“But when they saw him walking on the water, they thought he was a ghost. They cried out, because they all saw him and were terrified.”  

Ten years ago, the city of Minot, ND where my family lived, flooded.  It was a massive flood, leaving homes, including ours, inundated for weeks.

‘Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink’ (it was river water) rose to a whole new level of meaning for us.  The water was rude, destructive, and it took its sweet time to leave - to crawl back into its (presumed) assigned banks.   We were helpless until it did, and exhausted after it did.   

Psalm 121 became important for us in those first days. With it we wondered “from where will our help come?”   The answer the Psalmist gives, and the disciples of Jesus who had water issues of their own in our story from Mark, was “our help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”   The water we dealt with in the summer of 2011 was literal. The water the disciples were straining against, and were nearly swallowed up by, was literal too, but the story in Mark also assigns a deep symbolism to it. Water represents chaos - he reported “straining against it” (v.48), the disciples represent human attempts to control something we can’t, and our Lord’s walking on it. A powerful symbol that demonstrates that which swallows human strength and exhausts us also is the means by which God in Christ comes to us.

In the immediate aftermath of the Great Mouse River Flood of 2011, which swallowed our home and sank our hopes, “our help came from the Lord.”   Literally hundreds of relief workers descended on Minot, they “came from the hills” to paraphrase Psalm 121, into the river valley where we lived and began to help us recover.  They “mucked out” our houses. They sanitized our houses. They helped re-build our houses.  It was a miracle to behold.  

But I also have to tell you this - that kind of kindness, that kind of grace is hard to accept.  It’s humbling to be in such drastic need, it’s humbling to be dependent, and grace humbles.  You might say, as the story of Jesus on the water infers, grace terrifies us.  We want to repay it but we can’t; we want to deserve it but we don’t; we want to tell it “I have received enough now”; but in the case of Jesus’ grace, we haven’t because that need is as bottomless as the ocean. 

This week in our worship service, we’ll ponder what is going on in this story of Jesus stroll on the water – we’ll dip our toes in the water of our understanding of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus only.  I pray I’ll preach the grace of our Lord Jesus better having been the recipient of so much of it ten summers ago.

Because of a cross.

Pastor Ken