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"Help!" --lessons from Matthew 14 and Romans 10. Weoley Hill, 11 August 1996 Hymn preceding sermon: "Stand by me" 1. When the storms of life are raging, stand by me;
There is a story about two local ministers of long tenure who wanted to welcome a new colleague in town who had just been called to his first church. They knew how hard it is, sometimes, to get a feel for a new community, so following his ordination they showed him around town and introduced him to the people he would have to get to know, and after he had been in town for about a fortnight, they took him fishing. Once they were out in the middle of the lake, one of the old timers said he'd forgotten his can of worms, so he got out of the boat and walked across the water to the shore, where he fetched his can of worms, and walked back across the water to the boat. A few minutes later, the other old timer said he'd forgotten his hooks, she he got out of the boat and walked across the water to fetch the hooks out of his box of fishing tackle, and walked back across the water to the boat. You can imagine how intimidated this new, young minister was beginning to feel. Were these chaps really that holy, that they could walk across the water without sinking? Was there faith that much stronger than his? Were they testing him, how sincere his call to the ministry really was? Had he any faith at all? He told them he had forgotten his lunch. He really hadn't forgotten his lunch, but he needed an excuse to get out of the boat and try his feet on the water. He stepped out of the boat, and what do you think happened? Of course, he sank into the murky water immediately, hat and all. The one old timer turned to the other and said, "Do you think we ought to show him where the rocks are?" Of course what this story about Peter in our Gospel today is really about is trying to walk through the insecurity and confusion of life at its worst, life without God. A common biblical image for life without God is stumbling or falling on insecure ground, like this one from Psalm 27: Some take pride in chariots, some in horses, but our pride is in the name of the Lord our God. They will collapse and fall, but we will rise and stand upright. In Psalm 40 the Lord draws us up from a mirey bog and sets our feet on rock to make our steps secure. You know the experience of trying to walk across a mirey bog, or wobbly rocks on a mountain trail, or trying to climb down over a slippery hillside of shale, or perhaps you remember falling into a river before you knew how to swim. That is life without God, according to the psalms. Psalm 88 laments that the singer is cut off from God, like those forsaken among the dead, fallen into the depths and overwhelmed with the waves. I said, this is life without God. What I meant, of course, is that this is what life without God is like, according to the Psalms. These psalms are not primarily about rambling through muck or shale any more than this story from Matthew is about walking on water. What both are about is the even more common experience of trying to get through the storms of life on your own, without God, and how insecure and traumatic and lacking in coherence that experience can be, without God. It's like trying to walk on water. It's like drowning. Of course, some of us, maybe most of us, have never had the experience of real insecurity, so we can be thankful for that. Perhaps there have been times when we've had to be thrifty, but we haven't actually had to live on the edge of survival. God has been good to us. We've been able to raise our children without want, work in our gardens for recreation rather than necessity, and travel the world as tourists rather than as refugees torn from our homes. Of course we are aware of insecurity that stands but a hair's breadth away. Every week, sometimes every day we are bombarded through the letter box with appeals for famine victims and earthquake survivors, innocent casualties of war and children dying under the weight of 3rd world debt and neo-colonial development policies. Or, closer to home, neighbours who snap under the strain of unemployment or who get swallowed up in a society built on people preying on one another for their sheer survival. Just listen to the security alarms going off and the helicopters clattering overhead. And you don't have to work for the NHS or the National Curriculum Company to know that some accountant somewhere has figured out how productivity increases in inverse proportion to job security. The tension gets so high there are people out there, whole families sometimes, who don't talk to each other anymore, people who don't come home anymore, people living with nerves stretched taut in silent, lonely desperation just trying to survive who don't even know who they are anymore. For neighbours like these the ground is very shakey indeed. And our rock of security here begins to look very small. Where is God? If we are honest, and we look at the dividing pain that stands between people, men and women, whites and blacks, people who are making it gloriously and people who are going under, the strong and the weak, the survivors and the patsies, isn't this how the world really works, and doesn't this make a compelling case against God? Where IS God? You don't have to have whole populations eliminated in ethnic cleansing or whole campgrounds of holiday makers washed away in a flood and buried under mud and grit to ask this question. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan rightly claims that one innocent dead infant makes a compelling case against God. Is there a God? Can we be free enough here in church to join our neighbours in asking that question? How many of us in the middle of some hot, sleepless night have looked at our own loneliness, meaninglessness, bitterness and anger at where life has left us hanging, and said, "There is no God"? The storms of life are raging. And there is no one to stand by you. Some, of course, can't see the problem, and are quite content to play tennis on Sunday mornings. Some seem to have the ability to step out into situations of the most extraordinary insecurity, self assured, smiling, seemingly without fear. Leaders show this strength of character, men like, say, Bibi Natanyehu, Boris Yeltsin, Bill Clinton, John Major. And Peter was like this. He saw himself as a leader-type. Their boat was far out from shore, the story says, and he looked out there at the rolling sea, full of confidence, and he said, "I can do it!" He's read one of those self-help books, "How to be a No-Limit Person". And then it hits him: divorce, cancer maybe. He gets caught embezzling, or maybe he's just a victim of downsizing and he's 52 years old and he can't get another job. Maybe he still doesn't see any of this, doesn't see the tension he's bringing to his family, the heart attack that's coming on, and he keeps saying, "I can do this" as he steps out onto that tossing water and starts to sink inexorably into the waves. "Help! I'm drowning!" "Lord, save me!" he says. And all who call on the name of the Lord shall be saved, Romans 10.13. All who call. We can't make it, alone. Those who in the darkest night are finally reduced to admitting this raw fact of life, who are reduced to calling out for help, sometimes paradoxically even when they deeply suspect that there IS none, have discovered a foundation of rock upon which to stand, a companionship with God and an intimacy with the crucified Christ which gives us the ability to walk into tomorrow without falling apart. Those who call on the name of the Lord will be saved. There is a community within the church that has made this promise into its themesong, and into a kind of law, accompanied with a rigid set of doctrinal baggage. You must confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord to be saved. But we need to remember that this cry of the heart comes most fervently at times when our hearts are in exile from all we had ever been able to count on before. Left wing social concern will no longer carry us. Right wing evangelical passion is no longer enough. Christianity itself is phoney, and we have had to abandon everything we ever knew about God. We cannot sing those songs of Zion in this strange land. We're past that. We've hung up our harps on the willows, and we are weeping. "Lord, save me!" This is not an assent to doctrine designed to keep Hindus and Moslems out of heaven. This is a pure cry for help. Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught Peter. The answer to the cry is unquestioning grace, pure grace. The crucified one is standing there alongside you, lifting you up. Rejoice! You don't have to be in this camp or that camp of the church, because once you have cried out in the moment of your desperation this camp or that camp of the church is already a useless relic of the past. God is not a member of any church. God doesn't even have a religion. And you belong with God now, in the uncharted waters of God's future, where you will walk steadily and without fear in companionship with your Lord. We need to receive this grace not only from our Lord, but from one another. The church is too divided, and instead of seeing one another as support in faith, we are at enmity with one another. When my mother's church got its new minister last year, for instance, it wasn't until after she had already accepted the call and was making arrangements to move that someone said, "Oh, by the way, the wife of a former minister is in the church, and not only is she a member, but she is a serving elder. Oh No! she thought. She'd seen the story many times before. That's all I needed, was someone rallying the back benches to tell me everything I'd be doing wrong. It was too late to back out, but she wasn't looking forward to this, her first church, at all. Her heart sank as she imagined being at loggerheads every time she wanted to initiate something new. So the day came that she moved in, and had to face the congregation at a big social occasion held for her welcoming. Here's someone I want you to meet, she was told. I believe you've already heard about Mrs Arthur. . . And there was Mrs Arthur, sitting there on a settee holding a cup of coffee. Anne sat down beside her, all prepared for an icey reception. "You know that story about the three ministers who went fishing?" my mother said. "Yes." "Well, I'll show you where the rocks are." And so we are called to support one another, to show one another where the rocks are we can stand upon, and introduce one another to the rock of our salvation, Jesus Christ our Lord, for everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. Rev Dr Tom Arthur
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