Walking on Water

Watch the sermon here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU6lDtWKZIw

“Walking on Water”

Sermon by the Rev. Rhonda Rubinson

Delivered at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, NYC

August 9, 2026

To begin today, I’d like to ask you a few questions:  First – how many of you know how to swim?  Show of hands.  Good – almost all of you!  Notice, by the way, that my hand is not up – I don’t know how to swim, never learned, and I’ve almost drowned at least twice, including once in the Dead Sea (that’s true, I have witnesses).

Another question:  how many of you know how to walk on water?  Nobody?  Okay, then, how many think you can learn to walk on water?  Why is my hand the only one up?  I don’t know why. In today’s gospel, Peter walks on water.  He was human, just like us.  Why do we think that we can’t do what he did?

Jesus does many wondrous things in the gospels, as he does in today’s gospel, but everything he does – including the miracles – is to teach us about us, to teach us what we are capable of.  If we look at today’s gospel through this lens, it’s clear that today’s story is not about Jesus walking on water, it’s about Peter walking on water.  And Jesus is telling us that if Peter did it, we can too.

Like every story in the gospels, this one has several levels – literal, allegorical, practical.  Also, like every story in the gospels, the cultural backstory is important. Back then, most people were like me, frightened by bodies of water, so they were eager to get away from them whenever they could. Notice, Jesus didn’t go to a beach or a lake when he wanted to get away, he went to a deserted place, on land, often up the side of a mountain.  People who worked on water, like Peter and the other fishermen disciples, were very familiar with the hazards.  We know that the Sea of Galilee was and still is particularly susceptible to sudden violent storms.  Many boats sank in it, many fishermen drowned – including no doubt friends and colleagues of the disciples.  Some of their bodies were never found; the survivors feared that the spirits of those dead men continued to roam restlessly in the dark waters, seeking others to join them.

Folks of Jesus’ time were also deeply afraid of demons in the waters.  Remember the time when Jesus cast a legion (about 5000) demons out of a man?  Remember that Jesus cast them into a herd of swine that then threw themselves into the sea and drowned?  Well, everyone feared that those very demons also still lurked beneath the surface of the Galilee.  It was never safe to go into that water.

Yet in today’s gospel, that’s precisely the danger that Jesus disciples find themselves in, they are on the Sea in one of those dreaded storms – waves threatening to sink their boat, heavy winds keeping them from heading to safe harbor.  They had spent in the night in this frightening tempest, they had surely been praying, but they hadn’t received an answer. Instead, conditions continued to deteriorate. Their nerves were frayed to the breaking point. and they were exhausted.  But then, just as the sky was began to brighten before dawn, in that time when objects just begin to emerge from shadow, the figure of Jesus becomes visible, walking on the storm waters toward the boat. The disciples cry out, “It’s a ghost!” afraid that the spirits of death in the deep had come for them.

Now here our translation does not capture the fullness of Jesus’ reply. It says, Jesus said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” That sounds very kindly and calming, doesn’t it? – it’s just me, don’t be afraid. But what Jesus really did say, in Greek, is “Have courage, I AM (‘ego eimi’) is here, do not be afraid.”  “Ego eimi” is similar to the phrase God uses to answer Moses at the burning bush when Moses asks God for God’s name, and God replies:  I AM.  Or I AM WHO I AM.  Or I SHALL BE WHO I SHALL BE” – meaning the God of all creation is here, the giver of life is here.  Jesus is announcing his divinity; he is announcing the presence of salvation. 

It is this theophany in the midst of life-threatening danger that pushes Peter to ask Jesus to call him out on to the water.  Peter is not asking for proof that it’s really Jesus out there, rather, he’s trying to reach God to not only survive but to overcome the storm.

Jesus does call him. Peter steps out of the boat, into the storm, onto the sea, and lo and behold! – he walks on water, just like Jesus!  In doing so trusts not in what has kept him safe in the past – his boat – but rather in who is present, here and now – Jesus. Peter’s faith has overcome his fear.

Not for long.  The moment Peter takes his eyes off Jesus and instead looks again at the threat, he immediately begins drowning. Notice he doesn’t even try to swim, the obvious thing to do (and he knows how to swim, all fishermen do); isn’t it amazing how fear and panic can cause us to completely forget what we know?  So, Peter sinks and cries out to Jesus, who takes him by the hand, upbraids him for allowing his fear to win out over his faith, deposits him back in the boat, and stills the storm.

Now Clearly, this story is an allegory – the violent storm symbolizes the challenges that come against us in our lives and in our world, the winds symbolize opposition to our health, peace, and safety, the sea filled with waves, death and demons stand for everything both outside of us and inside of us that tries to destroy us, and the boat is all that we have relied on to keep us safe in the past. 

But this allegory also tells us that we can have faith even in situations where the odds are against us.  Now, we need to recognize that odds, percentages, probabilities, are all constructions based on statistics from the past, they are never prophecies of the future, unless we allow them to be.  It’s our acceptance of them as certainties that all but ensures that the worst outcomes of the past will repeat themselves.

This is made even more likely if we fail to learn from things we have tried in the past, sometimes with catastrophic results – because we know that those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.  This why our current contempt for history as well as the intentional efforts to erase or alter it are so incredibly dangerous – if we lose the past we cannot learn from it, and will likely repeat it.

We also make bad outcomes even more likely by doing what Peter did: allowing our fear to triumph over our faith – this means succumbing to the memories of demons and death that lurk in the deep waters of our souls, our own histories of abuse, illness, oppression.  The lure of the past can be devastatingly powerful, a force as strong as death.

We are surrounded by death, daily. The latest one we’ve heard about (likely there are others that haven’t made the news) is the death of Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, detained in the infamous Delaney Hall, where he was denied critical medications, and died. Why? We can point to the massive abuses of ICE as the cause, but consider the multiple failures of those in our government to stop ICE’s reign of terror, the disregard of voters who elected people who gave us every possible warning sign of what they would do if elected, the complacency of those not directly affected by those policies, yet who nevertheless who cower in fear before those same officials and so allow such policies to continue. Lopez-Cornejo’s death is the result of collective failure, really – collective fear.

Most days, when I wake up and turn on the news, I don’t feel faith and hope; I feel fury, often despair – and yes, fear.  I pray for relief from the storm, there’s no clear answer, and conditions continue to deteriorate.  We are confronted with fresh cruelties daily, new original ways to corrupt our legal, legislative and financial systems, “peace initiatives” (in quotation marks) that put millions of people into the crosshairs of armed conflicts, orchestrated by those who have managed to install themselves into positions of unchallenged power.  Many of us have been fortunate until now to not have been forced to develop the skills to cope with such times as ours; I, like many of us thought we would never need to, thinking that the world, or our part of it anyway, had somehow outgrown the most vicious aspects of our human nature.  So, when storms hit, we – I – immediately sink, not even considering the possibility that drowning isn’t necessary.   

How to avoid it?  The easiest way is to get aboard an unsinkable ship. But I think we’ve learned over the years that nothing external can truly protect us, there are weapons out there in the world that can sink any ship; we can’t rely on any of them.

No, the key to survival is within.  It is remembering that it is only when the storm gets into us that we are in danger of drowning, it’s when we swallow the sea or breathe the storm waters into our lungs that we perish. The only way to keep from drowning is to learn to water walk, to train ourselves to have faith in any and all circumstances – and I mean train ourselves.  Faith is a developable skill.  God gives us the capacity for faith, but we need to work at it, use it, do the reps.  We also need to make the effort to remember our own personal faith history, times when our faith has worked for us (we all can find those times if we look) – we shouldn’t have to repeat those lessons if we have learned from them. 

We will fail sometimes – like Peter, we are human, and we will tire or freak out, fall into the sea, sputter, and cry out for help.  But when that happens, remember “I AM” is here, now, always, on the sea and in the storm, and “I AM” is accessible to us in every person of faith.  That’s why we need each other – we ourselves may falter and need help, or we may be the ones there to reach out and take someone’s hand when they begin drowning and say to them, Jesus is here, have courage.

Church, we are drowning in things we could be walking on.  The climate of fear that is blanketing the world is causing us to forget what we ever knew, what we ever learned. We forget that Jesus told us that we would be able to do things even greater than he did in his strength.  We even forget the power of our baptism – which takes something that can kill us, water – and transforms it into the means of our salvation.

We have forgotten that Jesus calls us all by name to come out of the boat, step onto the sea, and into the storm.  Let us take each other’s hands and go walk on that water. What do you say?

Amen.