“Trust”
Psalm 104:1-6 and Matthew 14:22-33
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
8/13/23
Let my whole being bless the Lord!
Lord my God, how fantastic you are!
You are clothed in glory and grandeur!
2 You wear light like a robe;
you open the skies like a curtain.
3 You build your lofty house on the waters;
you make the clouds your chariot,
going around on the wings of the wind.
4 You make the winds your messengers;
you make fire and flame your ministers.
5 You established the earth on its foundations
so that it will never ever fall.
6 You covered it with the watery deep like a piece of clothing;
the waters were higher than the mountains!
(Psalm 104:1-6 – CEB)
22 Right then, Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go ahead to the other side of the lake while he dismissed the crowds. 23 When he sent them away, he went up onto a mountain by himself to pray. Evening came and he was alone. 24 Meanwhile, the boat, fighting a strong headwind, was being battered by the waves and was already far away from land. 25 Very early in the morning he came to his disciples, walking on the lake.26 When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified and said, “It’s a ghost!” They were so frightened they screamed.
27 Just then Jesus spoke to them, “Be encouraged! It’s me. Don’t be afraid.”
28 Peter replied, “Lord, if it’s you, order me to come to you on the water.”
29 And Jesus said, “Come.”
Then Peter got out of the boat and was walking on the water toward Jesus. 30 But when Peter saw the strong wind, he became frightened. As he began to sink, he shouted, “Lord, rescue me!”
31 Jesus immediately reached out and grabbed him, saying, “You man of weak faith! Why did you begin to have doubts?” 32 When they got into the boat, the wind settled down.
33 Then those in the boat worshipped Jesus and said, “You must be God’s Son!” (Matthew 14:22-33 - CEB)
Jesus has been taking a lot of heat lately. The Pharisees and Sadducees don’t care for him, and they continually let him know it. And not long before the story we just read, Jesus is in Nazareth where even his own neighbors reject him.
We know who your parents are, they say. So, don’t get uppity with us!
And Jesus says, Prophets always get the coldest shoulder from those who think they know them best.
That’s actually a rather loving expression of disappointment. In any age, living as a person of faith calls for embodying humility, compassion, and forgiveness toward those around us—and trust in the one who calls us to faithfulness.
John the Baptist seems to have struggled with the idea of grace-full trust. Whether motivated by love and compassion or by anger and fear, he threw one prophetic brick after another. Finally, he threw a brick through the wrong window—Herod’s bedroom window. By targeting everyone, he made himself a target. And then it was too late for anyone to tell him that he’d lost his mind, because Herod saw to it that John lost his head.
Hearing the news of his cousin’s brutal death, Jesus slips away, seeking solitude to grieve and to pray. And even there, crowds find him. Feeling their desperation, Jesus tends to them. He feeds them.
Afterward, he tells his disciples, We’re going to Gennesaret next. You guys take a boat across the lake and prepare things for us.
After pronouncing a benediction on the crowd and sending them home, a grieving Jesus climbs a mountain, again in search of solitude. In biblical literature, mountains represent the ultimate “thin place,” the place where earth and sky meet, the place of confluence between time and eternity, and communion between Creator and Creation.
While Jesus has just been a tangible, unmediated presence of divine love to the crowd, his quest for seclusion on that mountain suggests that a sense of God’s absence and the assurance of God’s presence often happen simultaneously. It’s a kind of knowing to feel a storm surge at the pit of our being, or an ache telling us that all is not right with the world. This deep knowing wells up from an ancient memory of the eternal wholeness from which we’ve come and toward which we live. The mystics teach us to receive that ache as God’s call to embrace the chaotic, complicated, and otherwise disappointing world with a heart for healing and hope. The only other options are to withdraw from the world as rather depressed and hopeless hermits, or to lash out violently, competing for security, attention, and control over so-called scarce resources in God’s Creation of abundance.
We’re not new to that struggle. We hear it throughout God’s long story with Israel. Remember Elijah. Fleeing from the spiteful Jezebel, he hides in a cave. God sniffs him out and says, Elijah, what are you doing here?
The prophet’s response is pure sulk: I’ve done everything right! Now I’m all alone, and everyone wants me dead.
Elijah has sought solitude, but out of fear rather than trust. So, God invites the piteous prophet to stand outside the cave because God is about to pass by. Then come the rock-splitting winds, the earthquake, and the fire. And let the dooms-dayers within each of us take note: God is not in any of this loud, blustering, sensational stuff. God does not work that way. That’s why we can laugh it off as an absurdity when anyone wonders what God was trying to tell Jonesborough Presbyterian when our building got struck by lightning last month. Seriously, if that’s how God worked, who would survive?
After the turmoil, Elijah finds himself all alone—again—not inside a cave, but inside “a sound of sheer silence,” and only then does he know that God is near.
Many generations later, echoing Elijah’s experience, Peter cries out, “Lord, if it is you, order me to come to you on the water.”
Let’s remember that, to many of the ancients, deep water symbolizes the darkness of chaos and the mystery of evil. When Peter demands a command to step out of the boat and onto the sea, he’s asking Jesus to call him out of the cave, like Elijah, and into the earthquake, wind, and fire. He’s asking Jesus to call him, like Moses, to confront Pharaoh and to tell him, Let my people go. He’s asking Jesus to send him, like David, out to face the Goliath storm threatening the boat and everyone in it. Peter is asking Jesus for proof of something one can experience only through faith.
Jesus says to Peter, Well, come on. And the next thing Peter knows, Jesus is hauling him through the waves like a drag net.
Peter discovers that following Jesus is about trust and risk rather than obedience and reward.
Being “fearfully and wonderfully made,” (Psalm 139:14) we are gifted creatures. We’re capable of remarkable feats of memory and interpretation, of incisive analysis, and of heights and depths of creativity that are nothing short of holy. There comes a point, however, when our minds have done all they can. Even when a theory can be more clearly developed, a work of art further refined, or a field more evenly plowed, there comes a moment when trust is the only way forward, and trust looks a lot like letting go. At that moment, we have to step out of the boat, even if the water is troubled and terrifying. And sink or swim, we trust the way of the Christ—the way of compassion, justice, and peace.
The life of faith is a life of trust. And while faith and doubt are often considered opposites, they are hardly mutually exclusive. As Frederick Buechner has so memorably said, “Doubt is the ants in the pants of faith. It keeps it awake and moving.”1
All the disciples see Jesus, but only Peter says, “Lord, if it is you.” Seeing may constitute believing, but believing, like obedience, often becomes an end in itself. Trust embraces all the doubt and dares to step forward into a future that lies beyond our sight, beyond our control, and way beyond the surface tension of mere belief.
All manner of waves are battering our boat: Wars and rumors of war all over the planet, more extremes in weather due to climate change, and an ever-deepening dependence on physical violence and violent speech as the only viable responses to opposition. And we can huddle together singing “Jesus Loves Me” so loud we never get quiet enough to hear the voice and feel the hand of the one who loves us.
But God’s Christ is calling. And he calls us not away from the storm, but into it, and out onto the deep. He calls us there not to target those whom we don’t like and can’t understand. He calls us out to embrace all Creation, to target it with compassion and grace, and to receive those self- and community-restoring gifts, as well.
Trust me, says Jesus. And follow me.
1Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking A Theological ABC, Harper and Row Publishers, 1973. p. 20.
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