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The following message for the moment is delivered by the Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. Today's message is entitled "Shore Anchors in an Age of Storms." Worship by giving attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded

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in the book of the Acts of the Apostles, the 27th chapter. I begin the reading at the verse numbered 13. "And when the south wind blew gently, supposing that they had obtained their purpose, they weighed anchor and sailed along Crete, close in shore. But soon a tempestuous wind called the Northeaster struck down from the

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land. And when the ship was caught and could not face the wind, we gave way to it and were driven. And running under the lee of a small island called Cauda, we managed with difficulty to secure the boat. After hoisting it up, they took measures to undergird the ship. Then, fearing that they should run on the

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Cirtus, they lowered the gear and so were driven. As we were violently storm- tossed, they began next day to throw the cargo overhead. And the third day they cast out with their own hands the tackle of the ship. And then, when neither sun nor stars appeared for many a day, and no small tempest lay on us, all hope of our

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being saved was at last abandoned. As they had been long without food, Paul then came forward among them and said, 'Men, you should have listened to me and should not have set sail from Crete and incurred this injury and loss. I now bid you take heart, for there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship.

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For this very night there stood by me an angel of God, to whom I belong and whom I worship. And he said, 'Do not be afraid, Paul. You must stand before Caesar, and lo, God has granted you all those who sail with you. So take heart, men, for I have faith in God that it will be exactly as I have been told. But we shall

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have to run on some island.' When the fourteenth night had come, as we were drifting across the Sea of Adria about midnight, the sailors suspected that they were nearing land. So they sounded and found twenty fathoms. A little farther on they sounded again and found fifteen fathoms. And fearing that we might run on

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the rocks, they let out four anchors from the stern and prayed for day to come. And as the sailors were seeking to escape from the ship and had lowered the boat into the sea under pretense of laying out anchors from the bow, Paul said to the centurion and the soldiers, 'Unless these men stay in the ship, you cannot be

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saved.' Then the soldiers cut away the ropes of the boat and let it go. As day was about to dawn, Paul urged them all to take some food, saying, 'Today is the fourteenth day that you have continued in suspense and without food, having taken nothing. Therefore, I urge you to take some food. It will give you strength,

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since not a hair is to perish from the head of any of you.' And when he had said this, he took bread, and giving thanks to God in the presence of all, he broke it and began to eat. Then they all were encouraged and ate some food themselves. We were in all two hundred and seventy-six persons in the ship. And when

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they had eaten enough, they lightened the ship, throwing out the wheat into the sea. Now when it was day, they did not recognize the land, but they noticed a bay with a beach on which they planned, if possible, to bring the ship ashore. So they cast off the anchors and left them in the sea, at the same time loosening

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the ropes that tied the rudders. Then, hoisting the foresail to the wind, they made for the beach. But striking a shoal, they ran the vessel aground. The bow stuck and remained immovable, and the stern was broken up by the surf. The soldier's plan was to kill the prisoners, lest any should swim away and escape. But

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the centurion, wishing to save Paul, kept them from carrying out their purpose. He ordered those who could swim to throw themselves overboard first and make for the land, and the rest on planks or on pieces of the ship. And so it was that all escaped to the land. And may God bless to us this reading from his work.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Paul and Luke are on board a Roman ship which is heading toward the capital of the Empire. They are near the island of Malta, when suddenly they encounter a great storm. It is with them day and night. At first they could see the sun

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and the stars, and then these disappeared from their sight. For a while longer, they could see the moon looking down with frightened and pale face upon the raging waters. For two weeks, the storm continued. They had jettisoned everything on board overboard, but they were still unable to navigate the ship. And so they simply

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let it run freely before the blast of the storm. They watched as the bow sprit would one moment point toward the heavens, and the next minute point down into the steep black gullies of the waves. There were 276 persons on board, and they were clinging to the masts and to the stanchions and to the spars. And

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then a cry that terrorized them even more came to their ears, for someone called "Breakers ahead!" Because of the darkness, they could not see what shore they were nearing, but they could hear the sound of the water smashing against the rocks. The captain ordered the sounding line to be thrown out and

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discovered that there was 20 fathoms beneath them. A few minutes later, he had the line thrown out again, and now there were only 15 fathoms beneath them. They were quickly heading toward this rocky coast. And so the captain issued this order, "Cast out the four stern anchors." And they did so. And the anchors gripped

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the bottom, and the ship drifted no more. And hanging on for dear life, they waited for the dawn. Now the church is often likened to a ship. You will see it so symbolized in printed literature, in banners, in stained-glass windows, and the like. I have even seen some pulpits designed like the prowl of a ship.

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Perhaps you have seen such pulpits also. We must acknowledge that the ship of the church in our country today is in a time of very serious storm. We are caught in a holocaust of waves and water. When two-thirds of our people are not in attendance upon worship each week, when the average member of the church gives

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only 37 cents a week to the easing of the need of the suffering of the world, when it takes 10,000 Christians to make three converts to the church, the situation is desperate. The other day I was reading the Foundation News, which is a paper published by foundations for foundations, and there was an article in

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there about why foundations do not like to give money to religious organizations. And in that article, there was the story of the dean of the Columbia Business School, who received a call from one of his professors. The professor said it was important that he speak with him, that he speak with him quickly, and that he speak

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with him privately. The dean gave him an appointment in his office, and as the dean waited for the professor to come, he wondered what it would be about. Had the man spent himself into some great debt? Was his marriage falling apart? Had he become trapped by drugs? The dean had heard all of these stories many times

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before. At long last, the professor came, and drawing a chair up close to where the dean was sitting, he said, "I understand that you are a religious man, and so I want to tell you something that I have not told anyone else in all the world. I pray every day." Now, my friends, when we live in a world and in a society

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in which most people do not pray, in which two-thirds of the members of the church don't even come to the place where they can hear someone else pray, and where prayer has become so embarrassing that it is acknowledged only in private with those with whom one feels very safe, then we're in a bad

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time. The storm is blowing all about us. Congregations are closing. Missions across the face of this country are being closed. Christian colleges are closing their doors. So what are we to do in the midst of this storm? Well, I suggest that we need to hear the voice of the captain of the ship that is the

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church, the voice of Christ. And I believe that he cries out to us the same words that that captain cried out to the crew on the ship on which Luke and Paul went through that storm. You remember those words? "Throw out the four anchors from the stern." This is what we are called to do, to throw out the anchors and then

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hold on until the dawn. Now, anchor number one is the apostolicity of the church. I understand that there is a television program called Murphy Brown, and at the end of the recent television season in late spring, she was left at a point of dilemma, hopefully to entice viewers to tune again in the fall to find out how

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the question was answered. Her dilemma was this. The man to whom she had previously been married and was now divorced had come back to her and offered to marry her again, this time with a far deeper level of commitment than he had known before. But at the same time, she was engaged in a very

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passionate love affair with a man who said he wanted them to have this relationship of love and intimate romance, but he had no desire that they should be married. And she's caught on the horns of a dilemma as to which of these two men she should go for, and she counsels with her friends. And in the

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midst of this counseling, she utters this line, "Why doesn't life come with an instruction manual?" Well, the fact of the matter is, it does. The Word of God lived out in Jesus Christ, and the words of Scripture which testify under divine inspiration to the message of God as we see it in Christ and as we see it in the

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world, these things are our instruction manual. And we need to hold fast as a church through our confessions and our creeds to the testimony of the prophets and the apostles. We need to hold fast to the 20 centuries of Christian believing which have sustained the church across all that thousands and thousands of days.

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Remember that Christ centered the Christian faith in himself. He said, "Come unto me and I shall give you rest." He sent Peter as an activist out into the world, and Peter tried to storm heaven and purify the earth at the same time. But Peter never saw himself as the equal of Christ. He said, "Lord, to whom shall we

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go? Thou hast the words of eternal life." Christ sent Paul, one of the massive intellects of the ancient world, out into the world to merge Greek and Hebrew thought, thus making the theology of the church more comprehensible to the world at that time. And Paul did that task, fulfilled it magnificently, but he never

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thought of himself as being in any way equal to Christ. He said, "For me to live is Christ." Jesus sent out the other apostles, driving them across land and sea to carry the message of the gospel as they saw it lived out in his life and as it was testified to on the pages of Scripture. By the end of the first

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century, we find graves in the catacombs in Rome. The graves of pagan Romans are marked with symbols of despair and sadness, but the graves of Christians, many of whom had died in the arena in the maws of lions and other wild beasts, those graves were marked with lilies and angels and crosses and symbols of

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victory. Already the faith was there. It was common in that time when a map was drawn and some part of the sea was to be represented where no one had ever sailed before. They would write across that part of the map, "Here be dragons." But the missionaries of the church, under the instructions of the captain, carried the

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gospel to India and to Spain and to Great Britain and even to our shores. And that gospel was Christ and the apostolic testimony to him. The faith moved up into Europe and there was aided vastly by the development of the printing press. The gospel was amplified and magnified by this great tool made available. And

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Luther and Calvin and Knox and Zwingli and the Westleys wrote and their words were quickly reproduced and sent out across the world. On and on, you see, that apostolic testimony has been carried. Just a few weeks ago, a young man named Sam, who had been in the Gulf War, came to see me. He told me that while he had

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been over there, he had found a book, belonged to a friend of his, and he'd read that book. It was a novel about the early days of the church, the heroes of those times. And he was so moved by that book that the Holy Spirit spoke through it to him and he became a disciple of Christ. He had to leave the book there

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when he returned home and he was trying to find another copy of the book and wondered if I could direct him to one. He wanted to give it to his wife so that she could come to know the faith which had already taken up residence in his heart. You see again, the testimony of the Apostles to the Word of God seen in

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Christ and through their words to their experience of him. The legions of Christ are extremely varied. There are the rich like Zinzendorf and the poor like Joan of Arc. There are the educated like Augustine and the simple like St. Francis. There are the professionals like Albert Schweitzer and there are the

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non-professionals like Robert Carey. But all of these together, of them all it may be said, "Ten thousand thousand are their tongues, but all their hearts are one." And what is that one thing about which their hearts rock themselves and to which their tongues testify? The faith once for all delivered by the Saints, the

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testimony of the Apostles. We dare not lose our heritage. The Apostles taught us that the center of our faith is to be found in Jesus Christ in the breaking of bread and in prayers, and that is the first anchor that we must hurl into the teeth of the storm. The second anchor is the ubiquity of the church. One of the

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world's most noted businessmen is Abraham Krasnoff, and in a new edition of Megatrends by Robert Nesbitt, Krasnoff is quoted as saying, "Any businessman who does not today have a global perspective is either dead or done." The church has had a global perspective from the very beginning. We have members of every race

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in every place. We have people who are accomplished in every worthy area of human endeavor. We have the largest fellowship on the face of the earth, brought together by the ecumenical movement, not into some great mega church but rather into that unity of the Spirit which is the bond of peace. We are

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united as one church going to this one world. Think of it. There are five billion people on this planet, and one-third of them are Christians. There are more Christians than there are adherents to any other two faiths on the face of the earth that you would like to add together. There are 2,500,000

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Christian churches and worship centers around the globe. There are 14,500 radio and television stations which reach more than 1 billion people every week. 550 million copies of the scriptures or portions of the scriptures have been translated into more than 2,000 tongues and distributed around the world. There

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are 250,000 missionaries at work in various places of the world today. The third world is increasing the number of missionaries that it is sending at a rate of 25% per year. In Latin America, the growth of the church is faster than the birth rate. In sub-sahara Africa, it's almost the same. Yes, the task before us

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is still before us. There are still more to be won than had been won. But look at who we are and where we are and what we have for the doing of that task. Just yesterday, we celebrated the 22nd anniversary of that occasion in which the first lunar module landed on the surface of the moon in the Sea of

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Tranquility there. And Neil Armstrong went down the ladder, and you remember his words, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." While he was making those first steps on the moon, Buzz Aldrin, the other astronaut who was in that lunar module, opened a small package which he had asked his Presbyterian

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pastor to prepare for him. And in that package was the Liturgy of Holy Communion and the bread and the wine. And there he offered up himself again through the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. We were there on the moon from the very beginning. We still have the capacity to turn the world upside down.

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And that anchor should help to steady us in this time of storm. The third anchor is the contemporaneity of the church, its reforming nature. One of our Pittsburgh businessmen said just about a month ago that security is to be found in change. What he was saying is you cannot approach the world today as the world

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was approached yesterday. You could speak to the first century in first century terms, but you must speak to the 20th century in 20th century terms. The church must begin to pray with its eyes wide open, knowing who people are and where they are and why they are what they are. Many decades ago now, an American

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professor of theology went over to Korea. That was before the great revivals in Korea, which have made it one of the great Christian nations of the world, South Korea. And this professor asked Graham Lee, the missionary who was showing him around, if he could preach to a Korean congregation. So Graham Lee took

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him to a small church and he said, "I will be your translator." And the professor of theology stood up to preach the sermon and he began with this line, "All thought may be divided into two categories, the concrete and the abstract." And Graham Lee, the translator, looked out at this little church with its earthen floor, its naked

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children, its toothless grandmother sitting on that floor, and he translated the professor's opening words in this way, "I want you to know I have come all the way from America to tell you how much Jesus loves you." He, you see, was speaking to the circumstance. He was speaking with a comprehensible relevance.

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We discover today that the baby boomer generation is tending to return to smaller congregations. They are seeking that intimacy which can be found in such places. And this gives us an opportunity, a freedom to experiment that is a new opportunity for us to tell the old story in new ways. Oh, there's much in the

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church that we should jettison. I really believe that if the Holy Spirit were to withdraw from most churches today, 95% of the organizations in the church would never notice the fact that it had happened. We need clergy who will read and who will lead, churches that will begin street ministries and offer

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worship services which are innovative and at the same time not offered to a congregation for their entertainment, but offered to God as an act of praise. We have nothing to fear as we go out into the world with the gospel in relevant terms. When Einstein came forward with his new physics, there were those who

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said that this would shake forever the foundations of the church. Interesting that the teachings of this man who praised the church for the way in which it stood against Hitler in Germany should now be prophesied as that which is going to undermine the gospel. But the fact of the matter is that Einstein's

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work and the relationship between time and space, what is called the principle of dilation, what he described as not a theory but as an actual natural phenomenon, that has helped us to understand the nature of God as light in a way that we've never understood him before. And that has given us new light

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on the whole question of foreknowledge that we have never had before. In other words, Einstein's work has corroborated the gospel, not corrupted it. Logic says to us that two opposite statements cannot both be true. So when we go with the gospel, the truth, out into the world, we will encounter pretending truths, but

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we need never fear them. For the gospel truth always inevitably triumphs. So the third anchor to use is the truth, and we need to scribe on the side of that anchor the word "now." The truth in the terms of now, for the people of now, and the needs of now, the anchor of contemporaneity. And the fourth anchor is

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the authority of our captain, the Lord Jesus. He is the one who said, "You will remember that the church will not fail and that the gates of hell will not be able to withstand it." Our ultimate hope as Christians is, of course, in Jesus Christ. It's an interesting thing to note that the only other place in Scripture

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where the word "anchor" appears, besides that passage with which we are concerned this morning, is in the book of Hebrews. And there we read, "Lay hold upon the hope set before us, which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast." Now what is the essence of Christian hope? It's Jesus Christ. He is our hope

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in life, he is our hope in death, he is our hope in life after death. He is the captain of our souls as he is the master of the ship that is the church. My favorite American painter is Winslow Homer, and I particularly like a painting of his of a small sailboat, its sail in place, and aboard the

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boat are three children and an older man at the helm. In the background, the evidences of a storm are seen, the clouds are ominous, and already the waves around the tiny vessel are froth-topped. But the three children are showing no concern whatever about this. One of them is sprawled on the stern, one of them is

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sitting in the bow, one of them is hanging over the edge looking down into the water. And why is it that they're not concerned? Because of the hand of that old salt on the helm. Well, Jesus Christ's hand is on the helm of the church, and no matter how high the gale, we may trust him, for nothing can sink.

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That he is and that he has to proclaim. There is no watery Holocaust which is beyond his control. I've always loved the words of that old Devonshire sailor who sailed under Sir Francis Drake for many years. He encountered one day a friend of his from school days, a landlubber, who had become quite successful. And this

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landlubber looked at the old sailor and he said, "Well, I can see that you have not made much of yourself." And the sailor replied, "Aye, I've been cold, hungry, shipwrecked, and afraid, but I've also been with the greatest captain to sail the seas." And that's what we can echo. Christ at the helm, so that we do not

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have to fear that sleek, barreled, steel, gray, swell of water and storm that is about us. Of course, the church is not forever bound to the earth. There will come a time at the end of history when the church militant here on earth will become part of the church triumphant in the kingdom of heaven. There will come a

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time when the captain of the church, just like the captain of that little boat on which Paul and Luke were sailing, will cry out to the crew, "Throw off those anchors! Cut them away!" And as that happens, the church will be carried by the winds. It will be carried to the very edge of the sea of time. But as it

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hurtles toward that place, it will find itself being directed and led by its helmsman, by its Lord, to the shores of eternity. You see, the captain of our vessel is not a mere man, but the divine Son of God. And the church is not a mere organization. It is a living organism. Its mass are the brawny trunks of its

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heroes. Its bulwarks are made of the sweet human flesh of Christians. The faces of laughing little children may be seen at its portholes. Its rigging is the joined hands of comrades. Its sails are the garments of godliness worn by the older saints of the church. And the numberless musings of the world's

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greatest dreamers gather together around its lofty flag. Yes, the church will disappear from the earth, but as the captain of that Roman vessel stood on the shore and counted those who made it to the shore, so Christ, the captain of the church, will call the roll. And all the Christians of the church and all the

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Christians of the world, the whole family of God of all ages and all times will be there, there on heaven's shore, and it will be said of them, just as it was said of those who were with Paul and Luke in that tossing Roman vessel on that Mediterranean Sea, it will be said of them, and it came to pass, that they all

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escaped safely to the land. And there, in the land of perpetual promise, on the shores of glory, there by the sea of glass mingled with fire, there where there is no night, for the light of God's glory illumines all that is, there all those who believe shall sing and rejoice at Christ's power to save.

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Let us pray. Our Father, we would be less than honest if we did not say that when we see the storm about us we are sometimes filled with fear. Remind us of that one who is the captain of our souls and the master of the ship that is the church, and as we

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contemplate him, may all our fears disappear away. May we renew our struggle against the heavy seas of life by holding fast to those anchors which will keep us afloat, and keep us until that time when Christ himself shall separate those anchors and take us to be with him, part of the church triumphant, forever

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and forever. Amen. [ capable site for the mind and body ]