Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, August 13, 2023
1 Kings 19:9-18+Psalm 85:8-13+Romans 10:5-15+Matthew 14:22-33
A few weeks ago, at our book discussion of "Everything Happens for a Reason," we went down a list of unhelpful things people say at times of difficulty or sorrow. In fact, the book's author, Kate Bowler, gives a list of those glib phrases said to her when, as a young mother of 35, she received a Stage IV cancer diagnosis.
“When my aunt had cancer...” (This isn’t about your aunt.)
“In my long life, I've learned that...” (Glad you’ve lived a long life. I likely will not.)
“I've been doing some research...” (My Duke doctors are clearly amateurs, right?)
and that perennial favorite, “Everything happens for a reason.” [1]
Does it?
Really?
There's one more saying like this, loosely taken from scripture but badly misinterpreted.[2] It's this one:
“God will not give you more than you can handle.”
Nonsense. God is always giving us more than we can handle, inviting us to get in over our heads, to do more than we could ever ask or imagine as it says in Ephesians (3:20-21).
When Jesus commands Peter to come to him on the water, that is God giving Peter more than he can handle. Everyone knows you can't walk on water.
A reference to walking on water is not actually unique to Jesus. Mastery over the unknown forces of the deep was a sign of divine power, and the Seleucid king who ruled a couple of hundred years before the time of Christ, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, was criticized in the Second Book of Maccabees for believing he could “sail on the land and walk on the sea.” Even the Emperor Caligula had a temporary 50km bridge built across the Sea of Naples so as to appear to be walking across the water on foot. [3]
But Jesus isn't just some poser king. When the disciples believe they have seen a ghost, he identifies himself with the words, "It is I” (13:27), the same words by which God identifies God's self to Moses and that Jesus also uses in the Gospel of John's “I am” statements. And if this Jesus is claiming that kind of identity, his walking on water is all the proof that the disciples need.
In Matthew's gospel, Peter becomes a representative example of the development of this band of twelve disciples. They don't go from Point A to Point B in following the way of Jesus, but there is a general move in the direction of understanding who it is they have hitched their wagon to. So, Peter is the one who practically challenges Jesus to prove that Jesus is the great I AM. “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water” (13:28), and that is when Jesus calls him out of the boat.
There are as many interpretations of what happens next as there are preachers and scholars who talk about this text. Did he begin to sink because fear overtook him? Did he take his eyes of Jesus? Did he become filled with doubt? Or did gravity just begin to do what gravity does?
The truth is it doesn’t really matter what Peter did. The important part is what Jesus did. He reached out and grabbed hold of Peter and did not let go until Peter was safe in the boat again.
There is a lot of fear afoot in this world. Much of it is justified, like the prevalence of guns in this country and the knowledge that our descendants will suffer the effects of a warming planet in ways that we can’t even fathom. There's also a lot of manufactured fear, like immigrants pouring over our borders to take our jobs and kill us all by bringing in fentanyl and other drugs or fear that allowing someone else to have some of the liberties that we take for granted will mean that we won't enjoy those liberties any longer.
Fear can make us believe some outrageous things. It can also paralyze us into inaction.
Yesterday was the 6th anniversary of the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville that ended with the killing of Heather Heyer, dozens physically injured, and hundreds bearing emotional wounds, me included. Most of us who organized that summer never expected in our lifetimes to be confronted with swastika-festooned Nazis carrying tiki torches, or white supremacists carrying so much firepower that the police were afraid that to intervene because it would have led to open battles in the streets. I never expected to be trained to resist arrest or to zig-zag along the ground if there was a mass shooter at one of these events. But there I was, along with friends and colleagues and activists.
Throughout that summer and fall, at the very same time I was being interviewed to come here to All Saints, I lived in a constant state of high alert, because August 12th was not just a single event. There were a series of almost weekly appearances of these people promoting terror in our communities that went on for months. My phone continually alerted me to situations where my presence was needed - the presence of as many as could to show up.
So, while none of us expected any of this to happen, it did, and we felt we had no choice but to stand up to hate, to stand in solidarity with those under threat, and to counteract hate with love. Even when fear was the appropriate response, doing the right thing required action anyway. And so I, along with many others, got out of the boat and stepped into the raging waters.
There were many times when we felt like we were sinking, but a hand always reached out to hold us up, to get us to safety or to a place to rest or recover. We who follow Jesus claim to be the body of Christ, so those hands saving us from sinking may have been friends or neighbors or even strangers, but they were the hands of Jesus, every time.
No matter what storms we as a community are facing or our country and world are facing, God's got us. We have work to do even when our knees are shaking or the waters are roaring around us. Bishop Barbara Harris always used to say that the power behind us is greater than anything that lies before us, so do not be afraid to take that next step, even if you aren't sure where your feet may land.
Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely
more than we can ask or imagine: Glory to God from
generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus
for ever and ever. Amen.
Ephesians 3:20,21 (BCP 126)
[1] Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved (New York: Random House, 2018), Appendix 1.
[2] 1 Corinthians 10:13
[3] With gratitude to Dean Andrew McGowan for these references. https://open.substack.com/pub/abmcg/p/walking-on-water?r=e0uiv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email