When we went to the beach with my family a few weeks ago, which we do every summer, we go with my dad, we stayed in a different town than we usually do. My family has been going to Hatteras Island, North Carolina, virtually every year since the mid-60s, which I understand is when a bridge first connected the island to the mainland, they’ve been there a long time, every summer. But over time, we’ve slowly moved down the island, trying to outrun the crowds, the development that overflows, and it just keeps pushing down the island. And over the course of my life, a few successive villages have converted from being these sleepy patches of gray wood cottages into these densely packed communities of big, brightly colored mansions, souvenir shops. The kind of people on the beach who will plop their chair and their Bluetooth speaker a foot from your head. I can’t handle that.
But for the last few, the last decade or so probably, whenever we go, we stay in the town of Buxton, which is two-thirds of the way down the island, right in the shadow of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, the most iconic lighthouse in America. But now, these past five years, a different threat has emerged, and one that’s even harder to deal with than annoying crowds on the beach. And that is that the Buxton coastline is disappearing. And so we’ve decided we had to stay somewhere else. Since September 2025, when this really started to pick up, 20 houses have fallen into the ocean. And these houses, people look at them whenever the video is on the news, like, why would they build a house there? These houses weren’t built in the surf. In many cases, they were built hundreds of feet back from the high tide line. But the Atlantic has moved in.
And so the graveyard of the Atlantic, as the area is known, is living up to its name in a new way, not just eating ships in the sea, but eating houses. And the state of North Carolina, basically every other year now, blasts millions of tons of sand. They dredge it offshore. They have these big, enormous hoses and blast sand onto the beach, bring out some backhoes. They did that two years ago while we were there. They’re currently doing it again. It doesn’t last. They can build 100 feet of beach and it’s gone in two years. The sea level there has risen eight inches over my lifetime. And one of the most repeated realities about human settlement on the sea is that if the ocean decides it wants a chunk of land that we want to, it’s going to win. Because there is no power on Earth like the sea.
And the way we tend to think about the ocean is a really modern thing. We’re talking like the last hundred years. Whenever we think of the beach, we think of a place where we go to, you know, play, to swim, to get a tan. We set up an umbrella, maybe have a corona and some lime on your chair. That is not what the ocean was for 99.9% of human history. The ocean has not long been a place of peaceful getaway. The ocean was seen as scary. It’s this uncontrollable mass of destructive energy. We see this all over the Bible whenever the sea is mentioned. In Genesis 1, the very beginning, we hear about the formless void, Tahom in Hebrew. And that’s this blank, rough, black sea. Before God began to create, that’s what there was, just this chaotic sea.
And think about the book of Jonah. You know, Jonah’s whole saga is struggling against the power of the sea and then the whale, of course. In Psalms, in Job, we meet behemoth and Leviathan, great sea monsters. It was understood that there were monsters in the sea. And this is not just an Old Testament thing. This aversion to the ocean remains deeply ingrained in the culture of this region for thousands of years. We get to Revelation 21. We’ve seen the ocean at the beginning of the Bible, the end of the Bible. John prophesied that whenever God’s kingdom comes, the sea will be no more. He puts it in the same breath as weeping and grief and pain. Those things will be gone and so will the ocean. Because it’s a threat. It’s got to be vanquished by God.
And so whenever a hurricane hits a city or the Atlantic starts to eat your favorite beach town, or if you’re swimming and you find the current has pulled you past or you can touch the sand with your feet, we start to feel that ancient perspective a little bit. It doesn’t take much to realize that we all have a degree of what’s called thalassophobia, and this is a profound fear of the deep. And it stems from the same word that Matthew here uses in Greek, thalassos, see. Nothing better reveals our powerlessness than being at the mercy of the ocean. And so all of this is important if we’re to make sense of the magnitude of this miracle here, of what it means to the apostles, of what it means to us.
Jesus walking on water here isn’t just like, oh, that’s a cool trick that he did. There’s some real deep substantive meaning here because violent water is this embodiment of chaos and destruction. It is literally the thing that made up chaos of the unformed world before God spoke creation into existence. This is complete chaos, complete fear. This thing that can cause instant death to all those people who are sailing on the ocean. And this becomes the ground that Jesus is walking on. The scariest thing imaginable, the thing we can least control in the world, Jesus is nonchalantly moving towards the apostles on top of the sea.
The Sea of Galilee is technically a lake. It’s a freshwater lake. But if you’re in a small wooden boat, in a sudden storm, some gale force winds that have come out of nowhere, it might as well be the Bermuda Triangle. It doesn’t really matter. There’s nothing but a thin layer of cedar between the disciples and lungs full of water. And Matthew tells us that this is happening in the dark. It’s early morning. A lot of translations will have it as the fourth watch of the night. That’s the last watch of the night. And it’s somewhere between 3 and 6 a.m. That is the spot when Jesus is walking on the lake. That’s the time. The sun hasn’t come up. The storm is surrounding them completely. It’s either pitch black or completely close. If it’s storming, it’s probably very, very dark. No stars, no moon.
And so whenever Jesus starts moving across the water, whenever they spot him off in the distance, the disciples might feel like they’re watching something like an aquatic grim reaper coming at them. They see a ghost gliding on top of these waves. And Matthew tells us that they scream in terror. These are grown men, 12 of them, and they’re not particularly delicate individuals. Some of them are fishermen. Some are political rebels, right? These are not delicate guys, but they see this ghost coming across the sea and they scream. It’s a ghost, they say. And just then, as they think they finally come face to face with death, Jesus speaks to them. Doesn’t shout to them. speaks to them. And he says, be encouraged. It’s me. Don’t be afraid.
So while they’re screaming in terror, Jesus’ words are calm. They’re measured. They’re authoritative. He just says it straight, and they carry loud and clear over the raging winds. Most translations, I’m including the one we heard, render Jesus’ words here, you know, it’s me, as it’s me or it is I. But in Greek, the phrase that’s used here is ego eimi. And that’s the exact Greek translation of the Hebrew name that God introduces himself to Moses with in the burning bush. So this can be translated as it’s me or I am. Jesus speaks from the water. I am the same way God did from the bush.
And we find out and they find out that this is not a ghost. This is not just like some phantom, some apparition who can just slide across the lake because he has no physical body and the storm can’t touch him. He’s real. It’s the opposite of that. When Jesus calls out, I am, he’s announcing to them that he’s there in the flesh. And we see that for sure when he grabs Peter’s hand. And so the creator is standing on top of the void again, and it doesn’t threaten him at all. The sea listens to his voice. And the disciples are watching the book of Genesis reenacted in front of them. Think about this. I read this story. This really struck me this time. Just as the Spirit of God was over the waters in Genesis 1, now they’re seeing God over the chaotic waters again. And he demonstrates that he rules over the chaos now. He lives and he reigns and he’s speaking creation again. The same way God said, you know, let there be light. Jesus is speaking. Be encouraged. It’s me. Don’t be afraid. He’s making something new.
And so Jesus demonstrates this incredible power over the sea, something that we have no power over. And then Peter demonstrates this incredible faith. Because Peter, it’s only Peter here. hears Jesus’ words and decides he believes him. Now, we tend, as we often do with Peter, to make him into this cautionary tale, this kind of dumb guy, this faithless guy. We see Jesus refer to him in a couple verses as, you of weak faith or you of little faith. And he sinks into the water because he doesn’t believe strongly enough. But look at what actually happens here. Peter doesn’t beg Jesus to stop the storm. He doesn’t beg Jesus to save him. He doesn’t beg Jesus to take their boat back to the shore. He sees Jesus. He hears his words on the sea, and he asks to participate in it. He asks to participate in what God’s doing, and he says, Lord, if it’s you, command me to come to you on the water.
And he steps out over the railing. He stands on the top of the lake. He’s this human being standing alongside God where nobody’s ever been before, standing on the water, in that same place where the Spirit was in Genesis. And only Peter puts his bare feet on top of this roiling water and starts stepping towards Jesus. And so whenever Jesus, in a couple verses, has to rescue him, grabs him out of the water, puts him on the boat, and then the storm calms, He speaks of Peter’s little faith, his weak faith, and we hear that as kind of an insult. I don’t think it’s an insult because it’s an acknowledgment that he has faith. Jesus has a lot of respect for little faith. We heard about the mustard seed a few weeks ago, faith as small as a mustard seed. Little faith is not a bad thing. The other disciples don’t even really have little faith. They’re probably lying flat on the deck. They’re probably hanging on for dear life on the benches, on the railings. And we’re making a massive mistake if, like them, we’re so terrified of sinking that we never listen to Jesus and step off the boat. If we stay in the boat, we risk being people of no faith so we don’t have to be people of little faith.
And Peter’s trouble only starts whenever he looks in a different direction. He gets spooked by the wind. He realizes that he’s standing in the middle of the water. He realizes that by every law of nature, he should be sinking. He should be drowning. He should be dying. And then the ocean reclaims its power, its terror, when he forgets who’s standing in front of him. He’s worried that he’s going to be dead by the laws of nature. But Jesus wrote the laws of nature, and Jesus says, Peter, you can be out here. And so how do we, when we’re 500 miles from the ocean, learn to walk across the sea with Jesus? And I think that we start by remembering baptism. Baptism isn’t supposed to just be some symbolic bath. You know, we use a teeny little bowl. We use a little bit of water. But baptism is supposed to be this immersion into death and coming out as a new creation. From the earliest days of the church, they used to baptize people in these pits that looked like graves. That was half the point. You stepped down into the grave and you walked out of the grave full of water.
And so going under the water to be baptized represents dying with Jesus to the powers of sin. And you rise out of that water and you step onto solid ground with Jesus again. And baptism represents letting ourselves be consumed by the waves of sin and death. and we sink under it, but then we come back out again. We walk on the water afterwards. So if we’re living out our baptism, we’re supposed to be like Peter. We’re supposed to step out in confidence on the lake that rages. And we all have seas to walk across. I mean, we’re probably not going to be invited to walk across the Monongahela with Jesus, but we all have these stormy seas. And it’s anything, this deep, is anything in our lives and in our world that feels uncontrollable, that we feel powerless over, that seems like it could swallow us. The loss of a relationship, a devastating diagnosis, anxiety, depression, addiction. The overwhelming weight of looking around at a world full of war, of injustice, and think, we can’t do anything about that. We’re stuck.
When we look at those realities, I think we feel that same philosophobia, that fear of the deep of this huge uncontrollable thing. That phobia that keeps the disciples glued to the little boat. We realize how quickly the water can pull us under. We go, oh, I don’t want to touch that. But we know somebody’s standing on top of the water. And it’s not a ghost. It’s Jesus who’s real, who’s alive, and he doesn’t promise here to teleport us out of the foaming waves. He doesn’t keep his disciples from facing storms. They’re in the storm. But we can still be sure that the one who spoke light into the darkness, into the stormy sea in Genesis 1, is still standing, holding out his hand and saying, I am. Don’t be afraid. Step out. The chaos, the abyss doesn’t disappear, but they become something we can walk across. We can walk through it.
This morning, we’ve sung the good news that Peter knew in his heart. This is one of my favorite lines in our hymnal. The moment before he jumped overboard, the wind and waves still know the Christ who ruled them while he dwelt below. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
