In the same boat

 AUGUST 28TH, 2023

It’s an obvious metaphor, isn’t it? When somebody is stressing out, panicking over a situation that, actually, we are all facing together? We’re all in the same boat, mate. Working together is essential here - if we all jump overboard and strike out in different directions it won’t end well. At the end of the day we do better when we work together - we’re all in the same boat.

And that’s why the Gospel writer's image of the disciples in the boat at sea is used for a passage that contains an important lesson about the Church on its stormy missionary journey throughout human history. From the very earliest years of Christian history, the image of a boat was carved on Catacomb walls as a symbol of the Church, and it's why the body of a church building is referred to in most Christian traditions as a nave (which comes from the Latin for ‘ship’). You come to church on a Sunday morning, you’re in the navy! The symbol of the Uniting Church, even today, is a boat. We’re all in it together, and the boat of the Church sails precariously on the sea of cynicism, worldliness and oppression in the hope of reaching safe harbour with its cargo of human souls. It’s a particularly good metaphor for modern Christians whose faith often struggles with the tension between a private piety focussed on getting to heaven - and discipleship as a voyage of transformation and service best undertaken in company.

A couple of things about this story, that Matthew adapts from the earlier version in Mark’s Gospel. And the first thing to notice is that Jesus has sent the disciples off without him - on a dangerous night-time journey across the famously capricious Sea of Galilee. It’s not the first scary sea voyage in Matthew’s Gospel - remember Jesus asleep in the boat in Chapter Eight? In today’s story, Jesus sends them off by themselves. Do you see the metaphor at work? This is the Church as it has been through history, sent by the one in whom we experience God with us - but at the same time alone, and as this story tells us, a bit battered. St Matthew, writing near the end of the first century AD, is talking to a Church that remembers the stories of Jesus’ earthly ministry, but that badly needs some encouragement to have faith in the presence of Jesus within their own community and their own challenges. How, they needed to know, and so do we, can we experience the presence of Jesus given his absence?

The second thing to notice is that the boat - a little human thing, a construction of wood and rope and canvas - is on the sea. The Hebrews, with their long ancestral memories of being nomads and herders, had a deep distrust of the sea. Throughout the Bible, the sea represents chaos and hidden danger, not to mention monsters - the waters of precreation held back by the creative act of God in Genesis, chapter one, for example - representing all the anxieties and dangers that threaten to break in and overwhelm the structure of the created order. In case you think I’m exaggerating, think of the description of the new earth in Revelation 21, verse 1: Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.

So in the middle of the barely contained chaos and destruction of the world, the disciples - we ourselves, actually - are left alone in a flimsy boat-church which frankly doesn’t seem up to the job. It leaks and it creaks. Incidentally, please don’t be downhearted whenever you hear of some super-church with programs galore and expensive plant and equipment and multiple full-time staff and hundreds of members. We’re called to be faithful, not successful, and the measure of your faith is not the size of your boat. It takes courage to put out to sea in a little wooden boat, and God’s people have been doing it for two millennia.

So here we are in our little fishing boat with its fragile wooden ribs and Jesus has pushed us out from shore and it’s the middle of the night. The Gospel tells us we are getting buffeted. As God’s people, we have believed the good news but we are still living in a world that doesn’t feel very safe.

A world in which the seas - as matter-of-fact scientists keeping reminding us - are literally heating and expanding and will inundate much that is valuable in human civilisation - if we continue to ignore the boundaries of our planet home. A world in which human genius and the logic of greed and overconsumption is poisoning our home and increasing the frequency of natural disasters like floods and fires and pandemics and giving us more and more of war and economic upheaval. A world in which poverty and suffering is unfairly distributed and even in our lucky country has begun to feel chaotic and unsafe.

The sea represents the repressed fears and chaos of our own imaginations and unresolved conflicts. In our own country, the hard question of justice and reconciliation with Aboriginal people is having another necessary moment. Harsh voices are insisting that First Nations people in Australia, who over the last two hundred years have been treated as less than equal, as less deserving and less entitled, still don’t deserve to have their voices heard on matters that affect them. It’s a harshness that comes from an unhealed wound in our national psyche, from a grievous unacknowledged guilt that stems from past and recent injustice.

The chaos is not always external, not always shared or collective. Made in the image of God though we are, we don’t know ourselves very well. All that we refuse to acknowledge about ourselves - the things we are ashamed about, the desires and fears we don’t want to own up to, the things about ourselves we learned as children to think of as not very nice - we push them down, beneath the surface. Nothing to see here. I’m not like that.

And the things we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves can take on a life of their own as a sort of shadow, and we project onto others the motivations or inadequacies we don't want to recognise in ourselves. To paraphrase St Irenaeus, the glory of God is a human being fully alive, but the human soul that does not know or love itself is also closed to the vision of its Maker. As Christians, we need always to keep in mind Jesus’ pithiest and most frequent teaching: do not be afraid.

But to return to the story. Because Jesus in this story also is doing what only God can do. Incidentally, we don’t read the story in Matthew’s Gospel the same way it would have been heard by Matthew’s 1st century Jewish Christian community. We modern people vex ourselves with our understanding of scientific absolutes like gravity - how could he walk on water? For ancient communities hearing this story, the real miracle - the real challenge in this story would have been that Jesus is doing here what only God can do! In the Hebrew Bible there are no qualms about breaking the laws of physics - but only God is at home in the depths of the sea! For example in Genesis, chapter one, the spirit of God hovers over the waters of pre-creation. In Job chapter 38, only God can stretch out the heavens and trample the waves of the sea. In the aprocryphal work, the Wisdom of ben Sirach, ch. 24, the Wisdom of God traverses the depths of the ocean. It is only God who can contain the fearsome monsters of the deep. Jesus, who at the beginning of this story is shown praying, in dependence on God, is revealed at the end as the one in whom God is fully present.

So, Jesus might have sent us on this voyage, in the frail and sometimes foolish boat of the Church. But we are not alone, and the one in whose name we are sent is the one who is in control of all that terrifies us. In fact, in the middle of the night, and in the deep places of your soul, is where God’s Holy Spirit is most likely to be encountered. Don’t be afraid to speak out for justice, and compassion and generosity.

But Peter. He is a klutz, of course. And appropriately, he is also representative of us. I think what happens next is not about Peter having enough faith to get out of the boat but not quite enough to stay upright on the waves. Because, remember? in the terms of the story, it’s not Peter’s prerogative - or yours or mine - to walk on water. Only God can trample our monsters down. I think the real lesson might be - stay in the boat. Peter’s response is typical of the individualistic sort of faith that we are not called to. For Matthew, the Gospel writer, the problem with Peter was that he wanted proof of the presence of Jesus, and so he got out of the boat. He did have a little faith, and so do we, and Jesus gently rebukes us when we try to test him. But, stay in the boat. It’s where we are called to be, together in the boat of the Church in the middle of the monstrous ocean that, actually, is also in God’s hands. We don’t know what lies ahead in the voyage but we are not alone.