This year we will again celebrate a partnership between cocoa growers in West Africa and chocolate makers in Britain. ‘The Meaningful Chocolate Company’ is part of the Fair Trade movement around the world working with producers to source cocoa and add value to this natural resource by generating an income for producers that enables them to invest in community projects they choose. New schools, medical centres, as well as freshwater, and good sanitation are just some of the benefits that Fairtrade makes possible.

All this may sound a long way from our reading today, but it springs out of a unique Christian insight into the way God works in the world – he works in partnership with us. “Who is this?” the disciples ask as Jesus stills the storm. Luke 8:25. The account of the stilling of the storm poses questions about our world, our God, and ourselves that shape the way we live.

Our world: We can read this account as the story of a chaotic world in which natural disaster always threatens to overwhelm us. Or we can read it as an account of a mechanical world in which God has abandoned us to our fate in the struggle for survival. The Church has read it however as the promise of a world in which God is in control over all the forces of nature and works with us to promote the welfare of the planet and its creatures.

Our God: These views presuppose the kind of God who might be in charge. Ancient civilizations saw malignant forces behind nature that humans must appease by sacrifice or sympathetic magic. The disciple’s rebuke of Jesus, for example, suggests that they might have held him responsible for the storm. Today we tend to think of the world as a machine working according to the laws of nature without any kind of divine intervention. If there is a God He has left us to our own devices; maybe the picture of Jesus asleep suggests this kind of view. But the bible presents us with another point of view: A God who is present and active in the world, working and suffering with us, and intervening in the person of Jesus to rescue us.

God with us

Our painting today illustrates this literally. Rembrandt in one of his earliest works (1633, when he was 29), pictures himself in the boat, beside Jesus. You can see him looking directly at the viewer, holding on to a stay that runs from the stern of the boat to the masthead. Unlike the other disciples, he seems calm as if to say, “I know how this story ends. I will be safe with Jesus in the boat.”. The composition of the picture, with the sky brightening up and the clouds clearing, suggests that it is not the disciples’ pleading that produces results, but that Jesus already had command of the situation. Even in a world where God seems absent, we must trust that He is ultimately in control.

The way we live: If we see this world as chaotic all we can do in response to the wild and maybe malignant forces of nature is to keep our heads down and hope the danger passes us by. On the other hand, our modern worldview assumes that humanity is ultimately the master of the forces of nature and can control them. Our approach to climate change rests on the belief that technological progress will deliver us from disaster. The Church from earliest times, however, has seen this account as an invitation to faith in a loving Creator. Jesus’ question “Where is your faith” Luke 8:25, asks us to examine where we place our faith. For the Church, God is present with us in the storm and in the calm, working in partnership with us in the project of making the world a better place to live.

The Fairtrade project is part of this response to the God who is in control of everything, by working with Him in the improvement of the lives of others we are working to make a better world where all can flourish.

Rev. Simon Brignall

With the world in turmoil, and storm clouds gathering, we pray for peace with Justice in Palestine/Israel and Ukraine.

Please keep our grieving families in your prayers.

God of peace and justice,
we pray for the people of Ukraine today.
We pray for peace and the laying down of weapons.
We pray for all those who fear for tomorrow,
that your Spirit of comfort would draw near to them.
We pray for those with power over war or peace,
for wisdom, discernment, and compassion to guide their decisions.
Above all, we pray for all your precious children, at risk, and in fear,
that you would hold and protect them.
We pray in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace.
Amen