SERMON Trinity 4 - 2018

Readings:
Job 38.1-11;
Ps 107. 1-3, 23-32;
2 Cor. 6.1-13;
Gospel: Mark 4. 35-41.

In today’s first reading, God (at last) speaks. God breaks His silence to meet Job’s persistent challenge and to confront the flawed advice of Job’s “friends”.
God spoke to point Job and the friends to the omnipotence (all-powerfulness) of God over creation. God’s speech leads us to one conclusion: God exists and, most importantly, reigns beyond our comprehension. The script that God reads out says that we humans are not created to understand but, to TRUST God’s ways.
Today’s gospel dramatises this script and this lesson in a captivating way. Mark’s account of Jesus calmly speaking to still the storm that engulfed the disciples’ boat is a compelling dramatisation of the overwhelming power of God.
What we should not miss in this drama, however, is that the disciples, like Job, were startled that the storm that would have destroyed them instantly ceased at God’s command!
Like Job and the disciples, we too are often perplexed that the God, who appears unconcerned with our troubles is, also, Lord over them. Our astonishment leads us to wonder: “WHY?” – “Why me?”; “Why now?” “Why not before?”
The truth is that there are no certainties with God. We can hold no neatly packaged ideas about God’s ways with us. We cannot understand God's ways.
Nevertheless, it is into the household and fellowship of this incomprehensible God that we baptise Jirire today. We do so because that very act of Jirire’s and our baptism speaks of the only act of commitment that the God, who acts beyond our understanding, asks of us: Trust.
We can only TRUST God, who, beyond our comprehension, is present in all of life’s turns.
We can only trust God who is intimately involved in quiet times as well as in our times of crisis. God is there with us, present in the pleasant and treacherous turns of our lives.
So, you can see that our baptism and Jirire’s baptism today is a very bold statement of our recognition that the only safe way for us to travel through life is to Trust in God.
What is more, Trust is what makes Baptism the font of our faith in Jesus Christ. Trust in God is the very way of FAITH. It is the way, the manner of doing (you might say), of the generous and persistent sower of seeds - who cares not whether the rains, the soil, the thorns, or the birds will allow his efforts to come to harvest.
This is what makes Trust in God, Faith, similar to the mustard seed - an object with all the potentials for life and all its fulness locked into a tiny space. Moreover, it is the blessed assurance that kept Jesus fast asleep in the windswept and wave-tossed boat, even as the disciples despaired.
Trust in God, is a reminder of the enormous power of Creation which we Christians carry within us. For whatever, the circumstance, fair or adverse, the Spirit of Christ Jesus, the kingdom of God, is ever within us.
And that is why we say, this morning, to Jire: "Come, join us as a fellow traveller in Christ and “learn to live each day hand in hand with the Lord”.
Besides, it is with this same Trust in God that we inaugurate the Fundraising Committee and admit its members to office today. We do so in full confidence that trusting in God for their tasks and for all our asks and hopes (especially for the restoration of our listed Fr Willis Organ, shaky and ropey as they seem at the moment), there is available to us the overwhelming possibilities and power of God.
So let us turn to Jire and each other and say let us travel “hand in hand with the Lord”.