Fairhaven UMC

There’s a largely unspoken, common wisdom consensus among Christians in our world today that Christian morality is pretty simple, right? Follow the law, be nice to other people, accept Jesus as Lord over your personal life for whatever that means to you. And there’s this intensely private understanding of faith. Your relationship with God is primarily in your heart, something that nobody else really sees. And to the degree that anyone else in the world around you can perceive you as a Christian, it’s by your humble conformity. You keep your lawn nicely mowed, so to speak. You don’t cause any trouble. You’re just an overall pleasant sort of person. The image of Ned Flanders from The Simpsons comes to mind. And accordingly, you don’t have any enemies. because you mind your business and you basically do what the wider society thinks you’re supposed to do.

I wish this were the case. I’m pretty comfortable in that lane. And I think it’s fair to say that the expectation for the past 150 years or so is that pastors above all are supposed to be like that. But you’ve heard me say many times at this point that this is not how Methodism began. For the first few generations of the Methodist societies, they were an organization of troublemakers, of radicals, of a certain type of Bible thumpers who made slaveholders, nominal Christians, and businessmen who exploited the poor via gambling and liquor very angry. They refused to just tolerate to be agreeable to the state of society and of the church. If they saw something that was unjust, Wesley was preaching about it, the Methodists were organizing over it, angry mobs attempted to kill John Wesley more than once for his preaching, all five feet two and 120 pounds of him. And at its worst, particularly in the early days, Methodism was perceived as a real threat to the stability of the wider society.

And at best, when things got a little bit less controversial towards the end of Wesley’s life, It was still seen as a persistent annoyance. The Methodists were annoying to everybody else. And both our Romans and our Exodus readings this morning reveal a similar orientation. This tension between the body of Christ and the world around it that’s supposed to exist. It’s supposed to be kind of a tense relationship in some ways. And Wesley called this devoted sort of faith scriptural Christianity that had a bit of an edge to it. this faith that has an edge to it, scriptural Christianity. And he coined that term in a sermon that got him banned from preaching at St. Mary’s Church in Oxford 282 years ago tomorrow, as it happens. And Romans and Exodus, importantly, are addressed to the heart of the greatest empires in their respective times, the Roman Empire, obviously, and New Kingdom, Egypt. But the relationship between God’s faithful and their rulers in these settings is a lot different than the dynamic that we tend to live in in Europe and the United States today. Caesar and Pharaoh, they don’t have close Jewish or Christian advisors. In fact, Pharaoh not knowing Joseph is the catalyst of the conflict in Exodus. Pharaoh has no relationship with the Jewish people. They’re these outsiders in the midst of the Egyptians. If you were going to have, say, a national day of prayer, any kind of national faith in Exodus or Romans in Egypt or the Roman Empire, it was going to be to a very specific set of gods that does not include the God of Israel. This was a minority religion. They’re not going to have patriotic songs on the other end. In the Hebrews hymnals, they’re not going to sing, God bless Egypt, right? That relationship doesn’t exist. And God’s people in both of these societies are at the outskirts. In Egypt, they’re foreigners, and their existence is illegal, really. When we think about all these babies that weren’t supposed to be born, these people are not supposed to exist, let alone be in this country. And in Rome, they’re already persecuted outsiders, even 30 years after Jesus’ ascension.

So, that means that in Egypt, by necessity, following God cannot be embodied in a polite, law-abiding righteousness. It cannot be embodied in conformity to the society that they live in. Instead, what God is doing in these places, the kind of people that God is working in, is in wholly conniving, in scheming among God’s people. And I think that’s really the best way to describe what’s happening in the story of Exodus overall. So the background, if you missed the whole context in the reading, is Egypt is terrified. Egypt is terrified because the population of Hebrew foreigners has exploded. They imported them as laborers, and now their population’s growing. They’ve become a real threat. This is always the case in societies that have an underclass of slaves or something like that. You can read letters from South Carolina before the Civil War where they’re worried about the number of black people that are growing. And the Egyptians are in a demographic panic. They’re worried that control is going to slip from their grasp, that the slaves are going to get it. The Israelites are going to get control over their country. These people were supposed to keep their heads down. They’re supposed to be cooking and cleaning and doing construction work without complaining. And now Pharaoh has implemented a crackdown. The Hebrews are put into forced labor. They’re sent outside the major cities to keep them physically broken down, unable to threaten the centers of power. That’s this growing, boiling threat, and they’re trying to spread it out. And to prevent the threat from growing even bigger in the future, Pharaoh begins this program of population control.

He orders the Hebrew midwives that they need to kill any baby boy who’s born at birth. We don’t want more of them. But because they respect God, that’s the phrasing that Exodus uses, these midwives, Shifra and Pua, refuse to go along with that plan. And it’s ironic and sort of funny the excuse the midwives give to the Egyptians. It becomes pretty obvious fairly quickly that baby boys are still being born. And Pharaoh calls the midwives into his office and asks what’s going on here. And the way they choose to respond is playing into Pharaoh’s pre-existing prejudices, this racism against the Israelites. And the midwives tell Pharaoh, well, these Hebrew women, they keep popping out babies because they’re just too robust. They give birth before the midwives can even show up because they’re so strong. They’re not like these delicate Egyptian women. And so the babies keep escaping before they can be killed. Shifra and Pualai, they’re scheming. They break the law. They become threats to national security. And yet, in response to their faithfulness, God calls that faithfulness, God blesses them. And their people continue to multiply, continue to strengthen.

And that’s a little bit different, I think, than the way we understand ourselves in the relationship to the society we live in. It’s clear that in this circumstance, here in Exodus, God approves of and upholds what from the outside looks like extremely bad behavior. But I think this isn’t a moral relativism thing. This isn’t an ends outweigh the means thing. The story that’s being told here is that Shiphrah and Puah and us, we can’t just do whatever we feel like we need to do for the greater good. That’s not what’s happening here. What God requires of his people in the living of our lives is this careful weighing of what allegiance to God means. And this can never be light. It can never be careless. This is some real deep, hard work. And we’ve got to be clear here that what we’re reading about in Exodus, what we’re being called to as Christians, is not a looser moral standard for living. But this higher standard that’s much more complex, that’s difficult, harder than the one people outside the church exist under. Chiphrah and Pua here, they know the consequences if they get caught. They know what’s going to happen.

And the Apostle Paul insists to the Christians of Rome, who are similarly under pressure, do not be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And he is describing exactly the process that’s going on in the heart of the Hebrew midwives. Note here, and this is hard, that God doesn’t tell Shiphrah and Puah what to do. He doesn’t say, oh, whenever these Hebrew babies come, you need to lie, you need to do this and make sure they’re still born. No, they respect God. They know God, and accordingly, their hearts are already shaped in such a way that whenever the time comes for them to serve, they know what to do. Their defiance, this kind of resistance that’s in them, comes from hearts who are already transformed, not from some personal sense of heroism. It’s God’s already been working. And it would be a lot easier if Christian life had just easy black and white choices, where we keep the peace, we don’t rock the boat, this is what you do in this situation, this is what you do in this situation, and then we just worship God in private. That’s not what we see in Scripture. The reality is that to truly be God’s people is to be transformed in our minds and then from our minds in our living. And it’s refusing to go with the flow, that conformity that Paul talks about. It’s refusing conformity. I love the full verse here, Romans 12, 2. Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you can figure out what God’s will is, what is good and pleasing and mature.

And this is really important, especially coming from Paul. We often imagine, this is another one of those kind of stereotypes of Paul caricatures. We imagine that Paul leans on the side of conformity, of Christians going along to get along in a hostile environment. That’s not really the case. Paul’s position is very nuanced. He is for staying under the radar, not causing trouble whenever it advantages the church. Because whenever you think about it, right, you can’t go around making enemies of everybody on purpose if you want to survive. Paul knows that he’s trying to build something up that needs to survive. But he is fiercely against conformity when it undercuts the work of the body and the gospel of Jesus. There are places to blend in and there are places to stick out. and unfortunately that means that we have work. We are required in Paul’s words to figure out what God’s will is. It means things are maybe not simple. Answers might not be clear in whatever situations we face in our lives, but the Spirit’s leading is there if we look for it. A transformed heart, a transformed mind, has to discern what’s good.

We see this in Exodus all over the place in this chapter. There’s a pervenient grace working even in Pharaoh’s daughter who doesn’t follow the God of Israel. She feels this tug of defiance on her heart, and when she pulls baby Moses from the Nile, she refuses to be complicit with the sin, the death that’s happening all around her. and she uses what we might call her privilege in the service of someone she knows is an enemy of the state. She flat out says when she pulls this baby out of the water, he must be a Hebrew baby. It’s not like she thinks that he might be an Egyptian baby who just happened to be floating away. She knows who he is. She knows what she’s doing. She knows she’s breaking the law. She knows she’s defying her own father, that she’s putting her people at risk. But the water, so to speak, of the Nile of baptism is thicker than blood, and God has no interest in ethnic loyalties or national loyalties. And by the grace of God, Pharaoh’s daughter gets caught up in what is right.

And to have faith in Moses’ God and in Paul’s God, the one who became flesh in Jesus, demands that we give up a simple, easy, lazy moralism in favor of figuring out what is actually good and pleasing and mature. I love that. Those three words there, what is good and pleasing and mature. Paul hits us with some tough love here, which is his style, obviously. And he’s saying to the Romans, he’s saying to us, you’ve got to grow up. Whenever you see injustice in the world, when you see abuse or exploitation in the workplace, in the family, in the church, when you see a situation where something is inescapably wrong in the eyes of God, a confrontation emerges between you as a child of God and the patterns of this world. You must not be conformed. If you’ve been transformed, you cannot be conformed. Those are opposites. If you’ve been transformed and you see something that God stands against, that there is something that needs to happen, that there is something that has to be addressed, leaving it alone is not an option. That’s what Pharaoh’s daughter, that’s what is being shown to us here. We can’t leave it alone because we’re supposed to chafe at the container of conformity. Your spirit, if it’s transformed by the Holy Spirit, can’t just live with it anymore.

And this is hard because then it requires you to do something. You’ve got to refuse to kill the children that Pharaoh demands. You’ve got to pluck the babies from the river. And the good news is that God comes alongside us when we do this, that we don’t have a lone ranger approach to things. You’ll notice that that’s what he does with the midwives. He doesn’t just leave us out on the edge whenever we’re trying to discern and do what is good and right and pleasing. And neither are we alone, not just with God, but with the body of Christ. Notice how communal all of this is that’s happening in Exodus. Shiphrah and Puah are heroes. You know, we have these named two great heroes in Exodus 1. But notice that they’re also part of like this underground resistance. Moses’ sister is part of it, Miriam. His mother, Jochebed. They together, they hatched this plan to float him down the river in the basket for someone to find. And Pharaoh’s daughter is part of it too. All of these unrelated people who don’t know each other, some of them, find themselves working together without having meant to for the good of God’s people. And imagine how shocking it is to be Jochebed and Miriam, Moses’ sister and mother, when Miriam’s watching to see where Moses goes in the river, and he gets pulled out pretty quickly from the reeds by an Egyptian. And not just any Egyptian, but this Egyptian, the princess, Pharaoh’s daughter, she rescues Moses. She rescues the one who will soon lead his people into freedom. The Spirit is working here among people who don’t even know each other, let alone have a shared plan, to ensure that God’s saving work is done. The Spirit is at work all over the place among all of these people.

And there’s this inherently subversive dimension of being God’s people. Maybe not all the time, and maybe it’s not going to be as dramatic for you as it is with Shiphrah and Puah and Pharaoh’s daughter, but there are moments, there are places in our lives where, like our Methodist ancestors, we have to become a threat or at least be really annoying. And Romans 12 gives us a vision of this too, as the Apostle Paul discusses the many different gifts of Christ’s body. He says, you know, some are prophets, some are servants, some are teachers, some are encouragers, some are givers, some lead, some show mercy. Everyone has a specific roll. The princess in this story with her institutional safety and sway, she can get away with what she’s doing in a way that lots of people can’t, and so she does. You know, the Miriam, this little girl, is able to stand back and watch what’s happening because who cares what a little girl’s doing? She can get away with spying here. And these midwives with their defiant mercy. And so the question emerges for each of us from time to time, given where you are, given the gifts that you have and who you are, what particular point of leverage do you have in service to God and to other people where you can transform the situation rather than conform to it?

And the point here is not to go looking for trouble or something. The point is that Christians, like the Hebrews before us, lose the ability to go with the flow if we’re allowing the Holy Spirit to work within us. That can be tough. That can be painful. And again, Paul uses that word mature. It requires us in some ways to grow up, to recognize that things can be hard, can be gray, can be difficult sometimes. But remember that a couple lying midwives, a mother with a basket, and a single compassionate Egyptian set into motion the fall of an empire, the liberation of God’s people. And who knows what God might transform by transforming you. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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.