While I was on vacation, the pulpit was filled by recent seminary graduate, Elder Summer Sattora. Here is her sermon from August 13, 2017. My thanks for her energy and leadership.
How Soon is Now?
Matthew 14:22-33
Preached at South Presbyterian Church Fellowship of Faith, August 13, 2017
I love movies. If you know me, this is not a surprising statement. I often speak in movie quotes or recall scenes from a favorite movie in everyday conversation. In fact, my mom and I are at The Cinema on Goodman and Clinton just about every week. I guess you could say it’s in my blood since my great-uncle once owned that specific movie theatre and my mom worked there back in the day. One thing that movies often do is play with time, specifically the passage of time, and they do this in a variety of ways. The movie may open with a scene and down in the bottom corner will be a date, say 1985. Stuff will happen and after a cut or fade to black, our next scene will display 2017. We’ve traveled 32 years in 32 seconds. Or perhaps we’ll get a grouping of flashback scenes with a voice-over narrative explaining a series of events that happened over say a hundred years, condensed down in to just five minutes for us. Or, a favorite of those who make romantic-comedies, the montage. Cue the scenes of our two romantic leads leading their unfulfilling separate lives until the inevitable meet-cute! A whole adult life shortened into half of a cheesy yet catchy pop song. We have become used to this idea of days, weeks, months, or years passing like, no pun intended, no time at all.
When you combine this warping of time we have from movies with our immediate gratification culture we live in, is it any wonder that waiting is not high on our list of favorite things to do? If you don’t know the answer to something, you can get it in as long as it takes you to say “Siri” or “Alexa.” With Amazon Prime we can get items delivered in just two days. Movies and TV shows are available as quick as signing on to Netflix or Hulu, and if it’s Netflix original programming you don’t even have to wait for a new episode every week. You get them all at once! We can preorder books so that they’ll be shipped to us the day they’re released. On many dating sites and apps you can decide within ten seconds whether or not someone is the guy or gal for you based on a picture and a couple sentences. We don’t even like going to a restaurant and having to wait for our food. What do you mean you cook to order? Why can’t I get it as soon as I order it? And etcetera etcetera etcetera. So perhaps when we hear today’s Scripture, we take the word “immediately” at face value. But how immediate was it, especially for Peter?
Let’s look again at verses 30 and 31: “But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’ Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’” Sure, for Jesus it probably was immediately. But what did it feel like for Peter? How long before he realized he was sinking? Once he realized he was sinking, how long before he started panicking? Once he started panicking, how long before he cried out? And how long did it feel between when he cried out and when he felt Jesus grab him? Did time speed up like in one of our movies? Or did time slow down? Did every second feel like a minute? Did he wonder if Jesus would in fact save him? I think he did. I think that time seemed to slow to a crawl for Peter as he waited to be pulled from the water. I’m sure he couldn’t think beyond one breath to the next as he sunk further and further in to the sea, arms flailing frantically as he tried to keep his head above water.
I can relate to Peter in today’s passage, both literally and figuratively. I recently had the, opportunity shall we say, to try white water rafting. Has anyone ever been? (If so) By any chance were you thrown from the boat? I was (thrown from the boat). Twice. Considering my first words to my friend Mike, who coordinated the trip were “Why are you trying to kill me?!” I think you know what my thoughts on the whole event are. Anyway, the second time I was thrown in to the rapids our safety guides threw a rope in to me. Yes, I was wearing a helmet and a vest so perhaps I wasn’t going to drown the way Peter thought he was, but when the water is pushing you forward and the rope you’re trying desperately to hold on to keeps sliding through your hands, time seems to slow down, at least in looking back. You’re trying not to swallow the water that’s slamming in to your face and your entire focus is on the next breath, on hoping that the rope will finally catch so you can be pulled to safety. Now, obviously I am fine. The rope caught, I was pulled to safety, and I got back in the boat and continued down the rest of the river without getting thrown in again. But when I read this passage, that was the picture that first popped in to my head, and I went from usually reading these verses thinking “Poor Peter, you foolish man of little faith” to thinking “Dude, I understand.” You’re trying desperately to have faith in being pulled to safety, but as the immediacy of rescue seems to be getting farther and farther away, so does your faith. You start embracing that doubt that in normal circumstances you can push away rather easily.
Why is it that the times we should have the most faith we often have the least? Because that’s the other angle of this story where I relate to Peter. That period of time where time seems to be dragged out can come out of that feeling that our cries for help are not being heard, so we start to lose our faith. We sort of expect that once we cry out “Lord save me” the response will be immediate. Once we pray for help or guidance or clarity or an answer or a sign we say our Amen and then expect the answer to be dropped in to our lap. Come on God, it’s been five minutes. Are you even listening? Now, yes, sometimes immediately really is immediately. We lift something up to God and in a relatively short time we get a response. In fact, it happens so quickly we’ve almost forgotten we asked for it in the first place. We smile and skip along thinking, Boy, God really does answer prayers! Awesome!! Then, there’s those other times. When we ask and ask and ask and we swear all we hear is crickets. We pray and we pray. We’re so busy praying that we can’t hear the answer. Or we hear the answer but it’s not the one we want so we keep praying. Or we’re afraid of what we might hear, so we stop listening. Perhaps Peter was so afraid he wouldn’t be saved that rather than opening his eyes to see Jesus standing before him with his hand outstretched, he had his eyes closed tightly, too busy sinking to see what was in front of him. I can just imagine Jesus standing right in front of a sinking Peter, waving his hand right in front of Peter’s face, kind of like “Hello! I’m right here! Open your eyes.” I can imagine how many times Jesus has done that to each of us.
Why is it that we become too impatient when “immediately” is in God’s time and not ours? Why aren’t we willing to wait, to draw on our faith to get us through? What is it about waiting that freaks us out? What are we so afraid of? Waiting for an answer should be a time to enjoy being in God’s time, but rather than allowing ourselves to be pulled towards God, we try to pull God toward us. We try to make God work within our parameters when God just wants us to sit with God, to be still in God’s presence. It’s not that God doesn’t want to answer us or chooses not to answer us, but that God is trying to have a conversation with us in that perceived silence. When you think about it that way, why wouldn’t we want to stop and enjoy the time of waiting? It’s so easy for us to see waiting as an inconvenience. We have other stuff to do, after all. People to see. Plans to make. Lives to live. We can’t do all of that if we are busy waiting.
One of the hardest things to do is pray and feel the Spirit saying “Wait.” I imagine the conversation going something like this:
Okay, God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit what do you say?
Wait.
What do you mean, wait?
Wait. Be patient.
Okay, but seriously, everyone is asking me what I’m going to do here and I don’t know what to tell them.
Wait for now.
But can’t now be, well, now?
Now will come.
But when?
Soon.
How soon is soon? I can’t keep going on like this.
Wait.
Sound familiar? Theologian Howard Thurman wrote the following in the book The Inward Journey:
“’To him that waits, all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny in the darkness what he has seen in the light.’
“Waiting is a window opening on many landscapes. For some, waiting means the cessation of all activity when energy is gone and exhaustion is all that the heart can manage. It is the long slow panting of the spirit. There is no will to will- ‘spent’ is the word. There is no hope, not hopelessness- there is no sense of anticipation or even awareness of a loss of hope. Perhaps even the memory of function itself has faded. There is now and before- there is no after.
“For some, waiting is a time of intense preparation for the next leg of the journey. Here at last comes a moment when forces can be realigned and a new attack on an old problem can be set in order. Or it may be a time of reassessment of all plans and of checking past failures against present insight. It may be the moment of the long look ahead when the landscape stretches far in many directions and the chance to select one’s way among many choices cannot be denied.
For some, waiting is a sense of disaster of the soul. It is what Francis Thompson suggests in the line: ‘Naked I wait Thy love’s uplifted stroke!’ The last hiding place has been abandoned because even the idea of escape is without meaning. Here is no fear, no panic, only the sheer excruciation of utter disaster. It is a kind of emotional blackout in the final moment before the crash- it is the passage through the Zone of Treacherous Quiet.
“For many, waiting is something more than all of this. It is the experience of recovering balance when catapulted from one’s place. It is the quiet forming of a pattern of recollection in which there is called into focus the fragmentary values from myriad encounters of many kinds in a lifetime of living. It is to watch a gathering darkness until all light is swallowed up completely without the power to interfere or bring a halt. Then to continue one’s journey in the darkness with one’s footsteps guided by the illumination of remembered radiance is to know courage of a peculiar kind-the courage to demand that light continue to be light even in the surrounding darkness. To walk in the light while darkness invades, envelops, and surrounds is to wait on the Lord. This is to know the renewal of strength. This is to walk and faint not.”[1]
So waiting can be a good thing. God’s now does not have to be our now. It shouldn’t be our now. Rather than waiting to be pulled from the water to have our little faith become big faith, we should go in to the water with big faith in the first place. Jesus is right there in front of us, reaching out a hand, even when we don’t see it, even when it feels like it can’t possibly be there. How soon is now? As soon as it needs to be.
AMEN.
[1] Thurman, Howard. The Inward Journey. New York: Harper & Row, 1961. Pp. 81-82.
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