Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 10, 2008

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Sometimes the Jesus of the Gospels hardly seems human. Indeed, the point that the Gospel writers wanted us to get from many of the stories they told about him was precisely that he was more than human. So they told stories of him miraculously healing the sick, feeding huge crowds with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish, and even raising the dead. All of them except Luke tell a story of him walking on water. We heard Matthew’s version of that story just now. Clearly no mere mortal could to that. The Gospel writers believed that, even if he wasn’t actually God for all of them the way he was for John, Jesus at least possessed the power of God. I can’t walk on water, and I assume none of you can either, although maybe we’ll find out for sure at the picnic at the Simmons’ home on a lake this afternoon. In Matthew’s story that we just heard, Jesus doesn’t seem very human, what with that walking on water routine and all.

Yet there are other times in the Gospel stories about him when Jesus seems very human indeed. We see the human side of Jesus in the very beginning of Matthew’s story of Jesus walking on the water. To understand that part of the story better, let’s back up a bit and put it in its context in the Gospel of Matthew. The first story that Matthew tells in chapter 14 is the story of the death of John the Baptist. King Herod had him beheaded, and Jesus hears about what happened. Now John the Baptist had been Jesus’ precursor and, I believe, his mentor, the one who had inspired Jesus to undertake his own public ministry. So Jesus was probably understandably upset by word of John’s execution. At Matthew 14:13 we read that when Jesus heard of it, “he withdrew from there to a deserted place by himself.” He wanted to get away. He wanted time to pray, to discern what John’s death meant for him, and probably to grieve. All of that was a very human reaction to the news Jesus had received. In a position like Jesus’, I would have wanted to do the same, and perhaps you would have too.

But Jesus had a problem. He wanted to get away from the world for a while, but the world wouldn’t leave him alone. When he got to his deserted place, crowds of people followed and found him. Matthew then tells the story of Jesus feeding five thousand men plus women and children with five loaves of bread and two fish that we heard last week. Jesus wanted to be alone, but the people needed him. So instead of running away, he ministered to them. Then, after he had done so, he tried to get away again, to get some time to himself. Matthew begins the story we heard this morning by saying that Jesus sent his disciples away in a boat and dismissed the crowds. Then “he went up the mountain by himself to pray.” He still needed that alone time, and again he tried to get it.

He got some, but not much. When evening came the world again called him back out of his solitude. This time it wasn’t a hungry mob that needed feeding, it was those disciples he had sent off in a boat across the sea of Galilee. They needed rescuing. They’d gotten caught in a violent storm and were in pretty serious trouble. Matthew doesn’t tell us how Jesus knew that they were in trouble, but somehow he knew. I guess that’s another of those not very human things about Jesus. He just knew that his friends needed help when most of us wouldn’t have. So he went to rescue them. He did it in quite a superhuman way. He strolled across the surface of the stormy lake. We couldn’t do that, but Matthew says that Jesus did. The important point for us this morning is not how he went, but that he went. His friends needed him, so he left his place of retreat from the world and came to them. He left the peace of his mountain solitude and entered the storm to meet his friends’ need.

You may recall that last week I said about the feeding of the more than five thousand people with what seems entirely too little food that I wasn’t much interested in whether or not it really happened the way Matthew says it did. The real point of that very Eucharistic story for us doesn’t depend on whether it ever happened as a matter of fact. The same is true of the famous story of Jesus walking on water. Many people want to believe that it really happened as a matter of fact. They even want to recreate the scene. Some genius has installed a sheet of Plexiglas just below the surface of the Sea of Galilee so gullible tourists can have their pictures taken, for a price I’m sure, “walking on the water” like Jesus did. What nonsense! Now if someone got a picture of a person actually walking on the water rather than on a sheet of Plexiglas just below the surface of the water, that would be something to write home about! We may want to believe that Jesus really walked on the Sea of Galilee, but the truth of this story for us really doesn’t depend on it actually having happened. The obvious metaphorical point of the story, and I suppose the most important one, is that Jesus comes to us in our times of trouble and can lift us up above those troubles if we have faith in him. That’s true of course, and it’s been preached from this text probably millions of times. It’s true whether or not Jesus ever actually walked on water.

The point I want to emphasize this morning is a different one. It is precisely that in this story, as in story after story, Jesus went where he was needed. He put the needs of others above his own needs. He wanted to get away, but the crowds needed him, so the healed them and fed them. He wanted solitude to grieve the death of his mentor, but his disciples needed him. So he went. That’s who he was. Time and again he let himself be called into the storm to serve God’s people. He never let his own needs and wishes interfere with his mission of doing God’s work in the world.

In this as in so many other ways Jesus is a model for us. Christians so often fail to see that he is a model for us. I think that one of the main reasons that we fail to see Jesus as the model for our own lives is precisely that tendency that the Gospel writers had and that the church has had ever since to turn Jesus into God. It’s not that Jesus wasn’t the Son of God Incarnate. Those of you who know me and my own theology know that I confess that he was precisely that and that I consider that confession central to the Christian faith. The problem is that the Christian tradition has for so long so let Jesus’ divinity overwhelm his humanity that it’s easy to ignore him as a model for how we are to live our lives. He was God, after all. We aren’t. So we can’t be expected to live like him, and being a model for our lives simply isn’t what he was all about, or so the Christian tradition has said for so long. That way of thinking, however, ignores one entire half of the traditional Christian teaching about Jesus. He was the Son of God Incarnate, but he was also fully and completely human at the same time. He lived a fully human life. Indeed, he showed us not only what God is like—that’s the Incarnation part—but what human life is supposed to and can be like too. That’s the human part, and we fail to understand our own tradition if we fail to hold both parts together and pay attention to both of them.

One of the things Jesus shows us in his fully human life is that just as he was called again and again into the storm of life to serve God’s people, so are we. We don’t get to withdraw any more than he did, as much as we may want to—and believe me, I usually want to. Now don’t get me wrong. Times of retreat and prayer are important. Alone time is important. We all need it, just as Jesus did. We need it as time for rest and restoration. We need it as time for discernment and prayer, as time to strengthen our connection with God. The point is that however much we may need retreat time, and however much we would like to stay in retreat time, that’s not what God wants of us. God calls us into the storm. There are hungry people who need to be fed. There are people in peril who need to be rescued, from the homeless person down the street to the African mother with AIDS and the children she will leave behind. There is injustice to be opposed, in Darfur and in Washington, D.C. There is peace to be won, in Iraq and in Israel/Palestine. We are called into all of these storms just as Jesus was called across the Sea of Galilee that stormy night so long ago to rescue his friends. No. We don’t get to live a quiet, uninvolved life any more than Jesus did. He was called into the storm. So are we. Are we ready to go? Amen.