Sermon

The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (RCL, Year A, Proper 14)
August 10, 2008

The Reverend Kay Johnson

My first reaction to this morning’s Gospel is to smile, because the image often seems funny to me. When I imagine Peter, floundering towards Jesus, he always seems to me to be wading through jello. Or the feeling you get when you are walking on a very thick, but very soft, mattress.

But in fact, of course, this is a profound and important story. The image of Jesus walking on water probably harks back to images from Hebrew Scripture of God’s strength and power:

“The waters saw you, O God; the waters saw you and trembled...Your way was in the sea...yet your footsteps were not seen.” (Ps 77) Job speaks in awe of God “who alone stretched out the heavens/and trampled the waves of the Sea.”

So for Matthew’s first readers, this story, like last week’s feeding of the multitudes, was probably about who Jesus is, and what God does...nourish our hunger, keep us safe...God, our creator, the ground of our being, without whom, as we acknowledged in the Collect this morning, without whom we cannot even exist.

But the story itself is not really about Jesus walking on the water (that’s the “given” of the story)...the action...the “plot” of the story is Peter walking...or not walking...on the water.

If walking on water is a miracle, and if it is a sign of God’s life alive in Jesus (and it is that, I think), then the miracle this morning -- the wonderful, the God-given, the “power that is more than anything we can ask or imagine” -- the miracle that happens is in Peter’s, not only in Jesus.

We are called to be receptive to miracles. We are called to allow miracles to happen in us. That’s the first lesson of the gospel this morning. The disciples are not great, noble, special people. Nowhere in the gospels are they portrayed that way. They are always ordinary folk, working people, often bumblers...the disciples aren’t different from you and me...the disciples represent you and me. Their story is our story. Their encounter with Jesus calls us to our own encounter with Jesus.

And the first lesson of the gospel this morning is that miracles can happen in us. Peter does walk on the water.

There’s another miracle in the story. There are the disciples out in the storm, out in a small fishing boat, being battered by the waves (another translation of the Greek would be that they were being tortured by the waves)...Think of what that’s like...Do you have a memory of being out in heavy weather trying to cope with something? Maybe literally being in a boat in a storm? Or having to change a tire during a snowstorm? Just trying to get across the yard to the clothesline in hurricane-force winds? Or a memory of emotional weather...a time when you were very frightened? Or tremendously worried...?

That’s the storm-driven landscape that the disciples are in this morning...and then there comes Jesus, walking on the sea...and he speaks...to reassure the disciples...

and what does Peter do? Does he say, “Oh, whew, Jesus, thank God you’re here, now everything is ok?”

No! He says, “Jesus, call me out into the storm!” “Jesus, if it’s really you, don’t just come to me...let me come to you...let me ride the waves with you...let me be as God-possessed...as fearless...as strong and as brave as you are.”

And Jesus says, “Come.” And Peter comes.

That’s a really overwhelming miracle right there! Not only that Peter walks on the water -- but that he wanted to walk on the water -- that he wanted to live the life of Christ -- that he wanted to share Jesus’s life in God.

Jesus is not just about safety and comfort. Jesus is also about courage and mission. Our life in God is not only about God helping us. It’s also about our helping God. We are called to do miracles...just as surely as Peter was called to walk on the water. And we’re promised that in and through and with God...with us...miracles can happen.

This is a very rich lesson, and you can allow it into your life in many ways. A friend of mine says, “I feel like that’s what I’m doing...walking on water...never quite sure I’m not going to go under, but still going on...”

You can reflect on that back-and-forth between faith and unfaith that’s one of the hallmarks of our Christian lives. One minute you feel really confident and filled with the life of God. And the next minute you feel empty and fearful, alone with yourself. (That’s the time to pray the most basic prayer of all: Help! I find that that prayer is always answered, although not always right away, and in many different ways...sometimes through another person, sometimes through a prescription for Prozac, sometimes through a sudden insight or awareness...The second basic prayer is Thank You.)

But what the lesson spoke to me about this week was about being called out into the storm, and daring to go.

I have two stories to tell.

One comes from a magazine published by the Fellowship Of Reconciliation.

It tells of a group of women, members of a Catholic Church in East Los Angeles in the early 1990's. They, "were searching for a solution to the heavy toll that gang violence was taking in their neighborhood. Eight gangs were active in the parish, and gang killings and injuries were an almost daily occurrence. One night the women were gathered in their prayer group, praying for a solution and their Scripture reading was today’s Gospel story. As they prayed, one of them was electrified with a sudden sense of discovery: she saw the storm, for them, as the gang warfare in their streets. Fearing for their own personal safety, they had retreated behind the locked doors of their homes like the disciples huddling together in their fragile boat..."

This mother explained to the others that she felt they were being called to walk together in the midst of the war zone of the gangs. The others looked at her as if she had suddenly gone crazy. Yet, after a long discussion, that night seventy women (and a few men) began a 'walking' -- a pilgrimage procession from one gang turf to the next throughout the barrio. When they encountered startled gang members preparing for battle, the mothers invited them to pray with them. They offered them chips, salsa, and soda. A guitar was produced -- gang members were asked to join in singing the ancient songs that had come with them from the various parts of Mexico. Throughout the night, in all eight war zones, the conflict stopped. People who weren’t part of the procession were baffled; the gang members were disoriented.

"Each night, the mothers walked...and within a week there was a dramatic drop in gang-related violence..." A Committee for Peace in the Neighborhood was formed and with it a process of communication and transformation that changed both the gang members and the women. The women listened to the deep anguish of the gang members about the lack of jobs and about police brutality. This lead them, in turn, to develop a tortilla factory, bakery, and child-care center, creating some jobs and giving the gang members an opportunity to acquire job skills. They also opened a school And they shifted from a 'Neighborhood Watch' mode -- where they were the eyes and ears of the police -- to being a group trained to monitor and report abusive police behavior -- and that then redefined the relationship between the Los Angeles Police Department and the barrio (for the better).

The article ends this way, "The people in this neighborhood are the first to say that they have not achieved utopia: poverty, racism, and violence have not ceased to exist. Nevertheless, they have taken an enormous step toward creating a much more human environment. They did this by risking being human together. Or, in terms of their founding vision, by 'getting out of the boat' and 'walking on the water.'"

What a huge and dramatic miracle -- an ongoing miracle: because certainly those women flounder as they do all that they are doing. Obviously they meet with difficulty, and frustration, and even failures...and have to cry Help...and find strength again.

The other story that occurred to me as an example of daring to go out into the storm is a small story, about a woman in my parish in Massachusetts who ventured into the “storm” of her own inner life. I wanted to use it because, as affluent, privileged Americans, I think it is sometimes hard for us to know how to place our own inner turmoil in a Gospel context. My life, for instance, is so hugely much easier than that of the women in East LA that I sometimes wonder what on earth I’m doing when I pray about my own small frustrations. But what I keep coming up with is a revision of the psalm: “smallness is not small to you, O Lord.” The world in God’s eyes is of a piece, and it all matters.

This particular woman was an angry woman, filled with resentment at current values. She was a “homemaker” to the core. She had a nice house, and she loved taking care of it, and she was privileged enough to be able to stay home and do that. But she saw her own choices as necessities and was deeply angry that, as she saw it, women who went out to work got all the recognition, and women like herself were (she felt) looked down on. But she was a very prayerful woman, and after awhile she came, in prayer, to question “rules” about identity. She tuned in to the fact that she was doing what she deeply wanted to do, and was blessed by that. She claimed her God-given self, as it were, and rejoiced in it, and then she began to reflect on what to do with who she really was. What she decided was to open her house for groups and individuals who needed a place to “refresh” themselves. She became a kind of one-woman retreat center -- and she probably worked much harder than she ever had before -- and she was no longer angry. In fact, just the opposite.

That’s a much less dramatic story than the story of the women in Los Angeles, but it seems to me that this women too stepped out into a storm -- the storm of her own inner turmoil -- anger, resentment, guilt, envy...probably shame...That’s dangerous territory. We don’t like to think about how yukky we are inside. And I think that the miracle that occurred in her was no less real and no less God-given than what happened in Los Angeles.

The Gospels...indeed the whole Bible...are full of “storm stories” of one sort or another. And so are our lives. And so is the world. And we never know what someone else’s storm story is, so we can never never never judge someone else as “not doing enough,” or “doing something that seems to us ineffective or unimportant. Sometimes I think we are called just to hunker down in our boat, where Jesus is also -- as he is in those other Gospel stories about the stilling of a storm. He’s not always out on the water. But sometimes we see a vague figure in the storm, a light, or shape or density. And we wonder if it might be calling to us...Maybe in a still, small voice, like the one Elijah heard. And at those times, I think, we need to dare step out and ask, “Jesus is that you?” -- and step right into the storm. Knowing that when we flounder, Jesus is there again. And his hand reaching out is very solid, very real. And it holds us very securely.