Job 38.1-11, Psalm 107.1-3, 23-32, Mark 4.35-41
The Third Sunday after Trinity, 20 June 2021
Clapham, Eldroth
‘In 2010, Harvard Business School chose the best business model of that year. They chose Somali piracy.’ Around that time the journalist Rose George discovered that ‘some 544 seafarers were being held hostage in ships often anchored just off the Somali coast in plain sight’.
‘Would that happen in any other industry?’ she asked. ‘Would we see 544 airline pilots held captive in their Jumbo Jets on a runway, for months, or a year? Would we see 544 Greyhound bus drivers? It wouldn’t happen.’ [1]
But it was another fact which she discovered at that time which most astonished Rose George - almost for the fact that she hadn’t known it before - that is how fundamentally we still depend on shipping, an industry today ‘far removed from Moby Dicks and Jack Sparrows’.
Sometimes it takes an interruption to awaken us to facts like these. For many of us this year such an interruption came in the shape of the stricken mega-ship ‘Ever Given’ which blocked the Suez Canal after it was hit by ‘a sudden strong wind’ on the 23rd March. John Lanchester described how this made ‘many, many people annoyed and upset’:
The ship’s captain and all-Indian crew, for a start; the Egyptian pilots who were in charge of the ship during its passage through the canal. Everyone stuck on board the several hundred ships waiting to go through. Everyone worried about the stupefyingly diverse cargo on board all these ships: oil, of course, but also many tons of the world’s most mined commodity (can you guess? It’s sand); and, of course, everything else, from widgets to trainers to computers, from coffee to consoles, from plastic crap of all types to medicines to, well, everything. Since 12 per cent of global trade passes through the canal, the economic damage caused by its closure was significant: a boggling $9.6 billion a day. [2]
All of this was something of a revelation to many of us, for as Rose George so powerfully puts it in her book Deep Sea and Foreign Going, shipping is an ‘invisible industry that brings you 90% of everything’. [3] ‘It has quadrupled in size since 1970. We are more dependent on it now than ever’. [4] And yet we suffer from what the chief of the Royal Navy, the First Sea Lord, calls ‘sea blindness’. We pay little heed to the sea itself and those who traverse it, to the companies who run shipping under their very elusive flags of convenience; [5] we pay scant attention to what goes on behind the high-security fences of the world’s container ports, and least of all to the conditions in which the world’s seafarers live. They will joke that their job is like being in prison with a salary - but those who know both forms of institution agree that sea life is the far harsher form of incarceration.
Those who go down to the sea in ships
and ply their trade in great waters,
These have seen the works of the Lord
and his wonders in the deep.
Let us try to go some way to overcoming our sea blindness and opening our eyes to these people who have brought us nine out of every ten things we own.
Who are they? [6] Often people for whom seafaring is a route out of poverty. Happy to take any well paid work that they can get, in less affluent regions such as the Philippines a seafarers wage will invariably support up to 15 family members at home.
The long term voyages they complete leave them isolated from friends, family and loved ones for up to nine months at a time. Whilst their wages are pitifully low by any measure, and their living conditions sparse, whilst the working hours and contracts are long and they may have to eat unfamiliar food for months on end, nevertheless many seafarers count being able to provide a better life for their families at home as worth the sacrifice of time away from them.
At his word the stormy wind arose and lifted up the waves of the sea.
They were carried up to the heavens and down again to the deep;
their soul melted away in their peril.
It’s a dangerous occupation in a tough environment: the perils of life at sea are real. Extreme weather conditions are one thing; but piracy at sea is a real and ever-present threat. Forget Johnny Depp winking at the camera and saying ‘life is good’: real-life piracy is an extreme danger and a frightening experience for seafarers, and the Mission to Seafarers describe how many suffer mental breakdowns as a result of the torture and torment they receive for weeks or months on end.
They reeled and staggered like a drunkard and were at their wits’ end.
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he brought them out of their distress.
Could you go nine months without Wi-Fi? You might have to on a cargo ship. Have you found it hard enough only being able to FaceTime your loved ones during the lockdowns of the past year? Imagine not even being able to do that. Many seafarers choose to only sail on those ships which do have Wi-Fi access on board. Imagine the strain that extended periods away from home can put on relationships with loved ones as well as on mental health, particularly so during the pandemic.
They woke him up and said to him,
‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’
The Mission to Seafarers cite ship abandonment as one of the most important issues afflicting seafarers: a surprisingly common event where unscrupulous vessel owners abandon their ships due to financial problems or on account of legal disputes. The ships are left in port or at anchorage, often because money has dried up for port costs, unloading fees and wages. The only way that seafarers can ensure that they are paid any wages owning to them is to remain on board for a statutory eight weeks and maybe more.
He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’
Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.
Many will find it entirely plausible that Jesus the Son of God, the co-author of creation, has such an affinity with the wind and the water that he can ask them to be calm, and they will respond. But even if that is a stretch for you, I imagine you may still be open to the metaphor in the miracle - to an appreciation of the One who yearns to calm every storm of life, to heal and make whole.
"Christ, I dare you hear the prayer I sing!
Lord, who cares if we are perishing?” [7]
As we pay constant heed to the storms in our own lives - the stormy seas we all navigate - let us also keep ourselves minded of those who go down to the sea in ships… praying, hoping, that they may see the works of the Lord.
Notes
[1] Rose George, TED Talk: Inside the Secret Shipping Industry. TED@BCG Singapore, October 2013.
[2] John Lanchester, Gargantuanisation. London Review of Books Vol. 43 No. 8, 22 April 2021.
[3] Rose George, Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Brings You 90% of Everything.
[4] Rose George, TED Talk: Inside the Secret Shipping Industry. TED@BCG Singapore, October 2013.
[5] Wikipedia: Flag of convenience.
[6] The following descriptive paragraphs are based on extracts from the website of the Mission to Seafarers: What is a Seafarer? and Our Issues, accessed 17 June 2021.
[7] Psalm 107:23, 25-26, 28-31 & Mark 4.35-41 – "Some Went Down to the Sea”. Prayer and song for God, original text adapted from the ELW psalter with original tune and performed by Pastor Joel S Neubauer, St Mark Lutheran Church (ELCA), Yorktown, Virginia. Shared for the season after Pentecost 2021 (Covid-19/coronavirus). Sourced from YouTube: https://youtu.be/VODlmwcL9ug.
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