The closest thing I’ve ever experienced to the perilous sea-crossing that we hear about in today’s Gospel lesson happened one summer day when I was about 13 and my Dad and I borrowed a sailboat from a neighbor and sailed across Lake Champlain. It’s a long lake, and very deep, but not terribly wide at the place we crossed, maybe two or three miles. Anyway, we got over to the west side, to Essex, New York, where we tied up at the municipal pier and walked around a bit and got an ice cream cone, and then we started back. We’d gone about a third of the way when two things happened at the same time. First, the wind died. Second, out of the dense black cloud that seemingly formed in an instant over the mountains to the west came a deep roll of thunder.
The little sailboat didn’t have an outboard motor but there was a canoe paddle and so my father leaned over the side and paddled while I created a little propulsion with the rudder by pushing and pulling the tiller to and fro. We crawled along like that, with the sky getting darker and the thunder sounding closer, glancing up nervously from time to time at the tall aluminum mast and the sails that hung limply from it. After what seemed like a long time we saw a line of different colored water advancing toward us across the surface of the lake from the direction of the storm. It was wind and it hit us in an instant, filling the sails. The rain was right behind it, and we ran before that wind through a heavy downpour, all the way to the Vermont side. And when we got there Judy, the owner of the boat, and my mother were waiting for us on the beach with their hands on their hips. I’m not sure which was worse for my poor father, the sight of the storm behind us or the sight of those two women ahead. But we tried to play it off as if we’d never really been worried-- “What’s wrong?” “Why did you doubt?”
“Why did you doubt?” is Jesus’ question to Peter after his short-lived excursion walking on the sea. I used to read this as a veiled accusation, as if Jesus were disappointed with Peter for failing his test. But now I think it’s a question offered with compassion and affection. It is something that Jesus really wants Peter to think about. “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” But of course Peter could not sustain his total focus on getting to Jesus. Of course his mind wandered, his attention shifted, he saw the wind, and was frightened. Out there on the face of the water, with his friends and his boat left behind, even with the grace of the God incarnate flowing through him, it quite naturally occurred to him to think about the habitual object of his worry and preoccupation--himself. And when he did this, he sank. His heart is not pure, his will and consciousness not united completely moment after moment after moment with God. Jesus knows this about Peter. And he knows this about us. But does this mean that we have failed? Does this mean that we are doomed? I don’t think so. What is lacking in us shows up in this story but only to illuminate in greater relief what is present in Jesus, which is what the story is really about.
You see, Jesus did not test Peter by having him walk on the water. That was Peter’s idea to test Jesus. He showed himself as a man of little faith not when he got afraid and sank, but when he said to Jesus, "Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water." Peter is not satisfied when Jesus says, "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid," but demands that he prove it by giving him something—in this case a supernatural power he is not ready or able to use. And this is how it often is with us. We may feel like the disciples, like we’ve been rowing all night against the wind, and the waves are battering the boat, and we are beginning to fear that we aren’t going to make it. In such times we might turn to God for help, but very often what we hope and pray for is a miracle.
We assume that if there is a God, he would give us the thing we lack. It might be money, or the healing of a disease, or a new job, or even a new attitude of confidence and faith in ourselves, but whatever it is, we hope and pray that there is a God who will give us mastery over this situation that feels out of our control. But the truth is that there are some lakes we don’t get pulled out of. There are some problems that never get resolved. Maybe that husband never will quit drinking. Maybe that child never does come home. Maybe that illness isn’t going to get better. Maybe those times of prosperity aren’t coming back.
But does that mean we’ve failed? Does it mean that we weren’t faithful enough, didn’t want it badly enough, didn’t pray hard enough? No, it does not, because that wasn’t the test. The test of our faith is not whether we can get God to work a miracle for us. God works miracles for us every moment of every day. There are just some miracles that aren’t meant for us, as much as we might be sure that they are.
The real test of our faith is this—do we despair of God? I don’t mean do we get down sometimes, or do we have our bad days, or even go through long periods of doubt and darkness and grief—we do all these things, and Jesus knew all about them. But do we give up hope? Do we give in to our fear and imagine that God has abandoned us, or worse, that God is some kind of avenging ghost, stalking us angrily across the dark water? The message of the gospel is that even when things are at their worst, even when we’re far from land and the storm is raging, and we’ve been rowing all night and the dawn seems it will never come, even in times when it seems as if we are helpless and chaos will overwhelm us, Jesus Christ is still able. Jesus Christ can still find us, even in the stormy darkness, and in his presence there is hope and peace.
This accords well with what Paul is saying in Romans when he writes that the word of faith is not “who will go up to heaven to bring Christ down? Or who will go down to the dead to bring him up? But the word of faith is near you, on your lips and in your heart. If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” It is a shame that this teaching, which is about the grace that gives us faith and restores our hope and is close by at all times, has been turned into another kind of test.
To say that Jesus is Lord is to say that he is Lord of Chaos and Creation, he is master of Life and Death, he is sovereign of Bliss and Suffering. And so to be “saved” is not to happy and upbeat at all times, or to never struggle, or to get everything you pray for. It is rather to know that even though we may not be perfectly aligned at all times with God’s will for our lives, and may even be in the dark about what that is, there is one who is, and does, and he will not lose track of us. It is to know that even though we cannot walk on water there is one who can, and will use even our floundering in the service of his great mission. It is to have confidence that however feeble and unsatisfactory our performance may sometimes be, he does not condemn us, but accepts whatever we can give and calls us to take heart, to keep going, to keep hoping for the completion and renewal of the whole creation that has already begun in him.
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