During the season’s first Monday Night Football, a matchup between the Bills and the Jets, the camera paused on a healthy, smiling young man on the Bills sideline. It was Damar Hamlin, the Bills safety who, just over eight months ago, collapsed on the field after making a routine tackle. Like millions who were watching that January game, I stared in shock at the television as an ambulance drove onto the field and 65,000 fans in the stadium were silenced by this inexplicable and entirely unanticipated event. A healthy, strong, 24-year-old professional athlete had just dropped like a rag doll onto the field.
It was only natural to feel a range of emotions as I saw Hamlin alive and in good spirits, from joy that he is back on the team, ready to play, to a nervous remembrance that his near-death experience could happen to anyone. There is a chaos in our world. It is usually held at bay by the limited control we exercise over nature and our resources. But when chaos intrudes into our regularly scheduled programming, it leaves us wondering when it will happen again.
It was also not lost on me that this game took place on September 11th, the 22nd anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. Many of us live with the vivid details of that day as we sat glued to our televisions, incredulous, as if the very fabric of our existence was being dissolved by the fires in the Twin Towers. One of our church members here in Northern Virginia was in the section of the Pentagon that was hit. He was thrown violently against a wall and lost many coworkers, including one he had just talked with 30 seconds before the plane struck. It was pure chaos—incomprehensible, unimaginable, irreversible.
The reason these events introduce chaos into our lives is because we don’t know everything that is currently happening or that will happen. In short, we are not God. Events that are chaotic to us do have explanations. There is a medical explanation to what happened to Damar Hamlin called commotio cordis, a rare cardiac arrest immediately following a blow to the chest. In the aftermath of 9/11, Osama bin Laden published a “Letter to America,” citing America’s presence in the Middle East and foreign policy decisions against Muslims in places like Somalia, Chechnya, and Kashmir as the motivators behind his holy war against our nation.
But in the moment—as we watch top-rated quarterbacks praying a Hail Mary instead of throwing one, as we watch the symbolic twin centers of the American economy in flames—reason has left the building. The stripping away of the expected leaves us with a visceral reminder that we are not in control of our world, that we do not know the future, and that whatever just happened could strike again.
We are not alone in this experience. Thousands of years ago, ancient peoples like the Canaanites and Babylonians lived with an intense awareness of the chaos that loomed over their lives. In their mythologies they had names for this chaos, stemming from their fear of the sea. The sea god was Yam (Canaanites) or Tiamat (Babylonians). In these primal stories, either the sea god itself or its servant (Lotan, or as you might know it, Leviathan) was portrayed also as a seven-headed sea serpent. Yam. Tiamat. Leviathan. These are the names Ancient Near East peoples gave to describe the constant threats of ocean waves that crashed against their shores and storms that could stir up at any time on their seas.
This helps us understand how some of Jesus’ disciples could simultaneously be fishermen by trade and terrified of the Sea of Galilee where they carried out their work. As observant Jews, they knew the stories of chaos in the Scriptures: the undoing of creation in Noah’s flood or the crashing of the Red Sea on Pharaoh’s army. They knew the warnings in Job 41 about Leviathan—“Lay your hands on him; remember the battle—you will not do it again! Behold, the hope of a man is false; he is laid low even at the sight of him.” Whether or not Israelites actually believe there was a seven-headed dragon that capriciously created waves and tumult on the sea, the fear of unexpected, destructive forces was quite real.
At a level too deep for words, I find a solace and solidarity in knowing that my own experience of chaos is an ancient one. I have felt the tumult of losing young, beloved church members in the last two years. A 35-year-old sister whose premarital counseling I had just completed died of a brain aneurysm while choosing her wedding playlist. A 40-year-old brother who I was mentoring toward church leadership died in his sleep on Good Friday of an undiagnosed heart disease. These stirred up the grief of losing my father to an immediate, fatal heart attack when he was 67 years old.
In the swirl of these gut-wrenching losses and the fear of who might die next, there is a comfort in knowing that humans have been naming these fears for thousands of years. I find myself on the boat with the disciples as the tempestuous waves crack the wooden vessel, watching the chaos break through their only layer of control and threaten their land-dwelling lives. I feel the instinctual terror of that which cannot be controlled. I hear myself asking the resting Jesus, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” (Mark 4:38)
Perhaps you find yourself here too. Whether it is a national event like 9/11 or your own personal chaos—the dissolving of family relationships, the loss of a predictable place to live, the unanticipated death of a dear friend, the looming obsolescence of the industry that pays your salary, or the shifting of moral norms that makes you wonder which way is up—you fear the unpredictability in your bones.
As you also voice your fears to the sleeping Master—“don’t you care?”—what would it look like to pause from bailing the water, set down your bucket, abandon your attempts to control what you know cannot be controlled, and ask the question, “How can Jesus sleep at a time like this?” Perhaps if the disciples knew the answer to their own question, “Who then is this?” (Mark 4:41), they would have remembered that there is one being in the Scriptures who is consistently unruffled by chaos: Israel’s God. Yahweh brought order to the first chaotic waters not by struggle—like the tales of epic battles between the sea and storm gods in Canaanite and Babylonian myths—but by speaking a word. There was no warfare when God ordered the world by his word. And when the Word became flesh and dwelt among fishermen there in the storm-tossed boat, there was no struggle to say, “Peace! Be still!”
We still live in a chaotic world. We do not know who will die next or what market forces will crash the economy or what variant of COVID will claim more lives or what the unintended consequences of geopolitical maneuvers will be. But we know the One through whom the world was created, the Lamb who absorbed our chaos-creating sin on the cross. We trust in the Deliverer who crushed the head of the serpent and will, upon his return, cast him forever into the lake of fire. We hope in the Redeemer whose resurrection will bring about The Resurrection in which the chaotic sea will be no more (Revelation 21:1). And when the chaos intrudes into our regularly scheduled programming, we can find our Savior there, resting in the back of the boat. We can draw near to him, sit down, perhaps even lay down beside him as the waves crash in. Our fears can be regulated by his sovereign calm. And we can know that if Jesus is near, we can ride out the storm until he speaks the final, forever word of peace.
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