Good morning and thank you for having me with you this fine August day.
I see that Pastor Bonnie put a quote on the bulletin this morning:
~Paramahansa Yogananda
With great respect and love for Bonnie, and after reading this morning’s gospel lesson, I have to say that I think that’s quite wrong. Limitation and defeat are very much a part of life. They should be accepted, and even expected. More than that, they should be welcomed and even celebrated, and not just on a personal level. For as Paul tells us, “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong”.
Our gospel lesson is an illustration of that very point. The whole episode seems like a set-up to me. Jesus “makes” the disciples go out in the boat (the Greek almost says he “forces” them). He then comes to join them in a way that he has to know will rattle their cage. He accepts Peter’s request–even knowing that Peter will have trouble carrying through with it–and then with a swift and sure hand, he saves Peter from difficulties that he might have avoided in the first place.
What gives?
Well, what gives is that Peter and the other disciples are learning a lesson here. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about this story:
We are called, very simply, to change the world around us, and that is risky business. It is so easy for us to sit at home in our easy chairs watching television, and never take a real chance in our lives. Yet that chance is exactly what Jesus demands of us. What Jesus knows is that the disciples will face significant danger and vulnerability after he leaves the scene. Some of them will in fact be killed for their pursuit of his mission of proclaiming love, grace, and redemption.
By any account, Jesus and his disciples will be reckoned as failures. They will try and they will fail to change the world. The brokenness of the world is still very much with us, 2,000 years after this story was first told. And still, we are called to do something about it.
And still, like the disciples, if we were to live up to Jesus’ radical commandment to love one another, we would be counted as failures.
What would our society say if we were to give away our wealth and share it with the poor?
What would our society say if we were to lay down our weapons and proclaim a message of non-violence?
What would our society say if we demanded that the poor and the powerless be heard first, not last?
What would our society, finally, say if we were to welcome everyone at Jesus’ table, just as we will do in a few moments?
I submit to you that were we to take these commandments seriously, we would be thought of as failures. Worse than that, we would be thought of as threats, as enemies of decent society.
But here’s the thing. We are still called to do just these things. Our place as disciples is with the weak and the limited and the defeated, out of compassion, and out of the knowledge that we too, are imperfect.
We are called to do all these things, and God knows that we’re not going to be able to do them. Not all the way, not all the time. We are called to give it a shot, in other words, to take the first hesitant steps, to go as far as we can before we notice the strength of the wind and the water rising around our ankles.
We are called to try, and to fail.
We are called to try, and to fail, and to know that God’s hand is reaching out for ours, to protect us and to pull us back to safety, and to help us try to change the world, again.
Were we not to fail, we would not know this. We would be tempted to believe that the world could be made perfect, that we could be made perfect without some kind of intervention. Friends, that is a sore temptation. For we are by nature neither completely bad nor completely good, but a little of each, and completely prone to overestimate our goodness.
And when we do that, we forget those commandments that Jesus gave us. Surely it’s not my job to help the poor, we say. I have better things to do. Surely it’s not my job to bring peace or justice to the world. I might lose everything I have. Surely it’s not my job to end war, or to end exclusion. I might get hurt. And so our hearts begin to harden, and we feel strong, where we should feel weak.
But in a sense, it’s exactly right to say that these things are not our job.
Our job is to do the best we can.
Our job is to try until we reach the point of failure.
Our job is to do what Jesus asks us to do, in trust, and hope, and humility, in the sure knowledge that God can take even such failures as ourselves and use them to do some good in a broken and hurting world.
Our job is to take a chance, and step over the gunwales and out of the boat into the stormy seas and streets.