“And with Wave and Whirlwind Wrestle”

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter,

and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea – for they were fishermen.

And he said to them “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”

Immediately they left their nets and followed him.

(Matthew 4:18-20)

 

 

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the Third Sunday after the Epiphany, January 27, 2008

Volume 2 Number 30

First United Methodist Church, 605 West 6^th, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

 

 

Matthew’s well-loved story of the beginnings of Jesus’ ministry seems to burst out of the starting blocks with amazing speed.   Earlier, Matthew recounted both Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan and his forty days of temptation, wrestling with evil in the Judean Wilderness.  Matthew tells these stories in a slow and paced manner.  With the Call of the fishermen we leave that gait behind.  With a quote from Isaiah as his starting pistol, directing our attention to the “Galilee of the Gentiles,” Matthew launches into the ministry that changed the world.  Everything gets faster.  “From that time Jesus began to proclaim ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’”  With narrative haste Matthew recounts the Call of the fishermen, and their immediate response, leaving nets and relatives in answer to the Call.

 

Speaking of things getting faster, in 1999 James Gleick published a book bearing the intriguing title, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything.  WIRED magazine used that book as the basis for an excellent article on this phenomenon, a story featuring the fastest humans and machines anywhere.  It was on May 6, 1954 that Roger Bannister -- who would later become a neurosurgeon with a title, Sir Roger Bannister -- broke through the barrier of the four minute mile, running the mile in 3.59.4.   It was not just a barrier on the stopwatch at track meets, but a genuinely psychological barrier, thought by some as unreasonable and even dangerous to consider a human running faster.  Things are faster now.  Much.  Over ten seconds faster, in fact, and the four minute mile, once a formidable barrier, is no longer so.  In 1997 David Komen of Kenya ran the two mile race in under eight minutes, showing amazing stamina in two successive sub-4 minute miles.   Yes, things are faster now.

 

That’s a snail’s pace, though, compared to the fastest men anywhere anytime, a record belonging to astronauts Tom Stafford, John Young, and Gene Cernan, whose Apollo craft in 1969 hit 28,547 mph just as they reached earth’s upper atmosphere.  That’s the existing record for human speed categories, but as for the fastest man-made object, it’s the New Horizons Probe, launched to explore Pluto and beyond in January 2006, which reached over 36,000 before main engine shut-down and now, assisted by the gravity of Jupiter, flies much faster, at speeds which would take it from New York to San Francisco in (are you ready for this?) . . . under 4 minutes! 

 

Distance has died many deaths.  Humans, created in God’s image, have shown themselves capable of rising to the Challenge of stepping across boundaries which previously may have been considered unassailable.  Challenging boundaries is who we are.  Columbus crossed a gigantic boundary in 1492 when he took a couple of months to sail across the Atlantic to discover a New World.  Five hundred years later, the jetliner has reduced that once impenetrable distance to a pleasant jaunt of mere hours.  Before air travel, it was the automobile, the telephone, the railroad, and the telegraph — all destroyed the existing sense of distance, replacing it with another. 

 

We live with Moore’s Law, a postulation that technological knowledge doubles every 18 months. One would think that the human spirit would by now have come to expect the crossing of boundaries, to see it as routine.  I’m not sure it is so.  We seem to possess something of an innate human inability to recognize that we are in flux, that at each stage we’ve reached, not a zenith, but merely another step along a continuum.  For those living at the moment of a distance-slaying innovation, there seems always to be a sound reason to believe that we’ve reached the human limit, that we surely can’t go any faster, that it would be unreasonable and dangerous to do so.

 

Journey back with me now 150 years to a time when distance died one of its many deaths at the hands of the Clipper, the finest invention ever to issue from America’s young shores.  With the Clipper, marine technology had in a single decade doubled the speed of all previous sailing vessels.  Bigger, taller, sleeker, and costlier, its masts stood higher than any urban skyline.  The Clipper industry was the NASA of its day, inspiring awe and ambition.  And poetry.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized the Clipper in his famous poem, “The Building of the Ship.”   Listen to the poems opening words:

 

Build me straight, O worthy Master!

Stanch and strong, a goodly vessel,

That shall laugh at all disaster,

And with wave and whirlwind wrestle!

 

“And with Wave and Whirlwind Wrestle!” was the refrain of Longfellow’s poem, capturing an essential feature of the human spirit symbolized by the Clipper, that our ability to imagine, to dream, and to build, places us on the periphery of God-likeness.

 

The Clipper brought one more thing, of course.  Money.  The Clipper craze generated new markets and new heroes, generating feverish investments and massive fortunes, delivering things like Chinese tea to London, Boston, and New York in record time.  It was with the Clipper that the word millionaire became entrenched in the American vernacular.  Technology had risen to the Challenge, once again, of destroying the existing sense of distance.  Why, with a Clipper, one could actually reach San Francisco from New York in an astounding time of (are you ready for this?) . . . 89 days!

 

Seems awfully slow to us, doesn’t it?  In 1850, however, that was fast enough to make gargantuan fortunes for those wise enough to invest in this cutting-edge technology.  I want to tell you about a particular Clipper named Challenge, the biggest of them all.  Challenge was built by a triad of brothers named Griswold, who spent the then enormous sum of $150,000, twice that spent on any previous Clipper.  Challenge displaced 2,000 tons of water and measured 224 feet.  It was the longest and largest sailing ship on the high seas, its mainmast towering over the New York skyline at an astounding twenty-three stories tall.

 

It was all about speed, the fastest vessel earning the most money.  There was a new incentive to be the fastest -- gold, discovered in 1848 at Sutter’s Mill in the foothills of the Sierra.  Before the gold, there were 435 residents in San Francisco.  The following year its customhouse recorded 91,405 arrivals.  Demand for manufactured goods soared, and the race was on.  Speedy delivery would pay off big.  There was no Panama Canal.  Ships bearing cargo from the east coast had to travel all the way around South America, all the way around Cape Horn.  Clippers, those “Greyhounds of the Sea,” rose to the Challenge, “and with wave and whirlwind wrestled.”   The Challenge’s captain signed a contract that provided a $10,000 bonus if he could reach San Francisco in 90 days.  He didn’t make it.  It took 108 days.  But a rival vessel, the Flying Cloud, made the trip in 89 days — a sailing record unbroken until 1989. 

 

Ah, but the Clipper’s glory days would soon pass.  Technology was soon to make distance die yet another death.  In 1853, 125 Clippers were launched, the going thing, the Intel Inside Pentium processor of its age.  But technology, thought to be in ripe old age by those who saw the Clipper first launched, was actually just learning to take its first baby steps.  The next year, only six Clippers were launched.  Why such rapid decline?  The railroad.  In 1869 the transcontinental railroad was completed, serving gold rush passengers at a fraction of the cost of the Clipper’s passage around Cape Horn.  With the railroad, distance died yet another death, hard to believe by anyone who’s ever sat at a railroad crossing, waiting for a lumbering train to pass, so we could press the accelerator of a much faster vehicle.  Yet it is so.  With the railroad the Clipper was rendered a vestige of the past.  I wonder what technology will tomorrow render our fastest machines but vestiges of the past?

 

Jesus’ Calling of Galilean fishermen to become fishers of people was a Call to Challenge the Next Wave, a Call to follow him, “and with wave and whirlwind wrestle.”  Perhaps Jesus realized that there was so much distance in the world.  There was distance between human persons that needed to die, and distance between human persons and God that needed to die.  The death of distance in Christ is ultimately the death of that distance between, not just male and female, not just Jew and Gentile, not just bond and free, not just black and white, not just between the healthy and the leprous — but between God and humankind.  This is the ultimate reconciliation, the ultimate At-one-ment.  In Christ, the distance between God and sinful human persons died a welcome death.

 

To point to but one example, did not Jesus cause distance to die another death in John 4, when he spoke with the Samaritan woman at the well?  The disciples were astonished to see this, regarding the distance between male and female, and between Jew and Gentile, as firmly established, a cultural boundary never intended to be bridged.  The disciples considered themselves at the zenith of cultural experience and religious theology.  They could not have guessed that their own understanding of God and each other was in flux, a point in a continuum.  As certainly as those who captained Clippers on the high seas would have found it difficult to conceive of a faster technology, these captains of early Christianity thought their theology at a ripe old age.  They were soon to learn that it was just beginning to take its first baby steps.  Jesus was calling them to wrestle “with the wave and whirlwind” of prejudice and injustice.  

 

If the Western world has led the way in technological willingness to see distance die so many deaths, Christianity, I think, has played a definitive role in the shaping of liberal Western attitudes toward technology and, perhaps more importantly, toward openness to cultural changes in attitude toward others.  Stories of Jesus such as the Samaritan woman have always called the Christian community to wrestle with the “wave and whirlwind” of prejudice.  This is no less than a Call to look at our lives with imagination, to see beyond the boundaries by which we have come to define ourselves.

 

Other cultures, shaped by less-tolerant historical figures, may seem more reluctant to participate in the death of distance.  While Western civilization seems to get a rush from causing distance to die yet another death, other cultures shrink in fright at the prospect of challenging their own, confining, Taliban-like views.  Our Savior crossed a few boundaries once thought to be taboo, and this leads us today to less willingness angrily to declare jihad in order to preserve our attitudes from any death of distance.

 

As human persons we awake each morning with distance between who we are and who we would like to be when at last we pillow our head for the next night’s sleep.  We step into the day with wave and whirlwind to wrestle in becoming the disciple Jesus wants us to be.  Perhaps circumstances have created distance – in a marriage relationship or a friendship, or even with God.  Yet, we are so created that we know we do not have to be tomorrow what we are today – that, wrestling with wave and whirlwind of anger and fear, suspicion and hurt, distance can be destroyed. 

 

“With Wave and Whirlwind Wrestle” means nothing less than to refuse to define ourselves by what we are today, to always be about the task, in faith, of Becoming Something Other, of stepping forth to leave the nets of our old life behind, Becoming what God is calling us to be. 

 

Sources:

“The Next Wave,’” by Jeff Howe, in WIRED, January 2002.

 

“Speed Freaks,” in WIRED, March 2003.