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Riding Out the Storm 8.9.26 · St. Paul Podcast

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hi everyone and welcome to the St.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Paul Podcast.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Mark Neethammer, senior pastor at St.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Paul Lutheran Church, located in Davenport, Iowa, part of the Greater Quad Cities area of Iowa and Illinois.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Right here each week, you will find beautiful music and a message of hope and good news to guide your life.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm hopeful that this podcast can inspire you and help you on your journey of faith as you grow in love and trust in our God.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: That is the reality underpinning the story we're about to hear from Matthew's gospel.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: So in the middle of all of that tension, Peter, having seen Jesus walking on water, demands that he walk on water too.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is a story that has for generations been used as a way of telling us to simply have more faith.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Don't doubt, just believe.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Which is fine.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: But we're more like Peter than we may want to admit.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: When challenged, we tend to get distracted by the chaos rather than having eyes on Jesus.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: However, I'm not sure that this is a story about simply having more faith.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's something much deeper here.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: So take a listen and see what you think.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Is it as easy as just having more faith?
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Immediately, Jesus made the disciples get into a boat and go on ahead to the other side while he dismissed the crowds.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, It's a ghost, and they cried out in fear.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, Take heart, it is I, do not be afraid.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Peter answered him, Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Come.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, Lord, save me.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, You of little faith, why did you doubt?
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: When they got into the boat, the wind ceased.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: And those in the boat worshipped Jesus, saying, Truly, you are the Son of God.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's something decidedly human in this story, something any of us would do or have done.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: So here's my sermon on chaos, control, and how we need to get back in the boat.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, people of God, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, if it is you, yelled Peter, command me to come to you on the water.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's be really honest to start off.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: This request, or maybe demand is a better descriptor, is absurd.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: There are a number of things that Peter could have asked for from Jesus, and for some reason he chooses, dare me to walk on the water.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't take long for us to realize that it would have been better for Peter to ask Jesus to, I don't know, make the wind stop blowing.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Or, Jesus, hey, get in the boat and help us bail out.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Or if all Peter wanted was proof that it was Jesus, he could have said, hey, what's my mother-in-law's name?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that would have been sufficient to get what Peter needed.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: But Peter chooses to ask for the power to walk on water.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: A curious and I am convinced intentional move on Peter's part.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: So let's set the context here because there's something kind of interesting happening when we dive into the history of things, and we'll get there in a minute.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Here we have Jesus' friends, they're disciples, and they're on this boat.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: The weather has gotten really bad, and I imagine water's been pouring into this boat, and some of them are probably trying to bail out as much as they can.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Waves are causing the whole boat to rise and fall violently.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm getting seasick, kind of thinking about it.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: And quite reasonably, they're scared.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody would have been scared in a moment like this.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: So here they are, they're scared for their lives, and then on top of it, they see a ghost walking towards them on the water.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: So they go from being deeply afraid to deeply afraid and seeing a ghost, which is somehow worse.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure what words to describe that, but that would be terrible.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where Peter demands the wrong thing.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: All Peter could likely think about was the danger in front of him, the threat of injury or death.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because chaos was, in fact, all around them, and Peter wanted to do something about this chaos that was about to, or that they felt, was about to consume them.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Which is a remarkably human thing to do.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: If something is going wrong for any of us, we want some sort of control over it.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: When there's danger imminent, we want to lessen its impact.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: If there's pending destruction around us, we want to have a chance to prepare for it.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: We want to do something about what's in front of us.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because nobody likes being hurt, nobody likes being overwhelmed by chaos.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: So any of us would do anything we can to make that go away.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: And Peter thought that he could help by stepping out of the boat, by walking on top of that chaos.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if we were to go into Bible study mode for just a second, we would quickly realize that from the very beginning of the Bible, and then therefore the very beginning of time, water has been used in Scripture as a symbol of chaos and struggle.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: In Genesis 1, right away, the very beginning of things, before God did any creating at all, there was a formless void and darkness over the face of the deep.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then in, I think it's verse 2, we read about the Spirit of God moving over the waters.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: There is chaos, there is nothingness, there is a void, and God moves over the water and then there can be light.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Only after God moves over the water can there be earth.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody had to subdue that water, that chaos, before anything else could exist.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: So God moved over the waters.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: When the world was deep in chaotic and troubling times, God called Noah to build this giant boat so that he and his family would survive the chaotic waters that were to come.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: And they did.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: That dove with the olive branch came only after the chaos had subsided, after God calmed the storm.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Noah didn't calm the storm, it wasn't his to calm.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then in Isaiah, this beautiful prophetic book, as the people were in exile, the prophet reassured them that even when they go through the waters, they will not drown, walk through fire, and they will not be burned, it will not consume them.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Water, again, even in the prophetic literature, is a symbol of chaos, trouble, oppression.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: And God, again, is the one who decides how far it goes.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: Water is a force in scripture that brings chaos.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: And in every one of these stories and more, calming it was never anyone's job, but a God's.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Not Noah's, not the Israelites, not ours.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: It belongs to God.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Which is what makes it worth pausing on, what Jesus is actually doing, standing on the water in this story before Peter even opens his mouth.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus is not performing some trick, he's doing the one thing that Scripture has said since the very beginning that only God can do.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Walking on chaos like it's nothing is a claim about who is in that boat's path.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so here we have Peter then asking Jesus for the one job that was never on offer to walk out onto the chaos himself, to trample it under his own feet, but it wasn't his to still.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: This was not Peter's storm to calm.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, we have that illusion that Peter could do it.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: The reading says that he stepped out of the boat and he took a step, maybe two, and he was doing it, he was walking on this chaos, but then he noticed the wind and he sank.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's as if he tasted just for a moment the dream of subduing the chaos, of walking on the water, doing what wasn't his to do, but reality struck.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: As Peter is sinking, as he is drowning in the water, the chaos of the wind and the and the rain, the hand of Jesus pulls him up and puts him back on the boat.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus picks Peter up and puts him back on the boat where his friends are, where his community is, back on the boat that was still being rocked by the storm.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't until after he was back in the boat that Jesus stopped the wind and the rain.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: The storm wasn't Peter's to calm.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: The chaos that frightened them all, Jesus, the one who actually has that power that took care of the storm and the fear and the chaos.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: It was not Peter's to calm.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: That belongs to God.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings us to here, to all of us, to this week, to this place.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because we are not short on chaos.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: Some of it makes headlines.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Some of it sits on your chest at two in the morning.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you were to look around this room or around town when you're off doing your daily living, if you were to look around, you'd find people who are trying to figure out how to live from a paycheck and make it cover the mortgage and groceries and gas and still have maybe something left over.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: You'll find people watching someone they love get pulled under by the chaos of addiction, and finding out painfully that willpower alone was never gonna be the thing to get it done.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: You'll find people in the chaos of sending their kids off to college, wondering if they've taught them enough, if these kids can make it as grown-ups, wondering if they're gonna make it as ones with slightly emptier nests.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: You can find people trying to hold together a life that has room enough for work and family and rest and faith and finding there aren't enough hours to be good at any of it.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: We may not be thrown around by a chaotic storm, but that doesn't mean we aren't occasionally or regularly maybe consumed by chaos and fear.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: And when we are, what do we normally do with it?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we do the same thing that Peter did.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: We reach for the water, we try to take some sort of control over our lives.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: So we build particular budgets and safety nets and make multi-year plans.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: We read the news.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like if we just if we stay just informed enough, we can avoid the wave that's coming.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Some of that's wise.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: We're not called to be reckless.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: None of this is to tell you to stop trying.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: But some of what we're doing, if we're honest, is just like Peter's move believing that if we manage hard enough and if we just try hard enough or say the right things, then we can still those storms by ourselves.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: But we can't.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Not all of it.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we aren't supposed to.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the good news buried in all of this.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus doesn't leave Peter treading water once he starts to sink.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: He picks him up.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: And he does not set Peter down on some dry, storm-free island as a reward for figuring out the truth.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus puts him back in the boat with his community, with his people.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: So he's not off proving something by himself.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus calms the storm.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that's our pattern too.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: God generally doesn't hand us a calm sea on our terms.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: What God does is put us back in the boat with our people to remind us that we're always meant to be in the boat.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Not alone in the middle of everything that life throws at us, not trying to prove ourselves or independence.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: We're simply to let God be God so that we don't have to.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Martin Luther, the namesake of the Lutheran church, wrote this little teaching booklet called The Small Catechism, and in it he asks why we even bother praying the words, your kingdom come on earth as in heaven, when we pray the Lord's Prayer, which we'll do in just a few minutes.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: Luther declares that it does come, whether we pray for it or not.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: But he continues teaching us that we pray it anyway, asking that it come even to us, that we'd be let in on it, live inside it here in this boat instead of out on the water trying to build some smaller kingdom by our own effort.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's what it looks like to stop trying to still the chaos ourselves and start settling into the boat instead.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Not passively.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't about giving up.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is about being done pretending that the deep was ever ours to manage alone.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: So the invitation in the story is not to face your fears.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's not to get out of the boat, it's not to just be more faithful.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: The story is meant for you to ask yourselves are you willing to sit next to the people that God gave you?
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: Are you willing to ride out the storm together and let Christ do what only Christ can do?
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't Peter's storm to still.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's not yours either.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: That belongs to God.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: And God is already in the boat with you.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: If you are lonely when you feel afraid, you're not the only, we are all the same.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: In need of mercy to be forgiven and be free.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: And all the people say amen.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: And all the people said amen.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: Give thanks to the Lord for his love and all the people say amen.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: If you're rich or more, well it's a man We got strong, we know love is one with hand We're a broken body all in this together And we stumble and far this and we send this And all the people saying And all the people say they're never head And all the people saying Blessing art the forest be the words on the heart Blessing Heart Persecuting and the bearing heart Bless it are the people hungry for another start For this is the kingdom, the kingdom of God And all the people said amen.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: Whoa, whoa, and all the people said amen.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Give thanks to the Lord for his love never ends And all the people said Amen Yeah And all the people said Amen Whoa ho the people said amen Give thanks to the Lord for his love never ends And all the people said Amen And all the people say Amen Gathered into one by the Holy Spirit let us pray as Jesus taught us Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: Give us today our daily bread, forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us, save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, friends, it's never as simple as just having more faith, because so much of our lives is out of our control.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: What we can do, however, is notice that we've been given people to sit with, even as our lives unravel before us.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: And the comfort is that the grace of God is in that boat as well.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: We are free to let God be God, because trying to do that on our own will never work.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Paul Lutheran Church.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: Our commitment to endeavors that lend hope to other people stretches across the country and around the world.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: We hope that in a good way you feel a part of that reach.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: Tune in next Thursday for another edition of the St.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: Paul Podcast.