"O God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small."

Stop me if you've heard this one.

One day, a priest, a rabbi, and an imam are out taking a hike in the forest. They see that they need to cross a wide stream, but there is no bridge for miles in either direction, and they have no boat. The rabbi, shrugs, and steps out and walks across the stream to the other side. The imam looks at the priest, and says “Well, if he can do it, I can do it,” and he walks across the stream to the other side. The priest looks up and down the stream, and then across. The rabbi and the imam shout to him “Are you coming or not? We don’t have all day!” The priest sighs, shrugs, and says “Well, if they can do it, I can do it!” So he steps out and… sploosh!... he’s in the water, sopping wet. The rabbi says, “What? You didn’t see the rocks?”  

So….

Can we please give Peter a break?  After all he did walk on water!  He did ask to have Jesus call him and he did step out. And he certainly got further on his walk on the water than I… and probably any of us… ever would. And even when he got frightened and began to sink, he did reach out to Jesus for help.

Not a bad performance, don’t you think? In fact, I’d say that Peter’s actions was something of a miracle! Certainly compared to the priest in my little story!

We tend to think of sinking Peter. And we say in our hearts—see? He has no faith! He couldn’t do it! It’s like that other joke about this incident ending up in the newspaper and the headline reads, “Apostle Can’t Swim!” In my minds ear, I can hear the other apostles now, kidding Peter endlessly about this and busting his chops with remarks like "you know what happens when you put The Rock on the water? It sinks!”

But in all this we forget that everything that Peter did that day was an act of faith!

That doesn’t make stepping out towards Jesus in the midst of a storm any less scary, or his impromptu swim any less important, because his experience teaches us that our faith lives best is when we focus on Jesus. But when we get distracted and feel overwhelmed, the best we can do is cry “Lord, help us!”

So, I have another riddle for you: Why did the disciples cross the lake? To get to the other side!

When the early church remembered Jesus’ miracle, they could identify with it immediately. Not because they were sailors or fishermen, but because the new, young church was like a being in a small boat on a big sea in the middle of a storm.  So, in the Gospel of Matthew (as in Mark, whose outline Matthew follows) “going to the other side (of the lake)” means going from a safe place to a new, foreign or unknown place of mission—and this was by definition a risky and stormy trip.

Matthew is telling the story of what Jesus… and how he rescued Peter… so that his church can remember what it takes to weather whatever storm we experience.

And we all experience storms. It can be a personal storm—a conflict, facing a dilemma, dealing with a difficult illness or the loss of a job. Or it can be a corporate storm—in a workplace, a family, a neighborhood or even a church. Whatever the reason and whatever the place, we are all familiar with storms. We deal with them as best we can. We try to keep the water out and try to stay afloat, even if we don’t make any headway.

Jesus walks across the water and through the storm to come to the disciples. Some paintings I have seen of this shows a serene Jesus walking across the water as peacefully as a stroll down a lane on a summer day. But I think that when Jesus walked across the water, he got wet. The storm was all around him and the wind was still wailing. The powers of the storm and the wind and sea tried to overwhelm him, but could not. He walked through the storm, not immune from its effects and fully immersed in its reality. He was not overpowered by it.

He would do that on the cross. He would face everything evil and sin has to offer, including death. He would die a true and real death, just as he faced a true and real storm on the sea that day, and he would rise from the dead. In walking on the sea in the storm, he is not just demonstrating his power, he shows us that the storm is real and that the storm does not deter or stop him.

Notice that it is only after Jesus gets into the boat, helping a wet and chastened Peter, that he stills the storm. So there are three miracles here: Jesus walks on the water. Peter walks on the water. Jesus stills the storm.  But first, people got wet.So, let’s give Peter a break. And let’s give ourselves a break, too.

There are moments (at least) when we are all of us people of “little faith.”  Martin Luther has an accurate description of us:  he said that they, and we, are Simul justus et peccator  which means "simultaneously saint and sinner".  Peter is a lot like us: a lion of the faith with a heart of gold who is at the very same dense, fearful, and reactive.

The disciples  are just like us--- faithful people on a difficult journey. A journey beset by storms and it is in the middle of the very real storm comes a very real Jesus to meet them at the scariest moment.

At the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, there is a little plaque that was given the new, young president by Admiral Hyman Rickover, who commanded the US Navy’s Submarine Service. It sat on Kennedy's desk during his presidency and it was the same plaque Rickover gave to every new captain of every boat in his command. It reads: “O God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”

Every Christian will experience storms. Baptism does not make us waterproof! We will get wet! In fact, to do the ministries we are called to do, we will be sent into some pretty thick weather! But Jesus comes to us, and he is with us in the storm. We cannot still the storm or walk on water alone. But it is Jesus who has power over the storm. The storm will not defeat Jesus—and so the storm will not defeat us! Only sometimes we have a hard time believing that! And we people of little faith, we are at once saints and sinners, need only reach out to Jesus and say “Lord, save me!” and he is there in the midst of the storm to rescue us. 

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Bulletin for Worship for the 11th Sunday after Pentecost, August 13, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the 11th Sunday after Pentecost, August 13, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on August 13, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on August 13, 2023.

Which way is "up?"

There is an old story that comes from the heady days of the space race between the USA and the former Soviet Union sixty years ago. The story goes that when Yuri Gagarin, the first person to fly in space and orbit the earth, made his voyage in 1961, that he looked out the window and observed that he did not see God.

It gets weirder. 

It turns out that Gagarin never said anything one way or the other about seeing God out the window of Vostok-1! But we do know this: in the days before his rocket lifted off from Star City on the Wednesday after Orthodox Easter, Gagarin took his daughter, Yelena, to be baptized.

The only record of the infamous comment in fact comes from a speech by Nikita Khrushchev in the month or two after the flight. And he didn’t quote Gagarin but rather, in an attempt to mock religion, said what Gagarin didn’t see. The Western press, perhaps spotting an opportunity for propaganda (or else not being able to understand Russian) immediately attributed the words to Gagarin. 

I wonder if this comment, and the minor media and geo-political flap that arose from it, didn’t inspire a 1963 film Heavens Above!, where Peter Sellers plays a naïve but well-meaning vicar accidently appointed to a snobbish parish but who did exactly what Jesus taught: he gave away food, sold all his (and his parish’s) possessions, and welcomed the poor into his church, becoming such an annoyance that he is shot into space as the new Bishop of Outer Space, orbiting the earth reading the psalms over the radio from his space capsule. 

The misquote attributed to Gagarin was definitively answered by three American astronauts, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman as they orbited the moon in Apollo 8 seven years later on Christmas Eve, 1968. The three astronauts took turns reading Genesis 1:1-10, the creation story, on the same flight that gave us the iconic image of the earth rising over the horizon of the moon.

The geography of holiness is a tricky and dangerous thing!

The Feast of the Ascension, which comes forty days after Easter, describes and celebrates the return of the living, crucified, and resurrected Jesus to heaven. Many people, especially today when we can peer into deep space at other galaxies, get hung up on what is meant by “up.”

What is described in both the Book of Acts and in the Gospel of Luke is not a mere disapparation. Jesus doesn’t just disappear into the ether, but instead physically rises up into the sky, leaving the disciples staring into the heavens, mouths agape, until an angel comes and tells them to “snap out of it!” and come back to earth.

As sophisticated as we are, no matter how many airline flights we take, and no matter how many space shots we’ve witnessed, we still tend to think of heaven as “up” and hell as “down”, with us living somewhere in the middle. But as interesting as this cosmological hot-hero sandwich might be, the real significance of the Ascension is not geography but relationship!

If you turn to the catechism in the Book of Common Prayer, you will discover that “the mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” (p. 854)

In both the Gospel of Luke and in the Book of Acts, before he returns to heaven, Jesus tells his friends and apprentices to say put, and await the gift that God will send them.

He also teaches them one last time how everything they have seen and heard fits together as God intended. We discover that the disciples were not powerless nor afraid but spent their time together in what must have seemed like a transformed community: they prayed and sang and worshipped. They were not hiding but lived out in the open going between their home(s) and the Temple through the streets of Jerusalem!

What changed was the geography of holiness. Their place, their city, once a place of foreboding and death, is now a place of wonder and worship. They saw the world and their place in it with new eyes, and this even before the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, would arrive in another ten days!

You see, the Ascension didn’t just take Jesus back into heaven, into God’s realm in the cosmos, the Ascension revealed how the friends and apprentices of Jesus were now themselves drawn living in a new relationship with God and each other through Christ. They were changed. Their relationships with each other and even, in their eagerness, with the world was transformed.

The Ascension shows us the sneakiness of God. Its importance is exactly backwards from what we expect. We think it is about going “up,” when in fact it is God coming “down,” tuning our hearts and our senses towards Christ! The Ascension is daily living the prayer we pray every day: that God’s work is being done on earth—all around us! —just as it is in heaven!

So which way is “up?”

The Ascension shows us that as we are drawn to Christ, to each other, and to the world, we are being drawn to God. That way is “up!”

In God’s strange incarnational economy, Christ draws us towards heaven while at the same time showing us the only place we can really find that God is right here-- where we live, work, study, and play. The Ascension shows us that God’s power and healing is not reserved for the someday but is ready for us now. The Ascension demonstrates that in all of our everyday living, the Risen and Ascended Christ continues to be present.

The Ascension reminds us, as Orthodox bishop Metropolitan Anthony Bloom once said, “that the realm of God is dangerous. You must enter into it and not just seek information about it.” Look at what happens in Luke and Acts. Jesus draws to heaven and invites us to work in The City—in the places and in the relationships where God has placed you. And the only place where we can receive “power from on high” is in “the city,” where we his people live, pray, work, and worship.

When we do heavenly worship, with glorious music, we usually think that we are drawing ourselves towards heaven—and we are—but we are also witnessing to the reality that God is all the time bringing heaven to earth. I told you… God is sneaky that way.

This is the geography of the holy. As God’s people, the more we are drawn to heaven the more we live in service to the world; the more we are drawn to that ascended vision, the more we are invited to stay in the city. In the geography of the holy, we don’t need to go elsewhere to find God because the place where we find the power of God is right here all along!

It is said by some who knew him, that Yuri Gagarin carried in his pocket a small icon, right up until he died in a plane crash in 1968. I don’t know. But I do know this: we here in this city, in this place, in our witness, worship, and in our holy work, we baptized people are icons of the holy. What God is doing on earth with us now is what happens in heaven, just as Jesus said when he taught us to pray.

In the Ascension, we are invited to at once look up and see heaven and go out into the city and so inhabit the geography of the holy.

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Bulletin for Worship for the Seventh Sunday of Easter-- Sunday After the Ascension , May 21, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for 7 Easter A- Sunday after the Ascension, May 21, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on May 21, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on May 21, 2023.

Increasing our faith bit by bit

It’s that time of year, when your phone rings and you pull out it out of your pocket and… it is someone doing a survey. I don't know about you but sometimes I just hang up… sometimes I bite and answer the question.

Well, I don’t think that Survey Monkey has anything to worry about, but I want to do my own unscientific survey. Right here. Right now. Here’s what we’ll do: Using a scale from this small (finger and thumb close together) to this big (arms wide apart) answer these questions: 1. How much faith do you want? 2. How much faith do you have? 3. How much faith do you think you need?

Well, you’re not alone. Jesus’ disciples felt like they needed an infusion of some faith because they are feeling, well, a little overwhelmed.

In this second of three parts of the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is journeying towards Jerusalem. On the way, Jesus teaches the life of discipleship—about how to do and learn God’s work. Jesus talks about hospitality, welcoming and helping strangers, visiting prisoners. He talks about finding lost coins, seeking lost sheep and tells stories about prodigal sons, the rich man and Lazarus, and dishonest managers. Then he really lays it on in Chapter 17, which we heard today, by saying if you cause anyone to sin, you may as well be wearing cement overshoes and sleeping with the fishes! Jesus says you must forgive those who sin seven times a day…and that’s just for starters! Look how Jesus is often startled by his disciples lack of faith. We hear him say “You have such little faith?” more than once. “Where is your faith?” he asks on the stormy sea.

Whew! Is it any wonder the disciples cry out, “Increase our faith?” I mean with every passing step and every new parable, they see the job getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

It is a familiar cry. Whenever the church is faced with challenges, we say we need more: we need more resources, we need more planning, we need more people! The job is so big, this Gospel ministry we’ve been called to, it naturally seems as if we need more, more, more of everything before we can possibly do what Jesus calls us to do!

So, all we all know just how the disciples are feeling. We feel like we could do more if only we had our act together. We put off leading Bible study until we know more about the Bible. Or we put off increasing our pledge until we are making just a bit more money. Just tap into those feelings of “need more” before listening to Jesus’ response.

I am reminded of a cartoon I saw in the New Yorker. It shows a man crawling through the blazing hot desert past one glass of water after another. He says, “Half empty. Half empty. Half empty.”

Jesus’ response to his disciples cry for more faith is to tell us that you do not need to increase your faith. All you just need is the tiniest bit of faith imaginable. You don’t need this much (arms wide), you only need this much (finger and thumb close together.) A grain of mustard seed’s worth of faith can empower you to do great things.

Our catechism in the Book of Common Prayer tells us that we are to bear witness to Christ wherever we may be, and “according to the gifts given us, to carry on Christ’s work of reconciliation in the world.” This is the definition of lay ministry in the church. For this we were baptized.

Even so, there are days when we feel overwhelmed. There is so much more to do and it seems like there is so little of us. In today’s epistle, I think that Paul’s disciple Timothy was having one of those days…or weeks…and that prompted Paul to write a letter to his friend. Once Timothy was Paul’s scribe, his servant, his assistant. Now Paul is in jail and Timothy is out there doing the work that Paul started: planting new Christian communities and teaching the members about the faith. He is feeling a little overwhelmed. He is asking “give me more faith.”

Paul tells him some of the things he can rely on to deepen his faith: rest on the traditions he received; look to the examples of others he knows whose faith bore them up when things were tough; stick to the teachings and patterns of the Church.

And this is why I so appreciate our Prayer Book tradition. When I have run out of steam, when I find that I have no words to pray, I find the gift of the prayer book, the rhythm of prayer it sets out, reminds me that the rest of the church is praying if not the very same words at least something very close. I don’t have to make it all up and I am not alone.

I don’t know about you but knowing that I don’t have to invent it or make it up as I go. It is good to know that I am somehow surrounded by not only the saints living and dead, but also the prayers of all those people who read the Daily Office, who read Forward Day-by-Day, or who say a little prayer before their meals, or who also set out and do the work of God in their homes, their jobs, their schools and in the church—this is a real source of comfort and strength.

Jesus hears that we want this much faith, and he knows that we feel as if we only have this much. With all the pain and brokenness out there, it can all seem pretty overwhelming. But Jesus reminds us to watch out for those mustard seeds. The way we grow our faith in bit by bit by bit. 

I am no gardener, but I do know that there are some plants that once you set them loose in a garden, they take over everything. Mustard, they tell me, is one of those plants. You may have one tiny seed, but plant it in the right place and soon you don’t have one mustard plant. You have mustard plants everywhere.

Jesus is saying we could, with just a little faith, we can do the work of restoring one another and all of creation into unity God and each other in Christ. Jesus is saying that with even the smallest of starts, even as little as this (fingers close together) we can (and do!) transform and change the world.

Bit by bit by bit.

Trust what you have – what you have been given. Trust what you have to give. It is more than enough. You can uproot trees. You can move mountains. The lame will walk, the blind will see. Loaves multiply so there’s enough to feed everyone. As you sow, you shall receive. As you follow Christ, you will begin to lead. If only you have faith as small as a mustard seed.

And allow your faith to grow... bit by bit by bit.

I don’t need to do a survey… All this week, I have been watching ordinary, workaday Christians doing amazing acts of charity and care and love. I’ve seen people checking in on neighbors, friends, and fellow St. John's parishioners before, during and after the storm this week. Along with your friends at Good Neighbors, we'll fill up a van full of  bottled water, food, and household supplies, and we'll take it to our neighbors and partners at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, just a short distance from here. They are filling up a U-Haul truck with supplies going to Naples and not just from us but folks from St. Alfred's and other Episcopal churches in our Deanery plus other churches and synagogues in our neighborhood are joining in. And the wider church and faith community are doing their part, too. Episcopal Relief and Development, Lutheran Social Services, and Church World Service are all on the ground in the areas hit by the Hurricane, not just in Florida, but in South Carolina, and all along the Atlantic Coast, just as they were there after Hurricane Fiona after it hit Puerto Rico and other places in the Caribbean.

The funny thing is that most of the folks I saw doing these ordinary acts of service may or may not have been conscious of their faith at work, but there it was. It may have seemed this small to them, it might have seemed pretty ordinary; just fit into a busy schedule (as in "I'm already at the store, let me pick up an extra case of water to take to church....") From that angle, it might have looked like a teeny tiny bit... but it looked this big to me! And this is how the reign of God is built, bit by graceful bit by generous bit.

So here’s the question: How much faith do you have? Probably more than you think!

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Here is a link to the bulletin for the Seventeen Sunday after Pentecost  at St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater

Here is a link to the Scripture readings.

Here is a link to a video of the sermon.

Here is a link to a video of the liturgy.