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The Sermon for the

Third Sunday after Pentecost

June 25, 2006

Robert G. Moore, Senior Pastor

Christ the King Lutheran Church

Houston, Texas

The Lessons and Psalm for the Day:

     Job 38:1-11

     Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32

     2 Corinthians 6:1-13

     Mark 4:35-41

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen

“We have met the enemy, and he is us,” says the cartoon character, Pogo. The original was on an Earth Day poster. It indicates that no matter who we blame for the state of the environment it is we who continue to be responsible.

“We have met the enemy, and he is us,” is a saying that is applied in other situations in which humans try to turn the blame for things onto others, e.g., the communists, the capitalists, the terrorists, the liberals, the conservatives. The list of candidates goes on and on. Along with it is an effort to cast the other as the personification of evil. Of course, communism was a bad, if not a cruel, idea foisted on a people. Of course, capitalists have tried to draw the world’s map in its own way and has exploited natural resources in other lands. Terrorism is an insidious evil. Liberals want to change the system. Conservatives want it to remain the same. Yesterday’s liberal is today’s conservative.

In the body politic we delight in identifying the “evil empire” or the “axis of evil.” Such maneuvers allow us to present ourselves as the innocent ones. They are the wicked ones dwelling in darkness. We are the good ones walking in the light. Our latest example which calls all this into question is the unavoidable tragedy of war in which we discover that we too are capable of cruelty in the form of torture. We can kill innocent bystanders. We can lie to cover the truth. We can also play out the role of victims so that we escape the accuser’s finger. We could ask for forgiveness, but only for the forgiveness that comes to those who stand before God and acknowledge the truth of our messy existence.

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

The constant effort to blame others for our problems creates the condition in which we lose the strength of self-knowledge and the courage to be. Yes, the courage to be is what we seek. Paul Tillich describes the courage to be in his book by the same name. There he describes the human condition as one beset by three types of anxiety. There is the anxiety of fate and death which dominated the world of early Christianity. There is the anxiety of guilt and condemnation which dominated the medieval world prior to Luther. Then there is our own “age of anxiety” as Auden wrote of it. Our day is preoccupied with the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness. Each type is but a dominant expression of the human condition. All anxieties are present even if they are not prominent.

It is in the readings today that we encounter the concrete expression of these anxieties. We see it in the flood waters of the creation story and their reappearance in the book of Job, in the Psalms, and the Gospel. The expression of the watery deep with its waves which threaten to engulf us is the same watery deep over which the Spirit of God hovered before creation. In Genesis 1 we are told that the first act of creation was light. The second act was the establishment of a limit to hold back the waters and to create a space in which life might thrive. This is the firmament, a glassy dome which separated the waters above from the waters below. In that space the dry land appears and the sweet water appears allowing for vegetation to come forth on the third day of creation.

The mythic expression of creation in Genesis 1 shows how fragile the created order is. The watery deep is given boundaries and these limits make for the space of life. At no time does the massive, chaotic deep appear as the enemy of God. It simply does what God commands. Creation never ends. There is not one act of creation, but creation is ongoing in so far as God holds back the sea and its waves.

One can hear this in the words of the psalmist, whose song we chanted today:

Some went down to the sea in ships and plied their trade in deep waters;

They beheld the works of the LORD and his wonders in the deep.

Then he spoke, and a stormy wind arose, which tossed high the waves of the sea.

They mounted up to the heavens and fell back to the depths; their hearts melted because of their peril.

They reeled and staggered like drunkards and were at their wits' end.

Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress.

He stilled the storm to a whisper and quieted the wave of the sea.

Then were they glad because of the calm, and he brought them to the harbor they were bound for. Psalm 107

The psalmist’s picture is that adopted by the church which understands herself as a ship and faith as a voyage in that ship over troubled waters. God’s promise brings us to a safe haven. That is why a church ship hangs in our nave (ship) and in thousands of churches in northern Europe.

There are those times when the waters are used by God to counter the violence of the human creatures. The great flood is such an example. The Bible says that not only did God cause it to rain forty days and forty nights. God also opened the windows of the firmament and allowed the water deep to enter the cosmos and wipe out the violent and degenerate life that emerged in the great experiment of creation. This was done only to allow life to regenerate, and not out of arbitrary rage.

It is in the book of Job that we challenged with the questions of our own day. We cry out, “Who is God? Where is God? Is God powerless? Job is the righteous man who suffers at the hands of Satan but only by God’s permission. It is a disturbing fiction, but it is a story that still models for us the courage to be. Job does not yet understand the deep wisdom born out of the encounter with God. He has only the conventional wisdom of his friends. He believes that suffering is a result of sin. Job’s friends believe that Job is suffering because of sin that he stubbornly refuses to confess. Job knows of no such sin and is thereby in a position of accusing God. He accuses God of being unjust.

Suddenly God appears in a tornado and speaks directly to Job. First, the voice rejects the wisdom of Job’s friends. Suffering is not such an easy thing to interpret. Then God addresses Job demanding that he pull himself together and stand to face God. The Creator Spirit simply recounts the great acts of creation.

  "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”

Then God speaks of his gently containing the water deep like a newborn infant.

"Or who shut in the sea with doors

When it burst out from the womb? —

when I made the clouds its garment,

and thick darkness its swaddling band,

and prescribed bounds for it,

and set bars and doors,

and said, 'Thus far shall you come, and no farther,

and here shall your proud waves be stopped'?”

God is the one who creates the ordered world and calls us to work within it in trust that the God who created is the God who continues to create, and we are his stewards.

The problem is that we have resisted, failed and refused to be the stewards we were created to be.

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Dear congregation, Jesus appears on the earthly scene and establishes his identity, in that, he like God commands the wind, the sea and its waves. Jesus also addresses the anxiety of the disciples who do not understand who Jesus is.

He said to them, "Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?" And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?" (Mark 40-41)

The disciples are left awestruck by the power of the one who claims the authority of God. In his faithfulness to the heavenly Father he is threatened by the same anxieties which afflict us. He does not succumb to them but remains clear in his relationship to God. In this way his faith is demonstrated in his faithfulness. In other words, he is courageous in his faithfulness to God and to God’s ways of bringing about justice in the earth.

Brothers and sisters, it is not by fear that we become what God calls us to be. It is by courage born of faith granted to us by grace, that is, by God’s own gift.

We no longer need to allow our anxieties and our panic states to rule our lives. We no longer need to be ruled by marketers who take advantage of our confusion. We no longer need be exploited by politicians who want us to vote from our anxiety rather than from our confidence in God’s Word and our confidence in God’s justice. We may allow God to address us through the Word which is none other than Jesus Christ calling us to stand, to have faith, to be courageous. We then can recognize the enemy not only outside but within.

And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.