Get Out of the Boat

Scripture: Matthew 14:23-33

Many years ago now, I went sailing on Lake Erie with three friends of mine: Don, Tom, and Wayne. They were all seasoned sailors and all of them happened to be Methodist ministers. Because I was the only non-ordained member of the crew, they jokingly designated me the “ship chaplain.”

Tom owned the boat, a sleek little 28-foot Catalina. A couple of us were Walt Whitman fans, so naturally we called him “Oh captain, my captain.” And, indeed, he would have been the ideal skipper of this small but worthy craft—if only he had remembered before we departed to check the weather.

For a few hours we had a lovely time sailing, with steady winds and a bright blue sky. But, just as we arrived at our farthest point from land and turned for home, black skies descended and a terrible storm broke out. And I mean terrible. We later learned that it was so bad they pulled freighters off the lake. And there we were, bobbing along on 28 feet of fiberglass and a few yards of canvas.

Violent winds beset us and tossed us mercilessly. Waves crashed over the gunwale and washed across the deck. We pulled on layers of rain gear and clipped ourselves to the lifelines. We reefed the sails and used the boat’s small engine to try to work our way in the general direction of shore.

Tom suggested that to raise our spirits we sing. Don—his dry wit the only dry thing in sight—piped up with “Nearer My God to Thee.” We laughed at the gallows humor, but make no mistake about it: We were all terrified.

All of us, that is, except Wayne.

Wayne seemed completely unfazed by the whole thing. Indeed, he barely seemed to notice that we had sailed ourselves into the middle of a cold, wet, life-threatening crisis. The rest of us were scared senseless. But not Wayne.

Wayne napped. He grabbed a snack. He commented appreciatively on the brisk night air. He admired the sustained flashes of lightning and the impressive crashes of thunder. He smiled at the funny way the compass spun around dizzily whenever we almost capsized. He was a model of divine serenity. He was Christlike. He was extremely irritating.

We all wondered in amazement at Wayne’s almost supernatural calm in the storm. At one point, Wayne went down into the cabin below for his gloves. Tom, at the helm and preoccupied with the giant waves smacking our little craft about, didn’t see him do so. When Tom looked around and couldn’t figure out where Wayne had gone, he panicked and cried out in alarm: “Where’s Wayne?!” Don responded: “Maybe he walked home.”

We all know the story of Jesus walking on the water. And we all know one of its important details—even though that detail appears in only one of the three gospel versions that tell the story. In Matthew’s version, Jesus is not the only one who walks across the sea. So does Peter—although not for very long.

Now, I think that it’s easy to miss the importance of what happens here with Peter because of the two different—and, to some extent, conflicting—images that the Bible gives us of him.

On one hand, Peter stands as one of the towering figures of our faith. He and his brother Andrew were the first disciples Jesus called. When Matthew, Mark, and Luke list in their gospels the twelve disciples, they begin with Peter’s name.

Those same gospels portray Peter as the recipient of unique revelations and as having a special closeness to Jesus. In Matthew, Jesus describes Peter as the “rock” on which he will build his church. This metaphor takes on a kind of literal significance when we remember that the largest church in Christendom—the 5.7 acre Vatican Basilica that Michelangelo designed, that took more than a century to build, and that can hold 60,000 people—is named not for Jesus but for Peter and is traditionally thought to rest upon his burial site.

Jesus told Peter, “I will give you the keys to the kingdom,” a passage that gives rise to a symbol that has endured throughout the thousands of years of Christian art that have followed. In paintings and sculptures we can tell which disciple is Peter by the keys hanging from his waist or in his hands. It’s one of the best-known bits of Christian iconography.

Peter’s possession of the keys has built still more legends around him. Tradition assigns Peter the role of deciding who will and won’t receive admission through the gates of heaven. It’s as if Peter worked the host stand at the most exclusive restaurant in the universe.

This idea has, in turn, given rise to countless jokes about exchanges between St. Peter and those who have just arrived at the gates. The New Yorker magazine has a large inventory of cartoons on just this theme. I’m very fond of one that shows St. Peter saying to some poor soul seeking entry: “The only thing available right now is a handyman special starter condo on Tier 19 that’s just been reduced to $375,000, plus maintenance.”

The master of these New Yorker cartoons was a genius named Charles Barsotti. One of my favorite drawings of his depicts an amused-looking Peter saying to a relieved-looking fellow who is standing before the pearly gates: “No, no, that’s not a sin, either. My goodness you must have worried yourself to death.” Oh, how I hope it turns out that way.

Still, the gospels provide another vision of Peter, too—a vision that portrays him as so deeply human and profoundly flawed that we might wonder whether he’d let himself into heaven. Consider: In other gospel stories, Jesus commanded Peter not to sleep—but he slept. Jesus said to Peter, “You will deny me three times before the morning”—and, even having been warned, Peter did it anyway. On multiple occasions Jesus got so frustrated with Peter that he called him “Satan.” Peter’s remarkable promotion from “Satan” to the “rock” should give us all hope.

Most of us remember Jesus’s powerful warning that those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. But we sometimes forget that Jesus directed this rebuke not at one of his tormentors or persecutors but at one of disciples—a disciple identified in John’s gospel as Peter. And Jesus scolded Peter on that occasion because he had impulsively drawn his sword and cut off someone’s ear. So, when I say Peter was imperfect and impulsive, I mean really imperfect and really impulsive. On multiple occasions, the gospels portray him as, well, a bit of blunt instrument.

When we come to the story of Peter’s failed attempt to walk on the water we might therefore have one of two understandable reactions, depending on which Peter we have in mind. We may smile and say: “Well, of course Peter walked on the water! He was the rock!” Or we may shake our heads and say: “Well, of course Peter sank into the water. He was a rock.”

In thinking and talking about this gospel passage, we often focus on the moment when Peter got scared by the wind and waves, took his eyes off Jesus, and started to go under. It’s a dramatic moment—Peter was about to sink—and the image points toward a pretty obvious moral: Keep your eyes on Jesus. As the saying goes, “that’ll preach,” and lots of folks have preached it, present company included.

But today I want to focus your attention on something different. I want us to take a close look at an element of the story that precedes all that—a detail that I think tells us a great deal about who Peter was and about who Jesus calls us to be. And the detail is this:

Whatever else happened, Peter got out of the boat.

Jesus invited Peter to take a risk, to make a bold move, to engage in a leap of faith—literally. And Peter responded. We can imagine the other disciples looking at each other in astonishment and saying: “Whoa! He’s getting out of the boat!” And perhaps then adding with equal emphasis: “And I’m not getting out of the boat!”

Now, Peter can’t have found this an easy decision. Staying in the boat must have seemed a great deal safer. But, somehow, Peter understood that this was only how things seemed. Somehow he grasped that he wasn’t leaving behind security, but the illusion of security.

Helen Keller, who lost her sight and hearing as an infant, certainly knew something about what it means to feel insecure. But she wisely observed that “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.” She added: “Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” Jesus called Peter to a daring adventure, and Peter answered.

I think that Jesus calls us to a daring adventure as well—but oh, my friends, how we love the boat. Oh, how we love to tuck in, cover up, and float along. The boat is a comfortable place to be and to stay. The boat is good. How can we ever go wrong hanging around in the boat, we ask ourselves?

Matthew has a story about that, too. When Jesus had just begun his ministry, he invited James and John to come with him. Matthew tells us that “immediately they left the boat and their father Zebedee and followed him.” James and John got out of the boat. Zebedee didn’t. And that, my friends, is the last we hear of Zebedee.

Now, I’m not suggesting we should pass judgment on poor, unheralded, un-sainted old Zebedee. Although I have from time to time been tempted to have a custom coffee cup made up for myself that says on the side of it: “Today, try not to be Zebedee.” Maybe he did great things that the gospels just don’t tell us. We have no business passing judgment on him at all, but especially based on what the text does not say.

But let’s assume that what the gospels tell us is all that there is to say about him. Let’s assume that James and John got out of the boat and Zebedee stayed in it and that’s the last noteworthy thing Zebedee ever did. Even so: How could we condemn someone who did exactly what most of us would probably do under the circumstances? Zebedee played it “safe” and we would likely follow the same course. As a result, he missed a chance to walk in the footsteps of Jesus Christ. But, hey, he kept his boat.

Let he who is without this sin among us cast the first stone.

I suppose that Zebedee played it safe for the same reason most of us do—out of fear. Fear limits us and makes us small. It breeds inertia and feeds our darkest impulses. As that prominent contemporary philosopher, Bruce Springsteen, puts it in one of his songs, fear can “take your God-filled soul” and “fill it with devils and dust.” Well, amen to that.

I’m sure many of you know the film Apocalypse Now, where a crew of American soldiers travels down a river deep into the Vietnamese jungle. At one point they go ashore in search of mangoes but flee back to the boat when a huge tiger leaps from the bush. One of the soldiers—literally rending his shirt from fear—screams out over and over: “Never get out of the boat! Never get out of the boat!”

And that’s what fear does. It sends us cowering. And it keeps us in the boat.

We can always come up with a million seemingly good reasons to stay in the boat. We can always list a million justifications for staying put, staying behind, and staying safe. We can always find a million things to worry about, a million things to fear, a million things that need our full consideration before we take action.

Indeed, fear has an infinite capacity for creativity. Fear writes more of the fiction that we buy than anyone or anything else does. Some of the fiction it writes goes on the best-seller list. But the price never goes down, and fear always comes at too high a cost.

Years ago, I was talking with a friend of mine whose wife had recently learned that she had an advanced form of cancer. The news came out of nowhere and the prospects were grim. But he said to me: “You know, it’s strange. We are at peace in a way we’ve never been before. We’ve spent our entire lives thinking lots of things mattered. Now our life is entirely focused on just one thing.”

Peter had a million reasons to stay in the boat. But he had just one, much bigger, reason to get out. So he did.

I think that Jesus summons us to a life of courage, a life bravely and resolutely focused on what matters. I don’t mean a life wholly without fear. We’re human, and sometimes feeling afraid makes perfect sense. Besides, as the flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker once observed, fear has an important role: It is the necessary precondition for courage.

But Jesus invites us into a life of faith that makes it possible to see our fears for what they are and move forward just the same. I think this is what Karl Barth meant when he observed that “Courage is fear that has said its prayers.” The text does not tell us that Peter was wholly without apprehension; it does not tell us that that he whooped gleefully and grinned defiantly as he stepped over the gunwale into the sea; all it tells us is that he got out of the boat.

Getting out of the boat does not mean we will always enjoy what happens next. Faith may be the right prescription for fear, but like all prescriptions it may not work right away and we may need to contend with some unexpected side effects. In Peter’s case, his bold move carried with it an unwelcome lesson about the limitations of his faith.

But I don’t think that Peter’s faltering diminishes the greatness of his heart and his intentions. They apparently surpassed those of every other disciple, all of whom were evidently hiding under blankets and wondering what on earth their friend was doing. And sometimes our faith isn’t about where we step next or where we land finally; it’s about first stepping out of where we are.

In rare and wonderful cases, the moral value of getting out of the boat becomes delightfully literal. Many of you know the story of a man named John Newton who long ago sailed a ship that brought slaves to England. Then, on one remarkable day, John Newton got out of his boat. He dedicated his life to serving God and God’s children. And, along the way, he wrote a song called “Amazing Grace.”

And think about this: Where would we be—where would we be—if on D-Day brave men like Dick Grout and Shelley Meisenheimer’s father hadn’t gotten out of the boat? Nowhere good, that’s where we would be.

Periodically in our lives we have to decide whether and how to commit—or recommit—ourselves to God’s work. As we ponder the alternatives, fear—and fear’s right-hand assistant, complacency—will tempt us mightily. But what we need now are daring hearts, brave hearts, faithful hearts. It’s what we’ve always needed.

Those cartoons that have fun with the encounters between Peter and those individuals newly arrived at the pearly gates sometimes tease us about our inadequacies. Again, Charles Barsotti drew one of my favorites. But this time the petitioner looks nervous and Peter is disappointedly reviewing what appears to be his resume. “That’s it?” Peter asks the poor guy. “Salesman of the month, August 1987?”

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with “Salesman of the month, August 1987.” It’s a fine and commendable thing. We do lots of fine and commendable things as individual believers. We do lots of fine and commendable things through our churches. We do lots of fine and commendable things that are very admirable, and also very safe.

So, this morning, permit me to issue a bit of a friendly challenge, one I issue every bit as much to myself as to you.

I invite you to entertain this image: Your time has come and you’re standing before Peter like one of those characters in a Charles Barsotti cartoon.

“Tell me about yourself,” Peter says. So you do. You give him a pleasant list of all the fine and commendable things that you did for much of your life. And then you stop. You just stop. Peter looks at you inquisitively, tilts his head, and asks: “And what happened next?”

You smile. You look him straight in the eye. And the^[1]n you say, knowing that he of all people will understand: “Well, then … then … then I got out of the boat.”

Oh Lord, grant us the wisdom and the courage that it might be so.

And the people said: Amen.   

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