Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 8 2014

1 Kings 19:9, 11-13

Romans 9:1-5

Matthew 14:22-33

What are you doing here, Elijah? That is a question we reflected on in our month of prayer with last year. But in fact the answer, in this story, is easy. Elijah is on Mount Horeb because the angel of the Lord has guided him there, and given him food for the journey, even though he was despondent and wanted to die. Elijah is where he is because that is where God wants him to be. But Elijah has to discover God’s purpose for himself.

So too the disciples in their little boat, far from land, in a storm. They might well have asked “what are we doing here?”. The answer is not difficult. They are there because that is where Jesus has told them to be. But they haven’t yet realised what his purpose is.

Into that scene of darkness and trouble comes the extraordinary, the unknown: Jesus walking towards them on the lake. And the response of the disciples is that they must be seeing a ghost, and they cry out in fear.

For the disciples at that moment, the greatest reality that they can think of is death. So that must be the explanation. Death ends everything, so death must govern everything, being even more powerful than the raging of the sea. So a figure walking on the water must be a ghost.

It’s as though they have forgotten what came just before, which was the feeding of the five thousand. As we heard last week, that story speaks of a new exodus. The people of God followed Jesus into the desert just as the children of Israel followed Moses out of Egypt. They were fed with the food that Jesus gave, without limit, just as the Israelites were fed with manna in the wilderness.

The feeding of the five thousand, and Jesus walking on the lake, belong together. Both stories are about God’s new work of salvation in Jesus, the new exodus of the people of God: not from slavery in Egypt, but from the slavery of sin and death.

That’s what the disciples, at this point, haven’t realised. Jesus is leading his people out from sin and death. Therefore the figure walking on the water can have nothing to do with death. It is not a ghost, but the Lord of life, the conqueror of death. Like Moses, his path is across the sea, the sea that so often in the scriptures represents the forces of chaos and destruction. Unlike Moses, he doesn’t divide the waters to walk through, but walks on top of the waves. There is something greater than Moses here.

Jesus walks on the waters. In the beginning, says Genesis, the Spirit of God moved on the face of the deep to bring creation into being. The Book of Job says that “God… alone stretched out the heavens and trampled the waves of the Sea”. The Prophet Habbakuk, in a hymn of praise to the power of the Lord, says “You trampled the sea with your horses, churning the mighty waters.”

Indeed there is something greater than Moses here. It is God alone who walks on the waters, but now Jesus does so too. Jesus is doing what God does. Jesus says as much in the greeting he gives to his disciples. Our translation this morning says, “Take heart! It is I!”, but in the Greek he actually says “Be of good cheer! I am!”. Jesus uses the Divine name, the name of Yahweh, I Am Who I Am, to greet his disciples. And their response was the response that we rightly give to God alone: they worshipped him. The leader of the new exodus is God himself, the Word made flesh in Jesus.

Sometimes being a Christian can feel comforting and reassuring. Like the five thousand fed by Jesus with the loaves and fishes, we are conscious of the great family of the Church throughout the world, knowing that we are fed by Jesus and have more than enough. At other times we may feel more like that little group in the boat. Alone, battling in the dark, making no headway against the storms.

But whichever situation we might most identify with, what matters is that we are following Jesus, and that God is in Jesus to save us from sin and death. That is the ultimate reality, and we can trust ourselves to that entirely and totally, whatever happens.

The Church is often called to be far from the shore in a little boat. Sometimes its members will even be called to leave the security of the boat and step out onto the waves. The one thing that we can count on is that God is in Jesus, and he has come to save us. Our task is not to be in a safe or comfortable place, but to follow Jesus in witness and worship. “What are you doing here?” If we are in the place that Jesus wills us to be, that is enough, and he is enough for us.

The troubles that come to us, even if they are slight, can be discouraging. Here, being a parish in the Church of England, we are custodians of a historic building, and historic buildings from time to time throw a wobbly and present their custodians with unexpected repair works, as ours has recently done. We might think this is the last thing we need!

But this fades into insignificance compared with the real horrors faced by Christians and other religious minorities in northern Iraq, hundreds of thousands of them now forced to flee in the face of threatened massacres, their churches desecrated, their homes stolen from them, many already killed. That is something that we will not have to face. The worst we can expect as the Church in modern Britain is probably just to be ignored and marginalised as irrelevant. But we remember that we are one in Christ with our brothers and sisters in the violent and dark places of the earth, and we hold them in our prayers.

Although we are unlikely to face anything so extreme, there are other ways in which we can feel like those disciples in the boat, struggling on in the dark, making no progress, alone and afraid. At times we may, like Peter, feel that the waves are rising up around us, and we are sinking.

The storms and waves that surround us might be those of anxiety or illness, grief or weariness. It matters not. However dark the night, however far out from shore we may seem to be, Jesus is with us. As with his people of old, he is God, leading us into freedom, mighty to save. In whatever situation we are in, he says to us, “I am! Do not be afraid!”. His hand reaches out to save us. His presence is the one thing we need, our one task is to follow him.

Jesus does not tell us to stay safe, or to be careful, or to look after our comfort. He tells us to follow him. He has chosen us to be his witnesses, and that is all we need.

Last week the Patriarch of Antioch, the leader of one of the Churches under such terrible attack in northern Iraq, issued a statement asking for international aid. He said this was “not out of fear or weakness, but because we believe that we are the salt of this land and the witnesses of the Resurrection till eternity.”

I thought that was an extraordinary statement of Christian faith: the task of the Church is to be the witness of the Resurrection till eternity, even in the midst of murder and mayhem and the loss of everything. Even just to say that, in such a situation, is itself a powerful witness to the Resurrection

“What are you doing here?” That’s easy. Our task is to be witnesses to the Resurrection to eternity, whatever may be going on. The one who calls to us is not a ghost, but the Lord of Life, the Risen One, the Saviour. God has come to us in Jesus to save us, and that is the greatest reality, the ultimate truth, triumphing over all the powers of death and leading his people to eternal life.