[Machine transcription]
Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, the text comes from the Gospel reading. Will you pray with me? Entrust your days and burdens to God’s most loving hand. He cares for you while ruling the sky, the sea, the land. For he who guides the tempests along their thunderous ways will find for you a pathway. And guide you all your days. In the name of Jesus. Amen. You may be seated.
Very eloquent writer of hymns, Mr. Paul Gerhard, that wrote that. Ever since your baptism, as you heard at Peter’s baptism, you were taken out of this world and placed into the holy ark of the Christian church. A ship. That’s why this area of the church is called the nave, which is where we get the term navy, the common area. And why traditional churches have the roof that looks like the bottom side of a boat. And why the symbol for the church has always been a ship.
Now, even a seasoned navy man is aware of the seas and how tempestuous they can be. And isn’t it interesting that of all the things that God could have made to be a symbol and to save His people, He used an ark. And He used water to destroy and water to save. And then along comes this gospel reading where also water is used and a ship is used. And let’s face it, water does not give you the same confidence in it and on it as you are in land. Granted, you’ve got tornadoes on land sometimes, but water is a different beast altogether. And very few of us, if any, have great confidence in the water.
Oh yes, we can swim, but by golly, we know riptides can pull you down and away, and all sorts of manner of things can happen in the deep, dark, tempestuous sea. And that’s why God did what He did in these men’s lives. And yet… what he did with them is the same thing he does with you. But the same problem with those men in that boat is the same problem with us in the boat of the church. We don’t perceive that we’re on water as Christians in the holy ark of the church. We perceive that we are in control and we have the ability to influence, to shape and to do all kinds and manners of things, and forget… we’re like those apostles on an inward body of water, not the ocean. And God is still the one in control.
The one who guides the tempests and all of those waves is the same one who delivers the fearful. So the question can be asked: do we really have a healthy respect of how tempting things are in this world? Do we really have a healthy respect for how vulnerable and frail we are in this world as sinners? A seasoned sailor would quickly tell young seamen that if you don’t have respect for this body of water, you’re a fool. Watch, be alert, because when something happens, you have to be ready to counter it and be prepared for it. You never become cocky on the water.
Well, the same could be said of you and me in this world. How easily people fall away and end up in Satan’s arms and not their Savior’s arms. How easy this world’s sirens call us to crash ourselves against the rocks of sin and this world’s temptations. Enter our gospel reading. These are not newbies or neophytes. These are fishermen. The majority of the apostles were fishermen, and they’re fishermen who are seasoned.
Secondly, they’re not on a new body of water that they’re completely unfamiliar with. They’re on the Sea of Galilee on which they’ve been fishing for decades. Decades. So it’s not as if their ability and their area is unknown to them. Kind of like you being used to the things of this world and I, being used to the things of this world, and thinking, oh, it’ll never get me. It’ll never have any influence over me. Well, if you read the text and heard it, Jesus sends them away before evening, before sundown. So this is late afternoon when he sends them out onto the body of water to go across to the other side while he dismisses the crowd of tens of thousands of people who had eaten the fish and the loaves.
It says in the text that he does come to them, but not until the fourth watch of the night. The fourth watch of the night is somewhere between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. And they were out on the Sea of Galilee before sundown. So they had been out there for eight or nine hours battling the wind and the waves, being shown how vulnerable and frail they really are. Being shown who is the Lord of heaven and earth. Being shown that they do not have all of the abilities that they perceive themselves to have. That they are lost and condemned persons purchased and won by no one else than the very Lord of life whom they accompanied as his apostles.
And the marvelous thing that we sing about, and the marvelous thing that is for us to grasp, is that the same Lord Jesus who stills the sea is the same Lord Jesus that allowed the sea to be tumultuous in the first place. If He’s the one who can calm it, He’s also the one who stirred it up for them. Why would He do such a thing to His beloved apostles? Why would He allow them to be so fearful and so completely devoid of any confidence? Why? Is he a sick deity? No. He wants them to cry out to him.
He loves when his children cry out to him in complete desperation because that’s the kind of children he loves who need daddy and only daddy. Who see in their Lord and Jesus the only help and nothing within them. That every time they look within their bosom, they see nothing but futility and frailty and have no confidence. But consider something that was said in the text about these apostles. It says in the text that their hearts were hardened. Can a believer have a hardened heart? Yes. Yes. You do have a hardened heart in the same place that there’s faith. Why else would you fear? Why else would you become anxious? Why else would you be overwhelmed? Why else would you feel those feelings of not well-being and trust in God’s promises unless you didn’t also have a hardened heart in the same place that there is faith?
Not my words, our Lord’s words to make sure we see in these men… they had a hardened heart. Why? Had they not just hours ago seen Jesus feed more than 10,000 people bread and fish? Had they not seen Jesus take care of a problem that they had no idea of what to do with and Jesus had told them, you take care of them? No, we don’t have anything. And he showed them that they did that. Have they not seen that eight or nine hours before they were at the desperate point at which Jesus finds them? Man, that is me to a T. And I know it’s you too. I’ve seen it in you at times. You’ve seen it in me. We have seen God feed us, literally feed us as if we were invalids here at this altar and from that book.
And when we go out having been fed by Jesus with His very flesh and blood and forgiveness of sins, we are fearful for the things that we are accosted by in this world and think, who’s in charge? It’s not our God. So these apostles are the same as you and me. And isn’t it interesting what Jesus did? He didn’t have to walk by them. He could have chosen to just appear on the other side and greet them when they moored their ship where they moored it.
He chose to walk by them to get them to do something that He loves for you to do: call out to Him. Cry unto Him. Seek Him while He is found. Be your daddy’s little boy or little girl and say, Daddy, help me, I can’t do it. That’s what He wanted to hear and pull out of them. When he greets them, or when they see him, they don’t go, okay, we’re good to go, it’s Jesus. They’re still in terror. They call him a ghost.
So in the midst of having just been called a ghost, and in the midst of finding their hardened hearts, and in the midst of their fear, does Jesus then call out, not rebuff, but love, and says, it’s I. Do not be afraid. Take heart, take courage, it’s okay. It’s okay. And as that begins to work upon their heart, he could have kept on walking and said, struggle it out. God helps those who help themselves. That’s not in the Bible, by the way. That’s heresy, by the way. It’s unright. God helps the helpless.
That’s right. God saves the sinner, not the righteous. That’s biblical. He gets into their boat with them. He gets into their world with them. He suffers with them and instills the storm. That’s what he does to you. He speaks words of love and tenderness and gentleness in the midst of your tumultuous heart and when your brain can’t shut off. And then he gets into the midst of your suffering and suffers with you because no one knows suffering like he does, right? No one knows abandonment like he did. No one knows that kind of horrific life that he does.
Though there’s nothing that you’re going to experience that he hasn’t already experienced in his entire 33 years of life, he steps into your boat with you as you suffer and are afraid of the wind and the waves, that he’s controlling, by the way, of the wind and the waves that’s tearing you apart from left to right. Right? While he sleeps in the front of the ship, telling you, it’s okay, I got this. Sometimes Jesus answers those prayers fast, doesn’t he? My goodness, here are all these hungry people, and boom, he gives them the food.
And sometimes he lets us struggle, puts our back to that row, and we realize we ain’t got it. We are going down. Eight or nine hours he let them, which must have seemed like eight or nine days. Well, whether it’s eight or nine hours, eight or nine days, eight or nine weeks, months, or years, or decades, God still allows you and is in charge of your suffering. Does He want you to suffer? No. While we consider this, that He’s in control of it, for whom did He pray when He went up on the mountain for those eight or nine hours while those disciples struggled in the boat? Did He pray for them? Wouldn’t you think?
He who was in charge of the wind and the waves, he who knew what they would struggle with as they went out on that boat, would he not have prayed for them, for their faith? And does he not pray for you every moment of every day as you are being allowed to struggle and as you will be delivered according to his time? Does he not pray for you? All of this is a part of how he trains us, trains us to say with St. Paul, to him who is able to do good far more abundantly than anything we can ask or think. Were the loaves far more abundant than anything those disciples could have imagined? Yes. Was the calming of the sea and training them far more abundantly than they could ask or think? Yes.
Was the healing of the people on the other side far more abundantly? Everything that Jesus does for you is far more abundantly than we ask or think because we are so ignorant and stubbornly sinful. But He speaks peace to you. It is I. Take heart. Do not be afraid. And He gets into our boat with us that we may be calmed. The winds don’t always stop when He steps into the boat with you. But that is a reminder that we are going to the safe harbor of heaven and until then, we know we might have to be tumultuously, tempestuously tossed about.
But He’s there with us speaking peace. Remember what the psalmist said: know this, that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself. And the Lord hears when you call upon him. He is not deaf. Again, the one you memorized in confirmation class: call upon me in every trouble, and I will deliver you, and you will glorify me. I don’t think those apostles thought that they were glorifying God in their fear and in their trepidation, and yet they’re glorifying God because they’re our example. We’re just like them. And God is glorified because they are incredibly needy for Jesus, just like you and me. That’s how they glorified God in that experience.
Finally, what the psalmist said that we sing in our liturgy, our response is we’re going to lift up the cup of salvation and continually call on the name of the Lord. For His voice speaks comfort. His presence is always there, and His promise is far more abundantly than we can ask or think.
In the name of Jesus, amen. The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds on Christ Jesus to life everlasting. Amen.
