How to Walk on Water
Matthew 14:22-33
The story in Matthew is about Jesus walking on water.
Of course that reminds me of another story.
A woman makes a visit to the Holy Land.
She is so eager to walk the path of Jesus.
She sees the Sea of Galilee,
and remembers how often Jesus was on it,
how many stories involve being in a boat on that lake.
She’s so excited!
She finds someone who will rent boats.
“I want to take a boat unto the lake, just like Jesus did.
How much do you charge?”
The owner of the boats names an enormous fee.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” the tourist cries.
The owner just repeats the excessive fee.
The tourist turns away in disgust,
and at that moment, today’s scripture comes to her mind,
and she mutters,
“No wonder he walked.”
I want to focus on Peter
and what happened to him in the time after this story ends.
Poor Peter.
Jesus walks on water,
and Peter’s world view, his understanding of reality,
is completely shattered.
Then he walks on water,
and his understanding of himself is completely shattered.
Then he panics, and sinks,
and his self-esteem is shattered, too.
That wasn’t a day when he went home after work
and told the wife about his day fishing
and asked for another cup of coffee.
His world had been rocked to its core,
the ground had shifted under his feet.
There was nothing left for him to hang on to.
The world we live in is the world we carry in our hearts.
(Rolf Gate. Meditations from the Mat. p.170)
Jesus was inviting Peter to carry some different things in his heart,
so as to live in a different world,
which is to say,
a different perception of reality,
a different perception of what is possible,
like walking on water, maybe,
or love
or peace.
Peter had a tremendous experience,
but he was probably miserable afterwards.
How does he integrate what he saw?
What he actually experienced himself?
There is no room for it in the world he knows.
Apparently,
Jesus thinks Peter lives in a prison, a small, limiting world.
That is not the world Jesus lives in.
One poet writes, “We run the length of our cage and rattle our dreams, never seeing that the bars are wide enough
to slip though.” (Mark Nepo. Facing the Lion, Being the Lion. p.264)
Peter was being invited to enter a process of transformation.
That allows us to look at Peter differently.
Maybe he wasn’t a failure.
Maybe he wasn’t a model of bad disciple,
just because he suddenly gave in to his fear.
Maybe his “failure” was not failure,
but the heart’s way to learn how to be in the world.
(Mark Nepo. Facing the Lion, Being the Lion. p. 193)
Joan Chittister retells the story of someone asking a monk what
goes on in a monastery. The monk answered,
“Oh, we fall and we get up,
we fall and we get up,
we fall….and we get up.”
Our faith tradition calls us to transformation.
Jesus, the dying and rising God, models the way for us.
We fall, and we get up.
We let go, and we walk on water.
We panic, and a hand reaches out to save us.
We let go of our ego, our small self, and we are born into new life.
We die and we rise.
Transformation.
And that is the role of the church:
to create a body of transformed people
who can then transform the world.
And it isn’t something that happens in one dramatic event.
It is a process, and it takes time.
That is a polite way of saying that many failures are part of the
process: we stumble, we sink:
it’s all part of it.
Maybe discouragement is part of the process,
and tears,
and moments of hopelessness,
and panic
Maybe dark nights are part of the process
and sleepless nights
and uncertainty and confusion and poor judgments.
Maybe doubt is part of the process,
and doubting God
and doubting God’s love,
Maybe these aren’t sins, or failures,
or signs that we are bad people,
maybe those are all part of the process.
A woman named Portia Nelson writes a poem about this.
It is about transformation.
It is about the truth that transformation is a process.
It is about how our ignorance and our clutching and our stupidity
are part of the process too.
She calls her poem, “Autobiography in Five Short Chapters.”
Listen.
See if you can find yourself in this little tale.
I walk, down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in
I am lost…I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place.
It isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in…it’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
I walk down another street.
(quoted in Mark Nepo. Facing the Lion…p.264)
So, what about us?
What about you and me?
Are there places in our lives where we have repeatedly failed,
where we have made the same responses over and over,
where we have made the same poor choices over and over?
Maybe instead of kicking yourself (myself),
maybe instead of calling yourself those names you call yourself in
bad times,
maybe instead of deciding you are no good,
maybe you are doing it just right.
Maybe you are in the process of transformation.
Maybe repeated failures are your heart’s way to learn.
At some point,
and it takes much longer than we expect,
we stop blaming others for falling into the deep hole in the
sidewalk.
At some point, we choose to walk down another street.
At some point we stop resisting and say yes to transformation.
Maybe you’re right on the edge of saying yes,
finally,
and maybe you don’t even realize how close you are,
because you’re so occupied looking at your failures and your
inadequacies.
But maybe really you are right on the edge of saying yes.
And really, what is faith but saying yes, over and over,
yes to transformation,
yes to life,
yes to the present moment, whatever it is,
yes to God.
Faith doesn’t have much to do with reciting creeds
or obeying rules,
though those are both good things in their place.
Faith is about saying yes,
over and over.
And what is church about, but saying yes,
and saying it out loud in front of witnesses
because if you have witnesses,
maybe they’ll hold you to it,
because some days, you need someone to hold you to it.
We try to model for our children
and for all those who come after us,
who are watching us to see how to do it:
we try to model saying yes,
yes to transformation,
yes to life,
yes to the present moment, whatever it is,
yes to God.
We look at our children, at those who come after us,
and we hope
that yes will get into their cells and bones right from the beginning and be forever a part of who they are.
But we know that eventually
they will choose for themselves what to answer to life.
And we know they will mess up,
they will hear the wind and suddenly sink into the water of fear,
they will walk down the same street and fall in the same deep hole,
over and over,
just like you and I do.
And they’ll eventually realize that’s part of the process
and they can forgive themselves for sometimes making a mess of it
and they can trust in the dying and rising God
who shows us the way.
Because that is how we walk on water.
So that’s what I like to think about when I hear this story.
I like to think about Peter,
after the time when, for us, the story ends,
but when, for him, the story is just beginning.
A whole new story,
a story of transformation.
One that has room for failures and messes and inadequacies.
One that brings new life.
©2008 Janice Jean Springer
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