Rev. Patricia L. Liberty

Scriptures:

Matthew 14:22-33

Romans 10:5-15

Everybody knows that Peter started out as a fisherman. He lived with his wife in Capernaum and they shared a house with his mother-in-law and his brother, Andrew. He and Andrew had their own boat and were in business with a couple of partners named James and John, Zebedee’s sons. The first time Jesus laid eyes on him, he took one good look and said, “So, where’s Simon, son of John?” Then he said, from then on, he’d call him Cephas which is Aramaic for Peter which is Greek for “rock”.

Rock isn’t the prettiest thing in creation, or the fanciest or the smartest and if it gets rolling in the wrong direction, watch out. But there’s no nonsense about a rock. Once it settles down, it’s pretty much there to stay. There’s not a lot you can do to a rock to crack it or get under its skin. Barring earthquakes, you can pretty much depend on a rock about as much as you can depend on anything. So Jesus called Peter “The Rock” and it stuck with him the rest of his life—Peter the Rock.

He could stop fishing for fish, Jesus told him. He’d been promoted. From now on, people were to be his business and he could start fishing for them. So wrote my favorite Christian apologist, Frederick Buechner, in his delightfully irreverent book, “Peculiar Treasures of Biblical Who’s Who”. He goes on to describe numerous events in Peter’s life. He says, “The day he saw Jesus walking on the water, he tried to walk out himself. He was just about to go under for the third time, because rocks have never been much good at floating, when Jesus came to the rescue.

Matthew’s was the only Gospel to record this incident of Peter getting out of the boat to meet Jesus. Both Mark and Luke record the storm and Jesus’ calming the storm but only Matthew has this little section about Peter. It’s significant for a couple of reasons and, in order for those reasons to make sense, it’s important that we do a little digging around in the story and realize that, first of all, this story was circulating about forty-or-so years after the Resurrection. It was a time of great struggle within and around the emerging community known as the church. There was spiritual, religious and political turmoil as the church emerges in the midst of Roman domination.

The first hearers of this story understood it as something of a metaphor for the life of the church—the boat is the church; the original disciples are really disciples of every age; the swirling ocean is the world. It was intended to be a word of encouragement for an uncertain church in an even more uncertain time. It wasn’t only the situation of the world that made everybody a little edgy. There was also this problem that all Jesus’ believers thought he was going to come back right away after the Resurrection and the world was going to come to an end. As the time between Jesus’ resurrection and the time that they were living got longer, those first believers had to figure out how to live, what to believe, how to respond to the world around them. It wasn’t part of the original plan because they never thought they were going to have to negotiate that.

Now, I know that sounds a little strange because 2,000 years later, we pretty much lost any urgency around the notion that Jesus is going to return on any particular day. Most of us don’t get up in the morning wondering if Jesus is coming back on that particular day. Yes, there are those people you see every now and then with bumper stickers that say, “In the event of the rapture, can I have your car?” But I think they are pretty much the minority in the religious world. But if there were cars in the first century, I think those bumper stickers would have been popular with non-Christians. As it was, people were just trying to figure out how to live in the in-between time. It’s something that we have in common with those first disciples.

The Gospel writers’ intent to have Peter swinging his legs over the gunwale and go trodding out to meet Jesus. Like those first disciples, we, too, know who Peter is. This Peter was someone that they and we know. This is the Peter who was the first one to proclaim Jesus to be the Christ, the one that Jesus blessed and called the Rock on which the church would be built. It’s the same Peter who was looking for a special deal about heaven somewhere along the line. It’s also the same Peter who, when things went kind of sour toward the end, tried desperately to disappear into the crowd by swearing up one side and down the other but he had no idea who Jesus was.

It is kind of tempting to look at this incident as another example of Peter’s penchant for missing the point; another snapshot of Peter the ran-his-mouth-before-he-engaged-his-brain disciple. For those of us who, from time to time, have a tendency to do just that, I have to admit it’s a little bit tempting. But there’s more to Peter than that.

I think that Peter is the archetypal disciple like all of us—the combination of fear and faith; one who has moments of profound insight peppered with more than occasional instances of complete obtuseness. He’s filled with excitement one moment, and trepidation the next. In that way, he is every believer in every age parceling out the cost of discipleship according to the toll of the moment. Peter’s story is our story—yours and mine. We can change the fears, change the insights all through the anxieties, but the rhythm of humanness stays the same. He is still called “blessed”. He’s still the one on which the church is built. At closer glimpse, what starts out as a quaint bible story is really a rich, grace-filled offering for weary believers of every age.

So this blessed bumbler bailed out over the side of the boat and starts to make his way toward Jesus. Right there, you kind of get hooked because walking on water is an impossible thing. It has become a metaphor for perfection, deity-like qualities. When we say somebody walks on water we think they are terrific human beings. When we read about Peter walking on water, it is even more amusing because of that whole rock/stone float thing. But, like the first hearers of this story, we know what Peter is all about. We also know the laws of physics which say that walking on water is impossible because of this thing called gravity. But let’s remember that it would be another thousand years or so before the apple would bonk old Isaac Newton on the head and that whole gravity thing would get worked out and worked into people’s brains as the way of the world.

So while our brains go right through that, bible brains went in a whole different direction and here it is. In the ancient consciousness, the sea was ultimate symbol of chaos and evil. As the new interpreters of the bible point out, from the epic of Gilgamesh forward, was a common place of ancient thought that no human being could walk on water. It was reserved only for deity. The one who overcomes the power of chaos and evil by walking on water was truly God.

So, now, for this weary group of believers, Jesus is reinforced for them as the savior, the sovereign, the one who would meet them in the chaos and struggle with the moment. So, you see, this isn’t finally a story about Peter and what he was or what he failed to be. It’s a story about God in Christ, the one who walks toward us in the chaos of our days, the chaos of our world, and the uncertainty of being the church. This is finally a reminder that we are met by Christ in whatever efforts we make toward faithfulness and the risks that we take for the kingdom, however unwise they may seem in the faith of the moment because it’s never about success; it’s always about obedience.

It’s really not important that Peter started to sink at some point because sinkers swim. He’s the only one who got out of the boat and waded into the chaos. When Jesus called him “one of little faith”, it wasn’t intended to be a judgment but, rather, an acknowledgment that Peter really did have faith. That “little faith” is a phrase that is used over and over again in Matthew’s Gospel and it’s never intended to be belittling or critical. Rather, it is a recognition that a little faith is usually how the journey begins. A little faith, like the size of a mustard seed to be exact, is all it takes to move mountains.

Sarah Dylan Breuer writes, “So how much faith do you need in your life or even to change the world.” Not much, by some ways of reckoning. You don’t have to talk yourself into absolute confidence that anything in particular will happen.” That’s a good thing because none of us really knows.

Faith isn’t about what you know. It’s about willingness to risk. It’s about willingness to take that step out of the boat whether you think you’ll sink or skate. A faithful person eventually gets to the point at which he or she can say to God, “I don’t know where you’re going but I know that wherever it is, I’d rather be drowning with you than crowned by anybody else.”

So if Peter’s faith is little, I guess I’d be happy to have a little faith like his—imbued with the willingness to step out of his safety and into the chaos, a belief that beyond our wisdom is a greater wisdom, beyond our knowledge is a deeper knowledge, beyond the sorrow and struggle of any given moment is a grace that touches the deepest places of our pain. Peter, the archetypal disciple, goes over the side with faith such as he has and such as he hoped for and advised us to do nothing less than follow along.

Brewer concludes those first disciples, the ones whose names we know and the ones whose names are lost to antiquity, took those steps— however cluelessly, however clumsily—and, in so doing, made space in which they and others could encounter God’s mercy. Sometimes cluelessly, often clumsily, we are invited to take our place as disciples of every age and swing our legs over the gunwale and head out to meet Jesus in the places of chaos and pain that are so much a part of our world. All it takes is a little faith.

Amen.