I love this passage of Scripture. I’m deeply grateful for Luke to include it in his Gospel. He’s the only one who presents this story in this way. There are similar accounts in the other Gospels. It might even be the same story, but Luke is the only one that nuances it this way. I love the fact that they’re out in the water on a boat, Jesus and his disciples. The storm brews, the storm is so bad that the disciples on the one hand are fearing for their lives, and what is Jesus doing? Sleeping. This is ridiculous, and I love it. You couldn’t have a starker distinction between fearing for your life and sleep. So, Jesus gets up, calms the storm. This morning let’s just rise above the credulity of it and look at this story for how it relates to our lives, because it can and it will, hopefully. Somehow from the mysterious power of being in Christ, Jesus calms the storm, and this is my favorite part. He turns to his disciples and says, “Where is your faith?” Where is it? So now, just in order to drive the point home, right now I’m going to come down there and just one by one I’m going to get right up into – because I’m so street, you know, I’m such a street guy, I’ll even use this phrase. I’m going to get right up in your grill. My family loves it when I say I’m so street. They just shake their heads. I’m going to get right up in your grill and get in your face and I’m going to say, “Where’s your faith? Where is it?”

This happened to me. This account happened to me, in this way. I need to speak to you in some code here this morning in respect for the setting and our meaning and purpose here today. I’m going to speak to you in code about some unpleasant things that I’ve seen, to set it up. This happened to me. I know what it feels like to have somebody say to you, “Where’s your faith? Where’s your faith? You had an opportunity to be faithful, and you blew it.” Some of you don’t know me as well as others. Vicki and I have been married for 43 years, thank God, and we have one child, Jackson, who’s now 30 years old, which is a whole other thing. He’s 30 years old. So, he’s our, quote, only child. When he went away to college, he went to the College of Wooster. We were living in Stow, Ohio, at the time, a little over an hour away. When he went away to college it really was hard on me. It was really hard for me. I had this separation anxiety that was really pretty irrational. It was the first time in my life I didn’t sleep for two nights, and I said to Vicki, “I’m not handling this well.” I get teared up even thinking about it now. I don’t feel that way now, but it was a very painful time for me. I went to my doctor and said, “I can’t sleep, and here’s why.” I really liked our doctor at the time, and I felt like I could be honest with her. I said, “You know, this is really hitting me hard. I didn’t see this coming.” I asked her a question, I said, “Does this happen to people other than me?” She smiled and said, “Oh my goodness, yes, all the time. You’re not alone in this.” That really helped me.

One of my irrational fears was based on this. When I was a student, at Mount Union College, which is now the University of Mount Union, when I was a student there, my junior and senior years, I was a resident adviser in the dormitory. I was an RA. Here’s the part where I need to talk with you in code. Two years I was an RA, and in those two years I had to go to the emergency room in the middle of the night twice, one each year, because one of my freshmen had imbibed alcoholic beverages to the point where they were flirting with death. We had to go to the emergency room. I saw this, twice. This is one of those dark mind traps. Our son was a really good kid during high school, and one of the reasons why he was a good kid, I think, was because his girlfriend for two years was an evangelical Christian girl. If he had misbehaved, she would have been very mad at him. Is this too much information? So fast forward to his freshman year. It took me a whole year, really, to adjust. But I did. I adjusted. And that’s when it happened. In a very light moment, after a year-plus, I said to Jackson, “Oh, by the way, I want to tell you something. You probably know that you couldn’t know how hard it was for me when you went away.” I told him some of my negative fantasies. I said, “I was so afraid that you were going to make really innocent, even potentially life-threatening mistakes.” And there was a pause. With God as my witness, and I’ll put my hand on the Bible if you want me to, this isn’t just an illustration, this actually happened to me. There was a pause in the conversation. He looked at me and smiled, and he said this, “Way to have faith in me, Dad.” Way to have faith in me, Dad. He was chiding me, and I deserved it. Where’s your faith? And boy, do we need it. I listen to NPR on the way to church on Sunday. Now he gets to play with toys like bombs and B-52 bombers. He gets to play with those toys now. Where’s your faith? Boy, do we you need it, I need it.

Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into the light. I want to tell you that the call to worship today are quotes about faith that I found online. One of them is from the Bible. “Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into the light.” “Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation.” This is the one from Hebrews – “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, and conviction of things not seen.” With all due respect to the Bible, I think this fourth one is my favorite. Although I love that quote from Hebrews, I love this one. “Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.” You know what bird I hear first every morning in my yard? Does anybody want to guess? A cardinal. Sometimes these silly cardinals start singing even before it’s light. We need to find a way to keep singing, even before the light.

I want to read to you a portion of my Parish Visitor article. You know, your favorite publication, the Parish Visitor? I wrote this for us. This is part of it. It’s entitled, “The Courage to Be.” “In Paul Tillich’s book, ‘The Courage to Be,’ he defines courage.” Let me say right there, Tillich is hard work. He’s really hard work. “In Paul Tillich’s book, ‘The Courage to Be,’ he defines courage as a self-affirmation of one’s being, in spite of the threat of not being.” This is his language. “He relates courage to anxiety. anxiety being the threat of non-being, and courage to be what we use to combat that threat. Tillich outlines various sources of potential anxiety, one of them being the anxiety of meaninglessness and emptiness. I suspect anyone hearing this today might agree we are living in anxious times. There are countless potential sources of anxiety for us to choose from. Things can certainly appear at times to be meaningless and empty of hope. So, at times we can use a good dose of courage. Tillich was born in a section of Germany in 1886 that is now part of Poland. In 1912, he was ordained as a Lutheran minister, and in 1914 he joined the Imperial German Army as a chaplain. He served as a chaplain in the trenches of World War I for four years. During the war, Tillich buried his closest friend and numerous soldiers in the mud of France. He was hospitalized three times for combat trauma and was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery under fire. This is a man who knew the anxiety of meaninglessness and emptiness, so Tillich writes a lot about courage. He writes about displaying the courage to be when facing anxiety by displaying what he calls true faith. He says we find this, quote, true faith by self-affirming ourselves. He says we draw from the power of being, which for Tillich is God.” Tillich wrote that the power of being, when we embrace the power of being, that is no less than God. “We use this true faith to affirm ourselves and negate the non-being. We can find meaning and purpose through the power of being.”

Now I’m going to say a word here. I’m very bad at pronouncing it and I’m going to do my best. Is there anybody here who knows what matryoshka dolls are? Matryoshka dolls are those Russian standing dolls where you look at one doll and inside the doll is a set of more dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. Keep opening the dolls and eventually you find the smallest one. What I have here, I’ve shown this to you once before. These are not dolls. This is an Easter egg. This was made in Poland. I’ve had it so long now I don’t remember where or how I got it, but I’ve got it. How many Easter eggs do you see? How many? Some of you say one. Wrong. Here’s one. And here’s two. Tillich said true faith is about self-affirmation. There’s three. How many do you think there are? There’s five. You keep going. You keep digging. And there it is. There it is. That little, green Easter egg inside all of us. When you’re in your car and you’re driving to church and you hear NPR and you want to give in to the meaninglessness and the lack of hope, you self-affirm, and you find it. Jesus walks up to us and instead of asking us, “Where’s your faith?” he says to us, “There’s your faith.” This is where our courage is to be found, deep within us. This is where we find our true faith. That’s where we self-affirm. It’s an eternal gift and it’s grace. It’s the still, small voice of God. It’s smaller than a mustard seed, and it’s bigger than the cosmos. It’s the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s the living spirit of Christ, and it’s no less than God. It’s the courage to be during anxious times. Amen? Amen.