Family Values Part Four: Laboratory

The New Revised Standard Version Jesus Walks on the Water

22 Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. 23 And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, 24 but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. 25 And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. 26 But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. 27 But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

28 Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” 29 He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. 30 But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” 31 Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” 32 When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. 33 And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

Introduction: The Shift

First Three Values

We belong to the family of Christ. We believe and trust in the saving love of Jesus Christ, which unites us all as brothers and sisters in Christ. So we will strive in all we do to support and encourage our families to live in to that calling.

Everyone belongs here. We hold fast to the truth that the Kingdom of God is free and available to all, regardless of whatever dividing walls our world may seek to establish. We will do all we can to tear down these dividing walls, to befriend the stranger, and to provide a safe and casual space for all to experience the healing love of Jesus Christ.

We will invest in the youth of our church. Young people are not only the future of the church, they are the church. We commit our time, our resources, and our energies to ensuring that young people have a seat at the table, a place to call their own, and a voice in our deliberations. We dedicate ourselves to providing opportunities for young people to have vital encounters with Jesus Christ.

Current Values vs. Aspirational Values

Current Values vs. Aspirational Values

In a sense, these first three are really easy. They’re our current values.

By this I mean that long before I got here, these values were already a reality here at LPC.

We were a family church long before I got here.

We valued everyone being a part of our congregation before we sat down to figure this out.

We have had a strong youth program for a long while running.

And to be sure, we can lean in to each of those values a little bit more.

But what we’re going to turn our attention to next are our aspirational values.

These are things that we don’t quite embody yet, but we want to.

We can recognize that embodying these next three values will make us a better church, and failure to do so will be kind of destructive for us.

Today’s Value

We will live in to our namesake as a Laboratory of Faith. We are excited to live in an era where the world around us is changing at an incredible pace, and we recognize that the church must change with it. We strive to experiment, to try new ideas, and to create new spaces for people to practice their faith. We will not be daunted by failure or disappointment, but rather see them as learning experiences along the journey.

Man, I absolutely love this value!

And as luck would have it, this is a value for Jesus as well.

Bible Breakdown

Bible Breakdown

Jesus is dismissing the crowd of 5000, and sends the disciples ahead of him.

These guys are fishermen

This sea is actually known for being kind of rough and terrible.

No big deal: Jesus is walking on the water

Kind of like when Sidney Crosby hit a home run at batting practice, because of course he did.

Notice: The disciples haven’t been afraid yet. They are when Jesus shows up

It was not the size of the waves that caused the disciple’s fear.

It was not the water coming up over the side of the boat.

It was not the wind and the rain crashing all around them.

They have seen all of that before.

It might be scary to other people, but it sure wasn’t scary to them.

But when they see Jesus doing what Jesus does, they get nervous.

And this is a critical question for us this morning: Do we?

There are a lot of pieces of our culture that perhaps can provoke our fear and angst.

Racial issues.

Changing schedules with kids and sports

The decline of the mainline denominations.

But I wonder if what really causes us to shudder, what really gets at our fears, is when Jesus actually shows up and calls us out of the boat, isn’t it?

I’ve heard questions around this from worried followers before:

What if he calls me to be a missionary?

What if he calls me to work with those people?

What if he calls me to quit my job and (Lord forbid) become a pastor?

It’s not the winds and waves of our culture that instills fear in us, I don’t think.

It’s the call of our wildly unpredictable savior, who could do something crazy at any given moment, couldn’t he?

The most important words in this passage:

Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.

You know what? We’d be really far ahead if we committed to memorizing this single verse, and carry it with us in our every day lives.

When someone we know has fallen deeply ill: Take heart, it’s Jesus; do not be afraid.

When someone we know is ravaged by the disease of addiction: Take heart,

When the waves of our own circumstances are crashing over the boats of our abilities: take heart.

At the heart of this phrase is a great word for us to consider:

Tharseo- to be firm or resolute in the face of danger or adverse circumstances, be enheartened, be courageous.

I love that the definition of this word is specifically for dangerous or adverse circumstances.

Anyone can pretend to be brave with the boat is at shore.

Anyone can be enthusiastic when nothing is required of them.

We’re all really good players when we don’t have any skin in the game.

The boys have worked out something for difficult times in life.

Doctors offices, dentists, getting on the bus for the first time

The boys turn to something they call their brave face.

I asked Julian the other day how he makes his brave face, and he said it’s when your eyebrows are really mad, but you’re still smiling.

But the boys have to use their brave faces to sort of will themselves to Tharseo.

Is Jesus’ presence enough to inspire us with Tharseo?

It’s these two ideas back to back:

Be courageous! Take heart

Because it’s me.

You don’t have to will this bravery from some sort of brave face.

This kind of bravery is a gift given to us by Jesus Christ himself.

Peter experiments

Filled with a good bit of Tharseo, Peter decides he’s going to jump in and experiment.

If it’s you, let me walk on the water out to you.

Again, sounds totally easy the way Matthew writes this.

But I think what Peter does that is absolutely brilliant for those of us who are thinking about the church is that he establishes a flow of experimentation that we need to pay attention to.

He tries

This is the first step obviously!

After hearing Jesus call out to him, Peter has to take that first tentative step out of the boat and on to the waves, which, quick reminder, were bad enough that the boat is getting swamped.

Pick any value that we’ve studied so far, and you’re going to come across a moment where we’re going to have to try something.

We want to be a safe space for families. We might have to try an after school program.

We want everyone to belong. We might have to try to speak to some folks who aren’t here yet about our faith.

We value our youth. We might have to occasionally turn the pulpit over to let some teenagers teach about what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

To be sure, this step requires a tremendous amount of Tharseo.

You have to be brave to try.

He succeeds

For the first little bit, Peter actually does it!

This part gets over looked a lot in this story.

For a few, fleeting seconds, Peter has tremendous success and is the only other person in recorded history not named Jesus to walk on water.

If we’re going to be the kind of church that is open to experimenting and trying new things, it’s going to be absolutely vital that we celebrate our successes wherever we find them.

Even if it’s just two or three seconds worth of success.

Even if what follows is a colossal letdown.

Even if we’re the only ones who know about the success.

We have to celebrate.

He fails

Ah, here’s the one everyone hates, isn’t it?

But it is a universal truth: if you are going to be a church that is committed to experimenting, to stepping out of the boat, you’re going to be a church that experiences failure from time to time.

Snoring at the Remix

Kris Kris o Kringle and the Sea of Glass

Totally getting busted not remembering someone’s name.

But here’s the truth about all of those failures:

My ministry still continued.

I wasn’t personally hurt by any of them, besides a little ego bruising.

Each one of those failures taught me something that I carried with me to the next time I tried something new.

And, most importantly, like Peter in this story, every failure was an opportunity for me to reach out and feel Jesus pull me back toward safety.

A great quote I came across this week: “The reason that we seem to lack faith in our time is that we are not doing anything that requires it.”

We need to be willing to risk failure so that we can continue to grow our faith, to put ourselves in positions where the only way we’ll ever be safe is if Jesus himself reaches out to help us up.

As Yoda says to Luke in the Last Jedi: The Greatest Teacher, failure is.

He follows

By my math, this story comes at almost the exact midway point through Matthew’s gospel.

That means that even after Peter tried something new, even after he succeeded a little bit but ultimately failed, it means that Peter kept following where Jesus called him.

A quick list of things Peter would have missed had he given up after his failure walking on water:

Healing a whole pile of people at Gennesaret

Healing a bunch of people on the mountains outside of Galilee

Feeding the four thousand

Peter’s actual declaration about Jesus as the Messiah (which, he failed at 6 seconds later, proving the pattern is real)

The transfiguration

Curing a boy with a demon.

Peter miraculously catching a fish with exact change for Jesus’ temple tax

Jesus blessing the little children as we read about last week

Healing two more blind men

The triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday

The Last Supper

The Cross

And the resurrection.

All of that would have been lost to Peter if he had given up after his failure.

But he didn’t.

He kept following Jesus, and waiting for new opportunities to experiment.

And again, for what it’s worth, he kept failing too.

But that never, not ONCE, made him a failure.

So many churches I know get to a point of failure, trying something new and finding out that it didn’t work, and they just retreat back to what always worked for them.

We tried to have a contemporary service, but no one came. Better go back to the way it was.

We tried to be more inclusive, but those weird people down the street came and took advantage of our kindness. Better close things up again.

We tried to invite younger families, but they were all too busy with soccer and hockey, so why bother?

If we are going to be a congregation that values experimentation, failure is absolutely an option.

In fact, it’s a guarantee!

But, it should never, EVER get in the way of our following Jesus wherever he might be calling us to.

Failure is a great teacher, and a way to continue to move our story forward.

Why do we doubt?

Jesus has a pointed question for Peter as he catches him:

Why did you doubt?

What was it about this situation that caused you to doubt what was going on?

You experimented, you were doing it! What happened to you?

And so a question for us, as I can already kind of see some squirming out there as we explore this aspirational value, is why do we doubt?

The Frozen Chosen

We have a bit of a reputation

You may have heard me use this term before, but I love it.

The Presbyterians are the frozen chosen.

Do things…differently?

Not on your life.

But I think the thing that freezes us tightest is our doubts.

I can’t envision the church being good if the potluck weren’t happening any more.

I can’t imagine we’re going to get anywhere by having an evangelism campaign.

You can’t talk about money in the church before, we’ve never talked about money like that!

If you try that, it’s just going to blow up in your face. You will fail.

And so we stay exactly where we are, but the trade off of course is that we experience the exact same results over and over and over again.

We have to choose to fight against that reputation.

Eyes on Jesus

My dad was a swimmer in high school and college, and a really good one at that.

One day he lost a race by something like 1/1000th of a second.

Feeling kind of dejected after weeks and weeks and months of practice and training and diet and everything, he asked his coach “How do you train to be 1/1000th of a second faster?”

His coach said “Easy. Stop looking in the other guy’s lane.”

So much of the reason that Peter failed in this story is because he took his eyes off of Jesus.

I wonder what we could do if we were worried less about how many people were in the pews, and worried more about how many people knew Jesus?

I wonder what we could do if we were worried less with how balanced our budgets were, and worried more about how our resources were being put to kingdom work?

I wonder what we could do if we were less concerned about what the community thinks of us, and worried more about whether or not the community knew Jesus who sent us.

We Experiment so that We Can Keep Following

We may walk on water

We may sink

But we will always follow Jesus