Pastor Detweiler’s sermon from Sunday, Aug

Pastor Detweiler’s sermon from Sunday, Aug. 10, 2008:

“Faith is reliance on God in helping us through the rough seas of life.”

1 Kings 19:9-18; Matthew 14:22-33

They were remarkable pictures - the scenes of flooded communities: houses, schools, and businesses set apart not by driveways and streets and grass, but by brown water flowing, swirling everywhere. They were the scenes from along the Mississippi and in Iowa this spring, reminiscent of the summer in the 90s when it rained every day for 60 days, and again in the spring of 1997, when the melting of the largest amount of snow in many years brought floods to northern Minnesota, the Dakotas and the upper Mississippi valley.

We like to think of water as a friendly force, soothing and cleansing, but it is also destructive. How many family albums, how many pieces of furniture passed down for generations, how many family homes are destroyed each year in floods?

A few years ago, our family went to Niagara Falls. The falls are beautiful, but - as one who grew up in the fear monger shop - my mother taught me to sense physical danger that others dismissed - I was intensely aware of their destructive power. I pushed my father in a wheelchair down behind the falls, where you can feel and hear the thunder of the weight of the falling water. Then we went on the boat ride up to the front of the falls - it was good I was pushing my father because it distracted me somewhat from the force of the current and those huge rocks that the boat’s power was keeping us away from.

Water and its destructive power were feared in the ancient world. They had no means of going under the water beyond holding their breath, so they could not see what was down there. To them a storm was a result of the activity of sea monsters and evil spirits that lived below the surface of the water, like Leviathan - the monster of chaos - referred to in one of the psalms. So when the disciples were in a small storm and saw a figure walking on the water toward them, they assumed it was one of those spirits coming to get them and finish them off. They cried out in fear and were so afraid that they did not initially believe Jesus when he spoke to them.

“Peter answered him, ‘Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.’ He said, ‘Come.’ So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus.” Peter trusted the Lord’s word and call and got out of the boat. He started to walk, “But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried, ‘Lord, save me!’” When he relied not on Jesus’ word, but on the things of which he was certain - like he would drown or be swallowed by the chaos monster - he started to sink. Clinging to certainty and the familiar rather than Jesus required him to cry out “Lord, save!”

Every Christian who tries to live by faith knows what Peter discovered: that to walk by faith means to walk on water and that faith is impossible without the Lord’s help and rescue. (Dick Koenig - Lexegete) Faith is not confidence in ourselves and what we know, but reliance on God in Christ leading and helping us through the rough seas of life.

Elijah’s fear had nothing to do with water, but it was the same fear - the fear of death. Following the Lord’s word and command he had walked on water in the previous chapter by challenging the prophets of Baal to a contest: the God who could send fire from heaven and burn up the sacrifice on the altar would be worshiped as the true God. The Baal prophets went first … Then came Elijah’s turn ...

But the patroness of Baal worship was the evil Queen Jezebel. She sent a message to Elijah that she would do to him what he had done to the prophets of Baal. So he was afraid and fled to Horeb. God finds him and asks what he is doing there. Elijah gives his self-pitying answer and God offers his presence. That’s not good enough, because after that - God in the sound of sheer silence - when God asks the same question: “Elijah, what are you doing here?” Elijah gives the same answer. Then God reasserts Elijah’s mission to serve and obey, to put aside his fear based on what he knows, and to trust God’s Word. He is to rely on God’s leading and help as he did in the contest with the prophets of Baal.

The purpose of the writer of 1 Kings - and Matthew’s purpose in passing on these stories of the fearfulness of exemplary believers like Elijah and Peter - to tell us that we are to rely on God’s word even when our fear tells us otherwise. In his word alone is life to be found. Both Peter and Elijah discovered that by trusting God’s word they could do far more than they imagined.

This is what it means to grow in faith in Christ - to be focused on him and the work he gives us to do. While we are worried and fretting, Jesus comes to us - he comes with us in sight. He didn’t wander on that stormy sea - he was walking toward the disciples and he said to them “Take, heart, it is I. Do not be afraid.” No matter how high the waves, no matter how strongly the wind blows against us, Jesus will never lose sight of us. He comes to us offering hope and help. (Foss)

But he also invites us to get out of the boat and walk toward him - to take the risk of being centered in him and not ourselves and our fears. It is when the wind and the waves are the strongest that Jesus lifts us. Walking by faith is walking on water, and that faith is impossible without the Lord’s help.

Somewhere in Europe, there is a statue of Jesus, the hands of which had been blown off in the allied bombing of WW II. After the war, instead of replacing the hands, someone put a sign at the base of the statue that read: “Christ has no hands but yours.” God has chosen to reach out to others with our hands: yours and mine. God could do it directly, but in Jesus, God has invited you and me to reach across the stormy waters of people’s lives in Christ’s name and lift them up. We can be the hands of Jesus.

He has reached out to us, reached across the waters of fear and doubt. We can be the ones through whom he reaches out to others, the ones who provide calm in raging seas, hope in the face of uncertainty, and a saving hand. And in doing so, we will find hope and calm for ourselves. In being his hands we can feel his own; in speaking a calming word we can hear his word for us; in reaching out to others we can sense his longing for us.