Reflection on the 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Sometimes you see a collection of funny church signs. Here’s one that always makes me laugh:

Sunday’s text for the sermon will be “Jesus Walks on Water.” Wednesday’s Bible study is titled “Searching for Jesus.”

Yes, today we read that Jesus walks on water. Peter rushes out to meet him, looks around, gets scared and sinks. We’re like Peter. Mostly, we hesitate and sink. Those funny church signs are right. Like the Wednesday night Bible study, we continue to search for Jesus. 

It was a dark and stormy night when Jesus went walking out on the lake. We have plenty of stormy nights. And we have a human reluctance to go out walking to meet him, out on that stormy water. Really, we’re less like Peter and more like the other disciples cowering in the boat. Today marks the 81^st anniversary of dropping an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan. That’s just one stretch of all the stormy water that’s tossing our little boats. We’ve budgeted a trillion dollars to make new nuclear weapons, but we’re running out of regular old interceptor missiles.

One year on Aug. 5 I was going to Albuquerque for a demonstration and an action. I had a long layover, and I read most of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” about the first three months or so in Hiroshima after the bomb dropped. That reading is a frame for my awareness of the suffering of war. It was like sitting in the boat, sitting with the storm. Spiritual advisers and psychologists, too, advise us sometimes to just sit with the storm – the grief or fear or pain. Sit with it. That’s what I did in the airport for four hours, sit with a not-very-long book about the aftermath of the atomic bomb. Yes, I’d say it was a search for Jesus.

We all sit with sorrow and grief and pain. Sometimes we jump up out into the storm to meet Jesus, and sometimes we cower in the boat, overwhelmed by the suffering.

Sit here for a few moments, as if you are the Apostles in the boat before Jesus gets there. Consider any war site, any bomb, even a little one. Or consider a migrant in detention or a child who comes home to no parents; they’re taken by ICE. Or being hungry. Or being sick and poor. For a moment we’ll sit in our own boat, rocked by the storm of our own grief. 

Pause for a moment.

Now look up and see Jesus walking through the war zone. We do our best to greet him, to walk out into the danger ourselves. In moments of great grace we do meet him in the midst of our own suffering. Other times, we feel alone in the storm. We can’t find him. Turns out that joke I told at the beginning has a little bite to it. 

I’m grateful I can still go out and hold a sign for an hour. I’m not too likely to travel across the country again to risk arrest. And I’m acutely aware that I’m preaching today to people who feel the pain of injustice at least as keenly as I do – but we are limited in energy and physical capacity. None of us are likely to actually be in a small boat in a storm.

But we grieve. We pray. We talk with our families. We write letters. We keep praying. We keep searching for Jesus. And in our hearts and sometimes in our actions we leap up to greet him on stormy waters.