"Walken" With Jesus

Author: Pastor Heidi Eickstadt (from sermon on 6/20/21)

One of my favorite actors is Christopher Walken. Whether it’s playing Captain Hook on Peter Pan Live a few years back or his many times hosting Saturday Night Live over the years, his deadpan performances and the unique cadence of his speech have always cracked my husband and I up. So, one year my mother-in-law gifted us a mug that says “Walken with Jesus.” It’s a funny play on words but it also makes me smile because it’s this image of this quirky strange guy Christopher Walken just strolling along, seemingly in conversation with Jesus, like it’s no big deal. Just walken with Jesus.

In a way, the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, they are simply accounts of the disciples walkin’ with Jesus too. Except these disciples literally walked with Jesus, a LOT. They walked all over Galilee and Judea, miles upon miles. They journeyed most of the time by foot but in today’s story, they are traveling by sea, over the large lake called the Sea of Galilee, and they are traveling to somewhere new in their journey with Jesus thus far. They are traveling from the predominantly Jewish area that is familiar and known to the unfamiliar and unknown mostly Gentile area and people across the sea.

So far, walkin’ with Jesus has been exciting yet, albeit confusing at times. Jesus has performed miracles and taught lessons that challenge and inspire and are unlike those they’ve heard from others. Yet, at the time of Jesus, there were others teaching and even healing others, what Jesus was doing wasn’t entirely new. Yet, now Jesus does something that is even rarer, he ventures across the sea to a land and people beyond the boundaries of what his disciples and Jewish people considered to be the People of God. He is taking the disciples completely outside their comfort zone and challenging them to see the other as worthy of teaching and healing, of being part of the mustard seed Kingdom of God for all that he has just been preaching about.

So the disciples here must have been filled with some trepidation and worry as they crossed the water. What was Jesus doing? What is our business with these unclean people across the sea? Is this Jesus truly bringing the Kingdom of God? Isn’t the Kingdom of God about restoring our people’s honor, glory and might? Isn’t this a distraction from the real work of the Kingdom of God?

So when the storm suddenly whips up out of nowhere, it may have felt like the tumult of the wind, rain and lightning was a manifestation of the churning uneasiness, fear and anxiety bubbling inside them. As the boat lurched back and forth under their feet and water started swamping it, the story of Jonah may have crossed their minds, the story of how God brought down a terrible storm on Jonah’s boat as he traveled away from where God was calling him to be. Ironically, Jesus was now sleeping right through the storm, just as Jonah had, a parallel that was likely not lost on the disciples. If God had brought a storm, perhaps Jesus wasn’t following God’s will in crossing these boundaries and including these outsiders in the Kingdom of God, perhaps they had made a mistake in walkin’ with Jesus, perhaps Jesus wasn’t to be trusted after all.

So, like the captain of Jonah’s boat, the disciples wake Jesus up and they question his motives and his actions. Why do you sleep while we are suffering? Don’t you care about what happens to us?

Sound familiar? Probably not the being on a boat with Jesus on the Sea of Galilee in a dangerous storm part but I know I’ve questioned what God is doing and where God is in the midst of the figurative storms of my life. It can be hard to feel like God is present and loving when you’re afraid, when you’ve been hurt, when the test results come back and the prognosis is not good, for you or a loved one.

Perhaps you’ve felt abandoned by God and most afraid in the spaces where God is supposed to be most present, in the people of the church. Instead of love and inclusion, you’ve met rejection and othering, whether it’s because of the color of your skin, your sexual orientation, your gender identity or your life experiences. Instead of being embraced, you’ve been pushed away. In all these times and for all these reasons, maybe you too can see yourself in the disciples, wanting to shake Jesus awake and demand answers for why there is such pain, in my life and in the world. Don’t you care? Why is this happening?

We hear that Jesus wakes up, that he rebukes the chaos of the wind and the waves and instantly, all is calm. Unlike Jonah’s story, the storm is not from God and is not a sign of God’s disapproval of Jesus’ boundary-crossing mission of inclusion. Jesus commands the wind and sea and sky, showing that He can overcome even the most powerful forces of destruction in our world. Showing the disciples and us that He is no ordinary teacher and healer, that His Mission and His identity is beyond our often limited understanding of who He is and who we are called to be as His followers.

Walkin’ with Jesus often doesn’t look like strolling nonchalantly through life like my coffee cup depicts. As the disciples learned through this literal storm, following and walkin’ with Jesus doesn’t mean you won’t face danger, pain and fear. The death-dealing forces of destruction in our world are myriad: illness, natural disasters, and accidents; war, greed, and power; forces like overpowering fear, anger, hatred; as well as interpersonal and systemic forces of homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, Islamophobia and xenophobia, to name a few.

But walkin’ with Jesus does mean that Jesus IS with you as you and I and we as the church face all of these forces that buffet and rage against us and, at times, within us too. Walkin’ with Jesus means that we are never abandoned to the storms and that the storms, these forces that work against God’s life-giving Kingdom, they will never have the last word, for us and for our world.

The Oxford Annotated Study Bible has a footnote about verse 40, which says Jesus’ words convey that “Faith trusts God to achieve God’s purpose, even through apparent destruction.” God isn’t causing the destruction or the suffering. But God IS working to transform it, just as God transformed the cross from an instrument of death, suffering and oppression into the ultimate symbol of hope, healing and love.

Faith doesn’t mean that we are not afraid, that’s not what Jesus is saying here. It’s not that we don’t feel fear, for that would be impossible. But we don’t let our fear be stronger than our faith in God and God’s mission. In his commentary the theologian Matthew Myer Boulton says that “what happens on the Sea of Galilee is no ordinary miracle story, but rather a kind of exorcism or healing story writ large. The reign of God has come near; it will meet with fierce, overwhelming opposition; and yet, the new world will prevail. The world’s death-dealing forces are no match for the God of life.”

May we trust in the God of life and love in the midst of the storms and continue to walk with Jesus, even when we’re afraid and Jesus’ way takes us into unfamiliar and uncomfortable places. With the help and presence of the Holy Spirit, may we participate in the Kingdom Way of God where all people are included and belong.

May we as a church joyfully keep walkin’ with Jesus, letting Jesus challenge and transform us to be reconciled people of faith, hope and love that shine forth in this world like a rainbow in the midst of the storm, assuring all that they are loved and that God’s Kingdom will come, and earth will be as heaven. Thanks be to God! Amen.