The Right Rev. V. Gene Robinson: If you wanna walk on water, you’ve gotta get out of the boat!!

Lord, take my lips and speak through them. Take our minds and think with them. Take our hearts and set them on fire with love for you. Amen.

Good morning. It’s always such an honor to be here in this sacred and beautiful place, and to welcome all of you to be with us this morning. I love this scripture. I mean, anytime Peter shows up, you know it’s gonna be fun, ’cause if he’s nothing else, he’s enthusiastic. And I like this, this scripture, especially because I’m no stranger myself to storms. And I like any story about weathering a storm. But I have to admit, as I prepared for this sermon, there was an old joke that I could not get off my mind. It comes from the time when, believe it or not it was not all that long ago, we were debating whether women were worthy of ordination or not. I hope you find that a horrifying thought.

But there was a joke, there was a joke going around about a young woman who had been ordained and was on her first clergy conference with her clergy colleagues in her diocese. And it was to take place on a very small island. Not all that far offshore, but far enough that you had to take a little boat out to it. And, and when they all got there, she realized that she had left her prayer book behind. So she stepped down off the dock, onto the water, and walked across the water and back onto the land and got her prayer book out of her car. And came back and walked back across the water and up onto the dock. And one of the clergy was heard to say, “Just like a woman to leave something behind”.

Now, I would call that burying the lead of that story, like to focus on that and not the fact that she had walked across the water. It’s really rather astounding. And it reminds me of this gospel, which we often describe as being about Jesus walking on the water. Well, hello. I mean, this was Jesus. We expected big things from him, and he kept kind of dazzling us all the time. But the lead of this story is that Peter walked on water. You kind of miss that part, right? ‘Cause he does fall fairly soon, but he actually is doing it. Peter is walking on water. It’s as if Peter sees Jesus coming toward him. And almost like last week when we celebrated the Transfiguration, and the disciples had a vision for who Jesus really was in the big scheme of things. It’s as if Peter sees Jesus for what he really is. And here’s Jesus’ message about what God can do, not just in and through him, but in and through Peter and James and John and all of us.

And he sees it with his own eyes. He believes it. And almost without thinking, he just steps out of the boat and starts walking on the water. He, in a sense, he becomes the kingdom of God. He embodies what Jesus has been trying to teach to them. Now he is human and he’s much like a toddler. You know, when a toddler’s learning to walk, they finally one day make it to the center of the room by themselves and all of a sudden, they realize that they’re by themselves and they get terrified and they just plumb down on the floor ’cause it’s just too much to bear. And it’s as if Peter looks around and realizes that he’s walking on the water and wonders, “Oh my God, how did I get here?”

So he begins to sink. He can’t sustain this vision of the kingdom and his embodiment of it. Now, when Jesus says, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” We, I don’t know about you, but it sounds a little bit like Jesus is chastising him, being a little bit critical that he had so little faith and so much doubt. But actually, I don’t think so. I think Jesus is not taunting him or testing him or pushing him to try it again. I think what he’s doing is in a very kind and loving and gentle way, saying, “Good for you.  There for a minute you had it. You saw it, didn’t you, and it held you up”. And then when Jesus reaches out to take his hand, it’s full of generosity and kindness and love. He just, he just wants to save him from drowning. There’s nothing condescending about it. It’s important to note that the role of faith here is not in stopping the storm. Faith rarely stops a storm. But what faith promises is to enable Peter to walk just on the water without falling, without drowning, to literally walk on troubled waters.

I have a little card that’s right by my desk. It has been for a number of years now, and it says: “Sometimes God calms the storm, but sometimes God lets the storm rage and calms God’s child”. That’s the role of faith. And Peter had that for a short while, and later in his life, of course, he would see it again and again and again. Well, so the rest of the sermon pretty much preaches itself. So I’m not gonna bore you with that. I’ll let you fill in that. And I’m just gonna go to the Cliff’s Notes version of what might be learned from this. Now, for those of you who are too young to know what Cliff’s Notes are, you can see me after church. But it was pretty much the way we got through Tale of Two Cities and Tolstoy without ever reading it. So, the three learnings for me that come from this telling is that number one, if you wanna walk on water, you gotta get out of the boat. And sometimes you might be able to do it without thinking about it, but most of the time it’s what worries us. Because once you’re out of the boat, you’re not in control anymore. And that’s always a scary place to be. But the only way you’re gonna ever walk on water is to make a decision to get out of the boat.

And number two, there’s help. There’s help available, love and support, but more often than not, you have to ask for it. And so you have to be willing to ask for it. And then sometimes even harder is being willing to accept it when it’s offered. And that help can come from family and friends and various communities of just all kinds. Occasionally it comes from the church, and it always comes from God. No matter how untrustworthy any of us might be for one another, God is never untrustworthy to us. God is there offering to save us freely and generously and with about as much love as the creation can muster. It’s amazing in this story and throughout scripture, and we miss it as to how much, how much God loves us and how highly God thinks of us. Jesus would later go on to say to the disciples, “You can do greater things than I have done”. And I think he meant it. I think he believed that. And in this story, we see what happens when someone like a Peter believes it for real.

So some questions you might think of in light of this story, what storms rage around you at this time in your life? You may have relationship challenges. You or someone you know or love might have an addiction that hasn’t been named, never mind dealt with. You might be about to get into a marriage, or you might need to be getting out of a marriage. Into a new job or finding the courage to stay in the one you’ve got. There may be some destination in your life’s journey that you know you need to go to, and it just scares you to death of what it might mean. Or it scares you to death because you haven’t a clue what it might mean and feel called to do it anyway. Those might be some personal storms raging around you.

But all of us here have some similar storms raging around all of us. We may live in a state that’s trying to deny our racial history. We may hear as we have lately, that slavery must have been a good thing for at least some of the slaves. You might live in a state that is quickly and almost desperately trying to remove books that include LGBTQ history and stories, or the cruel denial of healthcare to trans kids, transgender kids. We’ve got migrants being shipped by bus and three year old children dying during the journey. And if you and I don’t stand up against White Christian Nationalism, who’s going to?

You know what? It’s a scary time to stand up for much of anything these days, because you know what’s going to happen. We have become so polarized. So standing up and getting out of the boat, if you, if that doesn’t make you afraid, then you’re not paying attention. The question is, are you and I going to do it anyway? You know, it, it occurred to me thinking about this, that to remember that Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail wasn’t written to people who were against integration. It was written to people like you and me, good church people who were fine with integration. They just didn’t want to stand up for those who were being hurt from segregation. It was the letter to us that just caring isn’t enough. You have to get out of the boat and walk on the water. So what does getting out of the boat look like for you? What’s the first step you want to take on that next journey that God is calling you to? Because just as surely as God spoke to Elijah in that still small voice, God speaks to you and me. And calls us. And as you’ve heard me say from this pulpit before, you can be pretty sure it’s God’s voice if it’s calling you to do something you’re afraid to do or you don’t want to, to do, but know you need to do.

If the voice is telling you to do something you really wanna do, it’s probably not God messing with you. So when it’s hard, pay attention. And then who will you ask for help? Where will you go? Who will you count on? And how will you stay in touch with God so that God can lift you up when you start to sink? I grew up as a child, and I had a much better voice when I was younger than I do now.  But at about age three or four, my mother would take me to one church after another where I was rather locally famous for singing, God wants me for a sunbeam and Climb up Sunshine Mountain. Anybody remember those? I was spectacular. But here’s what I’ve come to learn. God doesn’t need us to be a sunbeam. What God needs are fierce workers for justice. God needs prophets. God needs people who will fight for integrity in their own lives and those of others. And God needs advocates for those who have no advocate. The miracle is God thinks you and I can do something about all that, but we’ve gotta get up out of the boat. So God doesn’t want you for a sunbeam. God wants to help you walk on water. No kidding. Amen.