trust – By Another Road

Here, Here: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 9 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 14:22-33.

About halfway across the lake, I knew we should never have gotten into the boat.

It was late December, and my mom and I were traveling through the mountain highlands of Guatemala, where she was living at the time, teaching in an international school in the capital city. Just after Christmas, we’d made the popular trip up to Lake Atitlán, one of the most beautiful lakes in the world. Its deep waters are flanked by precipitously high volcanic mountainsides, and there are small villages sprinkled along the shore, and one afternoon we found ourselves needing to cross over to the other side.

And so we got into the boat.

It was a lancha, a small motorboat used regularly as a water taxi across the lake since the mountain roads are narrow and dangerous in that area. And at first, the trip was lovely—the broad blue water, the high clouds and the breeze and the green slopes arcing upward into the vault of the sky.

But somewhere about halfway across, far too late to turn back, the choppy waves started to turn into swells, and the boat was tossed around and water started coming over the low sides, and I realized three things at once.

First, we were the only two passengers on this boat, when usually they should be packed with people. Second, I saw no lifejackets. And third, as I looked around us across the wide, turbulent waters, there were no other boats making the crossing. We were alone. And the landscape that had looked beautiful and exciting just a few minutes prior was suddenly wild and terrible and we were very, very small upon it.

If you’ve ever had a moment where you had to stare your own mortality in the face, perhaps you can imagine the hollow-in-your-belly, eyes-wide-open feeling that hits you when there is no illusion of safety left to hide behind, and there is only you and this moment and the terrible, fearsome power of being alive and wanting to stay that way.

And if you can imagine this, then you can also imagine what the disciples are going through this morning in our Gospel reading.

Because they are in their own little lancha, crossing to the other side of a stormy lake. We focus a lot on Peter’s part, but we shouldn’t skip past that initial, understandable feeling of terror as the waves tossed them around in the boat. We might even wonder whether they felt a little betrayed—didn’t Jesus tell them to make this crossing? Why would he send them out and leave them alone in this dangerous place?

It is the perplexity that comes when we realize a godly life is no guarantee of a comfortable life.

Because ultimately, friends—and you probably don’t need me to tell you this—we can all be very good little boys and girls, we can follow all the Lord’s commandments, and yet we will all end up in the lancha at some point in our lives—we all find ourselves in a moment when the waves are high and the sides of the boat are low and we forgot our lifejacket somewhere and it is far too late to turn back.

It may come in the form of a death or a divorce or a diagnosis or simply a sense of lostness, loneliness or regret. But we all end up there eventually. As do communities and countries, in their own cycles of flourishing and floundering. We cannot evade the storm forever. We pray to God, lead us not into temptation, but oh, the tempests still come of their own accord.

And when they do come…this is where a lot of popular takes on Christian theology sort of fall apart for me.

Have you ever been in the middle of a really hard moment or season of your life and heard it said: don’t worry! Just have more faith! Just pray a little harder! God won’t give you more than you can take! And they might even cite Gospel stories like today’s. You of little faith, why did you doubt?

It’s the spiritual equivalent of someone giving you a pat on the head and saying “there, there.” There, there, you’re overreacting. There, there, everything works out for the best. There, there, don’t rock the boat. Don’t disturb the peace for the rest of us, those of us who are trying really hard to pretend the storms only come for somebody else. There, there.

I don’t have much use for that type of Christian comfort.

Because our story today indicates something far more profound than a pat on the head. In stories like this, God does not say, there, there. No, to the disciples, Jesus says, here, here. He says I am here, here with you, in the midst of the worst. I am here, here, precisely where you didn’t want to end up. I am here, when the waves are too high and your heart is breaking and you have nothing left to hide behind. I am here, here, right here, and I am asking you to be here with me, too.

As we mature, we come to see that entering the storm is not an impediment to following Jesus. It is a requirement of following Jesus.

Because faith is about looking hard at life and choosing to revere its often frightening beauty. It’s about holding onto each other through the rise and fall of the times. Faith is about facing the darkness and speaking peace into it. It is about standing in the storms we prayed would never come and still whispering words of trust on our trembling lips.

And when we do…here, here, God says. Life and death and heaven and earth are here, here, now. Come out and stand here with me.

Why? What does it do for us?

Well, for one, it makes us vividly grateful. Some of the times I have felt closest to God and neighbor were not the good times, but the tough ones. Facing the storm also makes us, hopefully, less petty and critical of one another, a bit gentler with them and with ourselves, too, because we realize that we are all just in this little lancha together, making our way through the waves.

And hopefully that helps us get clear on the things that matter most and choosing them, day by day. The things that Jesus constantly shows us: Mercy. Compassion. Ethical clarity. Charity of heart and generosity of spirit. Careful discernment and bold conviction that love is the only truly saving power there is. These are virtues born of the storms of life, not the avoidance of them. Here, here, where it is indeed possible to sink beneath the waves, is the only place you can learn them.

You might wonder why I haven’t dwelt much on the fact that Jesus walks on water. That’s usually the headline of this story. But it can be a stumbling block, too, because I think we tend to equate walking on water with somehow transcending the problems and the limitations of this life and thinking that’s what Christian life is about—that having “enough” faith will allow us to escape the waves, to never sink.

But if you hear nothing else today, I need you to hear this. I need you to remember something important about Jesus. Something radical and transformational in my understanding of him. Something that is the opposite of a pat on the head and a “there, there” and a blithe dismissal of the storm.

It is this: Jesus does sink beneath the waves. Not here, but soon, he sinks. On the Cross, amid the tempest of our brokenness and rage, he willingly sinks.

He surrenders to the storm. He gives himself over to the chaos and descends down, down, into the deepest places of fear and sorrow. He goes down, down, down…all so that he can say to you, here, here.

Oh yes, even here, I am here. There is nowhere I will not go for you, to be with you, to find you, to bring you back, even from the very bottom.

Walking on water is a wonder. But you of little faith, why did you doubt that even if you do sink, I will be there. Wherever you go, I am already with you.

As for my Guatemala story, you can guess the ending—we made it to the other side. The lancha managed to ride the swells and we got off, seasick and teary-eyed, weak-kneed and deliriously grateful. The meal we ate that night was, perhaps, the most joyful meal I ever experienced, because it tasted like life.

And that, when you think on it, is the journey for us on this Jesus-shaped path.

We face death, and we taste life.

We huddle together among the waves and we stumble, wide-eyed, onto the shore.

We are passengers on the ship of grace, you and I, and some days we have enough faith and many days we have not nearly enough, but somehow, somehow, God keeps showing up anyway.

And he says, always, the same thing. The one true thing that can always be said of God and by God, no matter how high the waves get:

Here, here. I am here.

Fisherman: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on January 22, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 14:12-23.

And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”

My grandpa, like any person born and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, loved to go fishing. And in particular he loved to go ice-fishing.

If you are not among the hardy (foolhardy?) souls who have tried this pastime, maybe you can still picture it: a frozen lake in the dead of winter, all sentient life wisely hibernating or hunkered down in a warm place. Except for the intrepid ice-fishers, who drag their shacks and their camp chairs out onto the quiet snow-blown expanse to drill holes in the ice and to sit—in bitter cold and in pensive expectation—waiting for a bite.

I confess, the few times I went out ice-fishing with my family as a kid, I didn’t get it. I was bored and restless—and cold! I didn’t understand why anyone would willingly do this for fun, especially when you could just get fish at the grocery store. But then, I was a kid who grew up mostly in cities and in California sunshine, and the lake water didn’t run in my veins like it did for my grandpa. The stoic beauty of the ice-fisherman’s reverie was lost on me.

He would sit out on the ice, munching on a sandwich, sipping coffee from a thermos, contemplating the tree line, the sky, maybe his place in the universe; I was never quite sure. Sometimes he’d catch something, often he wouldn’t. He never seemed to mind. And truth be told, I think he liked the ritual of the trip to the lake—its sensations and its silences—just as much, if not more so, than bringing home a catch.

Now you still aren’t likely to find me out on a frozen lake these days, but as I look back, I have come to appreciate not only the spare beauty my grandpa found in ice-fishing, but also how his going out onto the ice was, in many ways, an encapsulation of who he was in the rest of his life. The quiet and the deliberative spaciousness of ice fishing were the same qualities he evoked most other days, with his family and with his neighbors and friends.

He had his hot-tempered moments, but for the most part he moved through the world with a gentle attentiveness to things and to people: content to be who he was, where he was, patient, not obsessed with the elusive big catch of one sort or another that many of us chase after. Maybe he had always been that way. Or maybe all those years of ice-fishing helped make him that way. I’m not sure, but I do know that it was a part of him.

My grandpa and his ice-fishing have been on my mind this week, of course, because Jesus, in calling the first disciples, finds a handful of fishermen by the Sea of Galilee and invites them, in a clever turn of phrase, to “fish for people” instead. It’s a beloved scene in the Gospels, but oftentimes I think we focus so much on the abruptness of the disciples’ response—how they seem to drop everything and follow Jesus on the spot—that we don’t spend a lot of time pondering what they were doing beforehand: namely, their original vocation as fishermen. I wonder, though, why Jesus singles them out, these men on the shore, among all the other people he might have invited into his circle.

Was Jesus calling them just because they happened to be there, without regard for their previous life experience? Was he, in effect, asking them to become someone entirely new, or did he see some particular potential in these men with their nets and their boats and their weather-beaten faces?

Given who Jesus is, I like to think he saw something already formed in them after a lifetime of traversing open waters and mending things that are frayed and waiting, day after day, with persistent hope for an unseen harvest from the deep. I like to think he saw something that made these fishermen exactly the right people for the journey that was about to unfold.

Because I believe that who we are and what we have done with our lives, no matter how simple or quiet or humble, matters to God. It matters in the Kingdom of God.

In the same way that my grandpa’s ice fishing and the rest of his life seemed to mutually inform one another, perhaps these Galilean fishermen already had what Jesus needed them to have as future apostles. Maybe their decision to follow him, as dramatic and abrupt as it seems, was not, in fact, a clean break from their past. It was not a rejection of who they had been, a rinsing off of the smell of fish and mud, but an embrace of what these things had taught them—it was the decision to trust that their lives, their skills, and their gifts might be brought forth in a new way for the purposes of God.

Maybe Jesus did not call them away from themselves and their original vocation, but deeper into those things. For he did not say follow me and I will make you something other, something better than a fisherman, but follow me, and I will make you fishers of people. In other words, I will make you the fullness of who you already are.

And so those fisherman had the courage to follow him away from the shore because they knew that they had what they needed within them; they were already enough. And if that is so, then perhaps we have what we need, too, perhaps we are already enough for wherever God is calling us to go. Not running away from ourselves but going deeper into ourselves so that we might embody what God created us to be.

And I know all of us, myself included, have parts of ourselves, parts of our story, parts of our personality, parts of our past, that feel worthless, parts we would just as soon leave behind. The embarrassments that enmesh us in a net of shame. The regrets that linger on us like the scent of lake water. The things that prevent us from believing we have anything of value to offer.

But Jesus is standing there, seeing all of it, knowing all of it, and he is saying, yes, you. I’ve been looking for someone just like you. Follow me. Follow me as you are. Follow me with what you have, no matter how great or small. Fishermen, follow me. Tax collectors, follow me. Saints and sinners, follow me. The mighty and the lowly; the famous and the forgotten; everyone, follow me— for everyone is needed where we’re going. And all that you have been and known and done will be gathered in and it will be made purposeful, it will be made beautiful by my love. It will be more than enough.

That, in the end, is what I learned from my grandpa and how his quiet, patient days fishing on the ice spilled over into his quiet, patient life: to trust in the sufficiency of who you are; of what you love; of what you know. Trust it to guide you, with God’s help, into what you do not yet know. Trust that God is already at work in the small things of daily life, shaping you for the vast and timeless purposes that only God can truly understand.

And regardless of whether it is ice-fishing or mending nets on the shore of Galilee or raising your kids or caring for your neighbor or striving for your daily bread, whatever it is that has formed you into who you are today, trust that you are ready to respond when Jesus calls you. You are ready and able, not in spite of your life but because of it, because every life has potential, every one of us shimmers with the possibility of God’s glory, like ice glittering in the sun.

Follow me, Jesus says, and I will make you fish for people.

So follow him. And let him show you the blessedness of who you can still be. The blessedness of who you already are.

The Ancient and the New

It’s been one month since I arrived in Mirfield; as such, one quarter of my time here is already done. I can already sense little shifts in the landscape. The dawn is brighter as I walk up the hill to morning prayer; dusk lingers a bit longer in the church as we chant the psalms at evensong. There are changes inside of me, too. A bit less disoriented, a bit more confident of how I fit into this place.

So much has gone on since my last post. There was the somber and beautiful Ash Wednesday liturgy, when the priest drew a cross on my forehead with cool, damp ashes that had been sprinkled with holy water. A day of silent contemplation at the College to usher in Lent, during which I alternated between stillness and dizzying anxiety. A weekend trip to the ancient city of York, where I wandered alone through the medieval streets looking for a glimpse of a ghost or two. At the massive and magnificent York Minster I was stunned into silence, not simply because of its visual grandeur, but in recognition of the centuries and centuries of prayers that have been offered up into its lofty heights. I felt alone, and yet deeply connected to that never-ending litany.

This journey thus far, with its ample opportunities for reflection, have made it very clear to me how I am still learning to be a disciple of Christ on the most basic levels: to look kindly upon myself and my flaws, and those of others; to trust that God actually loves me, personally, and not just as an abstraction; to recognize that grace is imbued into everything, whether I see it or not, because God is far more than I can see, or feel, or guess at. These are simple, incomprehensible truths. I know how much I still have to grow, and yet I am also seeing more clearly how becoming a priest is less about growth and more about fully inhabiting myself as God made me. We are not asked to be perfect as priests, but we are asked to be deeply, authentically ourselves, and that is the hardest thing of all sometimes. That goes for non-priests, too, of course.

Lest you think my entire month has been pensive introspection, there have been tons of joyful moments, too. Case in point: on Sunday afternoon I went to lunch with a classmate; we drove out into the countryside and the hills were so green and vast I wanted to cry. Afterwards we drove up to the Victoria Tower, an old observation structure perched far above the town of Huddersfield, and the wind was blowing and the clouds were scudding across the sky and I thought, yes, to be alive is a very good thing. To be here, breathing and breathless and crying from the wind and the wonder is exactly as it must be. Come, Lord. Come, spring. I am broken open, and I am ready.

Tea with the Monks

Sundays are a whirlwind at Mirfield. Mattins (morning prayer) at 7:30 with fellow students and the monks of of the Community of the Resurrection, then a sung Mass til 9, and then I dash off to my field placement church(es) in town: St. Mary’s in the center of Mirfield at 9:45, followed by St. John’s in the nearby village of Upper Hopton at 11:15. Four worship services before noon!

After Sunday lunch back at the College there is a bit of a pause when students are welcome to go up for tea in the large home where the monks live. I didn’t go my first Sunday and decided I would venture up today to meet some of the brethren (as the monks are collectively called).

A classmate and I got into a long conversation with Fr. Eric, who has been a monk with the Community since 1961 when he arrived at Mirfield as an “unwilling” young novice–he said that as a young man he felt the call to monastic life but he was resistant to it at the same time. He admitted that he even kept his luggage packed for the first three weeks at the monastery, ready (hoping?) at any moment to be dismissed and to go back to his regular life. And yet nearly 60 years later he is still there, still working out his calling, still seeking God each day in worship and contemplation.

Given my own struggles (see previous post) I was deeply comforted by Fr. Eric’s frankness. Do we ever really know FOR SURE that the thing we are doing is the only thing we could have/should have done? Whether it’s a career, a relationship, or any other major life decision, we always step into it with an element of blind trust, because we can never know how it will turn out. I asked Fr. Eric if he ever reached a place in his life where he ceased to struggle with his calling and he chuckled. “A retreat visitor once asked me if I ever questioned becoming a monk,” he said with a smile. “Before giving it much thought I answered her, ‘every day!'” He laughed merrily.

There are no guarantees when you commit to a relationship, even when it’s with God. There will be doubt and struggle, and sometimes you will question why on earth you are doing any of this. And when you think about it, God has no guarantees when entering into a relationship with us, either: we are fickle and resistant far more than we might like to admit.

Despite this, God remains committed, and that divine fidelity hopefully inspires our own faithfulness–to God, to each other, and to the loving commitments that we make in this life. Not out of a sense of duty, and not because we are free of doubts, but because we trust that fidelity itself is a transformative practice, no matter the outcome.

Fr. Eric then told us another story about an elderly monk who is visiting the Community right now from the northern reaches of England. He is not a member of their order, but he has a longstanding relationship with them. This particular monk lives alone on a mountaintop; he’s been there for years, waiting and hoping that some others will join him to form a community. Nobody has ever come, though, and so he lives as a de facto hermit. I was both fascinated and shaken by this image of a man waiting for a vision to come true despite all evidence to the contrary. What kind of patience and commitment must that take? Did he ever second guess his decision? How does he know that he should stay up on the mountain?

After the tea ended, with all of these thoughts lingering in my mind, we walked back through the garden towards the College building; the sun had set and the air was damp and icy. My classmate pointed toward a cluster of forlorn bushes and said that before I leave in June, they will be covered in roses. It was hard to imagine it then in the February twilight, but I imagine he must be right; the roses will arrive in their time. A few months from now, on a balmy night, the air will smell sweet and who knows what I will have learned. I can’t quite picture it, but I have to trust.