12th Sunday Homily Calming the Chaos

Life will have great trauma at times. We will face those moments when everything gets disrupted: Serious illness, loss of job, broken relationships, death. What will we do? What actions will we take? What will be our reaction?  Death certainly causes a lot of stress and chaos. We deal with emotions at the passing of someone we love, then almost immediately we need to take action; paperwork and arrangements. In our minds and hearts those, messy with lots of questions of why? How?

Yet daily life also throws us twists and turns. Life never goes according to our plans on our calendars. There is construction that makes us late for work or appointments; kids get sick; that lack of planning by someone else that now becomes an emergency on our part; emails and then opening the wrong email and then IT needs to get involved; the boss who lays extra work on our plate; the employee that does not perform well; etc

It is interesting to watch people react to that as well. We can witness people go with the flow; manage the change, take action with little to no drama. Then there are the others who create more drama and make it clear that the world is not going their way, and they are not happy, and someone must be punished for this offense.

When scholars really began to study and analyze scripture they discovered many different aspects that opened up the meaning of the words. One such discovery was the influence of non-Jewish cultures on the Hebrew Scriptures. While in exile in Babylon, the Jewish people worked on their scriptures seeking to understand why they were in exile. They appropriated Babylonian symbols and stories. One such symbol and story was their storm god. Jews used storms to show how God was known, a storm theophany. Also we learned that storms represented chaos for the Jews; who were not a sea faring people.

We have great examples of these in our readings and examples that are ancient and still relevant for our faith today.

God comes to Job and speaks to him out of a storm. God tells Job “I am God, not anyone else, and I am in control.” In the whole story, Job questioned why he was subject to his problems, because he was a good and righteous man. And this whole passage contains metaphors of storms and waves, God is there amid the chaos and God will bring order.

Even the Psalm has that metaphor.

Then our Gospel has that lovely image. Imagine that, Jesus asleep on a boat as it is within a storm being rocked about. Now, I get sea sick very easily, so this says a lot. Jesus remains calm, cool and collected. The disciples remain frightened. Jesus trusts in God. The disciples are a little shaky. Then the theophany, the revealing happens. Jesus quiets the chaos.

Discernment and contemplation play a very important role in our lives as Catholics. Discernment and contemplation stop us from panicking, quiets us down, makes us assess where we are, what is truly going on, and then opens our mind’s eye to see God in action.

These are not easy for us. Our impulse seems to be reactionary: do something now; respond, write an email, tweet, complain...  Now I am not talking in a case like our house is on fire; we don’t sit down in the flames to pray. We get out, we get our loved ones out of harm's way.  But every day, we deal with those little traumas of life, the chaos of simply living. And they can build up within us. They can wear down our joy, our energy, our life.

The ancient spiritual practice of prayer, contemplation and discernment helps. Every day, at the end of a day or beginning, we can just simply sit for five minutes, ask ourselves what happened, where am I? Where and how did I encounter God?  Where do I need to trust more? Whom do I need to forgive? Who do I need to ask for forgiveness. Where was compassion and mercy needed? Where was my patience and humility needed?

The more we attune ourselves to God on a regular basis, the more we can be attuned to God in those moments of chaos, those moments of stress; and we don’t have to be so rocked by those storms.  

Prayer becomes not just mere saying words because we have to pray. Prayer becomes something more than telling God what to do in our lives and in this world, or telling God what we want.  Prayer becomes a way to grow in awareness, consciousness of the presence of the Divine. Prayer becomes a means to walk into life, know that Father, through the Son and with the Holy Spirit remain present. God helps us to discern, to live, to make good choices, and to manage the bad ones better.

Life will always remain complicated, somewhat chaotic, unpredictable, and out of our control. God does not throw bad things at us, I don’t even believe God tests us; rather they are more often caused either by our own bad decisions or we are victims of others bad decisions.

We do have a choice. We can add to the chaos; or with attuned to the divine we can calm it.

God created this world in harmony, for harmony. God created us for this harmony.  Even through Jesus' final days, the chaos of the trial, the suffering and death; he remained trusting of the Father’s love and the Father’s love of us.  We celebrate this trust, this harmony, this peace in our Eucharist. We eat and drink to be reminded that no matter how bad it may seem, God’s love for us and of us, never ever fails. It remains.

And so can we.