Matthew 14:22-33
When I arrived at that particular congregation, I was told it was part of my job to select the hymns for worship. This was not welcome news for a whole bunch of reasons, including the fact that I am not even slightly musical, as well as the fact that the congregation, like the Park Church, used the New Century Hymnal, which was a great idea in the abstract all those years ago, but there are far better hymnals out there today.
But the real real problem of me picking the hymns was best captured by an exchange when I’d been there about a month. I don’t know whether the sermon was any good that Sunday, probably not. It certainly wasn’t on the mind of the congregant who made a beeline for me after worship. “Pastor,” he asked, “Why don’t you choose hymns we know?”
The answer, which I gave, was obvious. “I just got here. I don’t know what hymns you know.”
For the record, that was not the right answer.
Pretty much everyone in those pews, and pretty much everyone in these pews, has hymns they know and love. Which would be great if you all knew and loved the same hymns, if every hymn spoke to every one of our guests who comes through the door, if every hymn was suitable to every season and occasion and reflected our theology as progressive Christians engaged in the world. But you do not all know and love the same hymns, and as our church becomes more diverse, the variety of musical expression and taste only grows.
So yeah, hymnals can be an issue.
In fact, we’re still using a hymnal from three thousand years ago, every time we read one of the psalms, as we did with our Opening Words. And just like some of those old “He-Man God” and “Saved By the Blood” hymns, some of what is in the Book of Psalms doesn’t really fit where we are today, or at least not where I am today.
For one thing, many of the psalms are whiney. Supposedly, but not always really, written by King David, there is a whole lot of “they’re being big meanies” and “please destroy my enemies.” Not a lot of “love your enemies” or “get up and walk,” both Jesus things.
Then there are the many psalms that encourage fear of God. Between the whiney psalms and the scary God psalms, I have a hard time sticking to the lectionary every Sunday as I prepare our worship.
Fear of God is a pretty consistent theme in the Hebrew Scriptures. It can also be found in some of the “Day of the Lord” apocalyptic passages in the Christian Testament. And I’m just not down with that. My God is a God of grace and love and creativity. God isn’t a puppet master, and doesn’t send hurricanes to punish homos or active shooters to create new angels out of children who died in terror and pain.
Life can be challenging enough without God sending thunderbolts crashing into our lives. I’m perfectly fine leaving the dysfunctional behavior to the ancient Greek myths.
So, you know, I’m pretty good with the core message in our reading from Matthew, the famous walking on water that weirdly shows up in two of the three synoptic gospels and in John, which makes it a pretty core story in the initial oral histories of the Jesus community.
Those folks believed in evil spirits. It was an age when night was still considered dangerous, for the dark was dangerous. The disciples think Jesus is a ghost, for people cannot walk on water.
I am not interested in whether or not there was actual walking on water. If you require biblical miracles in order to believe while ignoring the daily miracles around us, you might be buying a different kind of salvation than I’m buying.
What matters to me is how the early Christians made meaning out of the historic memory of Jesus and the dramatic impact of his ministry, the way he not only changed lives, but as we now know, changed the world, even if his followers have sometimes been misguided. As the late John Shelby Spong wrote, the question is not did it happen in exactly this way, but instead, what am I supposed to learn from this story? How does this story reveal the holy?
And there is Peter, used as a foil for Jesus throughout the gospels. He does a courageous thing, gets out of the boat. But then he has his doubts, because human. And giving into doubts leads to failure, and he starts to sink. But instead of drowning, he asks for help, and is saved.
There are a whole bunch of lessons in there, about courage, about doubt, about asking for help. You work on those, okay? That’s your homework.
I want to come back to “be not afraid,” spoken by the one they’d come to understand as God-with-them, and with the question of whether we should or should not be afraid of God.
Because the way I see it, the people who depict God as filled with wrath, who see the divine as violent and judgmental, are themselves filled with wrath, are violent and judgmental. People who believe God destroys people are willing to destroy people. Those who worship a God who hates hate.
Their love is conditional. God’s love is absolute.
That doesn’t mean you should never be afraid. Fear is an adaptive trait that can contribute to survival. I’m not going to tell you to “be not afraid” when you receive a dreadful diagnosis, when the wind is whipping a wildfire at the edge of town or a flood is barreling down the river, when the fascist fever in Florida threatens to spread and seeks to snuff out our own democracy, literally threatens the lives of the LGBTQI+ community, of women, of our BIPOC sisters and brothers.
But all of that is not God. That has nothing to do with God. That’s just us.
We need to flip the script, claim God as a God who offers grace we have not earned, who sings creation, who is seen in restorative justice, not retributive justice. Who is not a male, for a male god leads to patriarchy and patriarchy leads to misogyny every single time.
A god who destroys our enemies because they are big meanies is a god who can destroy us too, and if that is god, you should be afraid. Be very afraid.
But that is not God. God, our God, gave us everything we need when there are big meanies, gave us holy imagination, gave us community.
And maybe that is the real takeaway, from bad old hymnals to bad old ideas about God, for while God may not be pulling the puppet-strings and casting lightening bolts, the god you worship absolutely has an impact on your life, and the god your neighbor worships absolutely has an impact on your life.
And yeah, while we’re at it, when Jesus calls you out of the boat, to the stormy places in life, get out of the boat. And if you do start to sink, and you might, ask for help.
We’ve got this because God has us.
Amen.