I have always loved the sea. I remember making my way down to Huntington Beach many times during my residency when my stress level began to rise. I would just stand on the shoreline and stare out at the vast ocean beyond and watch my worries and cares recede with each subsequent wave. It is really quite astonishing that the very ocean that sinks ships, creates tsunamis, and fuels hurricanes could give me the peace that passes all understanding. How was it possible for me to stand toe-to-undertow with a force that could crush me and yet walk away feeling empowered? Maybe what I experienced wasn’t the power of the sea but rather the power of God holding it back, not the sound of crashing waves but the voice of God saying, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther.”

 

 “Or who shut in the sea with doors

      when it burst out from the womb,

when I made clouds its garment

      and thick darkness its swaddling band,

and prescribed limits for it

      and set bars and doors,

and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther,

      and here shall your proud waves be stayed’? (Job 38: 8-11)

 

While I suspect most people don’t think much about their maritime encounters, they are still mysteriously drawn to the sea. Sadly, hoping to drown out the negative voices in their heads with sound cancelling white(cap) noise, they overlook the fact that they are actually experiencing a divine spoken word performance.

Several weeks ago, I discussed how Ancient Near Eastern Cultures viewed the sea as chaos. It was the primordial substance from which their gods arose and the same substance which those very gods were created to hold back. The Genesis story differed in that God stood outside the universe, created the primordial substrate, hovered over the deep, separated the waters from the waters, and then proceeded to order it with divine discourse. Contrary to Oscar wisdom, water does not have a shape therefore it is incapable of constructing order, but it is quite good at destroying it.

Postmodernism is the ultimate manifestation of this fascination with disorder. Postmodernism seeks to deconstruct reality, it bids the oceans of chaos come, but sadly underestimates our ability to tread water. It invites us all out to skinny dip but neglects to tell us about the undertow and we end up naked and afraid. We are told to find the God within but find that we are incapable of hovering over the face of the deep and end up barely keeping our heads above water.

Suicide is stereotypically depicted as jumping off a bridge into a lake, river, or ocean, but why end your life in water? Interestingly, the suicide rate has been increasing as our culture has become progressively more postmodern. Is it possible that as we break down the barriers God established, we just get wetter and our lives become darkened with an infestation of postmodern black mold? Sadly, finding no structure or purpose in life, our friends and family surrender to the chaos and cross the very line that God told the water not to transgress. When we ignore the gatekeeper of the deep we blur the lines between chaos and order and have a very hard time seeing the line in the sand. The Good News is that we don’t have to toss the baby out with the bathwater because God takes the stinky sinful chaotic water in which we marinate and tosses it back into the sea.

 

He will again have compassion on us;

      he will tread our iniquities under foot.

You will cast all our sins

      into the depths of the sea. (Micah 7: 19)

 

Maybe the reason that a visit to the beach is so powerful is because it is a unique opportunity to acknowledge our fallen nature and give the sting of death a proper burial at sea.

 

“O death, where is your victory?

O death, where is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Cor 15: 55-57)

 

We can write our transgressions in the sand and know that once they have been confessed they will be washed away by the sea of forgetfulness.

It is on the shoreline that we straddle the line between order and disorder, divine silence and speech, chaos and control. It is a mystical place because it is where God tells the chaos in our lives, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther.”