Here’s what I said as part of a funeral service the other day.

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Your mom was, as you said, spiritual. She let me pray for her at the hospital.

But I’m aware that none of us go to the church building where some of us first met.

And we’ve got questions about people who say they are representing God but then we think, “Apparently, God’s got a pretty incompetent HR department.”

One day, Jesus and his disciples were in a boat. Jesus was, understandably, exhausted. He fell asleep on a bench in the back of the boat.

And then a storm came up. Not just wind, but wind and waves. Water was coming over the sides of the boat.

Some of the disciples didn’t fish. They were accountants or students. They were scared when they got into boat.

But some of the disciples spent their careers on the lake. They knew storms. And they were scared.

Someone woke Jesus up.

“Don’t you care if we drown?”

Not the thing to say to the person responsible for the wind and the water and the trees that went into the building of the boat.

What we know about Jesus is that he had the capacity to walk on waves like these. And so he could have climbed out of the boat, let it sink with all the disciples, and gone to find better ones. Ones who could trust him.

But he didn’t.

He said to the wind and the waves, “stop.”

And they did.

The wind stopped and the waves were calm and it was, I’m guessing, the kind of scene that one of you said your mom loved. That peace after the storm.

He stayed in the boat during the storm and after the storm.

Sometimes people claiming to speak for God show the same untrustworthiness as the disciples did in this and several other situations.

But just as Jesus stayed in the boat and understood death from the inside, he’s with us.