The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

I watched a rather moving and interesting interview on YouTube this week, one which I posted to my personal Facebook page, an interview with a former LA street-gang member named Johnny. The interview is one of a continuing series by an LA based photographer who frequently takes in people living on skid row to photograph them in studio and interview them about their lives.

His channel has seen tremendous growth in viewership in the last few years and he is nearing 4.5 million channel subscribers and almost one billion video views. Part of the popularity of his channel is that his interviews with people are raw and un-judgemental, it’s an exploration into the life of the person he’s photographing; some of them have escaped addiction, the streets, and skid row, others are still profiting from it through prostitution and drugs, and many are still desperately addicted and barely clinging to life. The videos are a window for us into lives we may never know anything about, many of them a sobering reminder that the brokenness seen in these individuals’ lives usually stems from a kind of generational brokenness in their families, that trauma, pain, addiction, and neglect are things inherited, passed down. Helpful too when we think about those people we encounter in our own lives – a reminder that everyone has a story and it’s not always by choice that we are the way we are.

Johnny’s story in the interview is typical of this. His parents were immigrants from China, his father an abusive drunk, his mother submissive and never able to stand up to or overcome the father. At a young age Johnny found a certain camaraderie in the local Asian street gangs, a way to have respect, earn money, and feel in control. At 12 he entered the youth correction system, and a short time after being released from that reoffended and entered the adult penal system where he spent close to 8 years.

He speaks in the video of a growing awareness of a certain kind of emptiness within him, a void, a sense of almost self-hatred or having no sense of self-worth. A while after his release and after some important events that took place in his life his mother, whom he found to be a very different and more peaceful person than before he entered prison, needed a ride to church. Johnny had no interest in religion at all, but the pastor approached him while he was there with his mother and began to speak to him about his life, his crime, and about brokenness.

Often, I think, we think of that somewhat dirty word – sin – in the wrong way. We, like Johnny did, think of sin as simply doing bad things; that sin is something we do, and our goal is just to do it less and somehow this doing less pleases God who is keeping some sort of tally, and we just become people who are better than we were before because we do less bad stuff.

This is what Johnny thought about sin, and why he didn’t want to hear anything about it. Too often we carry burdens and guilt over things said or done, or things not said or not done, and hearing the word sin becomes a kind of pinprick or reminder to us of our shame and our guilt. But Johnny says the pastor changed his whole view of sin when the pastor said that it’s not the bad things that we do, and God doesn’t care as much about those things as we think He does. Rather, sin is that essential and inherent part of our being, our humanity, that keeps us from knowing what we want, that keeps our hearts full of storm-tossed seas, and uncertainty. That makes us want what we want and trust in us more than in God.

Sin, rather than ‘bad things’, is this generational thing – this inherited thing – that we cannot not have in us or as a part of us. It is as much a part of us, if not moreso, than our genetics and the things that make us tall or short, brown haired or blonde haired – you can dye your hair all you want, but you’ll always be blonde; you can stop doing bad things, but you’ll always have the capacity for sin in you.

It is not the things we do, but is that part of us that makes it possible for us to do those things we don’t want to do; we remember S. Paul’s anguish and that famous line where he laments that he can only do the things he doesn’t want to do, and not do the things he wants. This part of us needs healing, but it’s not a healing that we can provide ourselves, rather, because it’s a part of our humanity it’s our humanity that needs saving and lifting into the life of God. And for this we need someone who possesses our humanity, who is human, but who is also able to do that lifting because he is God. This is what we are talking about when we talk about salvation.

The Gospel today is short, shorter than it traditionally ever was in the history of the church on this Sunday, but it’s a story about storm-tossed seas and Jesus and the disciples in the midst of them. The boat begins to take on water and to sink, and the disciples obviously in a state of panic and fear run to Jesus who, Zenlike, is asleep on a pillow, “Teacher,” they ask, “Do you not care that we are perishing?” Notice that the do not ask Jesus to save them, but simply whether he cares that they are going to die? They had resigned themselves to their fate, in the situation they saw no hope even in the one lounging at the back of the ship, and so their only question is, basically, “we’re going to die, why aren’t you afraid?”

The disciples, like us, suffered from a lack of trust. The sea that day, as it is often in scripture is representative of human hearts, our hearts, uneven, wavering all the time, uncertain, doubtful, desiring one thing one minute and another thing the next. Johnny, the interviewee I talked about, came to see in himself the way that his restless and torn heart had led him in so many different and unhelpful directions; if we look at our lives, we can see that our hearts tend to do the same thing, pulling us this way and that, sometimes getting us into trouble. Make no mistake, the human heart left to its own devices is deeply, deeply deceptive, and not something to be trusted.

Jesus in the Gospel today and in the other miracle traditionally associated with this Sunday – that of the casting out of the demons from the Gerasenes – are two miracles in his life that demonstrate his power and his authority not just over creation, as in the waves, not just over those unseen powers and principalities that work to pull us away from God, as in the Gerasene demons, but over the hearts and lives of all of us.

The hearts of the disciples in the boat that day were blind and unaware of the power that dwelt with them in that very boat, they forgot who he was fixating on their own fear and calamity. In the midst of our own calamities, the difficulties of our everyday lives, and all of those many moments when we feel torn and conflicted by our weak hearts and desires, are we truly aware of the power and presence that dwells with us and in us, as we spoke about last week (‘that we may ever more dwell in him, and he in us’)

For Johnny, the former gangster now ex-con, it was the realization of this power of God’s love for him and Christ’s presence within him that at last brought stability, forgiveness, and peace to his life and wayward heart, and now he is a prison minister, bringing the Gospel to others who are clinging to the rigging in their own storms.

The disciples pose a simple question to Jesus today, “Do you not care that we are perishing?” A question we’ve asked before in different ways. And Jesus’ answer to them, to us, is likewise simple – his answer is his life, his death, and his resurrection. Yes, he cares, so much so that he comes to be with us and remain with us, there for us when we turn to him in trust and seek his help.

“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”