A few years ago a show business lawyer by the name of Ron Major got an idea. He was not a particularly religious guy but he talked about his idea as if it were a vision from heaven. “It hit me like lightning,” he said. “I was driving from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. It was night. I was alone in the car and suddenly I had it. Without any warning, it was there.” And what was ‘it’? Ron Major was going to help people walk on water.
That’s not exactly true. What Ron was going to do was to help people look like they were walking on water. You see, Ron’s vision was to build a 100 meter submerged hydraulic platform in the Sea of Galilee, not far from Capernaum, where today’s Bible story is supposed to have taken place. Then he would charge tourists, or pilgrims as he refers to them, about 2 dollars each to have the walking on water experience. And he would call it the “Walk on Water Experience.”
I can’t find any evidence that this thing ever got built. But just imagine what that would be like. You walk out on a big sheet of Plexiglas with a metal frame underneath it. The hydraulic pistons would adjust with the water level to be just out of sight below the surface. There were supposed to be catwalks on either side with nets to catch people who fell off. Lifeguards would be there to make sure that if you called out like Peter, “Save me!” somebody would be there to fish you out. It just loses something from the story in the Bible, though doesn’t it? Somehow it turns the whole story upside down. Instead of being a story about faith and doing things that don’t make any sense by the ways of the world this is using the mechanics…the ways of the world…to create the illusion of faith. Major said, “I don’t have any logical explanation for what I am doing.”[i]
I don’t either, because it seems to me that this points up our entire conflict about faith these days. We want the appearance of walking on water without the actual danger that we’re really doing it. We want to rely on steel instead of water. If we really took seriously Jesus’ call, we would live lives of risk-taking faith. But that’s the point of this sermon and I’m not supposed to be there yet. So let me back up.
Let’s start with the Bible. It’s a pretty straightforward story, if you’re used to stories with ghosts and storms and saviors who walk on water. It comes in the gospel of Matthew at a time when the disciples are just starting to feel that Jesus might be a prophet of a different order than others. Chapter 13 ends with Jesus going to his hometown and getting a less than warm reception. He doesn’t do any miracles there because of the unbelief of the people who can’t see anything except a carpenter’s son whom they had watched grow up.
Chapter 14 begins with Herod’s execution of John the Baptist, the prophet who had been a forerunner of Jesus. Herod was the Jewish ruler of the land and he took offense at John because he had dared to question his relationship with his brother’s wife. But he didn’t kill John right away because he was afraid of the people who saw in John a great prophet. Then Herod gets entranced by his stepdaughter dancing at a decadent banquet and promises her anything she wants. What she wants is the head of John the Baptist on a platter, which Herod provides.
So it has been a bad time for the prophets of God. But Jesus is beginning to show signs that he is more than those around him might think. Right after the scene at Herod’s banquet we get a different kind of feast as Jesus feeds five thousand men plus women and children out in the wilderness. It was like something from another time – as when the people ate manna from heaven as they wandered through the desert after leaving slavery in Egypt so many centuries before.
The miracles have started and the disciples are beginning to suspect that Jesus is going to change their outlook on a lot of things. Later, of course, they will sit down at another meal with Jesus and he will tell them startling, impossible things. “This is my bread,” he will say. “This is my blood,” he will say. Eating would never be the same.
Now Jesus had sent away the crowds. He went up on a nearby mountain to pray and the boat went on across the lake. Late in the night the boat was struggling against the waves and the wind in the middle of Sea of Galilee. Jesus came to them walking across the waves and the response of the disciples is as you can imagine it might be. They are terrified and they don’t recognize him. “It’s a ghost!” they cry out, which, of course, they would. There is nothing solid or substantial about the water. This was long before Ron Major came along with his idea for a hydraulic platform. Ordinary people don’t walk across the water. No one solid or substantial would walk across water. So…it must be a ghost.
Only it isn’t. It’s Jesus and says, “Pull yourselves together. It’s me! Don’t be afraid.” Actually what he says is, “I am,” which makes you think again about the Exodus story when Moses asks God for a name and God responds by saying, “I am.”
This doesn’t seem to do it for the disciples. They’re still not sure what they’re seeing, so Peter devised a test. It’s not a very good test, but it’s the best he can come up with on the spot. He said to Jesus, “Lord, if it’s you, order me to come to you on the water.” You can see why it’s not a very good test. If it fails Peter drowns, but O.K., that’s what Peter’s got. And Jesus said, “Come!”
So Peter gets out of a perfectly good boat and starts to walk across the water. His test is work. He’s walking. He’s looking at Jesus. He’s on his way. He’s got some new ideas for fishing charter trips.
But then three things happen. First, he notices that the wind is pretty fierce and that’s a little unsettling. Second, he gets scared. A natural response, but that leads to the third thing: he starts to sink. As long as Peter was focused on Jesus things were great. But now he’s gotten beyond the command. He’s in uncharted waters. He notices that the water is not solid or substantial. There is no hydraulic platform down there. And he starts to sink and he cries out, “Lord, save me!”
Jesus stretches out his hand and he grabs a hold of Peter, and he says…as he thought about the people in his hometown…as he has said to the disciples before and as he will say to them again in the future…he says, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”
“Why did you doubt? You were doing it, Peter. You were walking on water. When you threw caution to the wind, when you stepped out in faith…when you believed my command could change how the world as you know it works…when you took a risk and trusted that I am who I say that I am, you could walk on water.
“But when you listen to your doubts and fears, Peter…when you heed the fierce winds…when you are overwhelmed by the waves…when you believe the voice within you that says, ‘You can’t…he’s not…the world doesn’t work this way!’ then the world doesn’t work that way.”
Then the winds stop and Jesus and Peter get into the boat and the disciples worship Jesus saying, “You are the Son of God!” And we begin to see that they are getting it. Jesus is not just another prophet – he’s turning their whole world upside down. Walking on water is the least of it. Jesus is going to do something much more miraculous in their lives. Jesus is going to save them.
So what is substantial in this world? What is it that we can rely on to hold us up? Where will we put our trust? If the story is our guide, it says that the place that is most substantial is with Jesus. It’s not the people in the perfectly good boat who feel safe – it’s the person who has his eyes on Jesus, who walks toward him and who calls out to Jesus to save him – it’s Peter who learns that maybe the natural home for the Christian is not in the boat but on the water.
We say that we believe this as Christians, you know. We say that we are people of the water and we say that because of baptism. Baptism is the ground of our identity because in the waters of baptism God has come to claim us. In the waters of baptism we find the grace that finds us before we can ever turn toward God. And in baptism we express the faith that God has come in Jesus to save us and to save the world. When we forget who we are as Christians, we are supposed to go back to the water. That’s the water we walk on.
When I was in campus ministry at UVA we had a student who joined us in the middle of the year. When I first met him it was at a student activities fair where all the student groups were encouraging new people to join. I stood there with another member of the Wesley Foundation and talked with students as they passed by. Brian was at the booth next to us and he was dressed entirely in bamboo armor. He had a wooden sword in his hand. He was representing a Korean martial arts group, but the armor suggested something more. Brian was fighting with the world and fighting to find his place in it.
The student I was with invited Brian to come to one of our Thursday night dinners and he did. Then he came back the next Sunday. Soon he was a central part of our community and he was asking to be baptized. So we formed a small group that met through the spring and we explored baptism together and on Easter morning we baptized Brian in one of the most memorable days of my ministry.
Even more memorable to me though is what Brian said about being baptized and becoming a part of the Christian community. He said, “It was like before I was a kid out on the street playing with friends and then, one by one, mothers would come to the door and call them home to dinner. But no one ever called my name. Now I feel like someone is calling my name.”
Brian never stopped fighting though. He was still a warrior, but now he was becoming a warrior for a different cause. He joined the Peace Corps out of school and went to Haiti for awhile. Now he is married to another Wesley Foundation grad and when I last saw him, I could see that Brian is still fighting for the cause. It’s just that now he has been baptized into the cause of Christ and it changes everything.
Maybe you watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympics the other night. It was an amazing spectacle that offered us sights as wondrous as a person walking on water. There was a woman dancing on top of a platform that was supported by hundreds of people. There was a huge ball on which people were walking and dancing at all angles, some even upside down. And then when they lit the torch the final torch bearer was lifted to the top of the stadium and he ran in the air all the way around until he got to the cauldron where the Olympic flame will burn for the next few weeks.
The opening ceremonies expressed our greatest hopes for these games. There were great individual performances, like a man running in the air, but the aspiration was higher – that a world that knows war and struggle and economic distress might be lifted up for awhile by a spirit of cooperation and peace. That every individual could know that they are supported by a greater whole. In a sense the performers weren’t walking on air, they were walking on hope.
When I think about Peter it is easy to bring him down to my level. Silly man. Did you really think you could do it? Did you really believe that you could walk on water? And yet for a moment, he did. He believed that Jesus really had turned the world upside down. He believed that Jesus could open the door to a radically new experience of faith. Peter may have sunk, but he got out of the boat!
Am I ready to get out that boat? Are you ready? Are we going to believe that our natural home is really out there following Jesus, or are we just going to pay lip service to a new life and go on doing everything just the same? Are we going to leave this place today and go right back to the tired, old ways that have gotten us to the same tired places we have been before. As Tyrone Gordon, who once preached this text said, “If we want to go somewhere we have never been, we’re going to have to do something we have never done. If you want a new life, you’ve got to get out of the boat.
I don’t know that we’re ready to pay the price for that. I don’t know if we’re ready to go out on the water in faith and risk looking different or foolish or weak or vulnerable. I don’t know if we’re ready to go out with our friends and act like Jesus. I don’t know if we’re ready to go to school and act like Jesus. I don’t know if we’re ready to go to work and act like Jesus. I don’t know if we’re ready to go back to our husband, our wife, our boyfriend, our girlfriend, our significant other, our main squeeze, our love of our lives and act like Jesus. I don’t know if we’re ready to go to our parents, whether they are 45 or 95, and act like Jesus. I don’t know if we’re ready to go to our children, whether they are 18 days or 18 years old, and act like Jesus. I don’t know if we’re ready to look in the mirror and act like Jesus.
Because living the way the world wants us to? That’s just what they’re expecting. But living like Jesus? That’s walking on water. I’d love for folks to think I walk on water. I’d love for them to think I’m out there, stretching myself, doing amazing things, believing impossible things. But the dangers that go along with it? Not so sure about that. I’d much rather have Plexiglas and steel below me than water, if I’m honest with myself. Because if I really took Jesus’ call seriously, I would have to risk living out what I say I believe.
But…but when I look at the water of baptism, I want to believe. I don’t want it to be only water. I want it to be life. And the promise is there. My baptism wasn’t effective because it happened to me or even because I claimed the vows that my parents claimed for me when I was baptized as an infant. My baptism was effective because God’s promise is in that water. And because Jesus walked on that water. And because Jesus calls me to get out of the boat and walk myself. Jesus calls you to get out of that boat and walk yourself.
You don’t have to pay the two bucks for the Walk on Water Experience. You only have to give your life. What are you waiting for? Get out of the boat! Thanks be to God.
Matthew 14:22-33
Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side while he dismissed the crowd. Having dismissed the crowd, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came he was there alone.
Now the boat was already many yards distant from the land, being harassed by the waves because the wind was against them. During the fourth watch of the night, he came to them, walking on the sea. Seeing him on the sea walking, the disciples were terrified, saying, “It’s a ghost!”, and they cried out with fear. But immediately Jesus said to them, “Pull yourselves together; it’s me. Don’t be afraid.”
Peter answered him, “Lord, if it’s you, order me to come to you on the water.” So he said, “Come.” Getting out of the boat, Peter walked on the water and came to Jesus. But, seeing the strong wind, he became afraid, and as he began to sink he cried out, “Lord, save me.”
Immediately, Jesus stretched out his hand, grasped him and said to him, “You of little faith; why did you doubt?”
As they got into the boat the wind stopped. The ones in the boat worshipped him saying, “Truly, you are the son of God.”
[i] Robert Chalmers, “Walk this Way,” The Independent (London), April 9, 1999, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19990409/ai_n14225364/pg_2.
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