Life can be a messy business. There are a lot of difficult situations where it's hard to know what the right thing is to do. Whatever rules or principles you may have, there are always hard cases which call them into question.   For example: what if you discovered that you had a disease where you were going to lose the ability to walk, and then wouldn't move, and then couldn't speak, and then wouldn't swallow or eat, and then couldn't breathe independently? How would you react? Would you soldier on? Or would you ,like Dianne Pretty, argue that your motor neurone disease meant that you should be able to have help to die once you lost the ability to communicate with your family and friends?

There's a growing swell of opinion pushing for legalised euthanasia at the moment: what the Archbishop of York has last week called a campaign based on celebrity and opinion polls, headed by people like the popular author Sir Terry Pratchett who has early onset Alzheimer's Disease. The Debbie Purdy cases among others has pushed this into public attention; and people naturally feel sorry for others who face debilitating illness and death, and want to respect their desire to 'die with dignity'. There's a strong popular feeling backed by pro-choice arguments for having assisted suicide made legal, as it is in Holland and Oregon and a few other places. But there's also a wealth of medical and legal opinion based on experience and rational argument that legalising assisted suicide is wrong.  It's a complex issue which includes questions about the power of medicine to keep us alive and the relative importance of personal choice. Today I only have time to focus on one particular aspect of the issue, from a Christian perspective.

In a debate last week reported in the Observer newspaper, Baroness Ilora Finlay, a professor in palliative medicine, said to Debbie Purdy: 'I think it's a fallacy to say that you can define when someone's terminally ill. I look after these patients; I've looked after many thousands of them. We have patients who people thought were terminally ill; the diagnosis has been wrong; the prognosis has been wrong. There have been other things that can be done, and they are alive years later. Some of those had, at the time, been desperate to die and felt that really they had no future, and had spoken and asked about assisted suicide or euthanasia. Very often people are in complete despair at a time and say they think they would be better off dead, and that may last for a week or a month or so, but I've been struck by all of those who say afterwards, "I never believed I could have so much quality of life again; I never believed my days could be so rich". And it's only been when their problems and their anxieties and their fears have been addressed.'  And Debbie Purdy, who lives in Bradford, who has multiple sclerosis, and has campaigned to be able to end her life, replied: 'Every year in the United Kingdom, people that are suffering from incurable illnesses, like multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, motor neurone disease, they commit suicide because they're frightened of the future.'

The fear of the future that Mrs Purdy refers to is what needs to be overcome: the fear of pain, and above all dying without dignity – the Swiss Clinic for assisted suicide and the campaign to change the law share a dedication to Dignity. It comes back to trust and faith in the end: trust in the people around us to care for us, and faith that they will love us even when we have lost our dignity. But losing control, and being able to cope with it, isn't the easiest thing to do. Debbie Purdy describes herself as 'fiercely independent': and dying involves losing our independence and the ability to run our own lives as we would wish.

Today's gospel reading relates to this. Jesus' miracle of the stilling of the storm is a very important story in the first three gospels. While he sleeps, a sudden fierce storm blows down on the Sea of Galilee; even the experienced fishermen on the boat panic and cry out for help, and roughly shake Jesus awake to get him to do something. Interestingly the Gospels use the word 'rebuke' for what Jesus says to the wind and waves. Jesus also rebukes the powers of evil, the demons, in his exorcisms. The implication is that through the storm the powers of evil and chaos were trying to destroy Jesus and his disciples. But Jesus shows that he acts with the power of God as he stills the wind and waves; and it's no surprise that early church artists used the picture of a boat in a perilous sea to represent the persecuted church, which did not have to fear with Jesus in its midst.

So the standard interpretation of the story is that Jesus acts with the power of God to make things better. After all, that's what we want when we're faced with chaos and evil in our lives, when disease and disaster strikes.

But there's another interpretation I want to put to you, based on the most intriguing part of the whole gospel passage – which is that Jesus is asleep. The wind is howling, the waves are coming over the gunnels into the boat, the disciples are shouting and screaming in panic – and Jesus is asleep.    Why is he still asleep? Because he has faith. He trusts that God his Father will be with him and the disciples. God doesn't save them from being in a storm, but takes them through it, however bad it gets. And Jesus has faith too in the sailing skills of his disciples. And because he has faith, he's not afraid, and he can sleep. So when the disciples shout at him to “do something, for God's sake”, he not only acts to allay their fears, but also asks them – where is your faith? For if the disciples trusted in God, they wouldn't panic either in the face of the storm. Here in this gospel passage Jesus is not only our Saviour who saves us from trouble, but is also our role model for the trusting person with faith who goes through everything with God – as indeed he will do in his passion and death.

So what's this got to do with assisted suicide? It's all to do with faith; with letting go of fear. Although they're on opposite sides of the debate, Debbie Purdey and Ilora Finlay agree that it's fear of what will happen that lies behind the desire to have access to assisted suicide. The key issue for society is how we address the fears of those who don't want to lose their dignity; how we as good neighbours help and value one another however much or little we have or can do. We need to know that, however ill or incapable we are, we're loved and wanted by those around us.

Professor Finlay says it will cost a lot of money to do that in society, and I guess it will. But we as Christians have a way of doing it which isn't about money: the way of faith in Jesus Christ, to follow him through losing our life and into death, in the faith that God will never desert us.

So there are two things we need to do: first, to offer people a role model, like the one Jesus offers us, of being at peace in the midst of the storms of life, because we have faith that God is always with us. Who is the neighbour that we can be alongside and love, and be a friend for, in the midst of all their trials and sorrows?

And second: when we face our own storms, the loss of dignity, the chill winds of dying; instead of trying to control what will happen or praying desperately that God will make it better, let's sit with Jesus in the boat and have faith that with God we will see it through to the end; because we trust that his love will always hold us and that God will never forget us.

For our faith is not in the end that God will give us a better quality of life for a few weeks or years. Our faith is in our relationship with God, whose love we see in Jesus Christ, whose life we may share for eternity; and that quality of life begins here and now, in good and in ill, by living in the company of Jesus.