Cowes Week Regatta Service
Holy Trinity Cowes, 3rd August 2008
The last time I stood in this pulpit was three years ago, and since then I have lost about three and a half stone and most of my hair. While the weight-loss may be welcome, I wouldn’t recommend the method of achieving it. As some of you know, I have been battling off and on with leukaemia. It’s been quite a journey. The NHS has come up trumps again and again. And the whole experience has pushed me to the edge of the community, the edge of the Church, and the edge of my faith. I have known doubt and fear like never before, and times of real darkness. Yet these have all, somehow, been made bearable by the care and professionalism – and love and prayers – of those who have looked after me. And there’s nothing like the sheer routine of treatment to give confidence that one is part of a process, a path others have been on before, and so things are not quite as awful as they seem.
So I’m afraid I can’t give you a bland account of faith. It would be insulting to you, and utterly false for me. Not that I think someone with a streak of scepticism such as myself would try to anyway. Put at its sharpest, what kind of sense am I supposed to make of the question posed in tonight’s first reading from Job – ‘is your religion no comfort to you?’ – and the stilling of the storm by Jesus in the gospels which we’ve just heard?
I have always had a lot of time for Job, an unknown figure, from Northern Arabia, not a Jew. One of those figures who wrestled with the problem of suffering in a way that’s paralleled in some of the religious literature of the time. He has lost his family and his whole livelihood, but he insists that he has done nothing wrong. Along comes a series of ‘Job’s comforters’ who try to fob him off with second-rate answers. The first of these takes the common view, held by many folk today, that if something goes wrong with your life, it’s because you somehow deserve it: God is punishing you because of something you have done. So religion comes in as a kind of amiable drug, to dull the pain, but not to have much, of anything, to do with the problem. Well, Job refuses to accept that answer, and all the other superficial answers given to him as the book unfolds. And so must I. I didn’t get ill because God wanted to punish me. I got ill, because I got ill, because I got ill.
And that brings me to the stilling of the storm by Jesus. It has a superficial interpretation, which is all about the sea as a nice place for fishing expeditions, and things suddenly get rough, and Jesus comes in as a kind of wizard, hey presto - to sort everything out. But it’s not quite like that. In Jewish tradition, the sea is a place of fear, danger, uncertainty, and mysterious, hidden creatures. I’m not sure if there was a belief in something like the Loch Ness Monster among the people who lived around the Sea of Galilee! To venture out in a boat for the Jew was to take a risk. Jesus’ presence on the expedition is about entering fully into the fear, the danger, the uncertainty of life as many of us know it. Oh yes – it can be exhilarating at times: that’s one of the reasons why there is such an event as Cowes Week. The sea still represents the precariousness of the lives we lead. Jesus does indeed calm the storm, but only because he is there in the first place, there in the boat, there with the disciples.
On my hospital bed, as the various fluids were being pumped into me, I occasionally did ask the Job question, why is this happening to me? But I knew that it was a waste of time and, more important when fighting a serious illness, a waste of emotional energies. Then I turned to the stilling of the storm. That made better sense, because it is about taking the dangers and dimensions of life as I know it seriously, by entering into them, and deriving strength and endurance from a Saviour who fully understands them.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
