Waking Up Christ from the Inside Out

 

A few years ago, Disney and Pixar released a fantastic animated film called Inside Out, which creatively portrays the emotional life of an eleven-year old girl named Riley in which joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust are all personified as colorful and charming cartoon characters. As the girl Riley struggles to deal with the stress of moving with her family from Minnesota to San Francisco, two of her personified emotions—both Joy and Sadness—get lost in the labyrinthine halls of her distant and fading memories, leaving Fear, Anger and Disgust in charge of her emotional life, a recipe for disaster. Somehow Joy and Sadness must work together to find their way back to headquarters and save Riley from emotional shipwreck.

I recently re-watched the film and noticed that the character who portrays Anger (voiced by the rabid Lewis Black) is frequently reading a newspaper. I found this detail cleverly amusing and appropriate since the news we hear and read often makes our emotional lives feel especially stormy with anger, as well as with fear and disgust. Recent news of violence, political division, cruelty towards the weak and vulnerable can easily enrage us and smother our joy and compel us to cry out with the disciples in today’s Gospel to a God who appears to be sleeping and ask, “Lord, do you not care that we are perishing?”

In the Bible, God does not seem to ignore questions like this. In some ways, God seems to invite them and appreciate them, in all their honesty and sometimes righteous anger, as we see in the Psalms of Lament. And sometimes God honors these question with a response, as we see in this morning’s reading from the Hebrew Scriptures—in which God answers Job out of the whirlwind—as well as in this morning’s Gospel—in which Jesus responds to his disciple’s question by calming the storm. Sometimes it seems like God is asleep and we need to wake him up by pleading and praying forcefully like Job, like the Psalmists, and like the disciples in the storm. Our country is in dire need of such prayer warriors, who might rouse God from his apparent slumber to calm our nation’s ferocious tempests, lest we all fall overboard. We need prayer warriors who can take direct action to protect the weak rather than just blame the victims. We need prayer warriors who will do more than just perpetuate the endless cycle of scapegoating and blame, who will do more than just express anger and disgust towards Republicans or Democrats or evangelicals or our president.

The great Christian theologian St. Augustine of Hippo reflected on this morning’s Gospel with these words. He said, “When you have to listen to abuse, that means you are being buffeted by the wind. When your anger is roused, you are being tossed by the waves. So when the winds blow and the waves mount high, the boat is in danger, your heart is imperiled, your heart is taking a battering. On hearing yourself insulted, you long to retaliate; but the joy of revenge brings with it another kind of misfortune—shipwreck. Why is this? Because Christ is asleep in you. What do I mean? I mean you have forgotten his presence. Rouse him, then; remember him, let him keep watch within you, pay heed to him. . .This is the moment to awaken Christ and let him remind you of those words: ‘Who can this be? Even the winds and sea obey him.’”[1]

The Gospel calls us to wake up and to wake up the Christ within us. We can so easily succumb to our own inner voices of fear, anger, and hatred that stir up dark storms within us, which can then burst violently from the inside out. We can so easily fall into the temptation of responding to anger and hatred with more anger and hatred. As St. Augustine said, “[We] long to retaliate,” but revenge only results in a shipwreck. The Gospel calls us to wake up the Christ within us, the Christ who rebukes the winds of anger and vengeance and says, “Peace! Be still;” the Christ who breaks the cycle of violence by calming the storms within us so that we might calm the storms within others.

The Gospel calls us to wake up the Christ within and give his Voice of Love and Peace priority and preeminence over all other voices and emotions within us, all those other voices that compete for our attention, that push and pull us like violent winds rocking an unsteady boat.

More than anything else, Jesus preached about the Kingdom of God; and what is the Kingdom of God? It is any territory in which the Voice of Love reigns supreme over all other voices, where God’s Love is in charge at the headquarters of our inner life. Internal and external voices that abuse us and cause us to abuse others all submit to the Voice of Love in the Kingdom of God. This is why Jesus says the Kingdom of God can be within us. Voices of anger and fear and hatred might cause emotional and psychological turbulence like the winds and waves on the sea, but in the Kingdom of God, all of these voices ultimately obey the Voice of Love and when the Voice of Love says, “Peace! Be still,” they cease and there is a dead calm.

Part of why we gather here each Sunday is to listen together to the divine Voice of Love and give it honor and authority in our lives, to calm our inner storms. That is what we are doing here: letting Christ’s Voice of Love wake up within us and calm our souls just as it calmed the winds and the sea. This is how we will calm the nation’s tempests of anger, fear and violence: by waking up Christ inside so that we can be Christ in the world, calming the storms, from the inside out.

Today we will pray for and bless some of the young adults among us who are graduating and beginning new and exciting chapters in their lives. We will also pray for the children who will be joining us here this week for Music and Arts Camp as well as for the many vulnerable children here in Humboldt county, in our country, at our country’s borders and throughout the world. Let us pray for peace and calm within their inner lives, which may often be rocked by powerful emotions like fear, anger, and sadness. Let us pray that Christ wake up within them to still their storms with his voice of love, which reigns supreme in the kingdom of God. And as we sing our Offertory Hymn “Eternal God, Strong to Save,” let us pray the words boldly, especially the words of the last verse as we hold God’s children in our hearts:

O Trinity of love and pow’r

Your children shield in danger’s hour

From rock and tempest, fire, and foe,

Protect them where-so-e’er they go;

Thus, evermore shall rise to Thee

Glad hymns of praise from land and sea.

Amen.

[1] Sermons 63.1-3.