A few weeks ago I caught the TV show, “America’s Funniest Videos.” You may know that on that show there are clips of poignant scenes from the human drama, as captured by someone’s home video camera. This particular clip caught my attention. A father was trying to show his small son how to fish, specifically how to use a rod and reel. Dad, from his place in the boat, cast his line smoothly and perfectly, and then motioned to the little boy to try it with his. The boy picked up his smaller rod and reel and swung it out, not just with his wrist, nor just with his arm, but with his whole body. Of course the momentum of that mighty swing and the unsteadiness of a boat in the water meant that he fell forward and almost threw himself out of the boat. But that wasn’t the funny part. The funny part came when Dad, acting on reflexes, dropped his own fishing rod, sprang out of his seat, grabbed for the boy, missed him, and promptly went head over heels, into the water, got tangled like mad in his own line, and came up sputtering bleep-bleep! The camera recorded it all faithfully .. the little boy safe and dry in the boat, dad all tied up in his own line, making frantic signals to shut that blessed camera off!
In all of that I see a parable about our witness as Christians. When we go to show somebody else what it is to live, we need to be sure of our own footing. Where we stand is not always solid ground; it is sometimes a shaky place. And if we are unprepared and insecure, the place where we stand will throw us overboard, and we’ll be no good to anybody.
Let’s peg down some things. Few if any of us are on completely solid ground. We face challenges, every day. We face unsteadiness, shakiness, and uncertainty. The place where we stand is more like that father’s rowboat. It shifts, it slips, it rocks. We have to make decisions, consider our health, attend to our finances, handle conflicts, do it all – and then the church comes along and says, “You ought to be witnessing to somebody else. You ought to be telling others about Jesus.“ The trouble is that we are in a shaky little boat, without a good place to stand; and trying to show others how to live, when we are unsteady, well, that just may tangle us up and drown us too. That’s a shaky business.
And then, in fact, it gets worse. Not only do we have a lot to do just to keep ourselves standing, but we also get tossed around with extra stuff, don’t we? In the midst of all our daily responsibilities and the stuff that has to be done, we run into storms. We run into things we didn’t expect and don’t believe we deserve. Storms. Controversies, opposition, and conflict. Storms. Sickness, death, and crisis. Suddenly our little boats are rocked, not so much anything we do, but by what is happening all around us. Storms take over. Now nobody would teach a child to fish if a storm was brewing, would they? And nobody stops to bear a spiritual witness if his own life is caught up in a stormy mess.
So have we pegged down this much? That our responsibility to witness depends on our getting a secure place to stand; and second, that life is sometimes lived in a stormy sea. So what does that mean? Does it mean that it is impossible to do witness? Does it mean that we will never be effective for Christ?
The explorer Balboa, in 1513, saw from a mountain in Panama something he had never seen before – a great ocean spreading westward from the new world. Balboa noticed that this great ocean, compared to the Atlantic, which he had just crossed, was calm and peaceful and quiet. He named it Pacific. The Pacific Ocean; the peaceful ocean. Of course, Balboa had never seen a typhoon; he had not experienced the terror of a tsunami. But by comparison with what he had known, the waters before him were tranquil and peaceful. It was Pacific.
If we are going to stand in a little rowboat and lead our lives, we’d like it to be on the Pacific Ocean, where things are calm and manageable.
But when Jesus stood in a boat one day, it wasn’t on the Pacific Ocean. It wasn’t in a quiet and placid place. It was a stormy place. Literally, the Sea of Galilee is the kind of water on which sudden squalls arise. Mark shows that happening later on in the chapter. It was a stormy place; It was the kind of place where little boys can be thrown out of fishing boats and their dads can come up sputtering, all tangled up. It wasn’t the kind of place you would want to be if you were going to teach someone how to fish, or how to live. It wasn’t the Pacific Ocean. But Jesus stood in that boat to teach there one day, and taught us much about our witness to others.
I
First, Jesus showed us that if we are going to share a witness, we do need a secure place to stand. But that secure place is not based on external circumstances. It’s based on knowing who we are and whose we are. It’s based on faith. If we are to be effective witnesses, we must get a solid place to stand, but it won’t be because of props. It’ll be from something inside.
When Jesus got ready to teach this crowd, he sat them down on the land and then stepped into a boat and rowed a few yards off shore to stand and teach. You know, as someone who has done a lot of public speaking – the record says that this is the 631st Sunday sermon I’ve done here – as someone who has done a lot of public speaking, I know that where you stand can be important. You want a secure place to stand. I remember preaching as a student out in a little church in southern Indiana, and the platform concealed the church’s baptistery. Instead of the pool up here behind the choir, they had a pit in the platform floor, and that pit was covered by a plywood cover when the baptistery was not in use. Well, that meant that when you stood up to preach, if you used any body language at all, that cover would flex and bend. I almost got seasick on my own preaching! Having a secure place to stand can be important if you are going to teach.
But Jesus gave Himself one of the craziest, most uncertain places you can imagine – in a boat! One generous gesture and in you go! Is it just possible that He did that to show us that if we are going to tell somebody how to live, it’s not the props we use, it’s not the stuff we have, it’s not the credentials we carry that makes the difference. What gives us security is knowing who we are and whose we are.
When I was doing campus ministry at George Washington University, there was a fellow who would take up his place in the quad and start preaching until people gathered around. Most of them heckled and asked the unanswerable questions. I don’t know who this guy was, by conventional standards. I don’t know if he had a title or a seminary degree; he certainly didn’t wear clergy robes or stand behind a lectern. And most of all he didn’t face a polite audience who have been trained from childhood that when you are in church, either you keep quiet or you say “Amen”, but if you dislike what you hear, you wait until you go home to have roast preacher for dinner! No, none of that for this guy at GW. He just presented Christ. He dealt with the hecklers, whatever they said, and went on. He was secure. He stood in a secure place; but his secure place wasn’t the Pacific Ocean! It wasn’t calm and peaceful; it was shaky and stormy! He stood in a secure place because in his own mind he knew who he was and to whom he belonged.
When we are called on to give witness to our faith, we back off, don’t we, because, well, it’s not the right time or place? It’s a chance encounter and we didn’t say to that neighbor across the back fence, “Can I set up an appointment with you to come and talk about the plan of salvation?” No, it wasn’t that neat and clear-cut. It came when that the police caught your neighbor’s son and your neighbor said to you, “I don’t know what I’m going to do about that boy.” It came when the lady across the street went to bed one night feeling a little off, and the next morning they found her dead, and you had to think of something to say to her family. That’s when we feel insecure and shaky – when we didn’t choose the time or place.
But that’s when we need to give our witness. It is in the crisis moments of life that we need most of all to be able to stand, to share, to witness. We very seldom will have time to get ready. It will just be there. Boom. They will want to know who are you anyway, and what, if anything, do you have to say?
Jesus stood out there in that boat, that shaky little boat in the middle of the Sea of Galilee, on which storms arise so quickly, as a sign of His faith. He knew who He was; He knew that God was with Him. And so He spoke to the need of the moment.
You and I will find our security by planting our feet squarely in the boundless ocean of grace, trusting God to give us the words to say and letting God handle our anxieties. It is faith in Him that gives us a place to stand, even when where we stand is not exactly the Pacific Ocean, calm and peaceful. When He brings you into a place where a witness is to be given, give it. Speak it. It may not be the circumstances you would have chosen. But if you are His, you will be secure, secure because you belong to Him.
II
But now witness, of course, involves not only the one offering the witness. It involves those who receive the witness. Every speaker must have an audience, every teacher must have a class, and every witness must have someone ready to hear. What Jesus did for His audience helps us learn much about what we can do for those who will hear us.
Jesus put His audience in a place where they were comfortable and safe. He did not challenge them more than they were able; He did not demand more of them than they could commit. Jesus dealt with people right where they were and only then began to stretch them. In a word, He loved them.
I hope you have a picture of this scene in your mind by now. Jesus out in the boat, rocking up and down, every gesture causing the little craft to rock. Some storm clouds on the horizon, for, after all, this wasn’t the Pacific Ocean. This was a stormy Sea of Galilee. But He tells the people to sit down. Sit on dry land, on the seashore – where it is comfortable and is safe and no danger lurks. He does not ask them to wade out into the water where He has gone; not yet. He lets them sit comfortably until they are ready for more. He loves them, just as they are.
I would hazard a guess that there are not more than a handful of people in this room who have been argued into the Kingdom. I would suspect that few if any of you became Christians because somebody’s perfect logic showed you that the Christian way was correct and airtight. No, that’s not how it happened, did it?
It happened because somebody loved you into the Kingdom. It happened because somebody cared for you, just as you are, and gave you a comfort zone within which to be safe. You became a Christian, unless I badly miss my guess, because someone let you see that in Jesus Christ there was a way to live in the storms of life. It happened not because you were floating on a Pacific Ocean, calm and peaceful, with time to investigate big philosophical issues. It happened because somebody loved you into sensing that life in Jesus Christ has meaning.
I once heard Malcolm Boyd, the author of “Are You Running With Me, Jesus?” say that in all his years in ministry, no one had ever run breathlessly into his study to say, “I cannot figure out the puzzle of the Holy Trinity”, but that countless times they had run in to say, “I cannot figure out the puzzle of my life.” They do not need or want arguments; they want love in a safe place.
If you want to do a witness to someone, love them. Meet them where they are. Give them a comfort zone. Let them sit down on safe dry land while you bob around on uncharted theological waters. Do not worry about theological formulas or compilations of Bible verses. Listen to people’s heart cries. Pay attention to their humanity. They are not blank slates on which to write your ideas. Witness is love and listening and safety.
A friend of mine went to the beach in Florida to observe the tactics of an evangelistic group that had a reputation for making thousands of converts by pushing four spiritual laws at people. This group would ask you if you agreed to a series of four religious propositions, and if you did, then they pronounced you saved, then and there. My friend says that ten different times members of that group got him to agree to the four spiritual laws, and they duly chalked him up on their tally sheets as ten salvations. But not one of them stopped to ask who he was or what his needs were. That’s not witness. That’s exploitation. And that will do nothing for our neighbors and nothing for those who need to know Christ. What they need is love. More than anything, listening, investing, caring love, the love that lets them stay in a comfortable place, on dry land, until they are ready to get up and wade into the waters.
I’ve been reading a little of late about something called post-modernity. It’s said that we live in a post-modern age. That means that we are past the time when people respond to intellectual arguments and rational persuasion. Post-modern people want whole-self experiences. Post-modern people want to feel things as well as to know things. That’s why some turn to Buddhism or to Islam; we Christians have made our faith something to talk about rather than to experience. We have turned the word made flesh back into words. Post-moderns want to feel; they want music and dancing and incense and touch, the whole self experience. They want a safe place to feel and to be heard.
For life is stormy, and this isn’t the Pacific Ocean. Forty-something years ago I had been trying to persuade a young lady that I was in love with her, but it wasn’t going anywhere much. When she went on a trip and got anxious because she would not be around to listen to the radio for her music appreciation course, I saw a chance to demonstrate my love. I taped all the music she needed for her course and gave it to her when she got home. Did it work? Well, let’s just say that that old tape recorder has a place of honor in our home!
It is not arguments that witness; it is loving and caring and creating a comfort level for those you are trying to reach. For they do not float on the Pacific Ocean, quiet and calm. They are in a storm, and they need dry land for a while.
III
Even then, of course, our witness may not be successful, as the world judges success. We are not going to win everybody we seek to win. We are not going to persuade everybody we seek to persuade. We are not even going to gain the appreciation of everyone we try to love. That’s hard to accept. But it’s true.
Jesus put that into perspective too. Jesus put our work as witnesses into perspective by telling us that people are going through all kinds of stuff. So success in witnessing is not about us. It ‘s not about how good we are or how capable we are. Success is about being faithful and knowing that others respond according to whatever is happening in their own lives.
Jesus gave us a list of the kinds of things that happen to people, because nobody lives on the Pacific Ocean, floating lazily and calmly in tranquil waters. Most of us live instead in turmoil. So Jesus spoke about people who will hear your witness, but as soon as good things happen, Satan gets busy to tear them up. We know about that, don’t we? We as a church make some financial gains, and thieves break in and steal. Satan is at work. We as a congregation got some clarity about what we need to be doing, and little cloudbursts rain in about power or personality. Satan is at work. This is not the Pacific Ocean, nice and quiet. But, child of God, our faith is in the one who stilled the waters, our confidence is in the one who rose from death itself to defeat Satan. Peace, be still!
Jesus spoke also about people who will hear your witness, but will quickly be disillusioned because temptation will come. He called them “rocky ground”, and reminded us that there are some who are so messed up that it will take all we can do just to get them a little bit of stability. A police officer visited in my home the other night – forget it, whatever you’re thinking – and he told me about two children he and his wife are adopting. He said that their mother’s parental rights had been terminated by the court because she was so out of control, and went on to say that she was a part of a church in her community, where the pastor had spent huge amounts of time just trying to help one woman stabilize. That’s the way it is sometimes. Some are rocky ground, some are swept away by every little storm, because this isn’t the Pacific Ocean. This is a tough life. But as for you, child of God, peace, be still. Your faith is in the one who sets our feet on higher ground.
Keep going. Jesus speaks also about those caught in the thorns, those for whom the cares of life and the lure of things they do not have pull them away. We know that some we will reach will not get it; they will chase after things that do not matter. This is painful, because we thought they understood what it means to follow Christ, but they do not. I think of a young man, with such promise, such ability. He was a student of mine at Georgetown University. He went on to study for the ministry, and I just knew that here was one of God’s chosen. But as I have followed his career, I have seen him jump from place to place, always following the dollar sign, always wanting more, and always leaving behind him a trail of disillusioned and disappointed churches. How sad! How sad for him and how disappointing for me! It doesn’t feel like this is the Pacific Ocean, where everything is nice and quiet. It feels stormy and shaky. And I don’t feel successful in my witness.
But I trust in the one who stands in the shaky boat and teaches me to have faith. I trust in the one who puts me on dry land and understands me just as I am. I trust in the one who stills the troubled waters, deep down in my soul. I trust in the one who assures me that some will hear and follow. I trust in the one who stands in the shaky boat in the middle of the storm, the one who went from the shaky boat to the cruel cross, and from the cruel cross to the empty tomb.
For I do not live on the Pacific Ocean. Nor did He. But from His heart I hear it yet, “Peace, be still”.
