Kirkepiscatoid

This week's Gospel was Matthew's "Jesus walks on water, Peter gives it a go, doesn't fare terribly well." Wallace geared his sermon towards the fact this story occurs on the "fourth watch" (3-6 a.m.) and how a lot of the tumult, the stress, the worry in our life seems to hit us at 3 a.m.

The whole “sea, wind, tumult” thing was working on me today. All the talk about boats and waves and oceans and singing about peril on the see made me think of my “ocean of pasture” here in NE Missouri...with wind and thunderstorms and waving hay and green skies and hail, and oh, yeah...tornadoes. When I was sitting outside last night, enjoying the stars and the occasional meteor (after all, it IS the season for the Perseids...I have never outgrown the Perseids!), it was mostly calm, and then the wind picked up and made the leaves on my cottonwood tree rattle and hiss. You could feel the power of an incoming front. I sat out in it a while, even zipped in the house to put on a long sleeved shirt and grab a blanket so I could still sit outside in the reclining lawn chair and be in the middle of it and feel its power.

I can often totally identify with Peter. Every time I take one of those "What Disciple are you?" tests, I always score out as Peter. My friends have heard me say many times, “If you want me to (fill lin the blank), just say so, and I will.” Shades of “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water”! Then Peter gets distracted by the wind and loses his focus on Jesus. Well, I can identify with THAT, too...that things can distract me and cause me to lose my focus on Christ. But Peter, being a guy that doesn't mince words, as he sinks, he doesn’t know much else to do except say “Lord, save me!” (Kyrie elaison). Hey, Peter is a heartfelt and direct kind of guy! No sense having any pretense about what is going on, he’s going to be pulled under in the storm and he’s a direct enough kind of guy to cut to the chase there! Like Peter, I know enough to just cut straight to the chase and admit I’m in over my head.

Fact of the matter is, though, that in our stormy sea of the cares of the world, it is so tempting to think, “Oh, Lord, the sea is so big and my boat is so small.” Well, hell, it IS big sometimes. Even if it’s not that big, it can FEEL big...and lonesome. But just like Peter blurting out “Lord, save me!”, God is there to pluck us out. Now that doesn’t mean we won’t be wet after this whole encounter. I have a feeling the part they don’t talk about in that story is that Peter felt a little like the proverbial drowned rat even after Jesus pulled him up....probably had a little water in his lungs from the stormy blasts of the waves, he’s soaked, he feels like I did the time I almost drowned when I got caught in a rip tide and an undertow out in Baja California, Mexico when I was thirteen. I was always a strong swimmer, but was out swimming probably just a little further than I ought to have been (I was out where the surfers were starting to surf in from,) and that stupid current just took me with it. Two surfers chased me down and caught me. I was in good enough shape to sit spraddle legged on one of their surfboards and ride back in, but I will never forget the feeling of helplessness as I felt my strength failing and was starting to be unable to keep my head above water, or the embarrassment that I had to be plucked out of the water.

One of the surfer dudes was trying to make me feel a little better, saying, “Kid, any of us can get caught in a rip tide if you’re out this far. You just had never experienced it and didn’t realize the thing to do was let go, not fight it. Next time, just let it take you till it dies out further out. You just have further back to swim, that’s all.”

Now there’s a concept...let go, don’t fight.

That is NOT an easy concept for me. 95% of where I got in this old world, I had to fight to get there. Letting go seems 180 degrees against my intuition at best, and just plain “wrong” at worst.

I’m reminded of a story my friend A. tells. He was the doc for the 101st Airborne in Vietnam. That meant he had to do jumps, same as Airborne, as part of his training. They were teaching him a trick where if you need to drop altitude in a short burst to get away from everyone else’s canopy, you can do this by maneuvering the chute a little. The problem is that you will literally free fall 30-50 feet when you do this maneuver...but sooner or later your chute WILL catch air and pull you back up to a normal descent. He said the first time he did this maneuver, his life literally flashed before him, it was that scary, to be free falling and realize you potentially could go “splat” at the end of this free falling. But he said, “I had to trust my instructor, and trust what he told me and sure enough, I didn’t panic and my chute caught air again and everything was cool.” It takes some doing to be ok with free falling in this world, yet knowing at some level that God will catch you and your chute will catch air again. Some of us can never do it. Some of us can. Personally, I’d rather be like Peter, swing my leg over that ol’ boat and say, “Lord, just tell me and I’ll do it!” even if the possibility exists for me to be afraid. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right????