There was another article in a prominent publication this past week or so that promised to explain the decline of church attendance among Christians in the twenty-first century. I guess its explanations were as good as any. I don’t intend to try to counter or agree with those explanations. I just want to say this morning that I do honestly think it’s hard to worship God right now. And I believe—Matthew’s gospel helps me believe—that acknowledging that difficulty is a step toward worshipping with confidence and conviction.
So let me sketch briefly why I think it’s hard to worship God. I promise I’ll have other things to say too, but let’s just put some of this out on the table. Let’s talk about why church is hard.
First: God has always been hard to worship. It may be the most natural instinct in the world to venerate the creator, but the whole history of Israel, just for example, makes it clear that it’s tough to stay faithful. And if you do stay faithful, God puts you through your paces. Ask any biblical patriarch or prophet, or any saint.
Second: What we are living through right now is a real crisis. I’m not saying that I know what’s going to happen in the future, but it just has to be acknowledged that our environmental, political, and technological circumstances right now are truly unsettling. So much of what we know and take for granted seems fragile. It’s discouraging. It’s distracting. We are all spending a lot of time grappling with these changes whether we realize it or not. Gratitude to God may not be our first response. We see a lot around us that feels like it can and almost should shake our faith. I’m not leaving us there, but let’s just acknowledge that almost on a daily basis our faith may be shaken. And we are constantly waiting for the next shoe to drop. There are so many shoes.
And a third reason that it’s hard to worship God: churches are scrambling to speak prophetically or even in a way that will make anyone bother to listen. We don’t have the political or technological solution to what’s happening around us, though I believe strongly that we can support and contribute to solutions. The things we do best are the things that we are afraid to do right now. We tell the truth. We confess our sins. We ask for help. And above all, we worship our creator in the person of Christ.
But It's hard to tell the truth because the truth is baffling. It’s hard to confess our sins because they are somewhat baffling, too. What’s normal about the way we live our lives every day, and what’s sinful about the way we live? Those questions can be addressed but first we have to realize that they are hard questions, and important questions.
It's hard to ask God for help, because seeing the fragility of the structures that surround us may make us question exactly how God works in the world. Our sense of reality is being shuffled around these days, and our sense of God’s sustaining help is probably being shuffled with it. That’s hard to admit. I don’t know why we think that we have to understand before we ask for help, but I would be willing to bet that many of us are, if we are honest, hoping that we will be able to figure out exactly what God can and can’t do for us before we throw ourselves at God’s feet and beg to be saved.
So it’s hard to worship God. It’s hard to worship God right now, in this environment. It’s hard to live the lives we normally live and still be reaching toward God.
So that’s why Peter’s risk-taking in the gospel this morning, and Jesus’s bold appearance, are so urgent for us to take in. Because what we are doing when we worship God isn’t just hard. It’s also breathtaking. And if we could see the full difficulty of our lives of faith, we might just also see that God is working among us abundantly.
Being here in church this morning, we are more or less already out in the boat in the stormy waters.
One of the reasons I just spent a bit of time talking about why it’s so hard to worship God is that I want us all, myself included, to take in the fact that if we are here to pray at all, to sing a hymn, to take communion, Jesus has already moved us away from the shore. We may not want to admit that this is a dazzling act of faith, because that would mean admitting that this is hard. And a lot of our day-to-day coping may seem to depend on pretending it’s not hard. A lot of what we do out there in the world may be based on numbing out and functioning.
But coming here today--climbing into this boat—that’s a profound act. We are making ourselves vulnerable to God. Available for God’s purposes. You have already this morning, before brunch, broken with what keeps us anchored to despair.
And out here on the water, as we are, we are going to feel the wind. Once we’ve broken with the dream of complacency and human self-sufficiency, we are going to notice the waves and the storms. We are going to grieve the losses on Maui. We are going to begin to face the suffering of the poor among us. We are going to admit that we long for safety. We are going to wish that we could turn back.
And this storm that we are feeling, that’s where Jesus is going to meet us. As we see the peril we are in, we will also see him more clearly for who he is. That’s how it works in this important story.
That’s why Peter’s words to Jesus in this story are so beautiful. I guess he’s kind of foolish and arrogant, but what he names is exquisite. “If you really are who you say you are, Jesus, call me out of the boat to be with you.” No, he doesn’t know exactly what he’s asking, but he knows he wants to be where Jesus is. He knows that hiding won’t work for him anymore. He knows that he needs to know more, to experience more, to trust more. Turning back doesn’t occur to him, because his vulnerability is giving him a glimpse of who Jesus really is.
What Peter shows us, and what we need so deeply to understand right now, is that worship and fear are connected. They happen when we recognize that we are in way over our heads. When we are far from shore. Maybe when we are stepping out of the boat that makes us feel a little bit protected on our journey.
Matthew tells us that when the disciples saw Jesus walking on the water, calling Peter to him, and saving Peter from the waves, they worshipped him and called him the Son of God. But I think the radical act of worship here starts before the end of the story. Getting into the boat was worship. Peter’s yearning to step out onto the water was worship. So was falling in and getting rescued.
Maybe Peter’s faith was small in a way, but Jesus certainly could work with it, couldn’t he? Jesus revealed himself and calmed the storm whether Peter was faithful in a perfect way, or not.
We need to see each other’s acts of imperfect faith, as we have seen Peter’s this morning. That means we need to acknowledge the storm. We may feel that it’s best to keep our heads down and pretend that nothing is wrong, but worship and fear are connected. If we suppress the fear we suppress the worship too.
Scared faith doesn’t feel like it’s worth much. But if we are naming our fears and our imperfections, and praying through them, perhaps we will also see that even the small faith we have is actually Jesus moving us forward. Right into the storm. Right to the place where Jesus can be seen as he truly is. We have been worshipping, and there is deeper worship to come.
God is working in this world. God is working in you. If you can’t see that, it may be that you are quietly overwhelmed with fear and don’t realize the marvelous act of God that you are, fear and all. Trying to stay normal in this world, you may be overlooking the extraordinary presence of God right inside you, and right here among us.
Welcome into this storm. Welcome into the risk and the danger. Jesus has brought us out here on the waters, and from here we can begin to see and worship Jesus more deeply, more honestly. We are out on the boat in the waves, where we can hear our savior speak to us: “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”
I don’t know whether this awareness is enough to reverse the decline of church attendance in America. I guess we will see about that. But I do know that here in the boat with you is where I want to be. I want to worship and give thanks, and see God acting in the world that God has made.
Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
August 13, 2023
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia