A homily for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 13, 2023
1 Kgs 19:9a, 11-13a, Rom 9:1-5, Mt 14:22-33
A few years after my college graduation, I visited a friend and her husband in Casper, Wyoming, where they worked for an oil company — she as a geologist and he as a chemist.
It was my first trip West, high in the Rockies and far different from anything I’d ever experienced as a Jersey Shore kid.
The first evening, Sue and John took me to hear the local symphony, and after the performance, as we walked back to their car, I noticed two things: The stars were close enough that I could pull one from the sky, and the light from the streetlamps didn’t seem to reach all the way to the ground.
Yes, it was that dark.
And I got a little short of breath, which at first I chalked up to the mile-high altitude.
Back at their place, we watched Johnny Carson as we talked and talked and caught up with each other — out there, the local TV station didn’t sell commercials for every spot, so we actually saw and heard Doc Severinsen and the NBC Orchestra play through the breaks. My breathing returned to normal. Whew.
The next morning, as I looked out their window at their back fence — in place strictly to keep their dogs from chasing the plentiful antelope — I realized their yard actually was about 50 miles long, that the nearest structure directly behind their house was way out of sight.
My pulse started racing and I gasped again, imagining myself becoming a bundle of dry bones alone on the prairie or desert or whatever you’d call the wilderness that Casper and settlements like it are plunked in the middle of.
Nyctophobia.
Agoraphobia.
I had them.
I still have them, to one degree or another. Irrational but quite real.
Any of our fears — the dark, wide-open spaces, flying, heights, clowns, bats, bankruptcy — are a combination of loss of control and lack of knowledge, of uncertainty.
Is there a bear or a coyote or a googly-eyed monster lurking in the dark waiting for me? If so, what is it going to do? What can I do?
If I get lost somewhere, can I find my way home? Can I survive wherever I am? Will someone look for me? Will everyone forget about me?
Kevin!!
Instincts kick in: Self-preservation. Survival. Fight-or-flight. Head in the sand, à la ostrich.
We start bargaining with God. “Dear God, if you save me from this, I promise I’ll never/always something something something, and this time I really mean it.”
Yes, when fear grips us, our instincts often turn God into a Swiss Army knife or Batman’s utility belt, even if we’ve never prayed before or haven’t spoken with our Creator recently.
Oh, we of little faith. Me included. Absolutely, me included.
As we grow and mature — a process that, ideally, continues daily until we reach our eternal rewards — we need to deepen our faith and trust in God.
Long before Jesus walked on the water and invited Peter — who sank like The Rock — the prophet Jeremiah spoke on behalf of God, reminding God’s people:
For I know well the plans I have in mind for you, plans for your welfare and not for woe, so as to give you a future of hope.
Love God? Love our neighbors as ourselves? Mere child’s play, as Jesus instructs the people in Mark’s Gospel when he tells his Apostles to let the children come to him, that the kingdom of Heaven belongs to people who embrace it as a child would.
But be not afraid? Put all our faith and trust in God? Let go and let God? Surrender micromanagement of our lives to someone we cannot see with human eyes, who speaks in whispers on a gentle breeze, whose influence in our lives has to be recognized with an open, loving heart and not stony analysis?
Really??
Yes.
Yes. Oui. Ja. Da. Uh-huh. Yup.
And doing that is scarier than vampire bats.
But just as we can grow out of irrational childhood fears as we mature, we likewise can mature into a deeply trusting relationship with our loving God, who puts people in our lives to help us and who directs us to places and situations where we can see that our God-given intelligence and skills and amazing abilities indeed will let us walk on the water with Jesus.
Or at least see where God put the stepping stones.
Because they’re there, if only we be not afraid.
