Sometimes people ask me what I do for a living. Believe it or not, it’s not this. Being a deacon is great, especially here in this parish, but it isn’t a living. What I actually do, I’ve realized, isn’t what I’ve always told people I do, I usually say I’m in the publishing business. But what I actually have been doing for years is try to get people to change.
You may know that the newspaper and magazine business isn’t what it used to be; in fact, it’s been going downhill so fast ever since I got into it 35 years ago that I sometimes think I must be personally responsible for starting it downwards. It’s a business that is changing at a frightening pace, and it’s very hard on the people who work in it. Because every day, they’re trying to change everything about the way they have traditionally worked, what’s good and what’s bad; they have to forget many of their old skills and learn new ones. Guess what? People resist all that change. They bend a little but then snap right back. It might be because there’s some denial that change is necessary, but it is mostly the fear of moving towards something that may or may not work out. Because you can never be sure, can you, about moving towards something that isn’t what you know? We all tend to like a present even if it isn’t working much better than a future we can’t control at all. Even in prison, it’s not unusual to run into people who fear the uncertainty and risk of life outside more than they do life inside with no freedom at all.
In the gospels, Jesus is constantly coming into contact with people who are afraid of what they suddenly find themselves confronted with. Today, it’s his disciples, who are afraid of a storm. But it can also be people who are afraid and don’t realize it. There’s the devout and rich young man who is afraid of what life would be like if he sold everything and followed Jesus, or the Pharisees who are afraid of accepting the change that Jesus represents, and who don’t want the ground moving under their feet. Maybe religious people especially are reluctant to change — even Pope Francis, trying to change the way the church does its work, trying this week to change the way we think about how we take care of this earth, he faces plenty of resistance to changing things we think should never change. You know the old joke about how many Catholics it takes to change a light bulb, and of course the answer is, what would you ever want to change a light bulb for?
And yet over and over in the scriptures, the thing we’re told most often is not to be afraid of something that is way outside of our experience. The angels in Bethlehem said it to the shepherds, do not be afraid, Jesus tells it to the disciples today. Notice that what they don’t say is that there’s nothing to be afraid of, or that everything always works out for the best. Many of the things we’re afraid of and resist and worry about aren’t nothing. The fact is, if you take your boat out into a storm, you might sink, and Jesus isn’t saying you won’t. Storms are an image throughout the bible of the ultimate loss of human control. That loss of control scares us, especially if it is heading us from safety into a direction that seems to mean we’re losing the things we think are holding our life together.
The problem is, we keep getting called to change, to be willing to take risks for love. Jesus in particular keeps shoving us into the boat and setting us out into the water. He always seems to keep asking us for the next thing, to give something up, to try something harder, to go out into a storm, to pick up a cross, or maybe the hardest thing, to change our minds or our hearts.
I can’t possibly know what you’re facing right now that is the change that is being asked of you, the storm you don’t want to go out in. Maybe it’s a major life decision about a new direction you feel called to head in, or you’re facing the need to start over in some significant part of your life. Maybe you want to be reconciled with someone who might reject it, or you are having difficulty embracing someone whose path in life you have always been taught to disapprove of. It’s often hard to know exactly what it is that we’re resisting — I can tell you that from personal experience.
Cardinal Newman said that the perfect people in this world are the ones who are constantly changing. If you look up in the sky at this expanding universe, we have to admit that God clearly finds change more appealing than we do. We like to say that God is changeless, but that might be wishful thinking on our part. Changelessness is what we want. The one changeless thing about God is that God is permanently on our side. Whatever it is that God is prodding us towards, every now and then we need to have the courage to get into the boat and head out. The one thing that doesn’t change is that God will save us.