What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, August 7, 2011

Eighth Sunday After Pentecost
1 Kings 19:9-18 • Psalm 85:8-13 • Romans 10:5-15 • Matthew 14:22-33

Immediately [Jesus] made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, "It is a ghost!" And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid." Peter answered him, "Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water." He said, "Come." So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, "Lord, save me!" Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, "You of little faith, why did you doubt?" When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, "Truly you are the Son of God."

I am sure many of us know of someone who is always the first person to raise their hands, or speak up when a question is asked. A “brown noser,” we often call them. I don’t think the disciple Peter was necessarily trying to earn a better grade or be at the top of the class called “Discipleship 101.” He was acting like that when he eagerly shouted out to Jesus to tell him to walk on water. But he did have a certain eager initiative and risk-taking streak that none of the other disciples had. In some ways Peter is the overachiever disciple. After all, it took more gumption for Peter to call out to a mysterious figure taking a stroll on top of a lake and say, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water,” than the courage it took for the coyote in the Looney Tunes cartoon to choose to run over an empty canyon yet again to catch the roadrunner.

For a few moments, Peter pulls it off. This ghost tells him to come, and he does it. He’s walking on water...for a moment. But then...holy mole...the wind starts to pick up. He wonders if he can do it. He realizes this is a scarier and harder task than he’d thought. He wonders, if he starts to sink, whether he’ll be able to save himself, and whether he’s really cut out for this or not. Soon, he’s sinking like a rock.

But it’s not Peter’s fault that he sinks. He’s not supposed to be walking on water. None of us is! None of us, no matter how eager, excited, enthused, or talented we are, could possibly do that! But somehow we think that that is our job—that that is what is expected of us...that we can achieve unbelievably high expectations that we set for ourselves—or others set for us—that we have no way of keeping them.

On top of that, when we try walk on water and struggle to do so, ourselves and others often see it as a lack of character or lack of faith. “If I could just have more faith in myself, then my job wouldn’t be so demanding.” “If I could just believe in myself, this marriage would stop from going down the tubes.” “If I just believed I could make it through, this sickness would go away.”

But no increase in faith will fix these nor any crisis we face. It is not our business to be in the business of walking on water, of being in control of outcomes that are beyond our power. That is Jesus’ business. As the Lord of life and death, it is Jesus’ job to be our lifeboat. It’s his job to save us. It’s his job to walk on water—to do the impossible, go to any length necessary—to come and rescue us, we who are in the boat being tossed about on the ups and downs of our lives. It is Jesus’ job to stand in the midst of our chaos, our struggles and and our fears and reach out a hand to us that pulls us all together into his boat that directs us all to his new life. That is the Jesus we meet who saves us from drowning, and that is the Jesus we meet on the cross.

Once I met a bishop whose ego challenged him to zealously believe that his job was to save the church. He shared that a very wise spiritual director told him to keep a cross in his pocket at all times. Anytime that he began to think that he was the one in control—the savior—he could reach in his pocket for that cross, and remember who he was, and whose he was. He wasn’t God. He wasn’t the Messiah. He was a sinner, rescued by the hands of Christ to proclaim the one who is Lord of life and death to the world.

Just as Peter’s failure to walk on water plunged him into the water, so too can our failures draw us deeper into the grace of God who rescues us in Jesus. For much of the first part of Quaker writer Parker Palmer’s adult life, the God he believed in was a God of abstract peace and justice ideals that he could never manage to live up to. Finally thrown into the darkness of a clinical depression, Parker struggled more than ever with the shadow side of himself that he had denied existed for years and years. In the midst of what was an excruciatingly lifeless time in his life, he came to see that God not just in abstract theology, principles or beliefs. In coming closer to his own inability to walk on water, Parker recounts that he grew to trust that God is also found in our experiences—of our suffering as well as our joy.

In one interview, Parker recounts a way that he experienced God’s presence even in the throes of some of his worst days of depression: “After asking permission to do so, every afternoon about four o'clock, [this friend] sat me down in a chair in the living room, took off my shoes and socks and massaged my feet. He hardly ever said anything. He was a Quaker elder. And yet out of his intuitive sense, from time to time would say a very brief word like, 'I can feel your struggle today,' or farther down the road, 'I feel that you're a little stronger at this moment, and I'm glad for that.' But beyond that, he would say hardly anything. He would give no advice. He would simply report from time to time what he was sort of intuiting about my condition. Somehow he found the one place in my body, namely the soles of my feet, where I could experience some sort of connection to another human being. And the act of massaging just, you know, in a way that I really don't have words for, kept me connected with the human race.” (“Speaking of Faith”, 11/16/2006)

Those massaging hands were the hands of Jesus, reaching out to rescue Parker from his depths. They were hands that could only come from one who chose not to dwell in the heavens but to come down and hold up arms to grab us, support us and set us up straight again—not having to walk on water, but to join with him and those he rescues on his boat.

Those hands are the hands of Christ that rescued Peter, and that rescue us—hands that cling to us and that will never let us go. Jesus’ hands are the ones that reach down and pull us up in our baptism, saving us from drowning in death, raising us to new life.

What storms, what chaos, are we seeking rescue from today? We don’t have to deny that they are there, but we also don’t have to deny that somehow, someway, Jesus comes to kneel at each one of our feet and touch our lives with his life this day. We can open our hands and together go and be a community that does not walk on water, but that stays connected to each other, and goes to share that connection in the world, both in our brokenness as well as our joy, all in the name of the one holds us up in his love. Amen.