9 Pentecost, A p14, August 10, 2014
1 Kings 19:9-18 Psalm 85:8-13
Romans 10:5-15,
Matthew 14:22-33
Have you ever seen anyone
walk on water? I have seen people walk
on water and I've done it myself. I did
it as a child and also when I was at seminary in Wisconsin. I must confess though the water that I walked
on was the hardened variety found on the frozen lakes of the north. That sort of diminishes the miracle doesn't
it? I have also seen people walk on
water before in one of my water dreams.
But dream state, altered state seeing does not have the same status it
once had in the ancient world.
All of
the miracles in the Bible are believable if we accept "altered
states" kind of seeing. It was
common for dream states to be a significant mode of communication from the
non-conscious side of life often characterized as the abode of God or the
Spirit. Dream states have a naivete
about them, a purity about them because we as human being do not control such
states. Since we as humans cannot make
dreams happen and since we cannot control their content, they have a
fascinating feature to them. They can
have the sense of the divine because they seem to be communication to us in a
fashion which we are not used to. They
also are mysterious to us since they have cryptic communication. They do not seem to have obvious
meanings. They engage us and make us
ponder their meanings. And they do not
have literal meaning. And they do not
have scientific meaning because one cannot replicate or repeat exactly what the
dream experience was. When
anthropologists have gone to study other cultures which have not had contact
with the cultures affected by the Enlightenment and modern science, they have
found that people in their wakened state and conscious lives can still see in
way that is more of what we call "dream-like" seeing. They do not yet fully distinguish between
what's inside and what's outside in the way in which we have been taught to do so
from having been raised in the cultures of science where the subject and object
split is so pronounced.
Much of the Bible includes accounts where it
is obvious to us today that people saw things differently and experienced
differently and used a different kind of language reporting to relate to them
the important things about their values, their beliefs and their faith. Dreams and visions were shared and became a
part of the community lore and written down as a part of the community’s literature.
After reading the Gospel language of the
storm, Jesus walking on the water and Peter's attempt to do the same, I think
we could honestly say that we could dream something like this ourselves. And in dreaming something like this we might
be able with some reflection to come to some various insights.
First, our conscious minds cannot collect
everything that is happening to us and around us. Our conscious minds have the limitation of
remembered frames of focus but our unconscious peripheral awareness is always
taking in more than what we do with intentional focus. And in our dreams and in other moments of
altered awareness we can have access to all of what we have taken in and it is
presented to us in sort of collage images.
And we have to reflect upon these collage images to come to some
insights about our lives and about how we can live with hope and faith in our lives
today.
The Gospel story today is the equivalent of a
very serious water dream. And a water
and storm dream is definitely an indication of an anxiety dream. Anxiety is a major truth of everyone's life
because we love our lives enough to cherish and value them and to know the threat of the loss
of life and the things and people we have come to enjoy.
We enjoy loving friendship, freedom and
ability to be free agents, health and safety.
We experience or we observe the loss or the threat of loss of
everything. A water dream reveals to us
the experience of anxiety, a form of fear.
This is a universal human experience.
The water and the storm would indicate to us the state of chaos which
everyone can know when systems come into conflict and when the competing goals
of people cause pain, hurt and injury.
The chaos of Anxiety and fear come to us on
many different levels. We can be
incredibly galactic in our anxiety and worry about solar flares or a comet
hitting our planet or we can resort to conspiracy theories involving UFO's and
aliens. When people were limited to but
a radius of but a few miles and relied upon the stories of
travelers, then it was much easier to subscribe to the great cosmic stories to
provide cause and effect answers for local situations even when one had no way
of verifying cosmic effects. Astrology
is very entertaining even while it is hard to verify as valid one to one
connections between stars and human personality tendencies.
Today with rapid communication it is easy for
us to have world and global anxiety. The
water and storms of our own world threaten us to think about the spread of
chaos. Genocide in various places in the
world. ISIS forces killing Christians
and other religious minorities. Boka
Haram extremists slaughtering innocent people.
Troops amassing on the border of the Ukraine, cyber thieves threatening
economic interchange, perpetual hostilities between Israel and Palestine, Syria
is in an incredible warring mess as well as Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and
Pakistan. Drug cartels having violent
control and we oppose them while being one of the largest drug using countries
in the world. Kleptocrats making condition so unlivable in their own countries
forcing even children to make dangerous journeys for the hope of a safer
place. Truly, there is occasion for us
to have storm and water dreams of anxiety for the global threats in our world.
But water dreams of anxiety are also relevant
to our own pockets of chaos. We face
economic changes, job changes, change of location, addictions, relationship
stress, family crisis, health crises and so we like Peter and the disciples can
be in our small boats caught in the midst of great waves of water in very windy
storms.
In the midst of our storms when we react with
fear and all of fear's fingers of anxieties, we seek one who is with us enough
to know our anxiety but beyond us enough to see beyond the particulars of our
chaos. Peter in the midst of his storm
saw the vision of Jesus walking on the water.
Jesus did not allow himself to be possessed by Peter's fear; he was the
vision of one who could survive and live within the storm. The vision of Jesus was so comforting to
Peter that it actually made Peter confident.
Peter decided that he too did not want to put his life completely on
hold during the storm, he wanted to walk in the storm. He wanted to express his faith even within
the storm. So Peter walked toward Jesus
but the conditions of the storm distracted his faith. It was so much easier to believe in the
reality of the storm than in the reality of Jesus, who lived beyond the
storm. And when Peter used his good
reason not to believe, he did not believe and he sank. But even in his sinking he found that Jesus
rescued him.
Can we not see in this story portrayal an
altered state way of seeing our lives?
Can we not see the literal truth, the literary and artistic truth of
this story to our lives?
You and I are always already in stormy
states of life by virtue of the conditions of freedom in our world and because
of the reality of time which means there are many different changes that are
always occurring. And we have to live
with, adjust to, respond to and assert ourselves within the conditions of
change.
So what are the Gospel insights for us today?
One Gospel insight might be the admission of
the actual conditions of life. Folks, it
can be stormy out there and it can be stormy in here. It can be stormy in the heavens, it can be
stormy in the galaxy, it can be stormy in other countries, it can be stormy in
our country, state, city, neighborhoods, homes and family. We cannot avoid the reality of the storms of
life. Human storms are as inevitable as
the changing weather.
Another Gospel insight is this: Storms are not
the only weather condition. There can be
many other weather conditions which are more supportive of human safety. So, do not let the storms define the totality
of all weather conditions. In the human
sphere, do not let loss, pain, failure or threat, define the totality of
life. The total good outweighs the total
bad; it is just that the bad is such a deprivation of the good that it yells
out and gains attention beyond its actual strength.
Another Gospel insight for us: Let hope give us the vision for survival in
the midst of our life storm. The
greatest storm of life is death and the threat of death. The resurrected Christ stands before us as
the trump card to death. We begin there
to deal with the big Anxiety. But we let
the hope of seeing Christ inspire us to take steps in the direction of what is
hopeful. The details of the hopeful are
many: another job, a good health report, a successful surgery, a child growing
up, a relationship improved, an addiction interdicted in an encounter with a
higher power grace experience, a new friendship, the ministry of a piece of
music, reading some telling piece of wisdom in a book, an artistic image, a
sublime encounter with stories of cinema and television, a report of heroism,
courage, rescue and healing.
Another Gospel insight for us: Even if we falter in our efforts of faith, we
can still be rescued and given more chances.
Christ picks us up and Christ forgives us and he does not accuse
us. He simply challenges us to keep on
being faithful and taking those small steps of faith in the direction of Hope
signified by Christ who is the one who gives us a vision of surpassing our current
stormy situation.
My friends, this Gospels is true because it
invites us to an altered way of seeing within the very real storms of
life. Look up and see Christ as the one
who surpasses our stormy situation to inspire hope for us to take the next step
of faith. Amen.
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