(Another from our theologically liberal friend Harry Cook: this sermon is weak on ‘miracle interpretation’ and strong on pastoral psychology. Rowland).

The Religion Works

Sermons by Harry T. Cook

August 10, 2008

To read this week’s sermon “Terror,” just scroll down. Matthew’s story of Jesus walking on the water in the midst of a violent storm has been taken by many as proof that Jesus was God. The story is about something entirely different. It is about how the sincere and consistent practice of the religion Jesus apparently espoused inevitably leads one into terrifying situations. See if you agree.

Harry T. Cook

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Harry T. Cook

Matthew 14: 22-33

By Harry T. Cook

Terror, experienced outside of those frightening night-time dreams that come to all of us at one time or another, is a fairly rare experience among 21st Americans who are not, say, serving as soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan. To be sure, there are many dark corners in our cities and deserted lanes in our rural areas where, alone at night, we may feel the spine-chill of fear. But mostly we are not terrorized. The terms “terror” and “terrorism” entered our common every-day vocabulary when people in other parts of the world discovered that they could exact revenge for real and imagined offenses by engendering fear in us – and when high government officials discovered that they could take political advantage of that fear. Here are examples of terror: Imagine that you were one of the 2,900-plus persons in the twin towers of the Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, and you looked up from your desk to see a gigantic airplane speeding toward the window one foot from you at 500 miles per hour. That would be terror – but only for an instant. Imagine that you were one of the passengers on Flight 93 and knew that within minutes you would either have your throat cut by a hijacker or be vaporized as the airplane drove into the Pennsylvania countryside, engines whining at top speed. That would be terror – lasting for an eternity of minutes. If you were a Polish or German or Czech or French Jew rounded up by the SS, say, in 1944, you already knew where you were headed – to Auschwitz, or Büchenwald or Sobibor – and the long train ride, the cruel, bureaucratic treatment at the end – all terrorized you. The feeling of terror is the raw knowledge that you have no control whatsoever in a situation in which your very life is on the line – when you are seeing that airplane coming at your window, or the earth rising up at warp speed to meet your nose-diving aircraft, or when the masked gunman leaps out from behind a trash-bin or materializes along the rural path. That’s terror, and you are helpless. So in today’s gospel are Jesus’ disciples said to have been terrified not only by the storm that tossed their boat around like flotsam, but when they saw something they knew was impossible: a man walking along the crest of those swells. Now they had control neither over the storm nor over their senses. They were dying AND seeing a ghost at the same time. Out of control! The common interpretation of this story is that Jesus, an incarnation of the creator of all things, can alter the action of any one of those things (say, a body of water or a weather phenomenon). Come to Jesus, and all will be well. That’s not what the story is. The story is that the communities out of which Matthew’s gospel came were made up of people who perceived (correctly) that they were living in a tumultuous time and risking their lives in equal parts by deciding to join the breakaway movement of Jesus Judaism or to stay loyal to the continuing Judaism that was toward the end of the First Century C.E. organizing itself around rabbis and in assemblies known by their Greek name: sunagohgays or “synagogues.” And, believe me, there was a price to pay for choosing either one. That price must have been so dear that the prospect of facing the consequences either way must have been terrifying. Matthew was clearly arguing for the new Jesus movement, and, in so doing, held out the hope that the ethical teaching of Jesus which Matthew had spelled out in chapters 5, 6 and 7 of the gospel would be the lifeline in the storm. Matthew used the image of Peter taking a chance by getting out of the boat to join Jesus on the rolling seas and then sinking because he lost his nerve to illustrate what Matthew must have perceived was actually the case. The people in Matthew’s communities must have been terrified, even as they took the chance on a new thing. They might sink. They might swim. But Matthew wanted them to believe that the spirit of Jesus, their dead hero, was in or on that water with them, and therefore it was the right place to be. And that’s the message of this text for us in the eighth month of the eighth year of the first decade of the 21st Century, to wit: that the going is almost always rough if one becomes committed to the ethic of Jesus, which entails loving enemy as well as neighbor, which entails the passive resistance of turning the other cheek, which entails the volunteered long trudge of the second mile after the mandated first one – and so on. Indeed, one’s religion may be a source of comfort – that word actually meaning “with strength” – but it may also be at the same time a source of terror. That’s because religion of the kind vended by gospel Christianity carries the one committed to it into the fray as he or she insists – as our Baptismal Covenant puts it – on justice and peace among all people and respect [for] the dignity of every human being. If, as Peter Finley Dunne so memorably put it, politics ain’t beanbag, then the religion that grows out of the gospel ethic isn’t a hobby.

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© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.