Walking on water & Breaking the mould
9th August 10th Sunday After Trinity
Matthew 14:22-23
Theme: Walking on Water & Breaking the Mould
I had really poor customer service back in January, flying with Ryanair. But when my wife and I returned recently from Prague, I think we all learnt something about customer service from a small incident that I witnessed on the plane. In front of us there were two women and slightly behind us, on the other side, was a mother and her young son, returning from holiday. And at a certain point in the flight the mother and son both got up to go to the toilet – the mother one side at the back and the son in the cubicle opposite her. But the boy was much quicker than his mother and returned to his seat first; and one of the women in front of me got up and went into thetoilet cubicle where the boy had been….But when the mother came out, she didn’t realise that her son was now back at his seat, and so she tapped on the toilet door, and said in a firm voice “Don’t forget to wash your hands, now!” …A few minutes later the woman, who was in fact in that cubicle, emerged, returned to her seat by her friend in front of me, &l heard her lean over to her and say, ”You know”, she said, “they’ve got the most marvellous customer service on this plane!”
We react to what we expect, don’t we, and not necessarily to what is the case. The mother, of course, completely expected that her son was still there. That was her act of faith…& the disciples of Jesus were very similar.
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For this morning’s gospel is one of those little stories that everybody knows, the walking on water. It is so well known it even has its own page on Wikipedia! So the disciples are in a boat crossing the Sea of Galilee and Jesus goes up into the mountains to pray. And as evening draws on, & the boat moves further from land, so the wind gets up & the boat is battered about by the waves. And amidst this wild sea,…the disciples seesome-thing, a movement, a figure, an apparition, walking across the water towards them. And they react to what they think they’ve seen - a ghost,perhaps - and they’re scared, frightened. But it turns out that the ghost.. is in fact Jesus.
And Jesus calls out to them, so as to calm their fears, and St Peter, ever the impetuous one, full of faith, calls back: “Look, if that’s you Lord, just say the word and I will come out, walking across the water, to you!” And as we heard, as St Peter steps out of the boat, so he feels the wind in his face, he sees how wild & crazy the waves are……and he hesitates, and as he hesitates he becomes frightened, and as he becomes frightened, so he begins to sink. And Jesus reaches out, and saves him……and asks him: “O ye of little faith: whatever was it….that caused you to doubt?”
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So what can we make of this familiar little story? Well the question I asked myself was whether Jesus’ accusation was a fair one, was it reasonable to accuse Peter of ‘little faith’…after all, he was the one who called back to the ghost, who jumped out of the boat, and who believed he could walk on water - like Jesus - ….while the other disciples were sheltering in the safety of the boat. Was he really the one of little faith?
St Peter, of course, is the stuff of Hollywood: he makes a great story, and even better TV, because he is incredibly straight-forward, uncomplicated, direct. “If you say it, Lord, I can do it”, as easy and trusting as that…. But is that faith, for it seems to me that it’s also somewhat blind. It’s a bit like writing an exam paper when you have the flu, when your brain can’t get the detail out, but still your hand keeps on writing anyway! You just do things…and no question. But I am not sure that we are actually required to have that kind of blind faith in our God. For if so, then why was it that God gave us such enquiring minds? For I am quite sure that our response of faith is a response that encompasses the whole of us - our brain, as well as our feelings and our heart. Christianity is not some knee jerk reaction, some party trick, some quick un-thought-out response. No, we have to be careful not to mix up impetuousness,with faith.
Because being a Christian is quite complex, and it’s so much more than head down and following one’s instincts or following the rules. It requires of us the ability to think, to consider prayerfully,to be aware of the values that Christ demonstrated in his day, and to adapt them, and to grow ourselves…..and to act anew, in our ownday. St Peter’s lack of faith was his failure to read the moment, to see Christ is in the storm around them, to know him in the danger that that little fishing boat was facing.
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And at the same time I am uncomfortable with the bad press that the notion of ‘doubt’ seems to get – both in the Bible & generally in Christian thinking. I don’t know if you’ve ever read ‘Monsignor Quixote’ by Graham Greene? It is the story of a road trip through Castile, by M’signor Quixote, the parish priest of a small village, together with the village’s communist Mayor, Sancho - a kind of modern day take on Cervantes’ Don Quijote. And along the way, the Mayor says to the Monsignor, “You know”, he says, “I was drawn to you because I thought you were a man without doubts”. “How wrong you were” replies the Monsignor, “I am riddled by doubts, I am sure of nothing, not even of the existence of God. But doubt is not treachery as you communists seem to think. Doubt is human.”
Doubt is not treachery, it is not the dreadful sin, the pariah that it’s sometimes made out to be. To be unsure of something, even of the existence of God, is in my mind no bad thing. It is human. It is human to ask questions, it’s human to delve down and see if we can find answers, and to manage with uncertainty in the meantime. So while faith isn’t a mindless knee jerk reaction, it’s also not an unquestioning loyalty to a particular set of beliefs. For it encompasses doubt: doubt and faith co-exist: they are both parts of our life, they are two sides of one coin.
And I think there is quite a lot in this world which could reasonably make us doubt. When we look for signs of God’s presence, we are often frustrated. Things don’t always seem to work out for the best, humanity does seem to take great lurches backwards from time to time, when an almost animal instinct to try & get the better of others will come to the fore. But they are the storms, and those moments are inevitable. Faith without challenge is nothing. But faith is what sees us through. Faith is not knowing, it’s not beingsure, it is having doubts. But faith is also how you survive the not-knowing, how you live with uncertainty, how you live with risk.
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And if faith is not the knee jerk, and faith is also not the absence of doubt, then what is it? …Well, it seems to me that it’s about guts, - having the guts to strike out, on a hunch about God, when actually you don’t know the outcome, you don’t know for certain. And in that respect, I think St Peter was absolutely right. It’s about doing something different, breaking the mould, stepping out of the boat and starting anew.
I’m afraid our world is very full of ...the expected, and like the mother on the plane, we react to what we expect, & not necessarily to what is in fact the case. The news this week has yet again been full of the tensions between Iranand the US. And it’s a kind of brinkmanship, almost a gambling to see who can be the first to make the other side do something really stupidand a really dangerous, in short a race to the bottom. But it’s so familiar: we’ve been there so many times before, & we, the population of this planet, are, again, both the audience of this big show of strength, the context in which it takes place, but also its victims if it all goes horribly wrong. Another storm.
Christian faith, I believe, starts with a very simple notion, a simple concept - that despite all the things, good & bad, going on in our world, that at the very heart of it, the very core of it, there is goodness, and there is love. And if that is so, then our job as Xns is to connect with that love, with that goodness, & to channel it into our world. And that means we need to be ready to break the mould, ready to do things differently, ready to get out of the boat, the safe place, the comfort zone, & enter the storm, to challenge the cynicism, the entrenchment - and the apparent inevitability - of much of what happens around us. And to find not some ethereal figure or apparition, but to find Christ, in the midst of the world.
Because that’s who we are, that’s our calling. And that is our faith: to change things, to make a difference, to blaze the trail for God’s kingdom. Or as Pope Francis said in Quito, on his Latin American tour in July 2015, “Our faith is our revolution, our faith is always revolutionary”.
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And it doesn’t just change our world, it changes us too. When God calls us to step forward, as he called the disciples, he is also calling us to become new people, kingdom people, to raise our game, to step up to the mark, to learn to give, as the prayer says, ‘without counting the cost’. And that is our revolution, because that is where we find our way, not only to God, but to the heart of the stranger, the alien, & all our fellow human beings.
It’s what Whitney Houston called “One moment in time…When I'm more than I thought I could be….. Then in that one moment of time….. I will feel…… eternity.” Amen.
Revd Hilary Oakley Assistant Priest Salinas Anglican Congregation
