Open Hearts Open Doors: Storms
Dr. Tom Pace
September 3, 2017
Acts 27:13-20; 28:1-2
In our sermon today we’re going to be looking at a passage from the book of Acts. There are lots of storms in Scripture, but this one we sometimes don’t think about as much. It’s in the end of Acts, and it’s near the end of Paul’s life. Paul has been imprisoned in a place called Caesarea by the sea and he wants to go to Rome and meet the emperor and make his case before the emperor.
When he went before the authorities in Caesarea, frankly, he worked to try and convert Festus and Agrippa. They said, “What? Are you trying to convert us?” They were blown away.
But Paul’s thinking that he wants to go to Rome, and so they’re going to take him to meet Caesar. So they put him on a boat, and they sail, and they encounter a storm at sea.
What we’re going to look at today is what we might learn from Paul’s experience in the storm at sea.
When a moderate south wind began to blow, they thought they could achieve their purpose; so they weighed anchor and began to sail past Crete, close to the shore.But soon a violent wind, called the northeaster, rushed down from Crete. Since the ship was caught and could not be turned head-on into the wind, we gave way to it and were driven.By running under the lee of a small island called Caudawe were scarcely able to get the ship’s boat under control.After hoisting it up they took measuresto undergird the ship; then, fearing that they would run on the Syrtis, they lowered the sea anchor and so were driven.We were being pounded by the storm so violently that on the next day they began to throw the cargo overboard,and on the third day with their own hands they threw the ship’s tackle overboard. When neither sun nor stars appeared for many days, and no small tempest raged, all hope of our being saved was at last abandoned.
Acts 27:13-20 (NRSV)

After we had reached safety, we then learned that the island was called Malta. The natives showed us unusual kindness. Since it had begun to rain and was cold, they kindled a fire and welcomed all of us around it. Acts 28:1-2 (NRSV)
Join me in prayer. O God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel and then, O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
Dr. Jim Bankston, who was the pastor at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in the Medical Center for many years, had a great illustration that has always stuck with me. He tells the story of a Northerner driving through the Deep South and stopping at a truck stop for breakfast. He went into the truck stop and ordered his breakfast: three eggs, over easy, with bacon and coffee and toast. You have to have toast with over easy eggs because you wipe up the yellow stuff – the yolk – with the toast. That’s what makes it good.
So the waitress took his order, and when she came back with his meal, it was three eggs over easy, bacon, toast, coffee and some white stuff with yellow butter floating on it. The customer said, “Ma’am, what’s that stuff there?” She said, “That’s grits.” He said, “I didn’t order grits.” She said, “Oh, honey, you don’t order grits. Grits just comes.”
It’s a great phrase to use anytime you wonder how difficult times come in your life. Just say to yourself, “Grits just comes.”
Storms will happen. Here’s the first thing I want you to know from our story today: ^“When a moderate south wind began to blow, they thought they could achieve their purpose; so they weighed anchor and began to sail past Crete, close to the shore.But soon a violent wind…” The New International Version translates that as “Soon a hurricane, called a northeaster rushed down from Crete.”
Storms just come. There will be storms. You live here on the Gulf coast long, and you know that. There’ll be another one sometime. There have been storms before.
And here’s what amazing. You can’t do anything to stop it. Look, these aren’t the worst kinds of storms in most of our lives. For most of us it’s the word cancer, or divorce, or it’s a job loss or it’s financial trouble. Or it’s difficulty with children, or grief or addiction. It could be a dozen other things – those storms. Storms will come in life.
And we like to think that we’re self sufficient enough that if we plan well enough, and organize our lives well enough, and make the right decisions, and amass the right possessions and fortune, and all of those things. If we can just do it right, we can just insulate ourselves and keep ourselves away from the storms. But, friends, grits just comes. Storms are going to come. So how will we deal with those? What can we do?
I think we can learn some things from Acts chapters 27 and 28. Here’s the first. It says, “Sailing past it with difficulty, we came to a place called Fair Havens near the city of Lasea. Since much time had been lost, and sailing was now dangerous, because even the fast had already gone by, Paul advised them saying, ‘Sirs, I can see that the voyage will be with danger and with much heavy loss not only of cargo in the ship but also of our lives.”
So Paul is saying, “Look, you’ve got to step away from the storm and hide out – hunker down! Let the storm pass.”
Some of you who’ve been here a while remember Rev. Kent Kilbourne. He was a good friend of mine – he is a good friend of mine that’s the best way to say it. He’s not dead. He lives in Florida and is retired, which I guess it’s almost like that. Oh, the Florida part is what I meant!
Anyway, when he came to St. Luke’s many years ago, he came out of a very difficult divorce. He was in Louisiana and came to St. Luke’s kind of right out of that pain. He was a musician as well, and he wrote a song about our church. That’s always meant a lot to me, and the chorus, the tagline goes, “Of course, there’ll be rainbows, but first we must find a place to watch the rain.” For him the church was a place to watch the rain. If you’ve ever been to see Fair Havens, it’s a beautiful place, a place to hide out and watch the storm.
Some of you are Garrison Keillor fans and I love to listen to his stories. He’s no longer on “Prairie Home Companion,” but he used to tell a story that I loved. It was about growing up in Minnesota. When he’d go to school as they began the school year he would be assigned a family that if a blizzard came in the middle of the day and he couldn’t get back to his house out in the country, he could go live with that family until the blizzard passed. That way they didn’t have to keep all the kids in the school. So he was assigned something called “A storm home.”
The family that he was assigned to was the Kloeckls. He wrote, “I always knew I could go to the Kloeckls if the worst came and knock on their front door. Mrs. Kloeckl would open it up and say, ‘Ah, it’s you, our storm child. Come on in, won’t you?’ Then she would shout to her husband, ‘Honey, come and see who’s here in our kitchen!’ And in a deep voice Mr. Kloeckl would answer back, ‘Is it our storm child?’ And she would answer, ‘Yes!’ and then smiling, she would say, ‘Oh, the weather is just terrible, isn’t it?’ Then she’d heat up some milk in a pan on the stove to fix some hot chocolate.”
He said that he never got to meet his storm family but they remained large in his imagination. Knowing that if the storm ever came there was a place for him to go.
The church is to be a storm home. Whatever the storm is, this is that place where somebody gives you milk and cookies, and makes hot chocolate for you on the stove, and loves on you, and doesn’t judge you for what led to the storm and does everything they can to care for you. That’s what the church is to be.
The most significant storm story in Scripture is the story of Noah and the Ark. The Ark is a storm home for creation. It was there to protect creation. And the architecture of the church is named after the Ark. This is called the nave – it’s ship’s language, because we are to be like the Ark, a storm home.
The story gets a little more powerful, because what’s happened is that they’re shipwrecked. And they try and continue to sail anyway, they don’t choose to hunker down at Fair Havens, but they head out into the storm. And the storm is going to overtake them, and they end up shipwrecked on the island of Malta.
Here’s what it says, “After we had reached safety, we then learned that the island was called Malta.The natives showed us unusual kindness. Since it had begun to rain and was cold, they kindled a fire and welcomed all of us around it.”
Maybe that’s another image, that of unusual kindness. We’ve seen a lot of that over the last week, haven’t we? Some incredible, unusual kindness.
I have to tell you that being here as pastor at St. Luke’s over the last week has been deeply moving. You can hear the emotion in my voice just as I begin to talk about it, because what God has done in the midst of this city and certainly in the midst of the church is just overwhelming to me. The response of people just to reach out and help one another in every way they possibly can is just incredible.
The day after the storm we called the Red Cross and said, “We’d be glad to be a shelter.” And they said, “You’re too small. We need room for hundreds and thousands of people so you’re not going to be a Red Cross shelter.” We said, “Okay, but call us if you need us.”
But the night after as we were closing they called the answering service to say, “We have 250 Red Cross volunteers who need a place to stay tonight. Can you put them up?” So we said, “Sure.” That’s what we said. We did, we said “sure.” We kind of said, “Sure,” and we’ll figure it out later. It’s one of those kind of deals. We had the youth here, and we needed showers for everyone. It was really everybody chipping in.
And the amazing kindness of you all to the 250 or so – actually it never got quite that many – Red Cross volunteers here night before last and last night to show up and provide food for all those folks, to bring in towels. They were short of towels. They needed all sorts of things. Just to be here and welcome them, to quote “Red Cross,” you all set a new bar for hospitality for the Red Cross, just to watch that happen.
Yesterday we sent out mucking teams, 26 different houses have been mucked on Friday and Saturday. I got this e-mail this morning: “Today my house was full of light, God’s light shining through and from each team member who came to aid me as I lay at the side of the road. I was overwhelmed by the love and support that was at the same time strong but gentle. Thank you, my St. Luke’s family.”
And I get those e-mails like every hour from somebody who you all have shown unusual kindness to. And it can be frustrating because you volunteer, and you want to do something, and no one asks you. And it’s all the logistics of that.
One of our members texted me day before yesterday and said, “I need water.” I thought maybe he needed water. Sounds logical. No, somehow he’d gotten himself involved in an airlift of water from here to Beaumont in Chinook helicopters, since you couldn’t drive it over there. He said, “I need water,” and somehow we managed to get him water. He took 150,000 pounds of water in a private plane and helicopter to Beaumont. I mean unusual kindness. Over and over again.
Our Gethsemane campus was opened up on the night of the storm. We couldn’t get to it so no one was there to be able to help because no one could get to there. But the police called, and through the miracle of technology we were able to unlock the church for the police to let all the people in who were marooned over in that area. Then we began at that campus to provide a meal every afternoon for the community – a free meal for anyone who didn’t have food. And they would come and gather together. CCSC was there to help as well.
This coming week our Gethsemane campus will provide a Summer Club House. In the summer for six weeks at Gethsemane we have Summer Club House which is a summer activities program for the children of the neighborhood. Well, next week people go back to work, but school is not happening yet, so onward with another week of Summer Club House. I’m sure I’ve left out lots of stuff, but it’s an unusual kindness that is demonstrated.
Now here’s why I want to lift this up, because it’s really important for us to understand the role of the church. Everybody is doing it, not just Christians. Everybody. We’re not doing it any more than your average Joe who’s out there giving it a whirl. It’s everybody in this moment whether you’re Christian, or Jew, or Muslim or Hindu, or Buddhist, or atheist or agnostic or just plain confused. Regardless of where you are at this moment you feel this need, this compulsion within you, saying, “I want to help. I want to do something.”
Where does that come from do you think? That is the image of God inside us. That’s how we were formed in his image, to be about the business of rebuilding and redeeming. And the church’s responsibility is to help people see that, that “You know what? That’s God at work in you! That’s the image of God coming out.”
Tim Keller calls it “common grace.” That’s grace available to everybody. Everybody can experience God reaching within them and plucking that place that says, “I want to help! I want to help!” And it’s our job to point at that and say “That’s the church.” You’re getting swept up in the Holy Spirit, regardless of what you believe. The Holy Spirit is sweeping you up into God’s work of redeeming and rebuilding the world. That’s our job is to continue to lift up the name of Christ in the midst of this.
So he goes on, in verse 17: “After hoisting up they took measures to undergird the ship.” So you can do some things in a storm. Here’s the first in verse 17b: “They lowered the sea anchor and so were driven.” So what they would do is drop down the sea anchor as low as it would go, because as the wind would drive them at least that would help create drag. As they get close to the island of Malta it says, “Fearing they might run up on the rocks, they let down four anchors from the stern.”
Here’s my question – what anchors do you have in the midst of the storm?
My predecessor Jim Moore wrote a sermon with the title: “Noah Built His Ark in the Sun.” It’s kind of now that we begin to think about have we put down the anchors we’re going to need in the storm prayer, learning where to look in Scripture in these moments of pain and anguish, making friends.
You know the most gratifying thing to me in the whole deal was not the work that we formally sent out mucking teams, but it was the Bible study group that just did it. Because they had invested in weaving their lives together into a fabric so that when one of them hurt all of them hurt. And they all just showed up at the house. One of our young couples’ classes we called them and said, “Do you need to have muckers over there?” And he said, “They’re already here. They’ve already showed up from our Sunday school class.” So we practice those habits of forming community, making friends so that when we need that anchor we can drop it.
What are those anchors? It goes on: “We were being pounded by the storm so violently so that on the next day they began to throw the cargo overboard. And on the third day with their own hands they threw the ship’s tackle overboard.”
So the second thing we might learn is that there is something about priorities. So one, we put down our anchor, second, we are clear about our priorities, and maybe there’s some things we need to throw overboard, things we thought really mattered but don’t matter so much.
Have you seen the pictures of the people coming out of the water with their garbage bags over their shoulders? Have you wondered what’s in those garbage bags? I’ve wondered that. So you’re leaving your house, and you can only take a garbage bag full of stuff. What are you going to put in it? Mementoes? Photographs? Letters from people you love? See, what a storm does for us is to make us think, “What really matters to you?” When we decide the things that don’t matter, we throw them overboard and get focused on the ones that do. Have you told the people that you love that you love them? Have you showed up to help the people you can help?
Here’s the third thing to do in the midst of the storm. Paul says to them, “I urge you now to keep up your courage for there will be no loss of life among you, only of the ship. For last night there stood by me an angel of the God to whom I belong and whom I worship, and he said, ‘Do not be afraid, Paul, for you must stand before the Emperor and indeed God has granted safety to all those who are sailing with you.’ So keep up your courage, men, for I have faith in God.”
There’s a concept that Angela Duckworth has spent a lot of time focusing on. It’s called “grit.” You may have heard of this. “Grit” is the combination of courage, and passion and perseverance. She believes grit is what makes certain people successful, and lack of grit is what makes others not so successful.
When Judge Emmett was here in our last service, one of the things he said was that other people are going to turn away, but we have to stay focused, because it’s going to be a long haul. It is going to take grit for us to move forward through this storm.
The difference between the people of God, those of us who are followers of Jesus and those who respond with common grace is that some respond out of emotion. It’s that sense where they say, “Oh, I need to help! I need to help!” And then they move on to something else a week or two later. But in the church we have had this vision of the kingdom of God where that which is broken gets fixed, that we’re a part of God’s work in redeeming and restoring a broken creation, rebuilding the kingdom of God. That’s been our mission – putting our faith to work in love.
And it has been, and it will be, so there is a perseverance, a focus of grit that doesn’t chase the next best thing but continues to move forward on this decision to be about the business of rebuilding. Like we said before, it’s great to be the first in, but we certainly don’t want to be the first to leave, to not give up on this. Because that’s who we are. And if you want to get through a storm you have to stay focused on the mission. You put down your anchors, you throw some cargo overboard – the things that don’t matter so much – and you stay focused on the mission to which God has called you, building the kingdom.
So, I’m thrilled to say to you how much I’ve longed for this and to say, “I love you.” And I hope you say “I love you” to one another. It’s good to be together again and to offer to God our praise and thanksgiving.