Proper 7 – Series B

I remember as a child my folks took me to a little circus that had stopped at the small town near where I was raised. The circus was a tiny affair really, but they did have a single elephant among their attractions. After the show, the kids were invited to come forward and see the animals. (This was all before the hyper-concern about liability.) We were able to come up and pet the elephant, the trick ponies, and see the lion in his cage. I had grown up around farm animals so was used to cows and we even had a horse. But that elephant was big. I remember looking at his foot and realizing that it was large enough to crush me. Our horse had stepped on my foot before. That hurt, but this was a foot on a wholly different scale than that. I was afraid because of the sheer magnitude of the creature.  In truth, that was a healthy fear. I could have been hurt by this thing. Today the disciples will learn a valuable lesson amid the waves and the wind of a storm that threatens to sink their boat. By the end of the brief pericope, they are far more afraid of the man who slept through the storm in the back of the boat than they were of the wind and the waves which had threatened them from outside the boat.