[Note: This is the text for my first official homily (=sermon) as lay preacher in the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin. I gave it at St John the Baptist Episcopal Church, Lodi, California. If you want to see the video of it, you find it at time codes 32:00 – 44:00 in the YouTube Video for the service:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR1CaLjhdpI
As the text reveals, this was not the homily I originally wrote for this occasion, because I got the dates on the lectionary mixed up. I will separately post the text of that undelivered homily, for Proper 15A, Sunday 16 August, on this blog.]
In the Name of the (†) Parent, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
I have confession to make:
When I volunteered six weeks ago to give the sermon today, I misread the lectionary calendar and have spent the past two weeks preparing and polishing a homily on the text for next Sunday, Proper 15, the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman whose daughter was possessed by a demon. In that homily, I had a lot to say about faith, or trust, and about marginality and the widening of Jesus’ ministry to encompass not just the Jewish people but all of us.
Then, about 6 o’clock last night, I downloaded the bulletin for today service, saw the cute little picture on the cover of Jesus striding over the waves and realized, with a “sinking” feeling, that we are actually on Proper 14!
I think this must be like the preacher’s equivalent of one of those humiliating, recurrent nightmares that teachers have in which you get up to give an important lecture, only to discover that you are wearing your pyjamas, and that your slides contain nothing but gibberish!
In that moment, as I descended from the pride about what I’d so carefully crafted, and started to cycle between shame and panic, I was struck by a sense of a strong resonance between today’s Gospel and what I was experiencing. In particular, it seemed that I was feeling something of what Peter must have gone through in this story. So what I’m going to try to do here is to spell out that resonance.
Last Sunday Deacon Greg talked about the feeding of the 5000: At that point, earlier in Matthew Chapter 14, Jesus appears to be grieving the death of his cousin John the Baptist; nevertheless, he has compassion on the crowd of folks who had been following him and his disciples along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. He talks to the crowd and cures the sick, then, miraculously, feeds the thousands of men, women and children who gathered there on the shore.
Today’s Gospel picks up the story as Jesus sends the disciples on ahead of him, out in a little boat to cross over to the western shore of Sea of Galilee, so Jesus can finally have some peace and quiet, possibly to contemplate his cousin’s death.
However, things have not gone well for the disciples: It has been a very long night: A wind has come up, and for most of the night it has blown the little boat off course, further and further out into the lake in the midst of the rough, choppy water. Obviously, the disciples are not happy about this! Maybe the rough weather will cause the boat to capsize or even sink!
Or: in my case, maybe my whole career as a lay preacher will sink before it can even begin!
The original Greek actually says it’s the “fourth watch” of the night, which means sometime between 3am and 6am. Let’s assume that it’s before dawn, still dark, and the disciples are exhausted and scared. They probably say to each other, “If only Jesus were here! He’d know what to do! He’d save the day!” And then, in the pre-dawn gloom, they see an indistinct figure wandering back and forth over the water. Naturally, this terrifies them even more, because they think it’s a phantasma, that is, a ghost, an illusion or a hallucination. Now they are completely freaking out: Not only are they all going to drown, but they are also going crazy!
In many ways, this apparition of Jesus foreshadows the puzzling post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. In any case, they experience Jesus calming them and telling them, “Take courage; it’s me; don’t be afraid!” This works.
However: As usual, Peter wants to be special: better than the other disciples, so he asks Jesus to help him also walk on the water. Jesus replies, telling Peter to just come to him, which Peter starts to do.
I can identify with Peter: I wanted to be special and have my first homily be a special also. I wanted to “walk on water”: to do it flawlessly and without mistakes. I told all my friends about doing my first homily and told them I’d send them the link to the video.
The ancient Greeks had a special word for this: hubris: that is, acting out of extreme pride. This is the kind of pride that the Book of Proverbs is talking about when it says, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” In other words, this kind of pride leads to its opposite: humiliation.
In Peter’s case, he starts walking toward Jesus. He is doing fine until he notices the strong wind, freaks out, and starts to sink into the water, crying out for help (again!). Jesus reaches out his hand and catches Peter, saying, in the translation we are using, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”
My humanistic psychotherapy friend, Jef Cornelius-White, is working on a new translation of the New Testament, entitled Listening with Love. He argues that previous translations of the Bible were all done by people who already thought they knew what the Bible said. In his translation, Jef is trying to capture what the text meant to the people living it at the time. He argues that the Greek word pistis, which is usually translated as “faith” actually meant something more like what we mean by “trust.” Also, the Greek for “little faith” is probably better translated as a “small amount of trust.” In other words, Jesus is challenging Peter for not trusting him enough.
So: I was doing doing fine with my homily for next Sunday, until I noticed that I had the wrong readings. My first thought was, maybe I can somehow fix this and keep my original homily that I’d put so much work into. I’m an oldest child of a large family; part of the privilege that goes with me being an oldest is that more than my siblings I get to construct the reality I live in.
But then I realized that (a) I don’t have the power to change the lectionary and (b) the bulletin was already printed. At that point I started to sink: I realized that I couldn’t explain or pretend or finesse my way out of this. I was going to have to swallow my pride. (Yuck, pride doesn’t taste very good!)
No, like Peter, I was just going to have to own the problem: “Lord, save me!” I was going to have to do the best with the time I’ve got: Sink or Swim. Pray for inspiration. Listen to the Holy Spirit. Ask Kenneth to help me with the Greek (thanks, Kenneth!). Ask Reverend Betsy, myself, and all of you for forgiveness for not being able to give this homily the time it deserves.
The weird thing is, the central stories for the two Sundays I mixed up -- Proper 14 (Peter trying to walk on water but instead starting to sink beneath the waves) and Proper 15 (the Canaanite woman pleading with Jesus for healing for her demon-possessed daughter) -- are like mirror images of each other: Jesus commends the Canaanite woman for the crying out with “trust in distress”… and he criticizes Peter for trying to claim a trust he does not yet feel or cannot yet truly act on.
The other readings for today also resonate with this theme of the saving value of trusting God: In Genesis, Reuben persuades his other brothers to spare Joseph from the pit, ultimately saving the lives all the brothers in a later time of famine. And in the Epistle reading from Romans, Paul writes: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”
Here are some of the lessons I’ve been able to take from this whole experience, for me,.. and maybe the rest of us:
• To begin with: Always check the lectionary calendar twice to make sure you’ve got the right readings.
And also:
• Let’s not expect ourselves to walk on water, at least without help.
• In the meantime, have faith, trust God, and grab onto something that floats.
• Be patient, wait in the trust that the wind will die down, the waves will calm, and the sky will lighten up a bit.
• When we’re ready, let’s start swimming for shore, figuratively or literally.
At this point, in my mind’s eye, in the distance, I can just make out Gennesaret on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. There are more adventures waiting there: people to be healed, Pharisees and scribes to be debated with, and in next week’s Gospel lesson a Canaanite woman desperate for healing for her demon-possessed daughter. And we get to do this sort of thing, together with our teachers and mentors, our friends, family members, and fellow St. John folks.
One of the things I learned from the lay preaching class I did last year with Canon Anna is that it’s important to have a strong finish to a homily. However, it’s often difficult to figure how to do that, especially under time pressure. In this case, it was my son Kenneth who came up with the seed for the key take-home lesson here:
Faith (or Trust) may not be enough by itself for us to walk on water, but if we work at it, it can probably keep us afloat.
May this be so for us! Amen!
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