The Third Sunday After Pentecost (Proper 7, Year B) - May 21, 2009

"The Wall of Whiners"

The Rev. Dr. Bill Joyner

During the week my day job in Research Triangle Park involves giving research grants to universities. On the whiteboard in my cubicle, there has long been a list, on one side, of faculty members from several universities who have incurred my wrath and whom I have vowed never again to recommend for funding because of some outrageous, maybe even now forgotten, transgression. A colleague labeled it “Bill’s Wall of Shame.”

Last week, on the other side, I established a new list, of people who haven’t made it to the Wall of Shame, and yet are exasperating because they are constantly complaining. This is labeled the “Wall of Whiners.” Someone added me to this list, probably because I like to whine about the whiners. I even used to have a sign on my wall that had a picture of Mike Krzyzewski and looked like a Duke basketball poster, but upon closer inspection it said “Getting every call, yet still whining about it.” I took this down out of respect for my Blue Devil colleagues. And you may remember that last year Sen. Phil Gramm was dismissed from the McCain campaign because he called us a “nation of whiners” (even though it may have been, partially, true).

Paul may be a whiner: In today’s epistle, he lists all he has endured – beatings, imprisonments, tumults, hunger – but then says, in effect, “Hey, I’m not complaining.” In his letter to the Philippians, in fact, Paul says “Do all things without complaining.” He could be a candidate for inclusion on the wall.

The disciples of Mark’s gospel, on the other hand, are definitely whiners. They wake Jesus up in the boat in today’s reading, saying, “Teacher, do you not care if we perish?” They complain at the feeding of the five thousand and at the feeding of the four thousand: “It’s getting late. We’re in the wilderness. Don’t make us feed them. Send them home!” They complain that others can cast out evil spirits and they cannot, about people bringing children to Jesus, about Jesus letting the woman pour perfume on his head. While there is debate about whether Mark’s disciples were slow to understand Jesus’ message or resistant to it, there is no doubt that they whined. I’d put them on my Wall of Whiners.

Now David, in the first lesson, was not really a whiner. He didn’t complain about being out with the sheep last week when Samuel wanted to anoint someone king. He didn’t complain about going up against Goliath – he volunteered! He could be a candidate for the Wall of Shame, since he killed people to get their wives and things like that, but not the Wall of Whiners.

But who are we more like? Are we like David, called to be a king, to conquer and scheme and unite kingdoms? Are we like Paul, called to suffer and teach and travel all over the known world explaining the teachings of Jesus and write letters which form the core of Christian teaching? Or are we like the disciples in Mark’s gospel – unsure, afraid, doubting, wondering, even abandoning Jesus – but, ultimately, in the boat.

The disciples, the gospel concludes, were “filled with awe” – the Greek implies more that they were still afraid – after the calming of the storm. But they ask the right question, they ask one of the questions we come here to answer each week. They don’t ask, “How did this happen?” but “Who is this?” Who is Jesus?

The other question we come here each week to answer is who we are. You may have heard the story about the young rector who had just gone to a new church. With his suit and collar on, he went to the nursing home to visit an elderly parishioner. She was sitting outside her room, and he smiled, stuck out his hand, and said, “Do you know who I am?” She replied, “No, but if you ask the nice young lady down at the nurse’s station, she may be able to tell you.”

One answer to this question is that we are disciples. We are like the disciples in the boat – and, in a sense like David and like Paul, but much more like Mark’s disciples – because we are also called by God. Our whining doesn’t disqualify us, our doubting doesn’t disqualify us, even our fear doesn’t disqualify us. In fact we are here in the nave of the church (which means boat) because God has called us here. If you think you are here for some other reason, that may be, but you are here because God has really called us here. It’s a step we have consciously made as today’s disciples.

Jesus accuses the disciples of not having faith when they wake him up in the storm – in fact, I don’t think that there is any instance in the gospels when Jesus acknowledges that the disciples do have faith. The Letter to the Hebrews says that faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Abraham and Sarah and Noah, it says, all died in faith, not having seen what was promised but having greeted it from afar, Faith is not belief, it is not theology, it is not the absence of doubt – Paul Tillich says that doubt isn’t the absence of faith, it is an element of faith. Frederick Buechner calls faith “less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch, a journey through space and time,” like the spiritual journeys of the clergy that they described last spring. Part of our faith, like that of Mark’s disciples, is that we are here together in the boat, not that we always know where it’s going.

We have probably all had scary boat accidents. My son Andrew nearly fell off the back of a sailboat in Long Island Sound when he was little and was yanked back up in a quick motion by the boat’s owner. My wife and daughter turned over in a canoe reaching for a hat. I’ve turned over in a canoe and looked longingly at my paddle drifting downriver. But in each of these cases we have, with help, got back into the boat. I think it is the same way with the disciples, and with us with the church, with each of our faith journeys. We all fall out, we all wander in different directions, but we are here today because we have been pulled back in, because we have seen that Jesus, and the church, do care if we perish.

Even if we are whiners, we are in good company with the disciples, who were not scholars or theologians or writers like Paul or kings like David. They were fishermen and tax collectors, and, like us, their main, perhaps only, qualification was that they went with Jesus when he said “Follow me.”