Love's Expectations

“OK, God,” I thought, looking over the readings for today, “Here it is, our fall kick-off Sunday, the perfect time for a nice, short, happy, inspirational sermon, and what do you give me to work with but your strange, cryptic Name and the scary demands that we care for our enemies and take up our Crosses! I wrung my hands for awhile this week, until I looked at our reading from Romans with teachers’ eyes. When I was an elementary school teacher, at the beginning of every school year, we had to sit down with each class and talk about how we were going to live together as a group that year. We had to haul out the big chart paper and talk about classroom expectations, carefully writing them down, having the kids sign their names, and posting them on a prominent wall in the classroom. “We will listen while others are speaking,” we wrote. “We will keep our hands to ourselves at circle time. We will arrive in class on time” and so on.  I think that our reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans can be seen today as our “classroom expectations” for our life together as a parish. The verbs in this list of commands from the apostle Paul are plural verbs, not singular ones. Paul is telling us how Christians should behave with one another in community, and he is giving us very specific guidelines, more specific than the vague “love your neighbor” that we find elsewhere in the Bible. So what are we signing onto this year as we come together as a Christian community?

Our list of “community expectations” is definitely written with the ink of love. The word “love” comes up again and again throughout the passage. Indeed, for Paul, it is God’s raw, torn-open, bleeding-on-the-Cross-kind-of-love that sustains us as we pursue the Christian life, and it is even what allows us to discriminate between good and evil. God’s love gives of itself no matter what; it stops at nothing; it pours itself out upon all creation, never holding back. It is this kind of love that Paul wants to see reflected by the Christian community: Love without pretense, love that is not used to gain power or status, love stripped bare of all play-acting, false projections, and cowardly disguises. Such a true, genuine love somehow turns away instinctively from evil, abhorring what is not life-giving, shrinking back in horror from all that harms and destroys. At the same time, Christian love clings instinctively to what is of God, holding on with all of its might. It implies passionate commitment to others, a commitment so desperately strong that weariness or fear or laziness or timidity cannot stop it for long. Christian love bubbles and boils with the Holy Spirit, so effervescent that it cannot be contained, overflowing into service to God.

          I think that I am safe to say that we have all felt—and shared—this kind of miraculous divine love, if only for fleeting moments. We have seen it in Christ on the Cross; we’ve felt it wrap its arms around us in times of despair, we’ve felt it flow over us in prayer and bubble up in us in times of great joy. We’ve felt its instinctive horror in the face of human hatred and oppression and its insistent pull in us toward the good. It is our experience of this amazing love that keeps us coming back to church, despite all of the church’s imperfections. It is joyful glimpses of this love that sustain us in our never-ending search for God. In appealing to our experience of love, Paul’s list of community expectations is written to speak to our hearts, rather than to our minds. It isn’t just a cold list of “shoulds” and “oughts,” but it asks us to open ourselves to the genuine love that we receive in Jesus Christ and to let ourselves respond in compassion, overflowing with blessing, hope, patience, prayer, and peace.

Some of the places where love leads us seem obvious. We can check them off of our list of community expectations as a done-deal. Rejoicing with each other in good times, weeping with each other in our sorrows—we can do that! I see that here at St. Thomas every week. Praying regularly, keeping our hearts open to God’s voice—we’re pretty good at that here in the church. Enduring through hard times in the parish—we have certainly done that before. Then there are the more difficult expectations: Keeping hope alive, sharing our material goods with the needy, welcoming the stranger among us, loving and respecting our brothers and sisters even when we disagree with them …. Well, these are all things that we know we should do, and we work at them. They are good to have on our list. But what about  the dangerous times, the times when evil seems to surround us, the times in which we feel threatened to our very core? What do we do then with all of this talk about blessing the people who persecute us? About refusing all revenge? About caring for our enemies and using only good to confront evil? Do we really want to put these on our list of community expectations? Aren’t they just for martyrs in far-off times and places?

          I just saw the movie, The Help, this week. For those of you who have not yet seen it, it is about a group of white women and their black maids at the very beginning of the Civil Rights movement in Jackson, Mississippi. One of the young white women, nick-named Skeeter, decides to write—and publish—the stories of the community’s black maids: the stories of their lives, their joys, their hardships. Since any kind of “fraternization” between blacks and whites is forbidden by law in Jim Crow Mississippi, such collaboration on a book, such uncovering of Truth, is extremely dangerous for both Skeeter and the maids. At first, the maids refuse to be interviewed. After all, why should they jeopardize their lives and their families’ lives so that a white lady can publish a book? How could a book—or anything, really—make any difference to the daily injustices and humiliations of their lives?

          But one of the maids, Aibileen, a devout Christian and church member, hears the preacher one Sunday telling us to care for our enemies, to overcome evil with good. Aibileen has suffered greatly, more than most, at the hands of the white people of Jackson. She has looked Evil directly in the face. At the beginning of the movie, in her unguarded moments, one sees pain and even despair in her eyes. After listening to the sermon in church, though, she goes to Skeeter and tells her that she wants to be interviewed. When Skeeter asks her who convinced her to change her mind, she rolls her eyes heavenward and answers, “God.”

          Indeed, the African American church community plays a persistent part in the movie, as I remember, more so than in the book, as images of the supportive worshipping community appear regularly. In the church scenes, the love of the community is palpable, as is the difficult command to love one’s enemies. It is clear that God’s demand for radical love on our parts, regularly repeated by the pastor, goes hand in hand with community support and love, with singing and joy and friendship.

          After one of their church members is brutally arrested for stealing, all of the maids from the church scene, accompanied by their pastor, decide to share their stories with Skeeter and to let them be published in the book. As they share the truth of their lives, as they make themselves vulnerable to one another, as they risk their lives for good, one slowly watches the women-- both the maids and Skeeter--gain strength and power. They become free from the evil of racism that surrounds them, even though they still live in its midst. At the end of the movie, after the stories have been told, enemies have been bound together in love, and truth is out in the open, the evil of racism is seen as the ridiculous thing that it is, and evil is overcome by good.

          What Paul tells us and what The Help shows us, is that we dare not leave the hard parts off of our list of community expectations this year. While we might no longer live in the Jim Crow South or in the persecutions of ancient Rome, there is plenty of evil that is still to be overcome in this world. In the presence of hatred and selfishness and greed, in the presence of intolerance and the refusal to compromise, in the presence of lies and cover-ups--we are blessed to have a community that both sustains us and challenges us, and a God who uses us as a vessel for His unquenchable love, pouring God’s love into us and through us every time we give him the slightest chance. This year, may we walk hand in hand outside of our comfort zone, supporting each other as brothers and sisters who follow Jesus on the way of the Cross. Shall we sign our names, and put it on the wall?

         

         

         

ATestimony

       One of the things that we always have to decide among ourselves on the diocesan Commission on Ministry, as we prepare to interview those who feel a call to holy orders, is which one of us gets to ask the mighty “Jesus Question.” You know, the same question that Jesus himself asks the disciples in our Gospel lesson: “Who do you say that I am?” One of our priests in the diocese is famous for asking candidates that question with skill and enthusiasm, but it is interesting—and perhaps disturbing—that even the most well-prepared and articulate interviewees often choke over their answers to this one question, their responses  hesitant or hollow, sweat pouring from their brows. Like the disciples in our Gospel, it is easy for those of us who have done our homework to be able to list what other people say about Jesus: we can quote our favorite theologians or the church catechism easily enough. But to find the right words to proclaim, with authenticity, how Jesus is for us the face of the “Living God,” makes most of us wiggle and squirm.

          For a long time, I would have been one of the biggest wigglers and squirmers of all. A Christian since birth, raised in church and Sunday School in the mainline Presbyterian Church, I certainly knew the words that I was supposed to say.  But I didn’t believe them. I never had any problem believing in God, but Jesus, this man who was supposed to be God, too, and who rose from the dead … I just didn’t know what to make of him. When I was confirmed in seventh grade, I remember guiltily and surreptitiously crossing my fingers when it came time to say that I believed in Jesus, reasoning that God’s wrath and disappointment over my dishonesty were certainly less immediate and frightening than would be my parents’ anger and disappointment, had I declined to be confirmed.

          Later on, as I studied Christianity as an academic discipline in college and graduate school, I struggled to make myself believe, taking refuge in abstract, philosophical words that could perhaps describe who Jesus was for me. I loved God; I had a deep prayer life; I was a faithful church-goer; I even felt a call to ordained ministry …. but I could not for the life of me answer the question, “Who do you say that I am?” I thought that it was an intellectual problem, one that I could figure out if I just studied it hard enough. I was ashamed to bring up my lack of faith at church, and, to cover my tracks, I became very good at the disciples’ “some say” response: “Some say Jesus is Logos.” “Some say Jesus is the Good Shepherd.” “Some say Jesus is the liberator.” “Some even say Jesus is their friend!” After awhile, I got so used to quoting others that their answers became the crutch that I leaned on to navigate the language of faith—but at the center, the language was empty. There was no risen Lord inside.

       So what happened, you are perhaps wondering? While none of us are ever free of doubt, how did I at least get to the place where I can stand up here in the pulpit week after week and honestly proclaim the risen Christ? It was God’s Word—Holy Scripture, delivered with a good dose of the Holy Spirit and a good dose of life knocking me upside the head—that transformed me from within. For me, it took studying the Good News in depth, breaking open the too-familiar, yet vague, language of the Bible, to find the strange, unsettling Jesus within. But that wasn’t all. I didn’t really know who Jesus was until, inspired by Scripture, I made the leap, until I gave up who I thought I was to let God use me for God’s purposes. I wanted a safe, comfortable life, a life lived on my terms. I didn’t want to be a priest, even though I had been called, and I didn’t want to follow a Lord who would make me do scary things. But when I studied the Bible, really studied it, it became clear to me that that is exactly what God calls all of us to do, including me: to hand over all of the things that keep us from following Jesus down that path to the cross—and to the resurrection. For you see, when we confess Jesus as Lord, as the Son of the Living God, we, like Peter, are at the same time giving up being fishermen on the cozy Sea of Galilee to be sent out into the world to proclaim—and to live—the Gospel. When we define who Jesus is, Jesus simultaneously redefines who we are. With Jesus, it is not just a matter of words, it is a matter of transformation. To proclaim who Jesus is, and to mean it, is to present our very bodies to God as a living sacrifice, as Paul writes in today’s lesson from Romans. It is to put our freedom into God’s hands, to let our minds be transformed into the mind of the Christ that we are confessing: to act like him, to follow him, to risk everything, as He did. To proclaim who Jesus is, is to admit that there is nowhere else to turn. As it says in the Gospel of John: after understanding what Jesus was asking, “many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. ‘You do not want to leave too, do you?’ Jesus asked the Twelve. [Again] Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’”

          Today’s New Testament lessons are not just about individuals, however; they are also about the Church, the Christian Community. For Paul, the Christian Community is Christ’s Body, each member necessary to the others and to the functioning of the whole. For Matthew, the Christian Community is a building, resting on a firm foundation of faith that cannot be moved or destroyed. For the Jews of Jesus’ day, the great Temple building in Jerusalem was God’s home on earth, their connection with the Holy One. Matthew sees the new Christian Community as the new Temple, the metaphorical one that is destroyed and rebuilt “in three days” in Jesus’ resurrection.

If we twenty-first century disciples name Jesus as Son of the Living God, what name does God then bestow on us as a Church? How are we the rock, the foundation, of Christian community? First of all, the true Church, built on the unshakable rock of our confession, is not a Church of fear. It is not built of wood, carved with crucifixes whose suffering faces resemble our own. Neither is it a Church of pure reason, a church built of cool metal and straight lines, too slippery to contain God’s complexity. The Church of Jesus Christ is built of stone, and we are the stones. I picture it like those ancient walls and buildings made of “dry stone” construction that one often sees in Europe.  Jagged stones are piled one on top of the other, held together by the clever placement of different sized rocks rather than by cement or mud or mortar. It has always amazed me that these piles of rock hold together at all, yet they are strong and steady, if a bit ugly and chaotic-looking, for someone who has grown up in smooth brick houses. We Christians, whether we are counted as individuals, parishes, or whole denominations, we are the sharp-sided stones wedged into one another, the small stones, the big rocks, the smooth flat pieces, that all together make up Christ’s Church. We are not always pretty, and never neat and even, but we are stronger than we look, because the wise hand of God has placed us where we are.

And Peter, when he receives the keys to the Kingdom, contrary to popular imagination, is not posted as guard at the Gates of Heaven. There are no Pearly Gates in our Gospel lesson. When Peter receives the keys, he is made manager of God’s house. He becomes the one who has authority over his Lord’s rooms and buildings. He is given the task of interpreting Jesus’ teachings in order to lead people into that narrow path at the end of which the narrow gate opens to the kingdom of heaven. As Ulrich Luz points out, Peter becomes the Guarantor of the [topsy-turvy] teaching of Jesus.[1] If we are Peter, then we are a foundation that lays open God’s Word and Jesus’ revelation. We are a foundation that binds and looses through the power of interpretation.

          Having just gotten back from viewing our Habitat for Humanity house this weekend, the shell of a house down on West 41^st Street, I would venture to say that the true Church of Jesus Christ could also be described like a Habitat Rehab House: Nestled in the depths of need, stripped of the past, members using their gifts to build something new, to correct injustice, to alleviate suffering, removing those barriers between heaven and earth, opening the way to the kingdom of heaven on earth, our actions serving as guarantors, and interpreters, of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.

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[1] Ulrich Luz, Matthew, 365.

Another Kind of Church Circle

          Years ago, I heard a poem in a sermon that I remember to this day. It goes:

          He drew a circle that shut me out—

          Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.

          But Love and I had the wit to win:

          We drew a circle that took him in.[1]

When I hear this poem, I picture children on the playground, drawing lines in the sand. Two of them stand smugly together, arm in arm, and carefully draw a circle around themselves with a long stick, binding themselves together in friendship and solidarity, while the third child stands alone outside of the circle, looking down at her feet, feeling rejected. Suddenly, the teacher walks over and hands her a stick, too, and together they draw an even larger circle that encompasses everyone, and then the left-out child looks up, a smile slowly spreading from ear to ear, as she becomes aware of her subtle triumph. At the same time, the mouths of the other two children drop open in bewilderment, until they shrug, drop their sticks, and all run off to play together.

          Maybe it is my years as the playground outcast or my years on recess duty in the schoolyard, but I like this image, and in the poem, the sly triumph of love over exclusion gives me goose bumps every time.  Maybe that is also why I love the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman from today’s Gospel. Most preachers rail against this story, upset to see Jesus turning on a begging woman, calling her a dog, and at first ignoring her innocent pleas. They don’t like to see Jesus acting that human, and they identify with the pain of the Gentile woman. But while the woman does suffer, she also wins the argument with Jesus and causes him to change his mind. I love the fact that the only time that Jesus loses a match of wits in the New Testament, is to a hated foreigner, and a woman at that. It seems that God’s elastic circle of love pushes us even to include an image of our Savior that seems out of bounds.

          We all draw circles around ourselves and our loved ones, consciously or often unconsciously; we all put up barriers to keep out strange people and strange ways and strange thoughts. Look at the violence in England this week, as various ethnic communities destroy one another's homes and property. Sometimes, our circles can serve a purpose, though. For the ancient Israelites, enslaved for years in the foreign land of Egypt, exiled for years in the foreign land of Babylon, forever surrounded by peoples of different religions and by countries much larger than they, the tight circle of Law kept them from blending into and being washed away by the cultures that surrounded them. Following certain codes of dress, eating certain foods, marking their bodies through circumcision, all set the people of Israel apart from their numerous neighbors and marked them as God’s chosen people.

          At the beginning of our Gospel reading, we see Jesus challenging these narrow circles that the Pharisees have drawn around themselves. Jesus realizes that the laws concerning rituals such as hand washing and temple vows could get in the way of God’s larger circle of love. With wit and even potty humor, Jesus breaks the tight circle of ritual that the Pharisees have drawn around their community and cracks open our access to the Holy Presence of God. But while Jesus can see the necessity of breaking open the hold of ritual law on his community, his vision still seems to extend only to the small circle of Israel. When the Gentile woman—the “Canaanite woman,” says Matthew (and who can be more outside the circle of the children of Israel than the idolatrous Canaanites, whose land they conquered in the days of Joshua?)—when the Canaanite woman approaches Jesus and his disciples, Jesus does not even lower himself to acknowledge her pitiful, repeated cries of “kyrie eleison,” “Lord have mercy,” and the annoyed disciples only cry out heartlessly, “Send her away!” Jesus understands himself as Israel’s messiah and cannot see the point of bothering with Gentile foreigners. God has God’s hands full taking care of the hungry, stiff-necked children that he already has, without adopting more. But the Canaanite woman has perhaps been following Jesus around for awhile and has been listening to his teachings. Perhaps she has already learned a thing or two from his clever disputes with the Pharisees and from his miraculous way of turning the world upside down. She has certainly seen his healing power and is desperate for him to use it to save her daughter. And so the Canaanite woman acknowledges him as Lord and turns his own metaphor in on him, suggesting that even crumbs of healing suffice, when they are filled with God’s abundant love. She grabs the stick and draws that second circle, enclosing the Gentiles, too, in God’s loving embrace. And Jesus, finding himself in a circle larger than the one he had imagined, recognizes his mistake.

          It is tempting to make this Gospel lesson all about Jesus and say, “My, look how Jesus grew!” Or, “My, how could Jesus be so awful?!” The question for us, however, should be, “How do we, as followers of Jesus Christ, join with God constantly to enlarge the circle of divine Love that surrounds us? We Episcopalians pride ourselves on our theological tolerance and our proclamation of divine Love. Moreover, here at St. Thomas, we are a very welcoming church, so what do we have to worry about? I asked a friend of mine familiar with “best practices” for evangelism in churches to come to St. Thomas “incognito” the other week and to report back to our Vestry how we did with welcoming newcomers. I am very pleased to report that she gave us an “A+” report card. She said that we were one of the most welcoming congregations that she had ever met, and we did all of the things on the checklist that churches are supposed to do. We took her right into our circle. But wait—before we get too excited. We took her right into our circle …. but in doing so, we did not break and expand our circle. She, as a white, middle-class Louisvillian, fit right in. She followed our rules; she spoke our language; she looked just like us.

Let me tell you a more disturbing story: This week I was in the elevator at University Hospital going to visit our trauma patient in the ICU. The elevator, as usual, was crowded, filled with all kinds of people who didn’t necessarily look like me. One of them, spying my collar, asked if I was a minister. After a bit of conversation, another man asked what “faith” I belonged to. “Episcopalian,” I said proudly. My response was greeted with visible shrugs and blank stares. “Christian, from the Episcopal Church,” I added, trying to be more clear. “Never heard of ‘em,” ventured one man, doubtfully. “Is that some branch of Catholics?” offered another. Before I could explain, the crowd got off of the elevator.

Now, at first, I was amused at the ignorance of this crowd. “How could they not know who Episcopalians are?” I chuckled to myself. “How ridiculous!” I thought. “Wait until I tell the others in our circle about this!” And then later it hit me. The people in that elevator with me in our region’s public hospital were poor and suffering. They were the people who call my office asking for rent money, the ones that I tell to go away and to call Eastern Area Community Ministries, instead. If I had been in the elevator of the downtown PNC bank building, I’ll bet that most of those well-dressed people would have known about the Episcopal Church. If we, as Christians, are here to spread the Good News to the poor and the outcast, to feed the hungry, to visit the prisoners, to welcome the stranger … then why don’t the hungry, the prisoner, and the suffering know who we are? Obviously, we are not doing a very good job of fulfilling the mission that Jesus gave us in this community. How can we better open our hearts to the “Canaanite women” who cry out for mercy, desperate even for the crumbs that drop from our tables? I’m afraid that, in our case, they might have already given up shouting at our doors, having already been turned away so many times. No matter how busy we are taking care of our own, God wants us to open our circle of love, to shower healing mercy in ever wider and wider circles, like the holy oil gushing over Aaron’s head in our Psalm and pouring down on his collar and down his beard, like the life-giving water flooding down from Mount Hermon to cover the whole earth. Like Jesus, maybe we need to revise our mission priorities.

Amen.

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[1] Edwin Markham, from Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems, 1913.

Save Me, O God, for the Waters have come up to my Neck

If I had been one of the 12 disciples in that boat on the lake in the storm, I would have been the one cowering at the bottom with my eyes squeezed so tightly shut that I never even would have seen Jesus coming toward us on the water. I would have missed the whole thing. I have a deep, inborn mistrust of waves and water that no amount of rational explanation can eliminate. As a child, it took me three whole summers of swimming lessons before they could coax me off of the steps in the shallow end, and even then, I refused to venture out where I could not touch bottom. I do swim now, but boats that bob and twist on the waves still scare me to death. Even airplanes, floating on an ocean of air, cause this white-knuckled flier to panic when turbulence pushes the plane around even a bit. I understand all too well the chaotic power in waves of water and air that threaten to submerge us without warning. I know the perilous uncertainty of floating, without firm footing, on billows of insubstantial shifting matter, with chaos looming just underneath the surface.

Chaos is indeed a terrifying thing.  Our Gospel lesson for today is full of its frightening power over us. In the Bible, water often represents the primeval chaos itself, full of all of the dark, dangerous forces that threaten the very order of creation. Personified in ancient Canaanite myth as Leviathan, the monster of the deep whom God has battled and destroyed, the menacing waters constantly churn up around us. The disciples are out in a boat on chaos itself, alone in a boat that is being violently battered by dangerous winds, alone on a vast lake in the dark before the dawn, far from where they last saw Jesus. And they are terrified. Terrified just like we are, in the chaos of our relativistic, materialistic, rootlessly urban existence in modern America.

Did you know that you are also in a real boat right now? Well, you are. You are sitting in what is called the nave of the church, and “nave,” like “navy,” comes from the Latin word for boat. And our boat is indeed “assaulted by the waves” and tossed to and fro by chaos, is it not? We are all especially afraid of the chaotic waves of economic uncertainty right now.  Real live storms this year have heaped up destruction and death and have thrown on deck before our eyes the chaos churning in natural disasters. Private storms rip at us from within, as well, as our own personal chaos or the chaos of disease, threatens to overwhelm us. It can indeed seem as if the powers and principalities of the deep are undoing creation, while we voyage alone in a very small boat on a very large sea. 

In our Gospel lesson, there is good news for us in our little boat. After a night of struggle, the disciples see Jesus, walking toward the battered boat upon the lake. Jesus’ appearance on the turbulent waters is more than just a miraculous magic show. Jesus calls out, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” These words from Jesus are not just personal words of identification and comfort for his friends, these are words of divine disclosure. “I AM” is the name of God, revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush. Jesus says to the disciples in Greek, “Take heart, I AM.” I am the Lord God, master of the waves, do not fear.

Moreover, for the disciples and for Matthew’s readers, Jewish Christians whose daily Prayer Book was the Psalms, Jesus’ stroll on the dangerous waters of the lake had deep theological significance. The God of the Psalms, the God of Jonah and of Job, is a mighty God who controls the chaotic waters of the earth, who makes the powers of the deep submit and bow before him. Listen carefully to the voices of the Psalms: “God of Hosts … you rule the raging of the sea, when its waves rise, you still them” (98).  “The waters saw you, God; the waters saw you and writhed; the deeps, moreover, trembled … Through the sea was your way, your path through the many waters yet your footprints left no trace” (77). “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me” cries the Psalmist (69).

 Jesus sends his disciples out into the storm and then comes to them as God, as the God who saves us, who turns chaos into order, who created the universe and is still upholding it against all the chaotic powers that would tear it to shreds.  When we cry out to God in our trouble, God comes to us. God, the Creator, the great I AM, sends peace into unruly Chaos, meaning into despair, calm into frenzied activity. Psalm 107,  a Psalm that must have influenced Matthew’s telling of this story, describes how our salvation from the waters of chaos happens:

“Some went down to the sea in ships… they saw the deeds of the Lord, his wondrous works in the deep. For he commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea … their courage melted away in their calamity; they reeled and staggered like drunkards, and were at their wits’ end. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he brought them out from their distress; he made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed. Then they were glad because they had quiet, and he brought them to their desired haven. Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love … Let them extol him in the congregation of the people.”

As a water coward, though, here’s my question for this scenario: how are we supposed to keep calm in the boat when Jesus is way over there on the other side of the lake? Is our faith supposed to be unwavering if we are good Christians? What if we're still scared? If we start to drown, is it because we didn’t believe strongly enough?

          Matthew answers these questions by adding Peter to the mix--Peter, that wonderful disciple, that Rock of the Church … well, that coward like you and me, the one who denies Jesus three times to save his own skin. Poor Peter. Peter is often used as example of insufficient faith in this story because he couldn’t make it across the water. "Aha," some interpreters say, "Peter doesn’t trust Jesus enough. If Peter had enough faith, if he closed his eyes to the external evidence and believed only the miracle, then he wouldn’t have faltered in the water, he would have walked safely to Jesus, he would have shown the others what true, spectacular faith looks like. Peter didn’t keep his mind focused on God’s Truth," they say. "If you keep your mind focused on Truth, if you refuse to think about the scientific laws that prevent us from walking on water, then you are on the path to Jesus. If you fall down into chaos on your journey," they scold, "then your faith wasn’t sufficient. If you start to drown, then you don’t really have the answers."

Actually, if we look closely at the text, we can see that such a reading is a significant misinterpretation. Peter’s great lack of faith does not suddenly occur as he crosses toward Jesus on the lake. Peter’s problems begin long before he sets out on the water. I believe that Peter actually goes astray when he wants to be sure that he has a firm grasp on Truth, with a capital T. Peter’s problem is not that he keeps an open mind; it is rather that he tries to pin down God too tightly. Before he sets out, Peter tries to bargain with Jesus, “If it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” We have heard bargaining like this before, coming from our own mouths:  “If you are real, God, save my loved one right now, and then I'll be the best Christian ever.” “If you are real, God, get me out of this mess.” Goodness, I start my silent bargaining as soon as I get on the airplane or in a boat! We also hear this kind of bargaining in the New Testament from the evil one himself: “If you are the Son of God,” says Satan to Jesus, “command these stones to turn into bread.”  “Prove to me that I have a firm hold on Truth,” we throw out at God, “send me a sign, and then I will be able to do marvelous things for you in my faith.” Scholars point out that the word used by Jesus in v. 31, when he asks Peter why he doubts, is a word used only one other time in the whole New Testament. It isn’t the usual word for the wary skepticism that we often call doubt. It is a word meaning “vacillation.” In wanting everything pinned down, Peter begins wavering before he ever gets out of the boat. Peter thinks that the way to escape the terrors of chaos is to walk to Jesus with celestial trumpet fanfare, with the banners of certainty waving behind him. But in reality, Peter only escapes the chaos of the deep when Jesus pulls him spluttering and dripping from the depths.

No matter how deeply we bury our heads in the sand or how we shore up the sides of our ship, we are disciples who sail on seas of chaos and uncertainty in this world. Through the fog and across many high waves, we Christians can feel God’s miraculous and powerful presence with us, we can see Jesus as Lord of the Turbulent Waters, but it is not the kind of knowledge that we can put under a microscope or use to balance a mathematical equation or hold as a bargaining chip with God. When it comes down to it, I think that a lot of our fear of chaos, like my fear of water, comes not from a rational dread of the chaos itself, but from the irrational fear that, deep down, I am not worth saving, should I start to go under. Our story shows us that such a fear is unfounded. We, like Peter, are saved from the depths, not by any fantastic feats of faith, but by the grace of God’s hand, that loving hand that reaches down into the dark, deep waters and pulls us up, kicking and coughing up water, often quite worse for the wear, and that places us back into the little boat with the others. Jesus is calling to us, begging us to come, to get out of the safety of our church boat and to venture out through chaos without the comfort of certainty, without waiting for a divine insurance policy, without a copy of The Answers in our back pockets, our only certainty the knowledge that, if the waves submerge us, Jesus, the Lord of Creation, will take us by the hand and pull us out, worthy or not.