Adults lie awake wondering if they can hang on to their jobs, their marriages, their sanity. Others fall asleep only to be plagued by nightmares of past memories and future fears. Elderly lie in institutions, lonely. Prisoners wait in jails, forgotten. Children go to schools that are understaffed, underfunded, without qualified teachers.
Teachers go to work for less money than it takes to rent a tiny apartment in Silicon Valley.
In the gospel story today, the sea reverberates with meaning from the Hebrew scripture. The Hebrew word for sea is derived from the name of an evil god in the Babylonian creation story, and such stormy water connotates evil, the waters of chaos, threat, and danger. Over and over again the Hebrew scriptures uses chaotic waters to symbolize all the forces at large which work in opposition to God s intention for the well-being of creation. These are the chaotic waters of Genesis 1 - so full of chaos and death that there can be no life without the creative will of God. In the story of Noah and the flood we again see the symbolic waters of chaos on the loose.