Getting Out of the Boat (Matthew 14:22-33)

Here is my manuscript for the sermon that I preached on Sunday, February 20 at Woodmont Christian Church. This is not exactly what I said but it is the gist.

For the last two weeks, the Winter Olympics have been on our TV constantly. It does not matter what event it is or whether the United States has any shot at a medal, we’re watching it. I love it. I love all the countries of the world coming together. I love the underdog stories. I was really pumped to see the Jamaican bobsled team back in the Games this year. It’s a lot of fun to watch. But something occurred to me this year as I watched and I don’t know why because tons of people on the internet have said the same thing: these are the most bizarre and stupid dangerous sports in existence. 

In the Summer Olympics, the events are pretty straight forward. Who can run the fastest, swim the fastest, jump the highest, throw the farthest? In the Winter Olympics it’s “We have this ice roller coaster and we have a variety of ways to send you down it at 80 miles per hour. You can go in a bullet sled with your buddies or lay on your back in a regular sled, or you can go face first, or we can stack another person on top of you.” Or “Ski down this mountain, go off the ramp, do flips and twists 200 feet in the air, and then don’t shatter when you hit the ground.” In biathlon, they took cross country skiing—which seems like it might be the most grueling sport in existence—and someone said, “But what if we gave them guns?” Even sports in which I have participated in like skiing or skating are down with such daredevil degrees of difficulty that if I were to try even half of what they do, my best case scenario is a concussion.

All of which makes what these athletes do all the more impressive. When failure happens in the Winter Olympics, it is often a spectacular failure. Like if I am running a race in my favorite sport track and I fail, I just don’t run as fast as the other athletes. But if you’re skiing downhill faster than a car zooms down the interstate, you could end up tumbling down a mountain. Or if you try a quadruple axel, you could end up splayed out on the ice. To go out there and try to do your best is to risk looking foolish. Yet they do it anyway; sometimes when they don’t even have to. 

Chole Kim had locked up the gold medal in the women’s snowboard halfpipe. On her last run she could have just boarded down the middle while singing “All I Do is Win” at the top of her lungs, but instead she attempted a trick that had never been done in Olympic competition before. She ended up on her rear end, but she tried. I admire that so much. Many of us avoid failure like the plague. So to go out and risk failure requires so much bravery and heart.

Today we are looking at a passage in which someone demonstrates an irrational amount of bravery and heart. They end up doing something amazing and failing spectacularly. Yet despite that epic failure, we should all probably be more like him. I think that this passage is such an important story as we consider what it means to follow Jesus and to live a life of faith.

The disciples were out in their boat when a bad storm swells up. If the story seems familiar, it shares a lot of beats with the passage Clay preached on a few weeks ago about Jesus calming the storm. Yet this time in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is not in the boat with the disciples. He stayed on shore to pray while his followers sailed on. In the midst of this wild tempest, Jesus begins to walk out to them on the water. When the disciples see him, they think that Jesus is a ghost. 

Leaping to this conclusion probably sounds a little bit like the frightened yelps of Shaggy and Scooby Doo. Yet the reason the disciples thought they were seeing spooky spirits is because the sea was believed to be a place of ghosts and sea demons. There is actually a great deal of scripture that saw the sea as this place of chaos, disorder, and death. In the Genesis creation story, everything is a watery swirling void before God brings order to it. In the story of Noah’s flood, the children of Israel crossing the Red Sea, and even Jonah and the large fish, the waters threaten and sometimes even destroy. The sea was something frightening, mysterious, and foreboding. I mention that not because it is fun anecdote that brings color to the story, but it highlights the amazing, mystifying, and some would say borderline stupid thing that one of those frightened disciples did next.

Jesus assures them that it is he and they need not be afraid. Then Peter calls out to his teacher and asks that Jesus command Peter to walk on the water to him. What was he thinking? From the first time I heard this story as a child, that has always blown my mind. I would linger on the edge of my grandparents’ swimming pool and touch the ball of my foot to the chlorinated surface thinking maybe, just maybe if I believed enough that I would find something solid. Alas it never happened. I would fall into the water with a spectacular kersploosh because that is what happens when you step onto the water: you splash right through. 

That is why none of the other disciples dared to ask for such a thing. The boat was safest place to be and to leave it would be foolishness. Jesus tells Peter to come on out, the water’s fine. So in the middle of this raging storm, above a swirling sea of chaos that Peter and his fisherman friends thought might be home to ghosts and sea demons, this disciple does something that risks a spectacular failure: he steps out of the boat and onto the water. And it holds firm. Amazingly, Peter walks on water.

Jesus calls you and I to get out of the boat. When we talk about faith, we often think about it is a noun. We tell one another to have faith. We wring our hands with worry that our young people are going to lose their faith. We begin to think of faith as a possession as if we could ever possess such a thing. In this mindset, faith slowly becomes a club to which we belong and not a way of living. Yet faith is a verb. It is what we do. It is getting out of the boat and following Jesus with our whole lives. In his book Art + Faith, the artist Makoto Fujimura says, “The essential question is not whether we are religious, but whether we are making something.” To put it another way, the question is not whether we attend church or call ourselves Christian, but whether we are living out our faith in what we do. Are we creating? Are we building relationships? Are we putting God’s goodness out into the world? Are we seeking to be peacemakers? Are we risking failure to actually follow Jesus with our lives? 

Many in our church this week are mourning the loss of Tallu Schuyler Quinn. She was a member of this community for so many years; an incredibly kind and loving person. And she was someone who got out of the boat. She saw that there were people who were hungry, people that the rest of the world often forgot, and she heard the call to make something. It started with delivering sandwiches to homeless camps. The work of Tallu and other volunteers evolved into the Nashville Food Project, a ministry that fed thousands of the most vulnerable individuals in our community. I cannot imagine that any of that evolution was easy. There were likely stumbles and falls. The problem of food insecurity in our city—like a storm surge—likely seemed enormous. Yet from everything I have heard, her conviction and heart were too big to play it safe. She got out of the boat. She encouraged others to do so as well. And by the grace of God, they walked on water.

That kind of life is not just for Tallu. The call to follow Christ is not just for people who stand in this pulpit, it’s for all of us. So what is your boat? How is Christ calling you out upon the water? That call does not have to be big. Maybe it is a desire to step more fully into a community that loves Christ and that means joining a small group where you don’t necessarily know everyone. 

Maybe you want your children to know how important the way of Jesus is to you and so you start talking more to your kids about faith even though they might roll their eyes at you and you’re worried you won’t have all the answers (and you won’t). Maybe you care about the education of children in our city and you come to hear what Dr. Adrienne Battle says at church this Wednesday night even though it’d be easier to just go home. Or you start finding ways to help out at Fall Hamilton Elementary School, where our church partners, even though you wrongly think there’s no way you have anything to contribute. Maybe you build a house for Habitat for Humanity, send a card to someone who is sick, try to mend a broken relationship, sacrifice 15 minutes of sleep in the morning to pray. 

Anything that brings God’s goodness, love, peace, and hope into your life and the lives of others, no matter how pedestrian it may seem, is walking on water. Christ is calling you out upon the waters to grow, to create, to build relationships, or to blaze some new trail. I don’t know what it is God is calling you to and it may be a thousand little things, but it’s never going to happen if you just sit there. You’ve got to get out of the boat.

But back to spectacular failure. I hate to do that, but the passage and life kind of requires it. Peter lives out his faith by getting out of the boat and does something amazing. Yet Peter saw the wind, he became afraid, and he began to sink. He took his eyes off Jesus. He forgot what he was doing out there. And something amazing turned into Peter thrashing about in the waves, begging to be saved. Living out faith is only going to work if we, as the writer of Hebrews puts it, fix our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. It makes sense, if we are following Christ, why would we look at anything other than Christ? We need to ground ourselves in Christ: in his teachings and way of living, in his grace and mercy. Yet it is so easy to get distracted. If we try to faith in our own strength, if we try to muscle through by our own skill or abilities or perceived righteousness then the waves will eventually find us. And they do find us all just like they did Peter.

Peter cries out for his teacher, “Lord, save me!” and Jesus whose power is made perfect in weakness, lifts Peter out of the chaos-strewn sea. Jesus asked Peter what happened to his faith and the disciple likely felt crushed. He had failed. Yet Jesus got him back into the boat safe and sound. He didn’t kick Peter out of the group and the disciple lived to get out of the boat another day.

I came across a quote from Mikaela Shiffrin from this past week. Shiffrin is an American downhill skier who is one of the best in her sport. She was expected to medal in multiple events and she didn’t. In fact, in her first several events she didn’t even make it out of the preliminary rounds. She crashed and the media spotlight intensified on her failures honestly in an unfair way. Yet Shiffrin kept going to the top of a mountain to dangerously ski down it. She did not win, but she kept going. By doing so she demonstrated, there are many kinds of victories. In the quote, she stated: “Get up because you can….just get up. It’s not always easy, but it’s also not the end of the world to fail. Fail twice. Fail five times.”

Peter’s life bears that quote out for his story did not end with that failure of nervy faith on the waves. Throughout the gospels, Peter was constantly bounding out of the boat only to quickly start sinking. Peter leapt out in faith when he was the first disciple to declare that Jesus was the Messiah only to be called Satan moments later when he rebuked his teacher for saying that Jesus would be crucified. Peter leapt again when he boldly declared that he would never abandon Jesus only to go on and three times deny that he ever knew this man that meant more to him than anything. 

The last time we see him literally leap out of a boat, it is after Jesus was resurrected and there is a sense that Peter is getting out of the boat this time because of fear. He could not shake the spectacular failure of three times denying this one who saved him. Yet when Peter got to shore, Jesus saved him again. Three times he asked Peter, “Do you love me?” and three times Peter replied that he did. And Jesus responded “Feed my sheep.” He wanted Peter to keep putting his faith into action, to love people, to take care of people, to keep getting out of the boat.

Those second and third and fifth chances change Peter. Grace transforms him. The next time Peter steps into the spotlight and out of the proverbial boat, he is speaking in front of thousands of people about how the way of Jesus changes everything. And you know Peter believes it with every ounce of his being when says, “And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Because he was again and again. Peter is someone who kept getting out of the boat, kept sinking, kept experiencing mercy until he finally by the grace of God could stand firmly on the sea. May it be so for all of us.