Our gospel this morning is wonderfully simple in terms of plot. The disciples are in the boat, there is a storm. Jesus walks across the water to them and Peter asks to be commanded to join him. Peter notices the wind, and sinks. Jesus saves him.
It doesn’t take long to tell the story and it’s not hard to get some inspiration out of it, though the exact nature of that inspiration might be open to discussion. It might be “Don’t put Jesus to the test by asking to perform a miracle.” It might be “Step out in faith.” Maybe what we take from this story is “Don’t take your eyes off Jesus or you’ll fall.” It may be “Jesus can do more than you can ask or imagine.” It might just be “Jesus is God and you aren’t.”
All good and well. All simple enough. There may be contradictory “messages” that emerge from this story but all the different messages, even when they conflict, are patently true and important. We get it.
But in each of these messages, with all their clarity, there is something lacking. Something a little bit deceptive. The clarity obscures something. That something is chaos.
There’s the chaos of the storm, the fear the disciples feel about being on their own in such rough water. There’s the chaos of the darkness and the abandonment by Jesus, who has after all sent them out to drown while he prays alone on a mountain. But then when Jesus appears, that’s hardly reassuring, because he is so strange. The disciples think he is a ghost or an apparition. They don’t just see him on the water and start rejoicing. He has to reassure them, teach them something about who he is.
But then there is chaos in Peter’s heart, too. One moment he recoils from Jesus as from a ghost, and the next moment, just to test whether it’s really Jesus, he asks this frightening apparition to command him to step out on the waters. And that works, but the next minute he realizes that it’s windy, and in his confusion he seems to think that it’s the weather that makes all the difference here, not relative density. So he notices the wind, and he falls in. And then the moment after that he is back in the boat, worshipping Jesus. Chaos.
I wonder where, in all that tumult, Peter got the idea of being commanded by Jesus. Did you notice? He doesn’t just ask Jesus to let him take a walk on the waves, nor does he positively declare that he’s going to jump out of the boat and take a stroll. No, he says to Jesus, “Command me to come to you.” In fact, he asks for that command as a reassuring sign that Jesus is who he says he is: “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”
Chaos, darkness, storm, water, command. We’ve seen these elements before, and they suggest a much more complicated story than the simple one we often tell about this passage: “In the beginning,” the Book of Genesis tells us, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters” (Gen.1:1-2). This is the primordial condition, the chaos, over which God spoke those first words of creation, that first command: “Let there be light.” And from this chaos God named day and night and proclaimed it good.
And these waters of chaos have always held a special place in the stories of God’s people. Noah’s flood, and his salvation, are like a second telling of that ancient tale. The crossing of the Red Sea is another version, as God’s people are able to pass through the formless void of the water into freedom. Again, after their wandering, the Israelites pass over the Jordan river to enter the promised land, created as Israel in a new Eden. And of course when Jesus is baptized in the Jordan, he descends down into that watery void, emerging to hear a voice from God, creating again, not just day and night but salvation, redemption of a fallen creation: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” the voice says as the Spirit descends. “Let there be light,” God said as that ancient wind blew over the waters. God saw that it was good, and God named it. That creating, commanding voice of God.
Is it possible that chaos itself stirred Peter to want to be commanded into a new being by the voice of Jesus? There is that storm on the Sea of Galilee, in the darkness, with the wind blowing. Peter thinks maybe he sees Jesus, and he listens for that primordial command. “Take me with you!” he asks. “Make me be with you as you transform the chaos. Make me different. Change everything.”
If this were just a story about Peter’s desire to follow Jesus into those stormy waters of creation, it would be important. But it’s about much more than Peter. It’s about you and me. Because we’ve heard that same call. As Saint Paul tells us, in baptism we die and rise with Christ. In baptism there is a new creation. In our baptisms, we have discerned something shadowy coming toward us from the primordial waters. We’ve called out to him: “Bring us where you are.” We’ve plunged down with him, into the Jordan, or the Red Sea, or the Flood, or the formless void, down into death and confusion. Down into matter. Down into the virus and the fear and the hunger and the struggle. Down into the racism and the violence. Plunged down with Jesus. Where the destruction is. [1] With him we’ve gone where chaos goes, where it rages: “If that’s you out there in the elements, Lord, speak the word and let me go where you go.”
And in baptism we emerge with him to hear the sound of the Spirit proclaiming “This is my child whom I love.” We are named in baptism, recreated, brought into a new home, delivered out of slavery, saved.
“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” And in Peter’s life, in his day, or rather in his darkest night, when the stormy waters surrounded him and the wind was against him, Peter called out not just for an end to the storm but for the sound of the original creative command of God. Chaos responds to the voice of God. Chaos responds to the Spirit’s touch. Chaos is dry land for Jesus, a sure foothold. For us, chaos is the beginning of a story of creation.
If we want to hear God calling to us, calling us into being, remaking us, making of us a creation, now is our chance. Now when the waters are rising and the fever is raging and old things are being cast down. That shape we can barely see, coming toward us—that’s Jesus. That’s the invitation to plunge in. That’s the promise of rebirth. That’s the promise of our baptism.
Jesus has shaped us, maybe from our earliest days, before we could know why we were being baptized, Jesus has formed us as people in his image.
I think the early Christians who told and retold this story knew something powerful about being recreated by Jesus. I think that’s why they preserved this story for us, why they kept the sacrament of baptism, why they developed the language of sacraments at all. Because they knew that in the swirling waters they met Jesus, down where he was meeting all of creation. They knew that when he walked toward them, master of the waves, he trailed in his wake all of salvation history, all the dying and rising. They knew that somewhere in chaos was the call.
Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
9 August 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
[1] Rowan Williams has written powerfully on this subject, and his work is inspiration here.