Matthew 14:22-33
So I want to preach to you this morning from this passage, “Faith Through the Storm.” At this point I should answer a question that some of you might be thinking, and if you’re not maybe you should be. You’re wondering it because walking on water is something so far out of the realm of our experience; so you think, “Did it really happen this way?” Maybe you’d be able to express your skepticism this way: “Bible stories like this are fables—not historically accurate, but psychologically helpful. Whether or not it really happened like this is less important than whether people find it emotionally satisfying.” “It’s effective, even though it is untrue.” There are a lot of examples of ancient literature we can talk about that are clearly mythical: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, for example. Gods and goddesses walk in and out of the scene with no one is very surprised. But the gospels just don’t fit that kind of literature. [a] They are written in a straightforward way, with historical details that are confirmed from other sources. [b] They were written too soon to be legendary accumulations. [c] They contain embarrassing facts about the disciples, which we could assume would as easily have been left out if they had been making these things up. [d] attempts to explain away the “miraculous” end up getting us tangled up in even more difficult problems. We would do far better to take this at face value, and when we do, it makes more sense of the historical data, the Bible as a whole, and even your own life, as we’ll begin to see. When we look at it this way, something opens up to us—not that is powerful even though it did not really happen; but because it really did happen. It is a historical event that makes a theological point to teach a spiritual lesson. In other words, [a] it really happened, [b] what really happened shows us something about Jesus, [c] what it shows us about Jesus changes us. [overview] Let us move through the narrative as Matthew presents it, following the spotlight from the storm, to Peter’s walk toward Jesus, then to Jesus himself. We will learn something about [1] what we go through [the storm], [2] how we go through it [faith], and [3] who enables us to.
