August 10, 2008

Oh Oh, It’s (Not) Magic

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 69:1–18
Matthew 14:22–33

“He said, ‘Come.’ So Peter got out of the boat,
started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus.”

Matthew 14:29 (NRSV)

I saw a man walking on the water.
Coming right at me from the other side.
Calling out my name; “Do not be afraid.”
Feet begin to run, pounding in my brain;
I don’t want to go; I don’t want to go.

“Walk on Water"
Creedence Clearwater Revival

I’ve been recovering this week from our senior high work camp to New Orleans. We had a great group of twenty-five youth and nine adults travel down to the Crescent City to contribute to the ongoing recovery efforts to rebuild homes and churches and to experience firsthand both the effects of the storm and floods and the ongoing culture of this unique American city. After a great time in New Orleans, the trip took a turn for the worse on the train ride home as a broken down engine, tornadoes, and some less than desirable management by Amtrak resulted in us arriving home eighteen hours late, at 3:00 on Monday morning rather than 9:00 Sunday morning. I don’t think I’ve really caught up on my sleep all week.

So it was no surprise that I found myself absolutely exhausted when I returned home late in the evening on Friday from a wedding rehearsal out in the suburbs. Anna and I shared some comfort food pizza and watched what was left of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Beijing. I was thinking about this sermon as I drifted off to sleep on the couch during the Parade of Nations. I suppose it was a combination of my exhaustion, the pizza, and the images of the Olympics and of Jesus walking on water, all running through my head, that prompted a rather strange dream.

In my dream I was in Beijing for the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. It was a beautiful cacophony of languages and colors and people. But then there was a panic. All the vendors at the event had suddenly run out of food and nobody knew what to do. People were hungry and agitated, and riots were about to erupt.

Just then Jesus showed up, cool as could be. He said, “Don’t worry about it, guys; I’ve got it covered.” So he took a sack lunch out of some kid’s backpack and produced enough pizza and fried rice to feed the entire assembly of people.

Everyone was, of course, quite grateful and asked Jesus what they could do to thank him. He thought about it for a moment and replied, “Well, to be honest, I’ve been watching the Olympics all these years, and I’d really like to compete in them, just one time.” The International Olympic Committee couldn’t really say no to Jesus, so they agreed that he could compete in whichever events he wanted. Jesus chose them all. And after some disagreement over which country he would represent—Israel wasn’t sure what to do with him, and he didn’t want much to do with any of the others—it was decided that he would compete independently, and the games began.

Jesus, of course, couldn’t be beat. The aquatic events were a breeze, as he just ran across the surface of the water, and since there was no precedent in this style of competition, there wasn’t much the judges could do. He proceeded to outrun everyone in the track and field events, which I guess didn’t surprise me too much, but I was rather impressed with his agility at gymnastics and skills in martial arts. He went on to compete in volleyball and basketball, spiking and dunking his way to gold medals. With each successive event, his performance got more and more amazing, until finally he was literally flying around and displaying a wide range of superhuman abilities. I thought to myself, “Wow, Jesus is like some crazy superhero out there.”

Just then—and this is where things really get weird—alien spaceships began to descend from the sky, and the people really did break out in a panic. It was clear that this was an invasion and the entire world was in danger. And once again, Jesus was cool as could be: “Don’t worry about it, guys; I’ve got it covered.” So Jesus flew up into the air and began fighting the hostile aliens, shooting laser beams from his eyes and lightening bolts from his fingertips. When it was all said and done, Jesus had saved the world, and he flew back down to Beijing to collect his gold medals, having broken every world record there ever was.

And then I woke up.

Now this strange scenario was obviously a product of a preacher’s overactive imagination, fueled by external influences and the need for a good opening for this sermon. I mean, Jesus couldn’t really do all those things, could he? Well, I guess he did some of those things—right? Maybe the flying and the lasers from his eyes were over the top, but our Gospel reading for today is the famous story of Jesus walking on water. That happened, didn’t it?

I suspect that some of us here this morning might be just as skeptical about the “walking on water” part as the “lasers coming from his eyes” part. We’re just not as into miracles as we used to be. Sure, we all like a good magic trick, a well-executed illusion, but we don’t really expect to see a lot of miracles in our lives. Based on my experience of leading confirmation classes throughout the years and having had just as many conversations with faithful adults, I think it might be interesting to poll those of us gathered here today to see what we really think about these miracles. You might be surprised at the results. Or maybe not.

But I don’t want to do that this morning, because, quite frankly, I don’t care whether this miracle really happened or not. It doesn’t really affect my faith in God through Christ either way. Whether it happened or not, what we are left with is this story, and this story is rich in metaphors and truths about God and the human experience.

The historicity of this story—or any story in the Bible, for that matter—doesn’t matter much to me, because my faith is not in the Bible. My faith is in the God that the Bible points to, a God that I know and experience in many ways beyond reading about him or her in a book. In a similar way, the historicity of this story doesn’t impact what I think about Jesus. Whether he walked on water or not doesn’t make his teachings any more or less true. Walking on water is not what gives Jesus’ life and death and resurrection meaning for us today.

In such an approach to stories like this, I am following the work of one of my favorite biblical interpreters, Marcus Borg. In several of his highly accessible books, Borg develops a way of reading scripture that prioritizes metaphor over literalism. (Two good books to start with are The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith, 2003, and Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally, 2001). A story like this one challenges what we think and know about reality. So what? If we move beyond thinking that the truth of the Bible depends on whether or not its stories literally happened just as described, then it doesn’t really matter. The truth of this story is much deeper than that. The truth of this story—indeed, the truth of the Bible as a whole—transcends historicity.

• • •

Several men—simple, hardworking men—had left all that they knew to follow a rabbi named Jesus. There was something compelling about this man, something that drew them to him and made it seem the most natural thing in the world to leave their lives and follow him.

They had heard him teach some pretty incredible things about radical love for God and for each other. They were witnessing him create a new kind of community built on acceptance rather than division. They had seen him do some things that they couldn’t really understand. Sometimes they were confused. Sometimes they were scared.

One day, after he had been talking about the kingdom of God to a big crowd of people on the shores of the lake that they called home, he wanted to be alone for a while to pray. So he sent these men, his closest disciples, away by themselves to cross the lake in their boat. As they crossed, the wind picked up, and the boat was rocked, tossed about on the waves. Many of them were fishermen and had been in this situation before, so they knew the danger, and they were afraid.

Just then they saw their teacher walking across the water toward them. At first they didn’t know what to make of what they saw. They thought it was some kind of ghost, so they were even more afraid. But then they heard his voice: “Don’t worry about it, guys; I’ve got it covered. Don’t be afraid. It’s me.”

Alone on the water, these men were afraid. They were afraid because they knew that there was a thin line between life and death in the water that they were riding. Perhaps as they were out there, before Jesus arrived, their minds drifted to that psalm we read earlier this morning: “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. I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God.”

Throughout my ministry training and during the first years of my doctoral work, my advisor and closest Bible teacher was a brilliant Jewish scholar named Tikva Frymer-Kensky. She was quirky and eccentric and sometimes difficult to work with, but she was immersed in scripture, and I learned so much at her feet. A rabbi’s wife and an active member of many Jewish communities, she understood that my aspirations as a biblical scholar went far beyond the walls of the academy in which we studied. She knew that for me these ancient texts were living words and that I felt called to share them with my own faith communities.

Throughout my studies with her, Tikva would often come back to this psalm. She found a way to work it into just about every class or discussion we had, because she understood it as a metaphor for our basic human condition. In hindsight, there is no doubt that this reading was colored by the fact that for most of the time that I knew her, she was sick or dying. So for Tikva, whose name means “hope,” this description of helplessness and drowning helped her find words to name what she was experiencing in her own life.

I imagine that there are many of us here this morning who can identify with that, many of us for whom life feels like a struggle to keep our head above consuming waters. Whether it is sickness and death, pressures from work or school, relationships that are falling apart, homelessness or poverty, or injustice or oppression—you feel the waters surrounding you, pulling you under. And it feels like there is nothing you can do.

And then you hear a familiar voice: “Do not be afraid. It’s me.”

Now the amazing thing about this story is not that Jesus is walking on the water. It’s that Peter takes a step out on that chaos, and for a moment at least, he walks on the water, too.

Knowing what he knew about that water, knowing how easy it is to be consumed by all the troubles and pressures of life, how much faith do you think it took for Peter to take that step?

Now I think there are two ways we can go with this story. What I think is an irresponsible reading is to say that Jesus is somehow the miraculous answer to all of our problems. I don’t think that’s what this story is about. Jesus isn’t a magic pill that fixes our lives and makes the world a better place.

Instead, what I see in this story is a regular person, just like you and me, following Jesus and taking that step into chaos with a trust in God as deep as the waters that threaten to consume him. This isn’t a story in which the disciples are passive and wait around for Jesus to save them. Those stories can be found in the Gospels, too, but this isn’t one of them. In this story, Peter takes an active role.

And that is what God is calling us to do. Two thousand years ago, Jesus walked among us and said, “Hey, this world you’re living in isn’t right. The lives you are living aren’t right. Let me show you what God wants for you, and let me show you how to make it happen. The kingdom of God is here.”

But for 2,000 years, most of us have lived our lives as we always have, and things haven’t gotten much better. My suspicion is that there are a lot of people out there who claim to be Christians that expect that one day God is just going to fix it all and make it better.

But why do you think that hasn’t happened in all these years? What do you think God is waiting for?

I think God is waiting for us.

God is waiting for us to be like Peter. God is waiting for us to fix our eyes on Jesus and take a step out onto the watery chaos, the chaos that threatens to consume our individual lives and our world as a whole.

Friends, that step isn’t easy. And it is scary. And, like Peter, we’re likely to let our trust slip and begin to sink into the deep waters. But in that moment, God will be there. God will come to us and say, “Don’t worry. I’ll save you.” God will come to you, and with the quite literal human hands of this community God has called us to be, God will save you.

“He said, ‘Come.’ So Peter got out of the boat, started walking across the water, and came toward Jesus.”

Amen.