A lively South African song has become a favorite at Seattle University’s Summer Institute for Liturgy and Worship. “Hallelujah! We sing your praises! All our hearts are filled with gladness!” Most Episcopalians in attendance, and even some of the Lutherans, manage to move a little when we sing that chorus. The final verse of the song begins: “Now he [Christ] sends us all out strong in faith….” Then things get complicated, for two different English versions have been published and we use both of them during the week-long event. What I assume is the original version goes: “strong in faith, free of doubt”; the more recent alterative reads: “strong in faith amid doubt.” Some Institute participants clearly favor the notion that true faith eliminates doubt from the Christian life; others are convinced that faith and human doubt can coexist.
Consider some gospel portraits of faith and its opposite.
To people he heals – like the hemorrhaging woman – Jesus often says something like: “Your faith has made you well.” Here faith appears as persistent, courageous action; faith’s opposite is despair, giving up and giving in to one’s situation. Jesus’ healing power invokes in us faith enough to get up, move out, and search for wholeness.
In people from whom Jesus casts out demons, faith takes the form of gratitude for unexpected, unsought liberation and the willingness to tell and re-tell the story to family and neighbors. Jesus’ power over unclean spirits reminds us that when we are genuinely possessed or addicted, transformation comes from beyond our will power through the strange and often painful gift of intervention – whether an profound religious experience, a costly accident, or a medical emergency.
And then there are Jesus’ disciples, terrified by his appearances in the midst of danger and death. “You of little faith,” Jesus asks in today’s gospel lesson, “why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14:31) From Jesus walking on the stormy sea and extending the strong hand of a deliverer, we might discover faith enough to stay in the boat and avoid Peter’s presumption of trying to walk on water.
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Listen below the surface of today’s gospel.
Matthew uses the phrase “little faith” throughout his gospel to describe the rule, not the exception – the typical state of faith among Jesus’ followers. Little faith, some faith, mixed faith – not the complete absence of faith.
This is the second dangerous sea crossing Jesus’ disciples have made in Matthew’s gospel. A second stormy night on the same sea; in the same boat perhaps. But Jesus was in the boat with the disciples the first time, although asleep; they had to wake him to still the storm. This time, they are alone. “Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds” (Matthew 14:22).
The boat is battered by the waves – an unusual word to be used of a object rather than a person – the word means beaten, tortured. The disciples find themselves many miles from shore with the wind against them. But it was Jesus himself who sent the disciples on ahead and he does not abandon them. He comes to them during the fourth watch of the night – between 3 and 6 am – when things are darkest, their need greatest, their prospects for survival slimmest.
Like God’s creative Spirit over the primordial waters of chaos, Jesus comes to his disciples walking on the sea. And as will happen when they first encounter Jesus raised from the dead, the disciples do not immediately recognize him. They become afraid and cry out, thinking they have seen a “ghost” (14:26). The Greek word is phantasm – and it is the only time this particular word is used in the New Testament. A phantasm is something unreal, a dream of someone not really there; an apparition, not a real person.
As is true of the appearances of the risen Christ, the disciples’ ability to recognize Jesus improves when he speaks to them – when they find faith enough to listen to a ghost and find out he is not a dream or apparition at all. “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid,” Jesus says (14:27); “Take heart, I AM” – a phrase more common in the Gospel of John where Jesus claims as his own the name of God. Jesus: no ghost, but also no mere man; he can cast out fear because he is the visitation of God for his disciples.
Now both Peter’s little faith and his doubt emerge. “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water” (14:28). Peter has enough faith to call Jesus “Lord,” but also too much doubt to stay in the boat and welcome this visitation. He wants, he demands, greater assurance that Jesus is no ghost. Jesus says, “Come,” and Peter is out of the boat trying to walk on water.
Peter speaks to Jesus with presumption, not faith – demanding that Jesus work yet another wonder on his behalf. Peter’s words echo what Satan said to Jesus in the wilderness: “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.’…‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, “God will command God’s angels concerning you.’” (Matthew 4:3, 6).
Lord, if it is you, Peter’s little faith and doubt demand, if you are who you say you are and who I think you are, prove it to me in a way that makes my freedom, my faith, my devotion, irrelevant. Lord, if it is you, command me – don’t lead me as a disciple or invite me as a friend or woo me as a beloved one, but make of me a puppet, a thing, make me the object of some magic of yours, make me do what I am not meant to do – walk on water. Faith, with its ambiguity and relinquishment of control and necessity of personal engagement, is too strenuous. Coercive proof would be easier than faith; bare objective fact less demanding than trust.
Peter leaves community behind. He tries to go it alone in a heroic action. Not content with Jesus’ appearance in the familiar and the ordinary, he steps out on a hopeless quest for the extra-ordinary. Peter soon is overwhelmed by feelings of insecurity, unbelief, and death. He sinks. But thanks be to God, Peter can never act so presumptuously as to cut himself off from the possibility of rescue and a new beginning in Jesus.
I understand Peter. Maybe you do too. How I struggle against the voice in my head that says, “If I don’t do it, it won’t get done.” And so I throw myself into trying to do it all, to do the impossible – alone of course. But we are not made to walk on water. Faith is not about walking on water. Faith is the courageous humility to stay in the boat, to be ourselves, finite, fallible human beings, receptive to Jesus’ power to heal and deliver in the ordinary and familiar, in community with others.
If Peter had exercised more faith, if we could exercise more faith, we would stay in the boat, trusting in Jesus’ trust in us, trusting the appearances of Jesus already near us, “on our lips and in our hearts” (Romans 10:8).
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Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, describes faith enough to stay in the boat in her statement about the recently concluded Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops from around the world. Listen to some of her words.
“Many bishops came to this gathering in fear and trembling, expecting either a distasteful encounter between those of vastly different opinions, or the cold shoulder from those who disagree. The overwhelming reality has been just the opposite. We have prayed, cried, learned, and laughed together, and discovered something deeper about the body of Christ. We know more of the deeply faithful ministry of those in vastly different contexts, and we have heard repeatedly of the life and death matters confronting vast swaths of the Communion: hunger, disease, lack of education and employment, climate change, war and violence. We have remembered that together we may be the largest network on the planet – able to respond to those life and death issues if we tend to the links, connections, and bonds between us. We have not resolved the differences among us, but have seen the deep need to maintain relationships, even in the face of significant disagreement and discomfort” (EpiScope).
Not uniformity or even agreement, but staying in the boat. For in this nave, this upside down boat church, we find our story, our meal, our calling, and each other. “Christ the Lord to us said,” the first verse of that South African song begins,
‘I am wine, I am bread, I am wine, I am bread,
give to all who thirst and hunger!’
Jesus says to us still, ‘All who do the Lord’s will, all who do the Lord’s will,
are my sisters and brothers.’
Now he sends us all out strong in faith, free of doubt,
strong in faith amid doubt.
Tell to all the joyful gospel.
Hallelujah! We sing your praises! All our hearts are filled with gladness!”
