July 27, 2006

Walking

Pentecost 8/12B Mk 6.45-52

Once again, having fed all those thousands on such a slim budget, Jesus is needing some privacy. So he has the disciples shove off and go back across the sea.

Of course, and as in every dime novel since, “it was a dark and stormy night.” When it got good and late and the waves were up and the wind was stiff and the boat was half way to the other shore, along comes Jesus. As if feeding all those folk didn’t seem enough grandstanding for one day, he chooses not to rent a boat or to swim in the water, but to walk on it. Peter may be terrified by all this like the story says, but seeming never at a loss for an inappropriate idea, tests Jesus. “Lord, if it is you (test # 1), bid me come to you on the water (test # 2).” “Come,” Jesus says. And sink, Peter does.

That winsome novelist and essayist Madeleine L’Engle once said that if we believe as we surely do that Jesus was fully human and could walk on water, then so can we walk on water. It’s only that we forget how.

I don’t like to think of us that way. I like to think of us as a remembering, not a forgetting people. We remember every time we gather around this Table and celebrate Eucharist. We remember the Christ and we reaffirm the Christ in each of us and in all of us as a worshiping community. But I suppose maybe we are, as well, a forgetting people, and we forget a lot more than just how to walk on water. Of course, we should not overlook that we can be deeply grateful that when Jesus said “do this in remembrance of me,” he was at supper and not at sea.

Maybe L’Engle is right. But if she is, our forgetting how to walk on water, as exciting as such a skill may be, is but a symptom of something far greater. It means, in effect, that we’ve also forgot how to be human. After all, if Jesus is God’s prototype of what it means to be human, and he could do all these logic- and science- and gravity-defying things, then we’ve forgot a tolerable lot.

But then there’s not much sense in our anguishing over that when there’s something else that we’ve apparently forgot, and is much nearer at hand and altogether more doable in God’s human scheme of things. And the church’s spiritual rehab program is the place to go about doing it.

“Spiritual rehab” is probably a misnomer. “Human rehab” may be better. For with God’s imaginative creation of us, we are already spiritually rehabilitated enough. But given that kind of moxie by God, becoming human beings in the manner of God’s great, sometimes shaky, plan of incarnation may well be more doable.

But how? By choosing to be, that’s how. Here we are, charged with spiritual energies beyond our most fanciful conception. And here we are, suited out in all this human hardware whose very first gift as God imagines us is the freedom to choose. Our tradition tells us that to be created in the image of God means we are free to choose to be loving, to be reasonable, to be creative, and to live in harmony with God and all God’s creation. And God, in the giving, tells us also that we are also free to dump the whole gift down the trash chute. That we end up making a mix of all these favors and privileges is what makes the party so exciting.

But there it is and no less. Not a one of us who has ever tried these freedoms could ever claim that such an owner’s manual and job description doesn’t turn out altogether quite well.

On the other hand, the evidence not only suggests, but proves on the whole how unstewardly we are at all levels of our society.

We’re making a mess of the environment and giving everybody asthma. Millions live below the poverty level while millions more benefit on their backs from irresponsible taxation and corporate welfare. We restrict morality to the bedroom and exempt it from the Pentagon’s war room and the White House’s oval office.

All this freedom to choose started out and was quickly thwarted in Eden. It was redeemed in Gethsemane, once again reinvigorated at Pentecost, and set forth on the Way which is coming our way. When we get it all straight and get our humanity more or less up to speed, then maybe we can take a shot at that water again and show old Peter a thing or two.

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