RCL Proper 19A
9 August 2020
Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral
New Westminster BC
Learning How to Run the Rapids
Twice in my life I’ve had the opportunity to go white-water rafting. Although I was a good swimmer in my younger days, I’ve always harboured a fear of drowning. Riding the rapids on those two trips allowed me to confront my fears in a somewhat controlled setting.
When you go white-water rafting, the first day or so is on quieter waters where you and your fellow rafters learn how to work together as a team under the leadership of a guide. You also get a basic course on how to ‘read’ a river, so that you can identify submerged rocks and hazards and to discern how the various currents and eddies will influence your passage through a particular section of the river.
During my first rafting trip, when I was seventeen, the practice and the orientation paid off. I was in the smallest of our three rafts with three other Scouts and our guide. We were going through one of the most difficult and dangerous sections of the river. Just above the rapids we had done some reconnaissance and a couple of practice manoeuvres. We knew we wanted to avoid one particular set of rapids. We watched the two larger rafts pass through the rapids and then tie up on the river bank below the rapids.
We set off and quickly hit the rough water. A sealed metal container that had not been tied down tightly enough came loose and knocked out our guide who was also our steersman. After a few moments of panic, we quickly recovered but the current took us straight into the rapids we’d hoped to avoid. A huge wave took us under for a brief moment, although it seemed to last much longer. We popped up and paddled over to the river bank where the rest of our group were waiting. We patched up our guide, bailed out the water and tried to regain our composure.
Looking pack from a distance of fifty years I remember this as one of the most remarkable experiences in my life. But fifty years ago my feelings were far less nostalgic, I can assure you.
Following Jesus is rarely smooth sailing.
For the disciples of Jesus their association with his mission and ministry was becoming more and more demanding and risky. By this point in Matthew’s telling of the story of Jesus, the crowds are growing, the religious authorities are becoming more suspicious and hostile and Jesus has started to delegate more and more responsibility to his inner circle.
No matter how we hear today’s gospel, the waters, whether real or figurative, the waters around Jesus and his disciples were indeed becoming more and more wild and unsettling. The boat of fellowship in which the inner circle of disciples were travelling with Jesus was becoming more cramped and perhaps even more unstable in the face of the political, social and religious winds that were blowing ever stronger in Roman Palestine.
So after a miraculous feeding of thousands of people, surely another straw threatening to break the patience of the religious and political authorities, Jesus sends his disciples off across the Sea of Galilee while he takes a break. The Sea of Galilee is beautiful but like Lake Superior sudden storms can quickly rise up and become deadly. The peril that the disciples is real and death is lapping at the gunnels of their small fishing boat.
Then they see him. Is he Death’s messenger coming to take them to Sheol? Even if it is Jesus, how many rabbis do they know who can walk safely on the waters of a stormy lake? Their fear and apprehension are perfectly normal reactions to their perilous situation and to the ghostly apparition approaching the boat. Just like Peter, I’d want some sort of identification before venturing out into the unknown on the word of a person who has just become a bit more mysterious.
We’ve weathered many storms.
A number of biblical scholars and theologians have suggested that every five hundred years or so the Christian movement undergoes a time of testing and reformation. Around the year 500, Christians began to be the dominant religious group within the boundaries of the Roman Empire after centuries of exclusion and persecution. A movement was now a growing institution. Around the year 1000 Christians found themselves split into eastern and western branches, confronted by the growth of Islam and the collapse of what was left of the Roman imperial structures. Around 1500 Christian entered into that conflict that split western Christians into a number of competing and sometimes warring tribes.
As tempting as it is to focus on the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to recognize that the rapids we are passing through began long before 2019 turned into 2020. We can choose to bemoan the difficulties we’ve been facing and long for the restoration of the ways things were or we can practice some new manoeuvres, scout out the river and plunge in.
This is a congregation that has already practiced new manoeuvres. We take our worship life seriously and seek to make it open to all, whether old-timers or newcomers or in-between. We have embraced the ministry of all people whom God has called into the life of faith.
This is a congregation that has scouted out the river that we are navigating. We know the needs of community whether we’re speaking about affordable housing, food security and a safe place to meet for community partners who share our commitment to the well-being of this city and all who live here. We continue to ask questions and ponder how we might better serve the people Lillian Daniels, an American theologian, calls the four ‘None’s’. [1]
1. “No Way. This person has made a deliberate and well-thought-out decision not to attend church, often in reaction to a genuine hurt.
2. “No Longer. This person used to attend church, but doesn’t anymore and doesn’t particularly miss it.
3. “Never Have. This person has never experienced church, and may be the grown child of parents in one of the first two groups.”
4. “Not Yet. These people may be curious about church and may choose to show up.”
These four groups are the currents in the river we navigate as Christians living in the twenty-first century on the Pacific coast.
This is a congregation that has plunged into these waters. No doubt COVID-19 has made our work a little bit harder. But the work was hard to begin with, so adding a viral difficulty factor makes things just a bit more interesting and the successes just a bit sweeter.
The good news is that we are not alone. We are part of a wider network of Christians who are navigating the same waters as we are. When we are frightened or uncertain, this wider network reaches out to us as surely as Jesus reached out to Peter.
The good news is that we have spiritual resources in the Scriptures we read and proclaim every time we gather for worship. We have the gift of the Spirit who shows us the way forward when we pause long enough to listen carefully to the whisper of its wisdom. We have the sure knowledge that God in Christ offers us a vision of the world as it can and, in God’s good time, will be, the haven we draw nearer to with every breath we take.
Right now I’m sure things look a little bit daunting, just as my rafting adventure did fifty years ago. But just wait. Five years from now, ten years from, fifty years from now, we’ll look back and know that these are remarkable times and that we are a remarkable people sealed with the Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.
[1] Lillian Daniels, Tired of Apologizing for a Church I Don’t Belong To (New York, NY: Faith Words, 2017), 39.
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