VIDEO VERSION

TEXT OF SERMON

I am going to be extravagant today
and tell you straight out
that we can almost walk on water. Almost.

That is the punch line
but like an old creek (or crick),
I am going to meander awhile before I get to it.

It starts here, with Annie Dillard.
“…In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger.  If God were to blast such a worship to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked.  But in the low churches you can expect it at any minute…” From “Holy the Firm” by Annie Dillard

Get it? “In the high churches” – that’s us.

What Annie Dillard is suggesting
is that you and I saunter and sashay into church.
We sing about God’s amazing grace,
as if once we were blind – though we don’t
really remember it – and now we can see,
though, to be honest, we believe we always could.

We walk right up to the prayers, Annie would say,
and read through them as if we had the right to do so –
as if praying to the God-of-all-that-is
does not endanger us.
They’re just prayers, right?

Then we snack on the bread and wine
as if it’s good for us; as if
it’s not going to get into our blood; as if
it won’t really do anything; as if
that kind of thing won’t turn subversive inside us
so that we end up acting against our own self-interest.

We pass the peace at church too, as if
we’re all friends.
We pass the peace, as i
being in association with people we might otherwise
never get to know,
is a harmless gesture.
We pass the peace as if
being connected through a spiritual community
won’t rattle our cage,
or change our politics,
or bruise our egos.

That’s what Annie Dillard is getting at:
Opening ourselves to the holy,
approaching the thin place
we say that spiritual community is meant to be.
We act as if the veil between us and God
isn’t really stretched to vapor –
a mere contrail between us.

Instead, we act as if going to Church
is like it was back in the 1950’s
when it was about making nice
and fluffing up the nest of the national identity.

If we are at all serious about this thing we are doing –
from a distance right now, but someday again in person –
then it is not about believing all the things
they told us about a God
who was the Great White Daddy in the sky
looking out after the American Way.
Nor is it some smoke and bells Oz
easily revealed by a little scientific Toto.

If this thing we do
is more than potlucks and kindnesses shared,
then we had better come ready to rumble
with a God that doesn’t suffer fools lightly.

We better be ready instead,
for a different category of experience.
Don’t get me wrong,
I am as skeptical as anyone
when it comes to a story that includes
some yahoo walking on water.
I too am a product of Enlightenment education
and God doesn’t get any freebies in my world either –
not that God cares too much about what I think.

Even so, I will not embrace the tale
of a whacko-mystical spectacle
unless it merges with hard-earned, personal experience.
So count me a Thomas
because unless I can see, touch, hear, or taste it
it gets left behind
in disbelief or detached agnosticism.

But that doesn’t mean I have lost my curiosity.
It pokes at me a bit, for example,
that we won’t even consider the possibility
of a spiritual extravagance such as water-walking
when our own ancestors as much as expected it?

That is worth thinking about
as we stand here grounded
by all our 21st century ballast.
For ten thousand years – thousands –
up until about 200 or 300 years ago in fact,
no self-respecting holy man or woman
would be caught dead
without a supernatural trick or two
up his or her sleeves.
Whether it was Pharaoh’s High Priest,
or a Hebrew Shepherd-Prophet,
or a 14th century Tibetan saint,
or a middle-period Christian mystic,
or better yet, a free-wheeling shaman –
they all had reputations for weird stuff.

Seriously, levitating, stigmata, healing,
flying, even the cessation of the heart…all of them
are among the strange and wonderful things
known to have been performed
by spiritual superheroes through the ages.

Our Pre-enlightenment ancestors expected it.
Jesus walked on water, the story says,
and there is no drama or fanfare about it.
I’m not suggesting that any and all such claims
should be taken at face value and accepted.
But I am trying to pry open a small crack|
in our imaginations,
through which to imagine
that God is more than we dare to expect.

I realize it is too challenging or even scary
for some people to get curious about things
their theological or scientific armor is hardened against
but walking the high scaffolding with the Mohawks requires it.

If we take Annie Dillard’s advice
and expect anything and everything
instead of sauntering around under the filter of pure reason,
then amazing things might happen.

If you will grant me a little openness
I can show you how it works
using the story about Jesus walking on water
we just read in Matthew.

When we wander into the text
the first thing we see
is that Jesus got tired of the crowds.
He got the heck out of Dodge
by the only means possible, a boat.
The crowds couldn’t follow him on water, right?

So that part of the story is reasonable.
I mean, Jesus is human after all,
and a person can only take so much.
It pains me to say so, but maybe he was an introvert?
Anyway, what we notice next
is that Jesus went up to a “high place” to pray.
He went to the high place alone.He went up there for perspective –
to get away from everybody, even his friends.
That is perfectly natural for someone to do,
introvert or extrovert – we all need to get centered sometimes.

But in fact, the gospels tell us that Jesus spent
a lot of time trying to get away from the rest of us –
from all our neediness.
That part of the story is interesting to think about
and gets overlooked because of the water walking.

Then the text addresses another practical issue:
Jesus was on the land
and his pals were on a boat
and in addition to the water, a storm was separating them.

So, as the story goes,
Jesus travels the shortest distance from A to B
which requires him to walk across the water.
The ancients,
and most people throughout human history,
would take such a statement in stride.

So lets keep our nose in the story,
and our attention away from wondering
about whether this detail is factual or not.

If we do stay focused, the first thing we notice
is that Peter makes a big splash.
Peter gets so excited he impulsively
tries water-walking himself.
I picture it as that kind of half-wakeful state
just after an especially vibrant dream
when we think the dream was real
until we fully wake up
and realize it couldn’t possibly have happened.

Jesus laughs, “Hey bonehead, you almost did it!”}
Then he helps Peter back into the boat.

What that suggests to me
is that even ordinary people can do extraordinary things –
like those stories we hear every now and again}
about a panicked surge of adrenaline
giving someone the strength
to lift a car to save a life.

So if we stop asking “Did it really happen?”
and wonder instead, about what the story is asking us,
we land at a very different place – the punch line:
we can almost walk on water…
not quite, but almost.

”We can almost a walk on water”
means we can take those first few steps
out above the elements
where we would normally sink
and for a moment,
we can glide above it all.

“We can almost walk on water”
means we can imagine beyond our normal limitations
and see what is possible
and almost walk to it.

“We can almost walk on water”
means we can shorten the distance
between what we say we cherish
and how we actually live our lives.

”We can almost walk on water”
means we can raise our heads and hearts
up above the chaotic morass and get a God’s-eye view
of our own lives – even if just a glimpse.

“We can almost walk on water”
means we are not stuck
with what other people say we can do,
or with what other people told us we are,
or with what we ourselves fear we have become,
or with what we grieve is our failure.

We can almost walk on water
means that in extraordinary moments
even ordinary people like you and me
can see
and hear
and know things
to which we are normally deaf and blind.

We can almost walk on water
means there is weird stuff out there –
God being the weirdest of them all.

All of it means that from time to time
we should try walking out over our assumptions –
and out over our closed-mindedness
and out over our rigid rationality
and see what’s possible without fretting about it first.

So just remember,
there are all kinds of ways to receive
or enter into the texts we hear week after week.
Think of it like poetry, music or theater –
art that stretches our imagination
and compels us to consider new questions
with new possibilities.
We don’t ask a poem, “Did that really happen?”
We don’t ask a painting, “Did it really look like that?”
We experience them.
We walk into them as they are given to us, at face value.
We experience them.

I want to suggest that the story today tells us
that God is to be imagined and experienced
not defined or predicted.

If you take nothing else from this, please walk away
with this echoing in your thoughts:
God is to be imagined and experienced
not defined or predicted.

Literally, what that means
is something we have already experienced for ourselves:
there are times and places
when and where, momentarily,
we live out above our worst habits,
and hold hands in the dark with our fears,
and heal the pain of our losses and limitations.

We can, miraculously,
imagine what our lives could be, and almost, touch it.

In other words, we can almost walk on water
and sometimes, for a moment,
we actually do.