“Get Out Of The Boat”

Text: Matthew 14:22-33

Several years ago they did a kind of survey. They went up to people and asked, “Do you think that there should be a law passed banning dihydrogen monoxide?” Before people responded, they were provided with this information. They were told that dihydrogen monoxide is a colorless, odorless, tasteless substance. It’s a leading cause of soil erosion. It causes bridges and other metal objects to rust and deteriorate. It decreases the effectiveness of automobile brakes. It’s a major component of acid rain. And although many people have gotten in the habit of buying and using dihydrogen monoxide on a daily basis, studies have found that when people then suddenly go without it for even a couple of days, the result is often death. What do you think? Should there be a law banning dihydrogen monoxide? Before you decide, maybe you should know that dihydrogen monoxide is the chemical name for what we more commonly call “water.”

Especially during the hot, humid days of summer we realize that we need to take in water and fluids in order to survive. For instance, if the amount of water is our body falls to just 1% below where it should be, we begin to feel thirsty. When the amount of water in our body falls to 5% below where it should be, we start to run a slight fever. When that deficiency of water hits 8% we lose our saliva and begin to turn blue. At a 10% deficiency we can’t walk anymore. And if the amount of water in our body falls to just 12% below where it should be, we die.

In the Old Testament book of Exodus, after the Hebrew slaves escape out of Egypt and begin their journey across the desert, one of their first cries to God was for water. They realized that without something as simple and basic as water, they’d never make it. In the Psalms, the goodness and life-giving nature of water is lifted up. In the 42^nd Psalm it says that just as a deer longs for flowing streams of water, so our souls long for God. Or in the 23^rd Psalm, God is praised for those times when God leads us beside the still waters. In the Bible, water is affirmed as a good gift from God, a vital gift that we need in order to live day to day.

But at the same time, water is also portrayed in the Bible as a potential threat. In fact, water, or more specifically bodies of water, are often depicted as the dwelling place of evil and chaos. For instance, in the Gospels is a rather strange story about how one day when Jesus cast some demons out of a possessed man, the demons exited the man and entered into some nearby pigs, which immediately raced down the hillside into a lake and drowned. The thinking behind that story is that the demons were using those pigs to help carry them home, back into the water.

Or have you ever walked by a fountain or a pond and seen quarters, dimes, and nickels lying in there? Why do people do that? Why do people toss money into bodies of water like that? The reality is that that custom originated centuries and centuries ago with the belief that if you threw money into pools of water, that was a kind of bribe so that the evil spirits that lived in the water would leave you alone.

Or consider this verse from the book of Revelation: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more” (21:1). The sea was no more. The thinking – using the beliefs and symbolism of that day – was that on that day when Jesus returned and made everything perfect, there would no longer be any evil in the world and therefore the oceans and the seas would be done away with because they were considered to be the home base of evil.

In 1735 John Wesley – at that time an Anglican, or Episcopal, minister, but who would eventually go on to become the founder of the Methodist movement – in 1735 John Wesley was sailing across the Atlantic Ocean from England to North America so that he could become the pastor of a church in Georgia. But along the way across the ocean a huge storm kicked up. The waves were tossing the boat every which way, water was leaking in, and the sails were being torn to shreds by the wind. Wesley was terrified, horribly afraid that that storm was going to be the end of them.

But as Wesley sat there in fear, he noticed that some of the other passengers, who were Moravian Christians from Germany, who were on their way to North America to preach to the Indians, didn’t seem to be afraid in the least. Instead, even as the boat got rocked back and forth, even as the salt water poured in on them, they prayed and sang, singing hymns and songs to God. When the storm finally ended and Wesley realized that they were going to survive, he looked back on that incident as a life-changing moment for him. He had always considered himself to be a person of faith. But when he considered how he reacted to that storm, and how those other passengers reacted, it made him realize that maybe his level of faith wasn’t as deep as he thought it was.

Notice here in this story, though, that we heard today in the Gospel of Matthew, even though there was a storm raging as the disciples sailed across the Sea of Galilee, their real fear didn’t kick in until they saw Jesus, until they saw Jesus walking to them on the water. Why were they afraid of Jesus?

Well, first off, let’s consider what it means that Jesus was walking on the water. Again, the water, the sea, was thought to be the dwelling place of the evil spirits. And in the Bible, when it speaks of God putting our enemies underneath our feet, it means that God gives us victory over them. Like it says toward the end of Romans: “The God of peace will shortly crush Satan under your feet” (16:20). And so when Jesus is walking along, with the water of the storm under his feet, that sends a message. It sends a message that Jesus is greater and more powerful than any evil, that the ultimate victory belongs to him.

But if that’s the case, why then are the disciples afraid when they see Jesus walking on the water? I believe it’s because they realize that when Jesus shows up in our lives, he doesn’t appear just to comfort and reassure us in our times of trouble. No, when Jesus shows up in our lives, he also appears to give us commands. After all, a recurring theme of Jesus’ teaching was that faith needs to lead to action, that spirituality needs to lead to discipleship. And that, I believe, is what the disciples were afraid of. They were afraid of what on earth Jesus was going to command them to do there in the midst of that sea, there in the midst of that storm, when all of their energy and focus was simply on trying to save their own skin.

And sure enough, Jesus gives a command. He tells Peter to come, to get out of the relative safety and protection of the boat and walk to him on the water. And how did Peter respond to that command? He did what Jesus told him. He trusted that whatever Jesus commands, Jesus also makes possible. And so Peter stepped out of the boat and began walking on the water.

And Peter only started to sink when he took his attention away from Jesus and the command he had given to him, and instead returned his focus to the storm and the wind and the waves, and began to think to himself, “Hey, walking on water isn’t supposed to be possible.” And it was at that moment that he began to sink.

Ernest Campbell, a former pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City, once told a gathering of pastors, “The reason that we seem to lack faith in our time is that we are not doing anything that requires it.” What Ernest Campbell was getting at is the fact that for the most part we like it in the boat. We like comfort. We like safety. We like what’s familiar. We like what we’re used to. But there are times when Jesus commands us to take a step of faith, to get out of the boat, and to start heading in some new direction that we never thought was possible, some new direction that we had never even considered before – but it’s the direction that Jesus wants us to go.

In what way is Jesus calling us to get out of the boat? What is Jesus calling you to do in your life that would involve a real step of faith? What is Jesus calling us to do as a church that might mean heading out into some uncertain and uncharted waters? Because we need to remember: if you want to walk on water, you’ve got to get out of the boat.