Then he made the disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but the boat by this time was many furlongs distant from the land, beaten by the waves; for the wind was against them. And in the fourth watch of the night he came to them, walking 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 for fear. But immediately he spoke to them, saying, "Take heart, it is I; have no fear." And Peter answered him, "Lord, if it is you, bid me come to you on the water." He said, "Come." So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus; but when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out, "Lord, save me." Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, "O man of little faith, why did you doubt?" And when they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, "Truly you are the Son of God."

Sermon  

Riding on the Storm

We often talk about this story as the story about the time Jesus walked on the water.  I think this story is easy to visualize and also pleasurable to visualize.  It’s something you can just picture in your mind as you’re hearing it or as you’re reading it.  And so, I checked “Jesus walking on the water” on the Internet to see what kind of images would come up.   I got quite a bit of Sunday School art and a few works by serious artists and also one painting that was extremely striking to see.   It shows Jesus over a lake; and the lake beneath him was as smooth as glass; and the light coming from Jesus reflected up from the lake.   As I said, it was very striking, a very interesting and thought-provoking picture.  But one of the thoughts it provoked in me was that’s not really what this story is about.  It’s not really a story of walking on water as if he were doing some kind of careful action, slowly and cautiously over a smooth surface.  Somehow, if you held your breath just right; somehow, if you summoned all the forces of the universe within yourself just right you could walk across the glassy surface of the water.

        This is walking on the storm.  This story is different from that picture.  That picture may have its merits, both artistically and spiritually.  It may be a good picture to reflect on if one is meditating or praying; but it’s not a picture of this story.  This story is about storms; Jesus walking across crashing waves; Jesus walking across a lake that is in turmoil; Jesus walking to the sides of his friends who are afraid for their lives.  That’s what this story is really about. 

        The disciples, I think, recognized that about Jesus; when they saw him and were finally convinced it wasn’t a ghost.  They recognized that this action of Jesus’, walking across the waves of the storm, was especially revealing of who Jesus is.  It wasn’t just that he could do a trick; it wasn’t just that he could do something that no human being could do; but it was that he was doing the kind of thing the scripture talked about.  They were having a moment of recognition based upon their training as Jews in the scriptures of the Old Testament.  They knew there was a Job; they knew the Psalms, which talk in many different places about God being able to move unperturbed over chaos; God being able to harness and use for his own purposes the energy and vitality and raw sheer power that is present in the universe.  Infinitely great, infinitely small, on all levels there is energy surging through all of reality; and God is on top of that; God moves over that. 

        Just as the spirit of God brooded over the deep when the earth was formless and void; before God spoke and said “Let there be light” in the opening verses of Genesis.  So God always has had this kind of relationship with all that is an extension of his thoughts; all that is an extension of his works; with his creation, God’s relationship has always been.   And yet creation manifests God’s power and contains God’s power; it is an unleashing of God’s power in so many ways and yet God also moves over that power creatively, continually, giving order and bringing peace; and bringing safety in the midst of all that commotion, all that energy, all that force that’s still there.  God walks across the storm.

        The poet, William Cowper, writing in the 1700’s, used an image that’s even a step beyond that; it’s the lines of a hymn that I learned as a child, but I don’t think it’s in the current hymnal – God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform, He plants His footsteps in the sea, and rides upon the storm.  Here’s an image for God that contains not only this story of Jesus walking across the lake, but also in all the prior mentioning of God in connection with chaos, in connection with the deep, in connection with energy and force and vitality that’s from the Old Testament; this story kind of crystallizes it, this story of Jesus and the disciples.  But what it all captures is God as the storm rider; God as the one who rides upon the storm.  Jesus riding upon the waves of the storm was recognizable to the disciples.  They saw that he was the Son of God, not just because he could do something that they could not explain; but because the thing that he was doing was the “God-thing” to do with the storm.  What God does with the storms of the universe is that he walks across them; he moves over them; he creatively interacts with all the force and the power and the energy that he has unleashed in reality.  This is God in a cosmic, universal sense in relation to God’s creation.

        But then, there’s Peter in the story as well.  Jesus walking across the waves is merely revealing to his disciples, a glimpse of who he is beyond being the mere human that is visible to their eyes on any day; that’s what Jesus is doing in the story.  But, what’s Peter doing in the story?  For a moment, Peter rides the storm as well; riding the waves of the storm.

        I’ve never done this before, but I have a feeling the closest a human being can come to doing this in a physical sense, is in the act of surfing.  I even played around with the idea of calling this sermon Surfing Jesus, or something like that.  I like my sermon titles to be a little bit thought-provoking, if they can be, but I don’t want them to seem too silly; so I rejected that title.  But I wanted to introduce the idea when a person catches a wave, when a person rides a wave to the beach there’s a special relationship with an unimaginable amount of power going on in that person.  The person who would ordinarily be in danger from the power of the force of the wave; the person who would ordinarily be only in the situation of a small tiny weak and powerless victim in relation to that wave, has in the act and the skill of surfing, learned how to work with the wave and allow the wave to give him a ride; to allow that force of energy to move the surfer, along with the power of the wave, toward the beach.       

        Surfing is really an amazing thing when you think about it.  When you think about all that energy going on beneath the surfer; you think about the surfer gliding skillfully, seemingly effortlessly; almost the way a sea bird skims the waves as he flies over the deep searching for the little flashing fish that he can catch.  So the surfer rapidly moves across that power that ordinarily would crush and destroy is the power that is instead lightly at the feet of the surfer.

        And when the story shifts from Jesus walking on the water to Peter walking on the water, I feel that the whole mood of the story changes into that kind of light-hearted mood.  There’s a sense in which Peter’s desire to get out there with Jesus has suddenly replaced the idea that the disciples thought they were about to die.  They were scared of drowning; but then, all of a sudden, Peter’s saying “Let me come out there with you.”  Peter, I think, catches a glimpse of the joy of connecting with the work of God; the joy of allowing the power and the strength of God to pick you up, in a sense; to carry you into the midst of all that surging energy that is at the heart of things.  Peter wanted to be a part of that.  Peter didn’t want to have some kind of power he could show off and lord over others, at least not in the better side of Peter at the moment when he asked to get out of the boat.  What Peter wanted to do was learn this technique of summoning the powers of creation and allowing those powers to carry him forward.  Peter wanted to get out there with Jesus because he realized that the presence of Jesus in his sight, so near the boat, was an invitation; a chance for Peter to do that if he chose to; and so he did.  

        I saw one Christian movie in which Peter and the other disciples were talking resentfully about who was Jesus’ favorite; and Peter at that point brought it up to the other disciples that none of them had ever walked on water before, that he alone was the one who had done that.  But that’s not Peter at his best; Peter at his best is the one whose simply calling out “Lord, call to me and I will come to you over the water.”  So it happened. 

        And I think in Peter we see a model for what we can do with our lives.   Because all that surging energy, all that force, all that power is right beneath the surface of our consciousness.  It’s part of who we are, it’s part of our situations, our relationships; it’s a part of  our commitment, a part of our life history, all the events of our life that have brought us to this point.  It’s a part of the possibilities that are out there for us, our work, our leisure, the things use to occupy our minds with when we’re being still; it’s the action we choose to occupy our hands with when we must be doing something.  All those complexities that come together to make up the human experience, all of those things surround us constantly. 

        We might sometimes feel that we’re walking through life serenely; but really, in a sense, as we move through life there’s a teeming chaos, surging and ebbing all around us and within us at all times.  Sometimes we can simply put it out of our mind and get through day to day and be pretty successful at making it through life.  Other times, it gets to us.  Other times we notice the wind and the waves crashing up around us.  Other times we realize what peril we’re in.  Other times we fall victim to the things within ourselves and the things outside ourselves that want to destroy us.  Then it’s good for us to remember God brooding over the deep; God sporting and playing with leviathan in the waters; Jesus walking across the waves to the disciples and when one of the disciples wants to walk out there with him, bidding him come to him.   Jesus is calling us to come to him and walk on the waves with him.

        We don’t have to be unaware of the chaos around us; it would help us, I think, in growing in maturity, in growing in our awareness of God, in growing in our relationship with God it would help us to be more aware of the chaos around us.   Self examination is an old spiritual discipline among Christians; it’s been going on for hundreds of years, and I think in our modern times we may be bombarded by so much momentary experience that we are losing the gift of practicing self examination.  But what self examination reveals in the great saints of the past is not only the actual sins that we have thought and said and done or maybe left undone, not only sins that we ought to be sorry for and ashamed about; but also difficult things, challenging things, negative things that are swirling around us and are part of the circumstances of our lives, the framework on which our lives are laid.  We notice those when we examine ourselves. 

        And so those plus the sins, together make up the chaos and the danger or predicament we often find ourselves in when waves are mounting high around us.  We sometimes even have the sky blocked out of our vision and all we see is the mountain of wave when we’re down in the deepest trough.  That’s what our lives are like, and self examination reveals that.   But when you move from self examination to the next spiritual discipline – practicing the presence of God; practicing trust in Jesus; practicing the letting go of our own desire to control, (our own desire to control which never gets us really very far anyway), practicing letting go of that and trusting in God to carry us through that chaos.  When we do this, when we are doing what Jesus is calling us to do, we are getting out of the boat, the boat in which we cringe and cower because we’re afraid it’s going to sink, we’re getting out of that boat and moving freely, with light hearts for at least a few moments of our lives, moving toward the direction of the far shore that is our ultimate destination – the shore where things are calm and beautiful and where life is meant to be lived; the shore that we can only get to by moving through the chaos.  And we can only move through the chaos by reaching out for Jesus as he walks beside us on the waves. 

        Jesus is the rider of the storm. He calls us to go for a ride with him.   When we do, the experience; however short-lived it is, however fragmented it is, however partial it is, the experience is bliss; and is moving us toward heaven.  Amen.                                             

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