"You of Little Faith"

Have you noticed? Wherever He stands, the winds cease ..... demons scatter, the chaos of the world vanishes into its own noisomeness.

        "Who then Is This?!" the disciples ask in wild surmise. And they worshipped Him.

This is simply God — utterly beyond introduction and defying explanation. He is the Holy One. He is the One Who Is.

Last week, we went to the crux of this morning's lesson: meditating on the Lord's invitation to Divine life. In particular, He invites Peter in the form of a Divine command:

        "Come!" He directs Peter.

Elsewhere, He commands His disciples,

        "You feed them!" perhaps with tens of thousands standing by.

And this same invitation we hear as a general invitation, issued to one and all, in the Holy Book that sums up every book:

The door He speaks of is the door of our hearts, our wills, our loves, the overarching purpose of our lives. And this is the imperative of life for all of us. This is the purpose of the Incarnation announced by the Forerunner and repeated over and over again. This is the purpose decreed by God Himself during the inaugural moments of His kerygma. We are to drop what we are doing. We are to reverse course. And we are to enter Divine life with Him, fulfilling our individual destinies, which mysteriously is one destiny: "The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand."

What is our qualification for this high calling? It is to have been made in His Image and Likeness. And, beyond this, to present our Image to Him in its true form, in its faithfulness: washed clean of filth and every moral disfigurement. Did not His Forerunner, the man from Eden, enjoin us to wash the world's vileness off of us in a ritual purification so vast that Peter would later liken it to a second Noah's flood (which was also God's decree for purity)?

The specific subject today is walking on the sea — which is the archetype for all chaos. These things run deep through the human soul, a common inheritance shared through racial memory. The philosophers and psychologists of the early twentieth century thought of it in terms of the "collective unconscious," a term coined by C.G. Jung during the 1930s.

I think it unhelpful to think of these things in terms of individual cultures. The Mesopotamians and, later, the Persians, for example, expressed it as a struggle between their god Marduk, god of gods, and Tiamat, the sea dragon. But it is basic to the human imagination coeval with the creation of mankind, perhaps. These things are far beyond culture, custom, and national stories. Indeed, such lesser things are artifacts from the Divine glyphs that proceed from the deepest currents beneath and around us.

We search the Sacred Scriptures, but does not Scripture teach that God inscribed His Mind upon our souls before He etched them in stone or caused them to be written on paper? St. Paul writes,

That is, we are God's primary text always already endowed with Divine powers.

Today, He invites Peter to master the chaos around him:

Mastery of chaos is basic. This is not only how God begins in His Creation, but what we must do, as well, in order to to "come in" with Him and "to sup with Him."

In seminary I read the words of a nameless Russian Orthodox monk, and they have never left me:

I took this to mean that our only sanity lies in the mindful life rooted in prayer. Since that time I have come to understand that the madness lies in our restless seeking after identities, even inventing them, while our only real and stable identity can only be one: a child of God, seeking one-ness with the Father, sent for and saved by the Son, and guided by the Holy Spirit.

What are examples of the chaos in our lives to be mastered? Do we begin a drive in the car by turning on the radio? When we get home with the groceries, do we instantly turn on the television? Do we live on a constant diet of distraction by the checking our smartphones every few minutes? All of these things are a pushing away of the Divine and a rejection of God.

We should view each drive in the car as an opportunity to be alone with God for prayer or meditation. The groceries are always a time for giving thanks for the myriad miracles that spring up even out the ground. And smartphones? Scientists now view them as serotonin delivery systems, with Stanford Prof. Anna Lembke likening the iPhone to a hypodermic needle dangling from our arms. Indeed, when are twenty-first-century men and women not inflaming their passions?

Our lives are intended for one-ness with God. But we will have nothing worthy to say if we have not prepared for our supper with Him. Indeed, we may be removed from the feast precisely because our wedding garment is not right (Mt 22:11-12).

We must empty ourselves of the garbage-culture into which which we have been born. It proposes ridiculous ideas such as living a life of constant distraction, inflaming our passions with disfigured imaginations, filling up our minds and lives with vile images and thoughts, until we draw our last breath, at which moment we are instantly plucked into Heaven. At least, that is the trend of conversation I hear at every memorial service I attend.

Master the chaos! This is our Lord's Divine command. Walk on the unruly sea with the same confidence a whole nation once trod through the Red Sea.

And if He should later say, disconsolately, that we have little faith, then we have been called to examine our lives to see how little our faith-life is. At the very least, our journey to Heaven begins by throwing out the television, by turning off the radio, and by folding a flip phone into our pocket. For, otherwise, we will not hear Him knock. And, if we should progress that far, we will have nothing to say at supper, for to speak with Him is to share a common heart, a common will, and a common love.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.