silenced by what became mainstream, orthodox Christianity. In my view Nixey overplays her hand when it comes to the silencing of voices by the Christian mainstream – the reality was far more complex than Nixey’s journalist’s account – but she is right that the time of Jesus was a time when many so-called wonder-workers were making similar claims.

Nixey is a journalist writing as a historian. St Luke is also attempting to write a form of history. But the Evangelist is also a theologian, and he wants us to go far deeper than amazement in the face of a report of a miracle in the ancient world. We, like St Luke, need to look a little deeper than the surface here.

In the ancient world, the sea was associated with uncontrollable powers, the monstrous forces of chaos. So, when Jesus calms a storm, as Luke’s gospel records, it is not just giving us a report about a nature miracle. Like preachers today, the Evangelist is inviting us to see Jesus as one who brings order out of chaos, whose rule and authority is over all creation, the one who can overcome the terrifying experience of disorder and decay, the things that threaten to overwhelm us. When the disciples cry “Master, we are perishing!”, Luke is encouraging those who read the gospel to see that faith in Jesus can help overcome the terror we experience when things appear out of control. This idea is also underlined at the end of the epistle reading we had from Revelation 4, a passage which marks the beginning of John’s vision of the world to come in this complex book. “I looked, and there in heaven a door stood open!”. When John sees what lies beyond the door, the first thing he sees is creation reordered in the presence of God. Christ has overcome the chaos of the world and rules a creation in harmony with God. The Book of Revelation is not a blueprint for the end of the world, as far too many have wrongly thought, but an encouragement to those who read it, the early Christians in other words, to have confidence in God’s power to overcome evil and chaos. Trust in God is the message of both our readings today.

We need not look far today to find chaos and uncontrollable powers present and powerful. It is perhaps salutary and healthy to remind ourselves, when faced with a daily diet of “you-won’t-believe-what-Trump-has-done-now” and the steady re-emergence of the far-right with its scapegoating rhetoric, to recognise that the forces of disorder and chaos have been with us long before Elon Musk bought Twitter. Living with chaos and uncertainty has been the lot of most people for most of history, just as living with chaos and uncertainty is the daily lot of much of the world today. Right now, as familiar certainties teeter, we share the disciples’ cry, “Master, we are perishing!”

Or maybe we don’t. Maybe we look around and wonder to whom we can turn in this emerging chaos. When times look uncertain, even grim and fearful, there has always been the choice to look to Jesus Christ, the one in whose name we have gathered for two millennia, through countless times of uncertainty and chaos. He is the one of whom we have sung, to whom we have prayed, and around his table his disciples have gathered, as much in times of trouble as in more settled times. Friends, this is the moment to ask ourselves whether we do trust in Jesus Christ, whether we do have faith, as these Scripture readings encourage us to do in times of trouble. “Master, we are perishing,” is the disciples’ cry of faith, far more urgent than the doctrinal formulas of the Nicene Creed. “Master, we are perishing,” is a prayer of faith in the midst of chaos.

But Jesus’ response to this cry of faith is anything but pious. The forces of chaos, the storm that rages, is rebuked. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds at this point, to wonder in our modern, scientific way about what happened, whether an actual storm was actually stilled by his words. But I want to invite us this morning to think beyond that, to how this story asks us to live as disciples. It is in the action of rebuking the storm that Jesus shows us a way of living the face of chaos. I want to suggest that living in the way that Jesus did should be a rebuke to the forces of chaos, a way of living that is in some way an act of resistance and reproach to all that threatens to overwhelm us. This is the mistake that many Christians make – that somehow faith in Jesus should be passive. But that is not the way of Jesus: he will not tolerate powers which threaten to overwhelm. Active resistance, or at the very least a refusal to go along with the chaos, is what disciples do. Perhaps we will need to think about how we do that. If, as Teresa of Avila famously said, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours,” the people of God need to live as much as a rebuke to the forces of chaos, as a comfort and strength to those whom the chaos overwhelms.

I was supposed to preach about our environmental responsibility this morning – I kind of promised the Eco-Church group that I would – as the readings have a creation flavour. I was going to focus on a very practical task of inviting us all to work out our carbon footprint. But then I came across a sermon preached by the Dean of Emmanuel College Cambridge, in which he criticises the concept of carbon footprint as far too individualistic (he even notes that the very idea of carbon footprint was invented by a BP oil executive). Carbon footprint, he says, I quote “serves to shift the focus onto us as individuals and away from the fossil fuel lobby and the forces that are actually driving the climate catastrophe.” The problem, he says, is far bigger, and requires a much bigger solution, a different kind of politics devoted not simply to growth, which reduces more and more of the planet to a resource for our use, but to a completely different kind of economics. Quoting the writer Edward Abbey, he says, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Perhaps then the response to the cancerous chaos around us is not simply to focus on individual solutions – how tempting it is in the face of chaos to retreat into Voltaire’s famous line, “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” Instead, we are invited to live as a rebuke to those forces. The best ways to do that, of course, throughout history, has been to organise, to build alliances with others who understand that the powers of chaos need to be resisted, people of goodwill of all faiths and none. Instead of simply saying, there is nothing I can do, better to withdraw and cultivate my own little garden – buy an electric car, do a bit more recycling and so on – maybe the disciple will want to go further and deeper, to examine the forces that create the chaos and to find ways of resisting and rebuking them. And if you think that is impossible for just a few of us to do, Catherine Nixey reminds us that there were probably just a few thousand Christians in the Roman Empire by the end of the First Century. The power of faith is not a matter of numbers; it’s what those people do.

The disciples cry, “Master, we are perishing!” and Jesus stills the storm with a word of rebuke. We are those who are called into discipleship by Jesus, not as individuals with souls that need saving, but to be a community of trust in Jesus and resistance to the forces of chaos that have long threatened to overwhelm many in our world, and now threaten to overwhelm us once more. When we say, “We believe Jesus Christ” …as we shall in a moment, we are joining a community of faith in God’s goodness, to be sure. But we are also joining a resistance movement. Amen.