August 7, 2011 - Pentecost + 8

Jesus Gets In the Boat!
Matthew 14:22-33
Pentecost + 8 – August 7, 2011

“Dear Lord, Be good to me. The sea is so wide, and my boat is so small.”

This prayer is known as the Breton Fisherman's Prayer. But it's also used by the Children's Defense Fund, and for years I saw it every day, hanging on the wall of the office where I worked with at-risk teens and their families – a piece of art that looked like a child had written this prayer in crayon and drawn a picture – a small stick figure in a little boat on the big sea, a reminder of the vulnerability of humanity. (the image shown here - I took it from the Children's Defense Fund website.)


This prayer came to mind as I thought about the gospel story, as I imagined what the disciples were going through that night on the Sea of Galilee. It's a prayer that might have crossed their lips as they wrestled against the waves, as they struggled with the wind, as they tried and tried with all their might to escape the weather and reach the other side. It was the middle of the night after all, a situation filled with stress and anxiety and fear. They were exhausted by the late hour, and all of their efforts had been in vain. They were far from land, and the waves just kept coming and the wind just kept blowing against them. It was the perfect breeding ground for discouragement and helplessness to set in, because no matter what they do, the disciples can't make their situation any better. They may be holding their own, but the fact remains that no matter how hard or long they row, they're not making any progress; things aren't getting any better; they can't control the weather; the wind keeps pushing them away from their destination. At this point, even though it seems useless, there's nothing for them to do but to keep trying anyway, even though it won't make any difference, that they're still gonna find themselves back where they started.

“Dear Lord, be good to me. The sea is so wide and my boat is so small.”

This prayer, or one like it, has probably crossed all of our lips at some point in our lives – the times when the forces of the world seem to be lined up against us and our means of defense and safety seem so meager. The sea around us is filled with wave after wave after wave, battering our little boats – waves of sickness or money problems or mental illness. The winds seem bent on keeping us from getting where we wanted to go – winds of desperation over divorce or the challenge of parenting or caring for our parents, winds that threaten our homes, our families, our place in the world. We feel battered and blown around by the world – and so we pray – “Dear Lord, be good to me. The sea is so wide, and my boat is so small.”

Now, I get what this prayer is trying to say. “Please God. Watch out for me. Protect me. The world is so big and dangerous, and I'm so vulnerable, I feel so small. But you're not. You're big and powerful, so keep an eye out for me, would ya?” But if you look below the surface of the words, if you think about them for a minute, you start to see that they imply something about how we think about God and what we believe about Jesus – besides the fact that God is big and strong, I mean. It kind of reminds me of that song by Bette Midler in the early 1990s - From a Distance - and that was the main part of the chorus - “Oh, God is watching us, God is watching us. God is watching us – from a distance...”

You see what I'm saying? Both that song and the prayer imply that God is far away, that God is looking down from heaven, and maybe if we ask the right way, pretty please with sugar on top, God might intervene to help us when the windy weather comes, in its many forms, as it always does.

And when we think of God that way, it still feels like we're alone much of the time. If that's all God is, then we are still left to face the winds and the waves and the chaos of the sea on our own, left to just keep rowing and hope the storm gives out before our arms do.

Perhaps that's about where the disciples were that night – wondering why Jesus had sent them off on a boat in the evening, left them to go it alone while he stayed behind, wondering how it might be different if only Jesus was there with them – they had seen him calm the wind and the waves before, of course. So where was he?

And that's when it happens. Then. Our version says in the early morning, but it could also be translated as the 4th watch of the night – which were the hours between 3 and 6 AM, then in those darkest hours, when daylight seems still so far away – then, that's when they happened to look up and look around – and there they saw Jesus coming to them across the sea. Of course, they didn't know what to make of it at first – they thought he was a ghost – what else could it be?, since no human being can walk on water, and they cried out in fear, terrified. But immediately, Jesus called out to them, “Take heart! It is I! Do not be afraid!” And they still don't quite know what to think, and so we have this scene with Peter asking Jesus to confirm his identity & hopping out of the boat and sinking – and again – immediately, Jesus reaches out to lift Peter up – and all of that is amazing – but what I really want to point out to us today – what the disciples discovered that day – is that God is not watching us “from a distance.” God is not looking down from heaven with a sympathetic eye, watching our boats get battered by the waves and pushed around by the wind. No, God does not stay far off – God comes to the disciples through the winds and waves and Jesus, God's Word-made-flesh GETS IN THE BOAT with them! Jesus comes and joins them in the middle of their fear, their anxiety, their exhaustion – he comes and climbs aboard, to be with them in the chaos that surrounds them – and as soon as he does, the winds cease.

But what I want us all to take away from this story today is to hear and to believe and to hold onto the fact that God is not far away. Even when we feel most alone, most powerless, most helpless to do anything to change our situations, whatever challenges we may be facing – especially then, Jesus comes to us walking on the water – but he doesn't stay there. He climbs into our boat with us! He tosses in his lot with ours, taking on our burdens, our sins, our hurts, our sorrows as though they were his own. He climbs aboard, and picks up a paddle and starts rowing with us toward the shore – and whether or not the winds cease immediately or continue to howl around us for a while, he is with us. Jesus does not abandon us, come what may. Jesus truly is Emmanuel, God-with-us; truly he is the Son of God, who loves us and will never let us go.

Thanks be to God!
Amen.

July 31, 2011 - Pentecost + 7

Jesus Multiplies Our “Nothing”
Matthew 14:13-21
Pentecost + 7 – July 31, 2011

Do you know the term “compassion fatigue”? It's what happens when people are faced with the on-going suffering of others over time. It can strike health care professionals or home health aides. It's also used to talk about what happens to the public at large, as we see images and hear stories of tragedy and are asked to give to help in those situations. It's another way of saying that we can become desensitized to the hurts of others or burned out in our efforts to do something about it.

I sometimes wonder if Jesus didn't feel the effects of compassion fatigue. Everywhere he went, after all, he was followed by people in great need, people seeking healing, people seeking hope. It happens again in this gospel story. Here Jesus is trying to get away for a little bit – the “after he had heard this” is about him finding out that his cousin John, the baptizer, had been beheaded by Herod, & so he goes off by himself to a deserted place to be alone. But when he gets there, he sees “a great crowd,” desperate, looking for the healing that only Jesus can give. And just in that moment, can't you almost hear him sigh? Yet, Matthew says, Jesus has compassion for them, and cures their sick.

And this goes on and on, until finally it's late – past dinnertime, and the disciples come to him, concerned. They want Jesus to send the crowds away, to go off into the villages and find themselves something to eat. I imagine the disciples wanting to give Jesus (and themselves) a little break, a little downtime. It's exhausting managing all this need, keeping the crowd in check.
But “No,” Jesus says. “No. They don't need to go away. You give them something to eat.”
“But,” they say, “we have nothing here. Just a few loaves and fishes.”

And Jesus says, “Bring them to me.”

Bring them to me. He has the crowds sit down, and he takes those 5 loaves and 2 fish, looks up to heaven, and breaks the bread and blesses it, and hands it back to the disciples to distribute.

Did you catch that? They say to Jesus, “We have nothing,” and Jesus says, “Bring your nothing to me.” And he takes their so-called nothing, their certainly-not-enough, and he blesses and breaks it and gives it to the disciples to give away to the people. And there is enough! Everyone gets to fill their bellies. Everyone is completely satisfied and when the meal is all said and done and they get to cleaning up – they find that not only did everyone get enough to eat, there are leftovers! 12 baskets full of bread and fish. Their “nothing”, in the hands of Jesus, becomes more than enough. Becomes abundance. Becomes a blessing once Jesus has blessed it – a blessing to a hungry people – 5000 men, and that's not counting the women and children. So how many is that? Ten thousand? Fifteen thousand? More? Who knows? But the point is, when the disciples give what little they have to Jesus, so little that it seems like nothing, Jesus multiplies it. Jesus makes it a miracle. Out of nothing, there is enough and more to spare.

Now I don't know where you find yourself in this story – You may imagine yourself as part of the crowd, aching for Christ's healing touch and deep compassion, hungry for peace or forgiveness or hope. Or perhaps, like me, you identify with the disciples this time around. Because there are times when we feel that emptiness, that sense of nothingness, when we look at the great crowds around us and are overwhelmed with compassion fatigue as we see, not faces of fellow human beings, but just their great need and feel powerless to do anything. We hear about famine and drought and starvation in eastern Africa, of ongoing devastation in Haiti and Japan and the mid-West and South of our own country from earthquakes and tsunamis and flooding and tornadoes, of growing poverty and hunger in our own land, we worry what will happen if this debt-ceiling debate is not resolved in the next 2 days, and that's not to mention the pain and struggles we witness in the lives of our families, our friends, our neighbors, trying to get by or to overcome addiction or to heal and move on from broken relationships, let alone our own personal challenges – the ones we wrestle with alone, that we keep hidden from others. We see these great crowds, filled with deep need, and it's enough to make us want to ask Jesus to send them away. Not just because of things like compassion fatigue, not because we don't want to do something for the people who are hungry and hurting and hopeless in our world, but because the problems are just so immense, and when we hear Jesus say, “They don't need to go away – You give them something to eat,” all we can see are 5 loaves of bread and 2 measly fish. Our resources – financial, emotional, spiritual, political, practical – seem so small, so “nothing” in the face of those needs, that that's what we say to Jesus. “We have nothing here, Jesus.”

But Jesus says to us, “Bring your nothing to me. Give what little you have to me. Trust me enough to place it in my hands.”

That's the trick of it, of course, to look at what we have, as little as it seems, and to give it away to Jesus anyway. To place our “nothing” in his hands, even though it doesn't make any sense, even though it seems like there's no way in the world that it could ever be enough to make a dent, even though we may want to hold onto it for ourselves, just in case. But when we do that, when we put our nothing in Jesus' hands, not knowing what the outcome will be, Jesus takes our nothing, lifts it up to heaven, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it back to us to give away – and in the process, we find that there is more than enough to go around, enough to make a difference in the life of someone else. That's why we keep putting these inserts in the bulletin when disaster strikes – not to guilt anybody into anything, but to give us all a chance to see what Jesus can do with what seems so little to us – how in Jesus' hands, our gifts multiply, how they expand, how he can make more-than-enough out of our nothing.

Jesus says, “Bring your nothing to me. Let me bless it so that it can become an abundant blessing, and find yourself blessed along the way.”

Amen.