Storm and Calm

“And there was a great calm.” — Matt. viii. 26.

How strongly and satisfyingly these words come in at the close of the story of the storm upon the Sea of Tiberias. Jesus and His disciples are sailing across the lake together. “And behold there arose a great tempest in the sea insomuch that the ship was covered with the waves: but He was asleep. And His disciples came to Him and awoke Him, saying, Lord, save us, we perish! And He saith unto them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith. Then He arose and rebuked the winds and the sea. And there was a great calm.” There is the noise and hurry and fight. The wild winds and clouds overhead, the wild waters beneath, the panic-stricken hearts within the boat. One moment all is tumult and distress. The next moment Jesus has risen from the pillow where He is sleeping and looked around, and said a word, and made a gesture, and all is changed. “There is a great calm.” The beauty of the story is in the way in which the change all comes from and belongs to Jesus. When He rises the storm stops. The calm that comes is from the power of His presence. As if 3.

strong, quiet man stepped in majestically among a crowd of noisy brawlers, and his very appearance made them ashamed and hushed their noise. So Jesus steps in among the elements, and they are still in a moment. It is a picture of the peace that He bestows. However feebly we understand it, the story at least is luminous to every loving eye with this — the majesty and beauty of Christ and the way in which peace flows out abundantly wherever He is truly present. A thousand thousand saints have felt that. These stories of the Bible, these stories of Jesus, are so full of His spirit that they scatter it everywhere, and the calm that fell upon the waters of Gennesaret has been renewed in the peacefulness and rest that have fallen upon multitudes of hearts that have read or listened to the narrative.

And how the same words tell the story of some point or crisis in a life. A period of tumult comes and passes. The storm of feeling is excited, and when it has fought itself out in its fury, it goes down and there is peace. A struggle for life, for bread, is pressing for a while and then the life sails out into smoother water; peace comes where there used to be suspense. There is a great calm. It is what the most eager and excited experiences are always looking forward to, — not to be forever distressed and harassed, but some day to feel things growing smooth and easy, to find a calmness and repose. Some men do find it far more easily than others — indeed, some lives are placid by their very make and nature — but I think that it comes to us all, at least in vague misgivings, that there must be a calmness and repose consistent with the fullest life and the most faithful duty and the most earnest thought, of which almost all men almost entirely miss. As we are whirled about in our maelstrom we are aware, or at least we picture to ourselves, that there is quiet water close beside us. Our ship grazes its placid surface, and then is swept back into the tumult and the storm. Is it a reality which we see, or only a picture which our fancy draws? I should like to try to speak this morning of the calmness that God really gives to people’s lives. It seems to me to be something that we are all so vaguely desiring and seeking that it cannot but be well worth while to try to understand a little of what it is and how it comes.

In the first place, then, the quality of which we speak is not a matter of original temperament. We know how different men are. We know how serenely some men bear, by the very constitution of their nature, experiences that overwhelm the sensitive brethren beside them. It is an open question which life is best. No man can say whether the passionless serenity of the calm man’s life loses more in the lack of strong enjoyment than it escapes in the absence of keen suffering. But, at any rate, that is not the difference that we refer to. Nor is it the mere placidity of outward circumstances, — the even flow of life that slips without a ripple on from experience to experience, from year to year. That is so often merely external, so apt to be deceptive. There is the chafing and restlessness that goes on in

V the quietest lives, and now and then we are taken by surprise when we are able to look down through some break in the most restless and excited career and see in what perfect repose of soul the man is living underneath it all. Men try sometimes to calm the tumult of the inner life for themselves, or for one another, by merely making the outward circumstances calm and peaceful, but it does no good. It is only dressing the maniac in a quaker’s clothes. They may hush and awe him for a moment with their serene composure, but after the moment’s hush is over he will be as wild as ever, and tear his uncongenial dress to tatters.

Neither the calmness of temperament nor the calmness of circumstances, then, is what we mean. Both of these, of course, are gifts of God. No hand but our Father’s tunes and disposes the subtle adaptations of His children’s characters, or arranges with the fitnesses of harmony or contrast the scenery in the midst of which they are to pass their lives. It is God who lays His hand upon a new life just going out from His creative presence and gives it a peacefulness and calm which it brings back to Him when it returns for judgment. But it is striking to see how much more easily we think of what comes to us by education and experience than of that which comes to us in our original constitution as the gift of God. It seems to be in some higher sense appreciable as a gift when it enters in through our consciousness by His discipline than when He sows it among the seeds of our unconscious being before we are born. And so it is the calmness that comes from our own thoughtful, fruitful experience of life lha.t we want most to consider and be thankful for.

I am assuming all along that calmness is a blessing. Are we ready to assume that absolutely? It is strange what two ideas are current, and how imperfectly we reconcile them with one another. One idea is that tumult and excitement is bad, the other is that nothing can be worse for a man than absolute calmness and serenity. We hold to both ideas by turns. We cannot settle down to either. As soon as our life begins to attain its longed-for peace we begin to fear it and to reach back after the disturbance which we tried so hard to escape from. All this seems strange, but it is not to be disregarded. It is not unaccountable. It shows us clearly enough that mere calmness, indiscriminately, will not do. It must be of the right sort. It must come from the right source. It must be lively and not deadly. It must keep and not lose the best blessings that belong to tumultuous life. It must be the calmness of perfect action and not of mere stagnation.

Indeed it is evident enough what a difference there is in different men’s composure. Two men are waiting for their execution. Compare the stolidity of one with the quiet, patient faith of the other. Paul and Silas are in prison at Philippi, “And at midnight they prayed and sang praises unto God.” How different from the dreary silence of despair with which perhaps some poor wretch in the next cell waited for his doom. Yet both were calm. See two men as they lie upon their death-beds. One like a brute, one like a saint, they both are calmly waiting for the end. Such scenes as these show us plainly enough that there is a higher peace and a lower, a good calmness and a bad. Do they not throw abundant light upon those words of Jesus, “Peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you. Not as the world giveth give I unto you.”

And now let us come and consider what the calmness is which, brought out by the discipline of life, may be really accepted as God’s gift. The truth .seems to me to be this: that the calmness to which God is always leading us consists in a perfect poise of tasks and powers. And this idea is valuable because as we follow it out it explains both the attainment of calmness and the loss of calmness which occur in every growing life, and shows how they are consistent with one another. Let us look into this. Take the lowest life, the life of the vegetable. We easily attribute to it a perfectly calm existence. Its tasks and its powers are in perfect poise. Its work is to grow, and the power of growth is present in the plant. But just as soon as life advances another stage, as soon as you come up to the brutes, little as we know of their existence, we have a misgiving that the repose is lost. The poise is not so perfect. Here are desires that the powers cannot gratify. We have entered into a world of passion and unrest. Then come to man, and you have all the higher range of tasks, each calling for its power, each making clamor and disturbance till its power comes to match it. Now see what the course is. Here is a life at low rest (as we may say). It acknowledges few responsibilities and finds in itself the powers to fulfil them all. Now let a new duty press itself upon that life, a new emotion, a new experience of any kind, before untried. The first result is a disturbance. The demands and the powers are thrown out of poise. But by and by the power comes up to meet the new task. The two are harmonized upon a higher level. There is a loftier calm attained. But still it is not the highest — another need appears. Once more the balance is disturbed; and only when the nature equals this new demand is it restored. So it goes on. So it goes up. Each higher calm provokes a new disturbance, and only so a calm a little higher is reached. Each in its turn is the healthy condition of the growing soul. Before us all, as the consummation, far off is seen the perfect rest in God when task and power shall be eternally equal to one another but for the imperfect being seeking perfection, it is in this constantly alternating attainment and dislodgment, this calm and tumult following each other that the happy and healthy life consists.

This is the general truth I want to teach. But I can show its meaning best if we take various special problems and difficulties of life and show how in them men come to a calmness that is given them by God.

I, Here, for instance, is this endless problem of the condition of the world we live in. Any man who has eyes cannot help gazing at it sometimes; and can any man look at it calmly, mixed as it is of sin and sorrow, pain, deceit, hindrance, hate, all confused with the divine things that are in it all the while? Well, see how it illustrates our principle. Some base, low-minded man, some mere indifferent spectator, some purblind mole of selfishness, looks at it and declares, “Oh, it is all right “; “There is no trouble.” He sees no problem. His coarse gaze finds no mystery. There is no puzzle, and so no struggle; and so on he drifts in the complacent serenity of his self-satisfaction. Close by his side is a nature which the blind problem of the world perplexes through and through. Here is a man whom the apparent injustice of the universe stirs to the very core. He cannot keep calm. He lives in a continual indignation. His life is full of outbursts of discontent. He sees things wrong, not right! What shall we say? Has not that man advanced? Is not this disturbance a higher condition than the old stagnant calm? Let us not blame the last or praise the other. Let us thank God when He lets us break loose from the first calm in which the lower natures live, and break out into vitter hatred or contempt of meanness, utter impatience at the deep-felt moral contradictions of the universe, even although it may convulse us to the bottom and break our calmness all to pieces. Let us be afraid if we find ourselves growing incapable of such noble excitement and disturbance! But, once again, what then? This is not final. The disturbance has come from the intrusion of a higher demand. The calm has been broken! How shalit be restored? Only when the powerful sense of God’s government is brought to meet this spectacle of prevalent disorder, only when behind all the unrest and distraction that we see our souls are certain that there is a power of order and beneficence at work, capable perfectly of controlling the disorder and bringing peace out of discord, — only then do we rise to the second and higher level of calm, where task and power once more are in poise. We begin with the serenity of clearly-seen conditions; we pass into the perplexities of apparent confusion; and we come at last to the higher confidence of faith.

This illustrates the law I tried to state. There are three conceivable conditions of our thought and feeling with reference to this apparent confusion in whose midst we live, — placid acquiescence, which is bad, and vehement questioning and remonstrance, which is better, and serene trust in a living God, which is the perfect condition of a human soul. Do we keep this always clear? Are we not constantly mistaking the first condition for the third — placid acquiescence which is too spiritless to ask any question for the serene trust which has found the answer for all its questionings in God? Do we not often think that when a man passes on from the first condition into the second, from placid acquiescence into vehement remonstrance, he is going backward and not forward? And yet this is the progress by which God leads our souls. There will be sad and fearful moments in it, in which it will seem as if all were lost; but they will be only the tumultuous moments of spiritual youth which come between the unthinking placidity of childhood and the thoughtful serenity of manhood. They are healthy and natural. They are the storms of spring that bring the summer, the revolutions out of which comes by and by the peace.

2. Then take another illustration. In the region of personal character the true relation of calmness to disturbance is equally manifest. There is a certain typical growth that hundreds of men go through that brings them from a lower out into a higher life. The lowest life where they begin is calm enough. Task and powers are in perfect poise. Men do not feel the pressure of any higher needs than food and drink and ordinary cheap society. They are quite capable of supplying themselves with these, and so they go placidly along. There are no high ambitions, and so no discontents. How calm those days go by! There is no murmur in the sky. The earth is solid underfoot. The man is equal to all the tasks he apprehends, goes regularly to his business every morning, enjoys the dinner that he honestly provides, is happy in his social joys, and faithful to his social duties. Task and power just balance each other in the still summery atmosphere of his contented life. But by and by a better thing has come. The spiritual nature is aroused. Something in that man that was made for a divine association is crying out for the divinity that it was made for. The soul wants God. Is it a lower or a higher state on which the man has entered when that which once satisfied can satisfy no longer, when the man seems to be standing awestruck and fearful before his own awakened soul, which is demanding of him its proper food? He offers it the best he has, but it will not be appeased. He spreads before it all his social refinements, all his prudential moralities, but the soul turns off from them all. It wants God, and the man has no God to give it. That soul of his presses him with vehement desires that he cannot gratify. He cannot satisfy himself. Has the man gone up or down in leaving his calmness and coming into this disturbed, tumultuous region of spiritual desire? This is the region that all the stories of conversion are always trying to paint. They make much of this phase of life, and they are true to at least one constantly recurring experience. The man goes about restlessly. He asks his friends, he reads his Bible, he haunts the church, to see if anywhere there can be found the power that can match this new demand and so the lost poise of his life be restored. Is it a higher state? We know it is! The man has left his old content behind as the pine tree leaves the clod when it shoots through the ground, and, with its tense vines tingling and aching with life, goes up to seek the sky. It is better, this spiritual need and ache and struggle — better, but not the best. By and by, as all stories of conversion love to tell, suddenly or gradually (they love to make it sudden in order that its divineness may be the more picturesquely evident), there comes into the man the power of God to satisfy this soul’s inexorable craving. He offers Himself to the soul that He has made. He will forgive it; He will supply it; He will teach it; He will give it Himself to love. Words of the richest meaning, figures teeming with the sweetest suggestiveness of peace, have been sought everywhere and heaped together to utter the new calmness of this higher life on which the soul enters when the soul has thus found its satisfaction. Tumult is past. Danger is all forgotten. Responsibility is no longer heavy. All is serenity in that high region where the human life abides with God, identifies its life with His and shares in His peace.

Again, see how in the growth of character this law of ours has found another illustration. Out of calmness that it may enter into a sublime calm. Losing his life that he may find it more abundantly, that is the progress through which the man passes who is worthy of it. Again we have the three conditions — the indifference, the struggle, and the reconciliation — the worldling, the seeker, and the saint. The unrest of the second is better than the calmness of the first, and both are only preparatory for the complete rest which remaineth only for the people of God.

3. I venture upon one more illustration because it is one in which I feel a very deep interest, but I will give it to you very briefly. I think that the history of very many of us, with reference to religious belief, is described under the law of progress which we are dealing with this morning. How many of us began with an easy implicit faith in the religious truths which we were taught? We conceived them narrowly and grasped and held them with no difficulty. We were quite at rest. We knew what was true; we were able to believe all that demanded our belief; we were perfectly placid in our traditional religion. But by and by with many of us came a time of painful, terrible dislodgment. The truths which we had held so easily rose, grew, became too great, too awfully important for us to hold with hands like those. Then doubt came. Could we say that we believed what seemed slipping away from us so? It may have been that the truths seemed incredible; it may have been that we seemed to ourselves merely too poor and small to have anything whatever to do with truths like those; at any rate doubt came. To those of us who can look back on such a time as something past, how does it seem now? Was it not better that such thoughts came to us? Was it not God who sent them, or, at any rate, was it not God who made us such that they must spring up in our minds when we came to think as He had made us to? And then, if afterwards we have been led on, as we believe, until in deeper personal sympathy with God through Jesus we are able to lay intenser hold upon the real spiritual essence of our faith than we ever could lay on its formal statement, shall we not thank God that He led us up to the better land even through tangled and dark woods that covered pathlessly the mountain side? Again, we have the three conditions — traditional acceptance, hesitation, v, spiritual faith. The dogmatist, the doubter, the believer. It is a going forward and not a going back when God leads us from the first into the second. Our care should be that, having come thus far, we may go on and not return. It is easy to slip back from doubt to dogmatism, and think that we are marching forward into faith. Let us beware of that, for the broad mountain top with its sunlight and free air is possible to all of us if we choose to struggle on and reach it.

Like the disciples pulling calmly on and thinking they could cross the lake, the Christ in their boat lying asleep, is the mere dogmatism that rests in its own sufficient grasp of the truths of our religion. Like the disciples all helpless with fright in the storm, and expecting to perish before they reached the shore, is the doubt which finds how helpless its own self-confident belief has been. Like the disciples, with their Lord awake again, sailing over the smooth waters into port is the faith that has come from personal apprehension of Christ. No religious calm is safe in which the personal Christ sleeps and we think that we can do without Him. It is a blessed storm, however hard it blows, that makes us wake Him. It is a blessed doubt that does for us, what doubt has done for so many, driven them from holding truths to hold the truth, from believing Christianity to believing Christ.

I hope that these illustrations have given us some idea of what the place and value of calmness really is, of when and where it is desirable, of how there are many portions of our lives in which it needs to be broken up in order that we may go on to a calmness that is higher.

I think some things must have become apparent which it is well for us to notice. These are:

That calmness being a true proportion between tasks and powers, it is a thing of absolute fact and not of mere emotion. It is not the way we feel about things but the way things are. And yet we are always making calmness a mere word of feeling.

There may be no peace in our lives and we go about still crying, peace, peace. There may sometimes, on the other hand, be the profoundest peace below and yet strange unrest on the surface. Who of us does not know men whose tasks and powers are indeed truly mated, and are doing their work smoothly and well, who are yet always dissatisfied; and others, only too many of them, who seem calm as a summer’s morning while all their life is at loose ends and fluttering with confusion?

And, then, from this it seems to follow that since calmness is not a thing of mere surface emotion, but must go down to the deepest condition of our lives, it can come not from any mere smoothing of the ruffled surface which we ourselves could do, but only from that harmonizing of the disturbed spiritual elements on which God must work. We cannot say, just, “Go to now, I will be calm.” We must cry with Paul, “Now the Lord of peace give us peace by all means.”

And still from this it seems to follow that no perfection of highest inner and outer calmness, no heaven here or hereafter is impossible for any poor vexed soul, or for the poor vexed world, since into the hands of Omnipotence has fallen back that task which man has struggled at in vain; and the calmness, the heaven which we cannot make for ourselves, we may take out of the free gift of His love.

When in the midst of all the restlessness of earthly life we talk of calmness our thoughts go forth to God. We think of Him as infinitely, eternally calm. No passion sweeps its cloud across His life. He is above, where indignation and impatience never reach. What do we think of as the meaning — what is the root and reason of His calmness? Is it not this — the perfect poise of task and power? It is infinity meeting infinity; the infinite duty and the infinite ability; no over-plus of task awaiting its power; no unused power that cannot find its task. In all that is included in the deep Scripture phrase which says that man was made in God’s image, I can see nothing deeper or more beautiful than this — the intimation which I find there that for man also such a state is possible; in him, too, there may be this perfect poise of task and power, and so he may be as calm as God. There is a perfect state conceivable for our humanity, in which there shall be no disturbing element, and yet none of the danger of stagnation that results from being undisturbed. We may be free from indignation, and yet never fall into feeble tolerance. We may be above doubt and yet hold vigorously every truth. We may be free from passion and yet full of feeling, — without haste, without rest, and yet abounding in life and work. The picture of such a condition of humanity as the first idea of God, is kept in the sweet story of the garden where the man and woman lived in the peaceful sunshine of the earliest days; and it renews itself in the other garden where the redeemed are to walk in white garments by the river of the water of life, with the Lamb who has brought them back to Himself — calmness at the end as at the beginning of the book of life.

And how is it in this middle life that lies between the paradises? I think there can be no clearer indication of what a mingled life of calm and excitement this present human life of ours is meant to be than in the life which the Son of Man lived when He was representing to us all the very pattern of a human life. Look at the Incarnation. That there was underneath, in the deep soul of Jesus, a strong abiding calm we verily believe; that many of the things that trouble us passed by and left Him unmoved we may be sure; but who that reads the Bible does not feel thankful that that perfect human life of Jesus was not one unbroken, placid, emotionless monotony? Who does not rejoice that his divine Master could be manlikely indignant? Who does not glory in those burning words of hot impatience with which Jesus showed that He could not abide the meanness of canting Pharisees and sophist Sadducees? Who has not heard the whip of small cords sing through the close air of the superstitious temple and clear the atmosphere as thunder does? Who has not been led into new thoughts of manly life by hearing Jesus rebuke Chorazin and Bethsaida, as well as by hearing Him console and forgive the adulteress? We must not let these scenes go out of the life of Jesus. If we do we shall forget to be indignant with meanness and oppression. We must not let them go and set up a colorless Christ to copy, or our lives will grow pale and wretched. No, my dear friends, the world may come, is surely coming where we shall be capable of indignation that is not fiery and scorn that does not burn. But with the pattern of the man of Nazareth to copy, that is not what we are to look for now. I complain of our present state, not that we are too restless and excited, but that we are restless and excited about the wrong things. I complain not that we are not calm enough, but that our calm and our excitement do not know their places. We fret if a trifle is wrong about our dinner, if a rival gets before us in the hunt for notoriety, if a companion does not pay us what we think the due respect; and we are calm as statues and smile on in perfect satisfaction while the laws of God are violated and the poor are wronged right by our side. We worry if we violated an etiquette yesterday, and let the sins of yesterday go unrepented. We are indignant with other men’s vices and tolerant about our own. Our storms blow in the wrong places. Our calms come just where we need the healthy fury of a storm. We want to pray not, “Lord, take away the power of excitement,” but “Lord, let our excitement like Christ’s be always true and timely — let it glow against all meanness and all sin, especially our own. And let every passion prepare us for a higher calm!”

I think what I have said to-day is true and most important, and yet, now as I look back upon our text and all the story out of which it comes, I fear that I have not said what you expected, what you had a right to expect that I would say when I announced it. I can fancy, I am sure, that there must have been some, who, conscious of perplexed and bewildered lives, hungered to hear something of how the soothing calm which they were longing for could come. They wanted rest. How should they get it? I have not seemed to speak especially to them, and yet in what I have said there is the answer to their question. You want peace and relief. Well, there is only one worthy principle by which to hope for it. Peace must come to you not by the lifting off of the burden, but by the pouring in of the strength that shall make you able to bear your burden. That is the only true and brave man’s peace. Is it bereavement that is troubling you? The calm must come back to you not by the restored presence of your dead friend, but by the new presence of Christ, who brings with Him in His spiritual access the spiritual companionship of all of ours who have gone to Him. Is it your sin? Only Christ the forgiver can give you peace. Is it your friendlessness? Only the friend of the friendless can help you. Is it your felt ignorance? Only the wisdom of God can hush or comfort you. Everywhere the calmness that we look for, all the calmness that we have a right to. He will give us. And if we all knew how near He was to us and how ready, who need go on perplexed, excited? Look back at those disciples upon Galilee. The boat goes tossing and filling, but why do they not call Jesus? They think they can sail it safely home themselves without Him. If they keep on so too long their boat and they will go down into the foaming waters. But no! At last, see, they have found out their weakness. They are turning to Him, — “Lord, save, we perish.” How readily He wakes! How mightily

He speaks! How graciously and perfectly into the souls that have come to Him for the power to match the tasks of life there comes the great calm, the peace that passeth understanding.