How Soon is Now?
Matthew 14:22-33
Preached at South Presbyterian Church Fellowship of Faith,
August 13, 2017
I love movies. If you know me, this is not a surprising
statement. I often speak in movie quotes or recall scenes from a favorite movie
in everyday conversation. In fact, my mom and I are at The Cinema on Goodman
and Clinton just about every week. I guess you could say it’s in my blood since
my great-uncle once owned that specific movie theatre and my mom worked there
back in the day. One thing that movies often do is play with time, specifically
the passage of time, and they do this in a variety of ways. The movie may open
with a scene and down in the bottom corner will be a date, say 1985. Stuff will
happen and after a cut or fade to black, our next scene will display 2017.
We’ve traveled 32 years in 32 seconds. Or perhaps we’ll get a grouping of
flashback scenes with a voice-over narrative explaining a series of events that
happened over say a hundred years, condensed down in to just five minutes for
us. Or, a favorite of those who make romantic-comedies, the montage. Cue the
scenes of our two romantic leads leading their unfulfilling separate lives
until the inevitable meet-cute! A whole adult life shortened into half of a
cheesy yet catchy pop song. We have become used to this idea of days, weeks,
months, or years passing like, no pun intended, no time at all.
When you combine this warping of time we have from movies
with our immediate gratification culture we live in, is it any wonder that
waiting is not high on our list of favorite things to do? If you don’t know the
answer to something, you can get it in as long as it takes you to say “Siri” or
“Alexa.” With Amazon Prime we can get items delivered in just two days. Movies
and TV shows are available as quick as signing on to Netflix or Hulu, and if
it’s Netflix original programming you don’t even have to wait for a new episode
every week. You get them all at once! We can preorder books so that they’ll be
shipped to us the day they’re released. On many dating sites and apps you can
decide within ten seconds whether or not someone is the guy or gal for you
based on a picture and a couple sentences. We don’t even like going to a
restaurant and having to wait for our food. What do you mean you cook to order?
Why can’t I get it as soon as I order it? And etcetera etcetera etcetera. So
perhaps when we hear today’s Scripture, we take the word “immediately” at face
value. But how immediate was it, especially for Peter?
Let’s look again at verses 30 and 31: “But when he noticed
the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out,
‘Lord, save me!’ Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying
to him, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’” Sure, for Jesus it probably
was immediately. But what did it feel like for Peter? How long before he
realized he was sinking? Once he realized he was sinking, how long before he
started panicking? Once he started panicking, how long before he cried out? And
how long did it feel between when he cried out and when he felt Jesus grab him?
Did time speed up like in one of our movies? Or did time slow down? Did every
second feel like a minute? Did he wonder if Jesus would in fact save him? I
think he did. I think that time seemed to slow to a crawl for Peter as he
waited to be pulled from the water. I’m sure he couldn’t think beyond one
breath to the next as he sunk further and further in to the sea, arms flailing
frantically as he tried to keep his head above water.
I can relate to Peter in today’s passage, both literally and
figuratively. I recently had the, opportunity shall we say, to try white water
rafting. Has anyone ever been? (If so) By any chance were you thrown from the
boat? I was (thrown from the boat). Twice. Considering my first words to my
friend Mike, who coordinated the trip were “Why are you trying to kill me?!” I
think you know what my thoughts on the whole event are. Anyway, the second time
I was thrown in to the rapids our safety guides threw a rope in to me. Yes, I
was wearing a helmet and a vest so perhaps I wasn’t going to drown the way
Peter thought he was, but when the water is pushing you forward and the rope
you’re trying desperately to hold on to keeps sliding through your hands, time
seems to slow down, at least in looking back. You’re trying not to swallow the
water that’s slamming in to your face and your entire focus is on the next
breath, on hoping that the rope will finally catch so you can be pulled to
safety. Now, obviously I am fine. The rope caught, I was pulled to safety, and
I got back in the boat and continued down the rest of the river without getting
thrown in again. But when I read this passage, that was the picture that first
popped in to my head, and I went from usually reading these verses thinking
“Poor Peter, you foolish man of little faith” to thinking “Dude, I understand.”
You’re trying desperately to have faith in being pulled to safety, but as the
immediacy of rescue seems to be getting farther and farther away, so does your
faith. You start embracing that doubt that in normal circumstances you can push
away rather easily.
Why is it that the times we should have the most faith we
often have the least? Because that’s the other angle of this story where I
relate to Peter. That period of time where time seems to be dragged out can
come out of that feeling that our cries for help are not being heard, so we
start to lose our faith. We sort of expect that once we cry out “Lord save me”
the response will be immediate. Once we pray for help or guidance or clarity or
an answer or a sign we say our Amen and then expect the answer to be dropped in
to our lap. Come on God, it’s been five minutes. Are you even listening? Now,
yes, sometimes immediately really is immediately. We lift something up to God
and in a relatively short time we get a response. In fact, it happens so
quickly we’ve almost forgotten we asked for it in the first place. We smile and
skip along thinking, Boy, God really does
answer prayers! Awesome!! Then, there’s those other times. When we ask and ask
and ask and we swear all we hear is crickets. We pray and we pray. We’re so
busy praying that we can’t hear the answer. Or we hear the answer but it’s not
the one we want so we keep praying. Or we’re afraid of what we might hear, so
we stop listening. Perhaps Peter was so afraid he wouldn’t be saved that rather
than opening his eyes to see Jesus standing before him with his hand
outstretched, he had his eyes closed tightly, too busy sinking to see what was
in front of him. I can just imagine Jesus standing right in front of a sinking
Peter, waving his hand right in front of Peter’s face, kind of like “Hello! I’m
right here! Open your eyes.” I can imagine how many times Jesus has done that
to each of us.
Why is it that we become too impatient when “immediately” is
in God’s time and not ours? Why aren’t we willing to wait, to draw on our faith
to get us through? What is it about waiting that freaks us out? What are we so
afraid of? Waiting for an answer should be a time to enjoy being in God’s time,
but rather than allowing ourselves to be pulled towards God, we try to pull God
toward us. We try to make God work within our parameters when God just wants us
to sit with God, to be still in God’s presence. It’s not that God doesn’t want
to answer us or chooses not to answer us, but that God is trying to have a
conversation with us in that perceived silence. When you think about it that
way, why wouldn’t we want to stop and enjoy the time of waiting? It’s so easy
for us to see waiting as an inconvenience. We have other stuff to do, after
all. People to see. Plans to make. Lives to live. We can’t do all of that if we
are busy waiting.
One of the hardest things to do is pray and feel the Spirit
saying “Wait.” I imagine the conversation going something like this:
Okay, God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit what do you say?
Wait.
What do you mean, wait?
Wait. Be patient.
Okay, but seriously, everyone is asking me what I’m going to
do here and I don’t know what to tell them.
Wait for now.
But can’t now be, well, now?
Now will come.
But when?
Soon.
How soon is soon? I can’t keep going on like this.
Wait.
Sound familiar? Theologian Howard Thurman wrote the following
in the book The Inward Journey:
“’To him
that waits, all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not
to deny in the darkness what he has seen in the light.’
“Waiting is
a window opening on many landscapes. For some, waiting means the cessation of
all activity when energy is gone and exhaustion is all that the heart can
manage. It is the long slow panting of the spirit. There is no will to will-
‘spent’ is the word. There is no hope, not hopelessness- there is no sense of
anticipation or even awareness of a loss of hope. Perhaps even the memory of
function itself has faded. There is now and before- there is no after.
“For some,
waiting is a time of intense preparation for the next leg of the journey. Here
at last comes a moment when forces can be realigned and a new attack on an old
problem can be set in order. Or it may be a time of reassessment of all plans
and of checking past failures against present insight. It may be the moment of
the long look ahead when the landscape stretches far in many directions and the
chance to select one’s way among many choices cannot be denied.
For some,
waiting is a sense of disaster of the soul. It is what Francis Thompson
suggests in the line: ‘Naked I wait Thy love’s uplifted stroke!’ The last
hiding place has been abandoned because even the idea of escape is without
meaning. Here is no fear, no panic, only the sheer excruciation of utter
disaster. It is a kind of emotional blackout in the final moment before the
crash- it is the passage through the Zone of Treacherous Quiet.
“For many,
waiting is something more than all of this. It is the experience of recovering
balance when catapulted from one’s place. It is the quiet forming of a pattern
of recollection in which there is called into focus the fragmentary values from
myriad encounters of many kinds in a lifetime of living. It is to watch a
gathering darkness until all light is swallowed up completely without the power
to interfere or bring a halt. Then to continue one’s journey in the darkness
with one’s footsteps guided by the illumination of remembered radiance is to
know courage of a peculiar kind-the courage to demand that light continue to be
light even in the surrounding darkness. To walk in the light while darkness
invades, envelops, and surrounds is to wait on the Lord. This is to know the renewal
of strength. This is to walk and faint not.”[1]
So waiting can be a good thing. God’s now does not have to be
our now. It shouldn’t be our now. Rather than waiting to be pulled from the
water to have our little faith become big faith, we should go in to the water
with big faith in the first place. Jesus is right there in front of us,
reaching out a hand, even when we don’t see it, even when it feels like it
can’t possibly be there. How soon is now? As soon as it needs to be.
AMEN.
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