Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Rez is a community where Jesus welcomes, shapes, and sends disciples for the good of our neighborhood. No matter where you are in life, this is a place for you.
Life Together In The Goodness Of God
Good morning. My name is Layla King. I bring you greetings from your next door neighbors, the Diocese of West Texas, where it is my pleasure to serve as the Canon for Mission and Small Congregations, which is a mouthful, but basically means that my job is to visit congregations about half the size of this or less on a Sunday morning and to be with them in the Diocese of West Texas. That is not why I'm here with you today. It is a thrill for me to be here at Resurrection South in my role as a Palestinian American Episcopal priest and in my vocation, doing some education and teaching and preaching and storytelling around the Palestinian Christian experience. So I'm so glad to be here with you. My great thanks to Father Scott for making this invitation and my thanks to you for having me preach and speak with you today. And I hope you'll stay after the service for that in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Whenever I hear the story of Jesus walking on the water, I immediately think of my sister Zaina. And this one time she came to visit me when I was a freshman in college. A great apart and native Texans, Zaina and I only experienced real winters when we attended our separate colleges in the northeast. So when Zaina visited me that February and I took her out to the pond at the edge of my rural campus, I think it was the first time that she had encountered a frozen body of water of any sort. I assured her that we could, in fact, walk out on its surface. And she was both petrified and excited. As she took her first few steps out onto the ice, her face lit up. She could not get over the fact that she was walking on the surface of the pond. Look, look, I'm Jesus, I'm Jesus, she exclaimed. And no sooner had the words come out of her mouth than she began to slip and slide over the ice. As she struggled and ultimately failed marvelously to regain her balance, she yelled out, oh no, I'm Peter, I'm Peter. I should say we were both brought up in the Episcopal Church. So despite the fact that people say Episcopalians don't know their scriptures, we obviously did because that was her reference. Poor Zaina. And honestly, poor Peter, too. He is perhaps the most famous of the disciples because he seems to get into these scrapes time and time again. It is almost always Peter who recognizes Jesus' power and true identity and then an instant later denies or doubts him. And here it happens again when Jesus walks across the stormy seas to the disciples boat and invites Peter out to meet him. Peter takes a few brief steps and then remembers the waves and the wind and the fact that that's water under his feet. And in that moment sinks. Many of us have become accustomed to thinking of Peter's sinking as a terrible failure, a failure of trust, a failure of faith. And perhaps it is. But if Peter is a failure here, so are we all. For which of us wouldn't quake and waver and doubt when there is quite a lot to be fearful of? Given all that's going on around him, it hardly seems fair to call Peter sinking a failure. Rather, I'd say he's accomplished a lot by getting out of the boat in the first place. Consider the scene. The wind is howling. Great waves are building and crashing all around. Jesus, like a ghost, is half walking, half floating nearby. And as Jesus comes towards the boat, he shouts to his disciples, take heart. It is I do not be afraid. Or an even better translation of Jesus words would be take courage. I am fear not. And that I am in the middle is key to what to understanding what's really happening in this scene. I am, after all, is the very name of the creator God, the God who covenanted with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who led Moses and the people of ancient Israel out of Egypt. When Jesus yells to his disciples, he's doing much more than just affirming that it's really him. With this one phrase, I am, Jesus offers a powerful truth to his disciples in the middle of the storm. Don't be afraid, he says. I am here and I am God. And you'd think that would be enough, enough to calm all fears, enough to reassure even the most doubtful of hearts. But don't forget, there's the wind and the storms and the big crashing waves. And the disciples are both in shock and in some very real danger. And given all that, despite Jesus' profound statement, I can't help but think that his command to Peter to come to him on the water seems somehow more feasible, more doable than Jesus' command to fear not, which seems pretty outrageous and impossible given the circumstances. So I commend Peter and I don't fault him for his failure or his fears. For how many of us quake and waver even now faced with our own dire conditions. Each of us faces the buffeting of human existence, sickness and sorrow, worries and anxieties, the stresses of our daily lives. And now more than ever, at least for me, the danger and chaos that surround us seem utterly out of our control and profoundly disconcerting. As a Palestinian American, I see the violence against and oppression of God's beloved people happening on the streets and in the neighborhoods of both of my homelands. And I feel powerless to stop it. But you don't have to be Palestinian to look at the news headlines every day and feel overwhelmed. Who among us can hear of war with Iran or wildfires at home and abroad or deep divisions across our political landscape that threaten to ignite the worst outcomes and not know fear. But in the midst of all of that, we hear the invitation from Jesus to come. To step out into the storm we see raging around us nevertheless. And we pray that we have the courage to do it and the wisdom and humility enough to reach out for Jesus when we start to sink. Surely such is the life of God's people of faith. Because faith is not a possession. I can't have faith in the same way I have a car or a house. Faith is not something we can lay claim to once and for all or a decision we make and never return to. We never get to check off, have faith on our list of accomplishments. The good news here is that faith is not an achievement. So neither can it be something Peter or any of us can fail at. Rather, faith is a process and an activity, a belief with the heart as St. Paul puts it in the letter to the Romans that defines and motivates how we live in the world. As people of faith, each of us lives out an ongoing series of risks and failures of hearing Jesus promise and command. I am fear not and trying to obey it of reaching out to the Lord when we are swept off our feet by the storms that threaten us. And of wondering and wavering, even as we hold tight to a sense of safety so deep that it can only come from our creator God. Faith is walking across the raging waters as we seek to follow Jesus. All the while knowing that we, like Peter, can never get very far on our own. As our opening prayer this morning reminds us, we who cannot exist without God may by God be enabled to live according to God's will. For that reason alone, whatever the storms that surround us, whatever the threats of those who seek to hurt us, whatever the hate that pressures us to be silent, we can trust in the great I am and ultimately have nothing to fear. Amen.